/ratanon/ - Rationalists Anonymous

Ziz is an amazing interviewee.

https://sinceriously.fyi/net-negative/

>Later in that conversation, the sun or clouds were shifting such that person A was getting hot, I was in the shade by the plants. They said it was getting too hot, so they were going to head back. I wasn’t sure if that was the truth or a polite excuse, so I considered it for a moment, I didn’t want to get them to stay just to cover up an excuse. But it seemed wrong as policy-construction to make the rest of probability mass slave to that small comfort when this conversation potentially concerned the fate of the world. I scooted into the bush, clearing shaded space on the bench. I think I said something like, “if that’s an excuse you can just decide to take a break, otherwise you could sit in the shade there.

>They asked if I was sure, I said yes, and they sat down. At slightly less than arms’ length, it was uncomfortably close to me, but, the fate of the universe. They asked if I felt trapped. I may have clarified, “physically”? They may have said, “sure”. Afterward I answered, “no” to that question, under the likely justified belief it was framed that way. They asked why not? I said I was pretty sure I could take them in a fight.

>They prodded for details, why I thought so, and then how I thought a fight between us would go. I asked what kind of fight, like a physical unarmed fight to the death right now, and why, so what were my payouts? This was over the fate of the multiverse? Triggering actions by other people (i.e. imprisonment for murder) was not relevant? The goal is to survive for some time after, not just kill your enemy and then die? I suppose our values are the same except one of us is magically convinced of something value-invertingly stupid, which they can never be talked out of? (Which seems like the most realistic simple case?)

>With agreed upon parameters, I made myself come up with the answer in a split second. More accuracy that way. Part of me resisted answering. Something was seriously wrong with this. No. I already decided for reasons that are unaffected. that producing accurate information for person A was positive in expectation. The voidlike mental state was not coming to me automatically. I forced it using Quirrell’s algorithm from HPMOR.

>“Intent to kill. Think purely of killing. Grasp at any means to do so. Censors off, do not flinch. KILL.” I may have shook with the internal struggle. Something happened. Images, decision trees, other things, flashed through my mind more rapidly than I could usually think.

>I would “pay attention”, a mental handle to something that had made me (more) highly resilient to Aikido balance-software-fuckery in the CFAR alumni dojo without much effort. I would grab their throat with my left hand and push my arm out to full length, putting their hands out of reach of my head. I would try to crush or tear their windpipe if it didn’t jeopardize my grip. With my right hand, I would stab their eyes with outstretched fingers. I didn’t know how much access there was to the brain through the eyesockets, but try to destroy their prefrontal lobes as fast as possible. If I’d done as much damage as I could to through the eyes, try attacking their right temple. Maybe swing my arm and strike with the ends of all my fingers held together in a point. If I broke fingers doing this it was fine. I had a lot of them and I’d be coming out ahead. This left as the only means of attack attacking my arms, which I’d just ignore, attacking my lower body with their legs, or trying to disrupt my balance, which would be hard since I was sitting down. I guess they could attack my kidney right? I heard that was a good target on the side of the body. But I had two, so I wouldn’t strongly worry. They could try to get me to act suboptimally through pain. By attacking my kidney or genitals. Both would be at an awkward angle. I expected the dark side would give me exceptional pain tolerance. And in any case I’d be pulling ahead. Maybe they knew more things in the reference class of Aikido than I’d seen in the alumni dojo. In which case I could only react as they pulled them or kill them faster than they could use them.

>At some point I mentioned that if they tried to disengage and change the parameters of the fight (and I was imagining we were fighting on an Earth empty of other people), then I would chase them, since if this could become a battle of tracking, endurance, attrition, ambush, finding weapons, they would have a much better chance.

>If my plan worked, and they were apparently dead, with their brain severely damaged, and I’d exhausted the damage I could do while maintaining my grip like that, I’d block playing dead as a tactic by just continuing to strangle them for 6 minutes. Without any movement, then I’d throw their body on the ground, stand up, and mindful of my feet, losing balance if it somehow was a trick, walk up to their head, start stomping until I could see their brain and that it was entirely divided into at least two pieces.

>“And then?” they asked. I’d start looking for horcruxes. No, that’s actually probably enough. But I’d think through what my win conditions actually were and try to find ways that wasn’t the same as the “victory” I’d just won.

>“And then?” “I guess I’d cry?” (What [were they] getting at? Ohgodno.) “Why?” I’ve never killed a human before, let alone someone I liked, relatively speaking.

>They asked if I’d rape their corpse. Part of me insisted this was not going as it was supposed to. But I decided inflicting discomfort in order to get reliable information was a valid tactic.

