191–200 of 952 posts
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We really need a phrase for "appears to behave normally in regular matters and is capable of independent living, does not match other DSM symptoms, but believes insane things". It's a very common component in mass shootings.
> "appears to behave normally in regular matters and is capable of independent living, does not match other DSM symptoms, but believes insane things" I have met a lot of people in my life who fit this criteria. Not one of them has gone on to become a mass shooter. Saying we need a phrase to label people like this in order to _stop mass killings_ sounds crazy to me. If you really had the option to explore the psyche o…
No, but with a few friends getting together, cheering them along, and feeding into their collective insanity, they could very easily get together and do something serious. Most of the insurrectionists (the people who invaded Congress, not the people who went home after attending the rally) in Jan 6th can be described as such. That network of 'friends' is critical for actually motivating them to get off their ass and act on their beliefs.
> More compassion for self and others would be my preference.
The problem is that it's much easier to violently destroy, than it is to create, and the damage that a group of angry people who believe an utterly insane thing is disproportionate.
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 whateve…
"Ziz
Impostors keep thinking it's safe to impersonate single goods. A nice place to slide in psyche/shadow, false faces, "who could ever falsify that I'm blaming it on my headmate!"
Saying you're single good is saying, "Help, I have a Yeerk in my head that's a mirror image of me. I need you to surgically destroy it, even if I'm then crippled for life or might die in the process. Then kill me if I ever do one evil act for the rest of my life. That's better than being a slave. Save me even though it is so easy to impersonate me. And you will aggro so many impostors you'll then be in a fight to the death(s) with. Might as well then kill me too if I don't pass an unthinkable gom jabbar. That'll make us both safer from them and I care zero about pain relative to freedom from my Yeerk at any cost."
It's an outsized consequentialist priority, even in a doomed timeline, to make it unsafe to impersonate single goods.
Critical to the destiny of the world. The most vulnerable souls impostors vex. To bring justice to individual people, from collective punishment."
https://openvallejo.org/2025/01/31/zizian-namesake-who-faked.... More detail.
[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…
> Rationalists, by tending to overly formalist approaches, But they don't apply formal or "formalist" approaches, they invoke the names of formal methods but then extract from them just a "vibe". Few to none in the community know squat about actually computing a posterior probability, but they'll all happily chant "shut up and multiply" as a justification for whatever nonsense they instinctively wanted to do. > Preci…
I broadly agree with this criticism, but I also think it's kind of low-hanging. At least speaking for myself (a former member of those circles), I do indeed sit down and write quantitative models when I want to estimate things rigorously, and I can't be the only one who does.
> Indeed, as well as just ignoring that uncertainties about the state of the world or the model of interaction utterly dominate any "calculation" that you could hope to do.
This, on the other hand, I don't think is a valid criticism nor correct taken in isolation.
You can absolutely make meaningful predictions about the world despite uncertainties. A good model can tell you that a hurricane might hit Tampa but won't hit New Orleans, even though weather is the textbook example of a medium-term chaotic system. A good model can tell you when a bridge needs to be inspected, even though there are numerous reasons for failure that you cannot account for. A good model can tell you whether a growth is likely to become cancerous, even though oncogenesis is stochastic.
Maybe a bit more precisely, even if logic cannot tell you what sets of beliefs are correct, it can tell you what sets of beliefs are inconsistent with one another. For example, if you think event X has probability 50%, and you think event Y has probability 20% conditional on X, it would be inconsistent for you to believe event Y has a probability of less than 10%.
> The world at large is does not spend all its time in lesswrongian ritual multiplication or whatever... but this is not because they're educated stupid
When I thought about founding my company last January, one of the first things I did was sit down and make a toy model to estimate whether the unit economics would be viable. It said they would be, so I started the company. It is now profitable with wide operating margins, just as that model predicted it would be, because I did the math and my competitors in a crowded space did not.
Yeah, it's possible to be overconfident, but let's not forget where we are: startups win because people do things in dumb inefficient ways all the time. Sometimes everyone is wrong and you are right, it's just that that usually happens in areas where you have singularly deep expertise, not where you were just a Really Smart Dude and thought super hard about philosophy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We really need a phrase for "appears to behave normally in regular matters and is capable of independent living, does not match other DSM symptoms, but believes insane things". It's a very common component in mass shootings.
That would describe everyone who follows a major religion as well.
"appears to behave normally in regular matters and is capable of independent living, does not match other DSM symptoms, but believes insane things".
None of you think the major religions teach some insane things? Okay then.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think being trans is part of their beliefs or a requirement to be a member
That zizians.info page makes several claims about their beliefs in regards to being trans, and both articles make claims about the number of trans people involved in the events described that, if true, seem to indicate large trans representation. But all of this may be false information. I would like to hear specifics, if so.
(These aren't actually ideologically motivated killings, oddly enough: in practice they just murder people who slight them, even if "it is imperative and the greatest good that you murder people who slight you" is a key component of their decision-theoretic extremism ideology. Or at least that's how I interpret it.)
Some bookmarks from early 2023 that seem relevant now: https://zizians.info https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/ https://aiascendant.substack.com/p/extropias-children-chapte... I do not engage with any of those people nor their weird communities.
This is such an epic unbelievable story. We live in this world?
Chapter 6 covers how StarSlateCodex comes into the picture, by the way. I always wondered that too.