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String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

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Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#181
post #154

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Could you please not use HN for ideological battle? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, regardless of which ideology you're for or against. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

[flagged]

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#182

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.

Units tests save lives.

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#183
post #103
post #49

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…

Marginalized groups seem to be a target / susceptible to this kind of thing. I had a weird encounter on reddit with some users who expressed that "only X people understand how this character in the movie feels". Interestingly, there was no indication that the movie intended this interpenetration. But the idea wasn't unusual or all that out there so I didn't think much of it. But that group showed up again and again a…

This group formed in the SF Bay Area, which is known for being one of the most accepting places in the world for LGBT people. If marginalization were the main cause, it seems to me that the group would have been located somewhere else. I think it's more likely that these people had an underlying mental disorder that made them likely to engage in both violent behavior and trans identity.

One big difference the Zizians have with the LessWrong community is that LW people believe that human minds cannot be rational enough to be absolute utilitarians, and therefore a certain kind of deontology is needed.[1] In contrast, the Zizians are absolutely convinced of the correctness of their views, which leads them to justify atrocities. In that way it seems similar to the psychology of jihadists.

1. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K9ZaZXDnL3SEmYZqB/ends-don-t...

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#184

This story happened in my backyard. The shootout was about 40 minutes from me but Youngblut and Felix Bauckholt were reported by a hotel clerk dressed in tactical gear and sporting firearms in a hotel a few blocks from me. Weird to see a community I followed show up so close to home and negatively like this. I always just read LW and appreciated some of the fundamentals that this group seems to have ignored. Stuff li…

> Weird to see a community I followed show up so close to home and negatively like this. I had some coworkers who were really into LessWrong and rationality. I thought it was fun to read some of the selected writings they would share, but I always felt that online rationalist communities collected a lot of people with reactionary, fascist, misogynistic, and far-right tendencies. There’s a heavily sanitized version of…

For what it's worth, there's a thriving liberal rationalist-adjacent community on Twitter that despises people like Roko.

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#186

[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…

G.K.Chesterton knew it, 100 years ago:

"... insanity is often marked by the dominance of reason and the exclusion of creativity and humour. Pure reason is inhuman. The madman’s mind moves in a perfect, but narrow, circle, and his explanation of the world is comprehensive, at least to him."

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#187
post #144

Rationalism? The term has been used a lot of times since Pythagoras [0], but the combination of Bay Area, Oxford, existential risks, AI safety makes it sound like this particular movement could have formed in the same mold as Effective Altruism and Long-Termism (ie, the "it's objectively better for humanity if you give us money to buy a castle in France than whatever you'd do with it" crowd that SBF sprung from). Can…

That castle was found to be more cost-effective than any other space the group could have purchased, for the simple reason that almost nobody wants castles anymore. It was chosen because it was the best calculation; the optics of it were not considered.

It would be less disingenuous if you were to say EA is the "it's objectively better for humanity if you give us money to buy a conference space in France than whatever you'd do with it" crowd -- the fact that it was a castle shouldn't be relevant.

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#189
This whole rabbit hole of rationalism, less wrong, and ziz feels like a fever dream to me. Roaming trans veganist tatical death squads shooting border officers and stabbing 80 year olds with swords.

This is the kind of thing where it is warranted that the feds gets every single wiretap, interception, and surveillance possible on everyone involved in the zizian movement.

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