>I said honestly, the thought crossed my mind, and technically I wouldn’t consider that rape because a corpse is not a person. But no. “Why not?” I think I said 5 reasons and I’m probably not accounting for all of them. I don’t want to fuck a bloody headless corpse. If I just killed someone, I would not be in a sexy mood. (Like that is not how my sexuality works. You can’t just like predict I’m gonna want to have sex like I’m a video game NPC whose entire brain is “attack iff the player is within 10 units”. [I couldn’t put it into clear thoughts then, but to even masturbate required a complicated undefinable fickle ‘self-consent’ internal negotiation.]) And, even if it’s not “technically” rape, like the timeless possibility can still cause distress. Like just because someone is my mortal enemy doesn’t mean I want them to suffer. (Like I guessed by thought experiment that’s nothing compared to the stakes if I can gain a slight edge by hurting their morale. But… that sounds like it would probably sap my will to fight more than theirs. And I said something whose wording I don’t remember, but must have been a less well worded version of, “you can’t just construct a thought experiment and exercise my agency in self-destructive ways because I in fact care about the multiverse and this chunk of causality has a place in the multiverse you can’t fully control in building the thought experiment, and the consequences which determine my actions stretch outside the simulation.”

>>14900

Are the Zizians being used by CFAR to cover up issues? Zizian thought looks like it can be cleanly divided into parts: 1) completely fucking nuts ramblings, 2) criticisms of CFAR/MIRI which look almost legitimate, sprinkled with completely fucking nuts rambling.

The criticism that MIRI accidentally an AI arms race by talking publicly about it isn't unique to Ziz, but features prominently in their articles. Same with CFAR hasn't done jack shit and is a broken organization, which I've also heard from a one of the neoreactionaries who was a CFAR alum. And the idea that Eliezer accidentally a minor is entirely plausible given his status as a polygamist phyg leader.

And then those points, which range from probably true to plausible enough, are littered with completely bonkers things like Zizian hemisphere theory, or appeals that their detractors are transmisoginists (because we all know Accelerated Graphics Port cards can fit in PCIe slots), or the entire Vegan Basilisk Thing.

So…cui bono?

>>14915

What are you claiming, exactly? That Zizians are fake? Nobody except the government would produce that much content and stage a protest for a psyop. Unless… It is the government doing this!!

>>14916

I'm saying that Zizian nuttiness allows CFAR to brush off legitimate criticisms by pointing out that Ziz also makes those claims. I'm not saying that CFAR is behind the Zizians (at least, beyond CFAR not working and possibly causing psychic breaks above baseline), just that it's opportunistic.

>>14916

John David Pressman (eg. namespace) has all but admitted they've been doing a Ziz-adjacent psyop: https://extropian.net/notice/A19FgMBokCRu6EyOrA

They have been running an anonymous blog focused on criticism of LW/CFAR/MIRI in the past (https://www.thelastrationalist.com/) and they have paid Ziz way too much attention in their writings (eg. https://www.wrestlinggnon.com/extropy/2020/09/29/four-sacrifices-and-the-phenomenology-of-undeath.html https://www.liberaugmen.com/)

I wonder what they're up to..?

>>14915

Does reading Ziz's ramblings contribute towards my eternal torture quota? I could totally see vegan fundamentalism become the endpoint of the woke holiness spiral (because “animals are the ultimate oppressed group” ore something like that). NegU already became a mainstay in Effective Altruist circles, I could see them becoming Zizian in five~ten years.

Roko Mijic (yes, the basilisk guy) is doing heaven's work dismantling bullshit like that:

https://twitter.com/RokoMijicUK/status/1309562290098798592

>>14916

Yeah, just go ahead and attack that strawman right away. He's not claiming shit - you are.

If anything, the Zizians are a loose reductio ad absurdum against the 2020 Rationalist/CFAR stack in that they represent certain trends among the Berkeley and Seattle Rationalists taken to their somewhat-logical extreme. These are people who a half decade ago were taken by Less Wrong and EA and the LGBT scifi polyamorous group housing culture that surrounded it and they decided they had "found their tribe" (Scott's words, I think) and moved out West to be with them and many of them did this as teenagers with no education, job experience, or even a stable personality. Although they all had probably had scored sky-high on some juvenile IQ test, they had already started failing at life by high school with all sorts of mental illnesses real or otherwise and would probably test 1-2 SDs over at best as an adult not nearly enough to accomplish anything with near-zero work ethic (as a few of the first generation 3-4 SDs over Rationalists could do). Needless to say, it didn't go well for many of them; none of them could actually hack a job in real AI work; a few managed to get a basic tech job somehow, but many experienced immiseration in lousy group housing. While pretty much all of them came West as Grey Tribers, their economic status (and perhaps resentment at their life failures) pushed them hard left, as did the trans identity many of them adopted.

