What I find interesting about these cases and the seemingly unrelated United Healthcare CEO assassination is that all were committed by extremely online data scientists who went to elite universities. I’ve been fairly skeptical of the right wing narrative that these schools have been “radicalized” (seeing as universities and young people have always been the hotbeds of leftist thought, how soon we forget the hippie m…
When your entire philosophy is a jupyter notebook filled with bugs from beginning to end but you don't know it because you've never heard of a unit test things go wrong.
I don't think so. The people specifically are vegan, and their leader believes that future AI overlords will punish people retroactively for their moral failings. This is reported in some of the other posts on this page. It's wild, but a view that is is fairly widely discussed in the rationality community, but only taken seriously by Fringe groups.[1] My question is what Sith meant to them https://en.m.wikipedia.org/…
But punishing humans for killing animals isn't a very rational thing to do, is it? Sounds 100% emotional to me, and emotions computers do not have. I guess if we spew enough of this BS onto the internet, AI could work it from there, but calling that rational doesn't make much sense to me.
Most of the news coverage I've seen of this story is omitting what some might consider a relevant detail: almost all the members of this group are trans. This is a divisive topic, but failing to mention this makes me worry a story is pushing a particular agenda rather than trying to tell the facts. Here's what the story looks like if the trans activism is considered central to the story: https://thepostmillennial.com…
The fact that many are transgender seems to be relevant because it’s a recruiting and manipulation tactic, not because of a connection to “trans activism.” I haven’t seen any evidence of that connection besides people involved being transgender.
Most of the news coverage I've seen of this story is omitting what some might consider a relevant detail: almost all the members of this group are trans. This is a divisive topic, but failing to mention this makes me worry a story is pushing a particular agenda rather than trying to tell the facts. Here's what the story looks like if the trans activism is considered central to the story: https://thepostmillennial.com…
I think the relevance of their transness is not very significant. The lesswrong apocalypse cult has been feeding people's mental illness for years. Their transness likely made them more outsiders to the cult proper, so e.g. they didn't get diverted off into becoming Big Yud's BSDM "math pets" like other women in the cult. I doubt they are significantly more mentally ill than other members of the cult they just had le…
[Former member of that world, roommates with one of Ziz's friends for a while, so I feel reasonably qualified to speak on this.] The problem with rationalists/EA as a group has never been the rationality, but the people practicing it and the cultural norms they endorse as a community. As relevant here: 1) While following logical threads to their conclusions is a useful exercise, each logical step often involves some…
Wow, what a perfect description of why their probability-logic leads to silly beliefs.
I've been wondering how to argue within their frame for a while, and here's what I've come up with: Is the likelihood that aliens exist, are unfriendly, and AGI will help us beat them higher or lower than the likelihood that the AGI itself that we develop is unfriendly to us and wants to FOOM us? Show your work.
> Just in USA Liberals are considered leftist Well, for a period of time liberals were the left. In the last decade or so the illiberal left has come up in opposition to the illiberal right, the latter matching the former’s hypocrisy in false promises of equality (while driving division) with false promises of freedom (while expanding the rulebook).
That’s just Culture War terms. And identification according to others (illiberal this or that) is often agenda-driven.
Self-identification is confused enough but identifying others is even more muddled.
> Just in USA Liberals are considered leftist Well, for a period of time liberals were the left. In the last decade or so the illiberal left has come up in opposition to the illiberal right, the latter matching the former’s hypocrisy in false promises of equality (while driving division) with false promises of freedom (while expanding the rulebook).
That’s just Culture War terms. And identification according to others (illiberal this or that) is often agenda-driven. Self-identification is confused enough but identifying others is even more muddled.
> Culture War terms
Sure. The Culture War’s belligerents are all, generally speaking, illiberal. And notably, most people steeped in it reject the term. Even those on the left.
Ziz (the cult leader) had a blog at sinceriously.fyi, where she elaborated on her philosophy. The blog has since devolved into a string of death threads and subsequently been deleted, but anyone who's interested in the backstory can still find some posts on archive.ph (e.g. [1]) and more on web.archive.org. From Ziz and other cult members' writings, it's obvious that the cult has been in conflict with the rationalist…
"Trans vegan 'Siths' who kill people with katanas" is not a sentence I thought I'd ever read, let alone type, yet here we are, in the most ludicrous timeline.
It's an actual Zizian belief that you must always do the craziest thing you can possibly think of, in order to "collapse" the weight of your current timeline in some sort of totally counterfactual probability space... This is arguably the closest linkage they share to actual Rationalist-ish ideas. (Many Rationalists do genuinely advocate for some sort of improvement to animal welfare - but I don't know of any Rationalist who thinks that an ant has the exact same right to moral worth as the average human, which is the actual Zizian position on the matter - including the "and if you disagree with this, it means you're double-plus nongood" part)