the old one is three weeks old, let’s start another
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Behind the Bastards just wrapped their four-part series on the Zizzians, which has been a fun trip. Nothing like seeing the live reactions of someone who hasn’t been at least a little bit plugged into the whole space for years.
I haven’t finished part 4, but so far I’ve deeply appreciated Robert’s emphasis on how the Zizzian nonsense isn’t that far outside the bounds of normal Rationalist nonsense, and the Rationalist movement itself has a long history as a kind of cult incubator, even if Yud himself hasn’t fully leveraged his influence over a self-selecting high-control group.
Also the recurring reminders of the importance of touching grass and talking to people who haven’t internet-poisoned themselves with the same things you have.
I listened to parts 2—4 today and even with an above-average familiarity with rationalist weirdness it was a wild fucking ride.
Kinda wild to have a community of vegan trans women whose most notable victims are a border patrol agent and a landlord and who are still the baddies in this situation.
The HPMOR/LW parts and to a lesser extent bits of CFAR were absolutely familiar (and all the more cringeworthy for it). Never quite realized exactly how obviously psychologically torturous cult shit CFAR event were about.
same. I’d known quite a depth of detail, but had never gotten as deep as the innards of those quotes from conference conversations
super healthy and normal situations.
wait wait wait wait wait wait
aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation
it was just next to some single-cell protein things so i assumed they want to just pour a bunch of (glutar-)aldehyde on their food for preservation. wow i hope they have a spare liver, because it would be rough, but no, it’s a cryopreservation method, like for tissue samples and so on
they wanted to diy a cryonics in their mobile trailer park with intermittent power from solar panels
Wired: The Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians (archive)
Evan Ratliff has apparently been tracking the Ziz cult since 2022 and when it blew up into mainstream news, he was ready
The MIRI, CFAR, EA triumvirate promised not just that you could be the hero of your own story but that your heroism could be deployed in the service of saving humanity itself from certain destruction. Is it so surprising that this promise attracted people who were not prepared to be bit players in group housing dramas and abstract technical papers?
Good point.
Logic. Rationality. Intelligence. Somewhere in all these attempts to harness them for our shared humanity, they’d been warped and twisted to destroy it.
Oh, the warping and twisting started long before Ziz. (The Sequences are cult shit.)
I mean, sure,
Liches have trouble thinking clearly about paths through probability space that conflict with their phylactery, and the more conjunctive a mission it is to make true their phylactery, the more bits of epistemics will be corrupted by their refusal to look into that abyss.
could “could read like the work of an intelligent but unhinged mind”, if you also think Gene Ray was “intelligent but unhinged”, they both use big words in wrong ways.
Where the 2 major Time forces join, synergy creates 2 new minor Time points we recognize as Sunup and Sundown. The 4-equidistant time points can be considered as Time Square imprinted upon the circle of Earth […] equated to a Higher Order of Life Time Cube.
Below a minimum level of hingedness the actual mental ability of the cult leader in question is irrelevant. On one hand it speaks to an ability to invent and operate incredibly complex frameworks and models of the world. On the other hand whatever intelligence they have isn’t sufficient for them to realize (or be convincible) that they’re fucking nutters.
This leads us into part 17 of my ongoing essay about how intelligence - as in “the raw mental resources supposedly measured by IQ or whatever other metrics” is useless and probably incoherent.
LaSota and those in her orbit alleged that CFAR and its leadership were laced with anti-trans beliefs and practices. (“That’s preposterous,” one member of the rationalist community, who is also trans, told me. “Rationalists have the most trans people of any group I’ve seen that isn’t explicitly about being trans. You’d just show up at a math event or house party, and it would be 20 percent trans.”)
The leadership can’t be transphobic because 20% of the membership is trans. In related news, the United States government cannot be sexist because [breaks down into bleak and bitter laughter]
just started a Ziz thread over on the Reddit sneerclub too
BBC summary of the story of Ziz
if ziz is not a flight risk, then idk who is
in true rrrrationalist fashion, they would just let her free if she explained everything (just like sbf):
LaSota ended the hearing frustrated with her ability to effectively communicate her message.
“I shouldn’t, um …” LaSota said, taking a long pause. “I wish I could be more eloquent, maybe I could if the circumstances were better.”
I’m a Vermonter and this shit is so insane. I wanna know what the people caught up in shooting the vermont border patrol agent were up to. What were they planning on doing in VT? Why were they armed to the teeth? Why did they have surgical equipment? What is the nature of their ties to Peter fucking Thiel?