What they could do, and did over and over again, is naval-gaze their own minds. Partly this was just an intellectual masturbation particularly attractive to the Rationalist-type for whatever reason, but partly these people really wanted to be more successful and more empathetic than what they were. Some of these second generation rationalists had been into tulpas and self-diagnosed DID and other types of induced depersonization as teenagers, and Berkeley reinforces this with psychedelics and Buddhism (CFAR's grabbing onto "Internal Family Systems" should be see in this light). According that zizians.info site, Ziz had a depersonalization technique UHS that actually works somewhat predictably, which in this subculture would be a powerful recruiting tool, given the prevalent interest in self-help "mental tech", particularly of the depersonalizing sort.

https://sinceriously.fyi/good-group-and-paseks-doom/#comment-1236

That comment is not Namespace and frankly speaking says more about Ziz's moderation policies that she allows such crap.

>>14841

The first part of this comment is indeed lifted from something that Namespace has been posting around, but I don't believe that he copied it here: https://extropian.net/notice/A2VfYrbiy4KDJHoQLY

The second part seems to be optimizing to make yourself sound like Eliezer: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SqNvmwDxRibLXjMZN/and-say-no-more-of-it

>>14918

This comment is either Jay Winterford ( Fluttershy_from_LW, https://mentalengineering.info, also see Rationalist Fleet etc. ), or someone trying really hard to impersonate Jay Winterford.

tl;dr of Jay's recent post https://archive.is/M6lFD: Jay believes he's being tortured by roko's basilisk for harming other beings in past lives and has decided to start harassing random people just to spite the basilisk and prove he is resistant to blackmail.

In short, there is no evidence of either Namespace (or for that matter >>14899 Zack M Davis) being affiliated/sympathetic to Ziz, more likely both of them seem to be well aware of the Zizian tactic of "let's make incoherent attacks against anyone who dares to criticize us".

>>14918

this is quite a roast to hand out as a psyop if hes a stealth supporter

> Ziz’s interpretation of game theory says the goal of retaliation is to prevent what you’re retaliating against from having happened at the planning stage. This implies that you should expect rational enemies to punish you severely for acting against them. But if you do something on someone else’s behalf, you can end up with a scenario where nothing done to you will be enough to punish what you did. There is nothing the Czar could do to Lenin that would negate the value of his activism. Even the nastiest tortures would be a feather against his heart of steel. To even attempt it the Czar would have to punish thousands, millions, the outrage would not be tolerated. No symbol of office on earth, no army of the bravest soldiers, no corp of fearless missionaries could protect the Czar from what righteous anger would follow.

> Indeed if your enemies commit to punishing other people as ‘triage’, then a sufficiently dedicated person can force them to punish arbitrary amounts of other people. All the better if your enemies aren’t demons but men: Eventually a truly, ultimately dedicated altruistic person can force those men to throw everything they love into the fire or refuse to give you full ‘justice’. In this sense love is intrinsically stronger than hate. Far from your motivation flagging at the idea all of humanity must be punished on account of your life, that level of influence should be exactly what is aspired to. Consider waking up in the morning and telling the mirror this mantra: “I want to be such a pain to my enemies that their only recourse for my life is to send all sentient beings to hell.”

>>14940

also shares some neetchee

> Thus do I speak unto you in parable, ye who make the soul giddy, ye preachers of EQUALITY! Tarantulas are ye unto me, and secretly revengeful ones!

> But I will soon bring your hiding-places to the light: therefore do I laugh in your face my laughter of the height.

> Therefore do I tear at your web, that your rage may lure you out of your den of lies, and that your revenge may leap forth from behind your word “justice.”

> Because, FOR MAN TO BE REDEEMED FROM REVENGE—that is for me the bridge to the highest hope, and a rainbow after long storms.

> Otherwise, however, would the tarantulas have it. “Let it be very justice for the world to become full of the storms of our vengeance”—thus do they talk to one another.

> “Vengeance will we use, and insult, against all who are not like us”—thus do the tarantula-hearts pledge themselves.

> “And ‘Will to Equality’—that itself shall henceforth be the name of virtue; and against all that hath power will we raise an outcry!”

> Ye preachers of equality, the tyrant-frenzy of impotence crieth thus in you for “equality”: your most secret tyrant-longings disguise themselves thus in virtue-words!

> Fretted conceit and suppressed envy—perhaps your fathers’ conceit and envy: in you break they forth as flame and frenzy of vengeance.