I can’t quite comprehend what it is they even believe in. When I read that this cult had ties to Peter Thiel all my alarm bells in my head went off. He’s arguably one of the most powerful and dangerous men in America.
Technically he doesn’t have connections to Thiel directly. They have connections to the lesswrong Rationalists (note, rationalwiki is not associated with the lesswrong Rationalists, and they don’t like each other, this place is also on team rationalwiki). However enough Rationalists are (or are friends with) neoreactionaries (for a long time LW was one of the few places where they were sometimes welcome, or even talked about). But this is one of the places where (through heavy layers of snark and derision) you could learn about these groups.
However, as the lore is deep, very annoying, quite bad (A lot of IQ-anon type people), I suggest you don’t start reading up on this. Ignorance once lost cannot be regained (There are also some very small (small as on low risk, but if you are one of the rare people high effect) mental health risks if you believe very specific things about skynet style AI and a few other silly beliefs). And you already got the important parts (Thiel and people close to him suck).
I think I lost some brain cells reading those links and I couldn’t even fully read them without closing the tab out of irritation lol.
What the actual fuck do these people believe???
What the actual fuck do these people believe???
If I had to summarize it, they believe in scifi handwaves and have taken them far beyond mere logical conclusions.
They believe in race and IQ, that people who code javascript blog a lot (no a lot) are superior (and should have all the money and power), and that the time of democracy is over. (and that some people should be reduced to biodiesel). They don’t believe the world has gotten less violent, they believe in corporal punishment, leather jackets make you look cool no matter the situation, etc etc.
Ow and that you can build Skynet using Turing machines.
This is not to be confused with what the zizians believe, they believe a bespoke set of other wild things. But I have never really looked much into them.
leather jackets make you look cool no matter the situation
Finally something me and the crazies can agree upon, at least until it’s too warm out.
Curtis yarvin and his support by the worlds most powerful people is terrifying.
Back when I was in high school (graduated 2007) was the start of the push for a focus on STEM and a defunding of the humanities. Way back then I warned it would lead to perfect little tech drones capable of aiding those who want to destroy the world but incapable of having any understanding as to why or of history itself. They defunded art because art is one of the most unbiased forms of learning history. A picture is worth a thousand words, yada yada.
I fucking hate being a Cassandra. Fucking hate it.
The Zizians believe in IQ, that animals are ethically equivalent to humans, that all people contain exactly two personality cores corresponding to the two hemispheres of their brains, that every personality core is either intrinsically good or intrinsically evil and less than 5% are good. They believe in violence as a form of mutually assured destruction: you should always escalate every conflict to the maximum in order to dissuade hypothetical agents from blackmailing you. And the stuff about Skynet.
I think to understand properly it should be recognized that while the personality-core stuff is out of left field, all of the other beliefs are pretty much just logical conclusions of mainstream rationalist thought. For instance Yudkowsky has to repeatedly explain that he’s not in favor of violence (except when he’s advocating for bombing data centers) precisely because it’s really easy to reach that conclusion from what he’s written. The Zizians mainly differ by reaching that logical conclusion and being willing to act on it.
you should always escalate every conflict to the maximum in order to dissuade hypothetical agents from blackmailing you.
Ah not understanding the escalation ladder (or knowing it exists, and just going all in every time because they don’t get it) a common issue, slightly more common among younger nerds it seems (Made worse by Enders Game), but also fascists (somebody shared a story on bsky where they had violently (fists etc) gotten rid of some fascists at an event, who later returned to do a drive by shooting).
Enders Game
you mean HPMOR of course
It’s really funny how HPMOR inherits the exact same problems from Ender’s Game like there was nothing at all to learn. Harry and Ender’s violence is recognised as maladaptive, a result of trauma, they might end the world or do a big genocide, but that’s because they’re so much smarter and more competent than anyone around them! They can keep their evil half (!!!) in check with the power of their big ethical brain (the good hemisphere???).
in order to dissuade hypothetical agents from blackmailing you
There’s also a whole thing with Yud accepting the many worlds interpretation as obvious truth that leads to (some) rationalists believing that getting killed in one timeline helps your surviving parallel selves by bolstering your case of being unblackmailable by said hypothetical agents, who are also from the future, which is why you can’t negotiate with them directly.
I was not aware of this, failed my constitution roll, and have taken psychic damage