In addition to the Net Negative piece, linked in the first reply, (which alleges Salamon confirming the allegations in https://archive.is/miricult.com), a reminder of:

https://medium.com/@itai.ilyich/if-i-cant-have-me-no-one-can-kathleen-rebecca-forth-born-april-11-1980-31c49ed15121

https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/10/30/brent-dill-is-an-abuser/

CFAR internal memo on brent: https://pastebin.com/fzwYfDNq

https://twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/status/1353872513139240960

RuffleJax twitter threads:

https://tacticalnymphomania.tumblr.com/post/175175271678/holy-shit-ozy-brennan-cptsdcarlosdevil-is

What the fuck was going down with the bay area rat scene, jesus christ

>>14943

I mean, Kathy was known for her false accusations and general BPD behavior:

https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/175157697076/i-realize-im-the-worst-person-to-write-this-and

Likewise, I am certainly going to believe the accusations of (squints) "tactical nymphomania" who otherwise links to Kathy's suicide note.

After trawling through a load of this shit my read is that Gwen is hyper sensitive and exaggerating a load of stuff sometimes you go to follow up a source that's been described as the scriptures of satan and it actually looks like an ostensibly reasonable take but Ziz, for all the vegan/moral fundamentalism, actually seems pretty based. Unstable, sure, but basically acting as you would expect someone who believed in some sort of absolute morality seriously to act. Even the hemisphere shit is slightly more plausible than you'd think at first glance, although I still think the full theory is fucking nuts and she's not doing any favours to herself by writing with such a dense internal jargon. But the accusations against MIRI/CFAR are pretty damning. I enjoy lurking unremedialgender.space and surveyanon, and am usually sympathetic to the "Blachard was partially right but it's more complicated than you'd think" crowd, but the stuff about brain volume ratios is legitimately interesting. Curious to know if that was before hormones. The deeper I go the more reasonable Ziz actually seems, which is a bit annoying because I was mostly doing this to mine for insanity screenshots to laugh at in a group chat with friends.

>>14948

B A S E D

To be clear, I think everyone involved is batshit insane, but at least Ziz is consistent in insanity. This is what you get when you actually take the moral realist scifi eschatology seriously.

>>14947

>Even the hemisphere shit is slightly more plausible than you'd think at first glance, although I still think the full theory is fucking nuts

I think I've experienced something like UHS by accident on a few occasions. I am very tired, but I am reading in bed instead of going to sleep, perhaps trying to get to the end of the chapter. I read with one eye at a time because I am holding my kindle close enough to my face that focusing with both eyes is uncomfortable. Then, I experience a sort of mental snap, a quale I generally associate with sleep paralysis, but I am not paralyzed. Then, I start to hear voices, either from some ambient noise morphing into speech or ex nihilo. This has happened maybe 3 or 4 times.

My working theory has been that this is is a sort of vestigial bicameral capability acting up, that is, my left hemisphere falling asleep or nearly asleep such that that it isn't sending its usual "hey, shut the fuck up, hearing voices is for schizos" inhibitory signals to the right hemisphere. That interpretation is from reading Jaynes. I hadn't read anything about Ziz or their theories until just now. It's interesting that they've apparently learned how to cause a state similar to this on purpose. I'm going to look into it more deeply. Hoping for the best for my continued sanity.

>>14948

extraordinary

>>14939

> This comment is either Jay Winterford ( Fluttershy_from_LW, https://mentalengineering.info, also see Rationalist Fleet etc. ), or someone trying really hard to impersonate Jay Winterford.

Jay has killed himself, bringing the number of suicides for which Ziz is responsible up to two:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uAc7bWgpEhrGwFcv7/i-m-sorry-fluttershy

https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/estes-park-co/jay-winterford-10111296

I expect the next Ziz's "suicide" victim to be Sobet Carter also known as (psc/PlumOfDiscord/RobustHibiscus/Nis/possibly other sockpuppets). He is currently being blackmailed by Ziz/Emma and used by them as a mule for potentially-illegal operations (such as spreading libel)

I also half-expect another anon webshite full of nonsensical accusations against James Eddington (https://www.ishygddt.xyz/ aka squeegily) similar to the one Sobet put up a few months ago against Pressman.

>>14943

miricult.com was eight years ago. Nothing came of it. Why is that? Who was wrong?

>>14900

The Sequences are legendary for being a long slog, but Ziz's shit is the fucking Northern Caves.

What is going on? Is everyone fucking everyone else and accusing them of DARVO? Is there some weird combination of the social license and default-pity of being female with the aggression of being raised male that puts transwomen at the center of all of this?

And who exactly is being accused of statutory-raping who, who is doing the blackmail, and how were funds misappropriated to pay them off?

How did a bunch of weirdos with the maturity level of a high schooler manage to get their hands on this much money and prestige?