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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'

#351

Post by Aurornis »

concordDance wrote: post #298
rachofsunshine wrote: post #149

[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…

> They have, in the past, responded to criticism with statements to the effect of "anyone who would criticize us for any reason is a bad person who is lying to cause us harm". That kind of framing can't help but get culty. I have never seen this and I've been active around this around for almost two decades now. > isolation Also very much doesn't match my experience. Only about a quarter of my friends are even ration…

I disagree. It's common for any criticisms of rationalism or the rationalist community to be dismissed as having ulterior motives. Even the definition of rationalism is set up in a way that it is de facto good, and therefore anyone suggesting anything negative is either wrong or doesn't know what they're talking about.

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

#352

Post by CamperBob2 »

chroma wrote: post #318
erikpukinskis wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the SF Bay Area, which is known for being one of the most accepting places in the world for LGBT people I live in the Bay. Maybe that is true, but in absolute terms the level of acceptance is still very low. Like, if Denver is 10% accepting, the Bay might be 15%. Or something like that. And Vallejo, while part of the Bay Area is a very different place than, say, the Castro. Culturally, it’s probably more like Detro…

Most of the Zizians who lived in Vallejo moved there from the Berkeley area. The reason they moved was because Curtis Lind felt empathetic and offered them extremely cheap rent. After not paying rent for years (despite at least one of them being an engineer at Google), they ambushed Lind, then tried to behead him and dissolve his body in a vat. Fortunately he was carrying a concealed firearm, so he shot them in self-…

"Invest in residential rental property!" they said. "It will provide a great income stream for your retirement."

We need to keep in mind that Lind was forced by law to give them free rent for two years. He was not allowed to evict them for virtually any reason AFAIK, including nonpayment. Yes, he was supportive and generous, but at some point we all reach our limits, especially when dealing with sociopaths who are bent on taking every possible advantage.

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

#353

Post by hollerith »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #149

[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…

>They have, in the past, responded to criticism with statements to the effect of "anyone who would criticize us for any reason is a bad person who is lying to cause us harm".

Which leader said anything like that? Certainly not Eliezer or the leader of the Center for Applied Rationality (Anna Salamon) or the project lead of the web site lesswrong.com (Oliver Habryka)!

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

#354

Post by Moru »

nkurz wrote: 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…

I know something else that is over-represented in killings. Soldiers. And soldiers are mostly male. So male is the natural killing machine, right?

But male humans are mostly selected to be soldiers by design. In some countries the only possible gender for soldiers.

So mabe it could be that there is some other agenda at play here? Mabe it is not related to trans but to grooming a target group into becoming cult members? Why is it that we always have to think there is a /Big Conspiracy/ somewhere? Don't spread around fud that you have no clue about with words like "omitting something I consider relevant" without making damn sure it realy is relevant. You just feed the trolls if you keep doing this.

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

#355

Post by photonthug »

llm_trw wrote: post #175
nullc wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I shudder to ask, but what exactly is a math pet?

Someone that you introduce to free group actions and the Cox-Zucker machine, hairy ball theorems, stuff like that

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

#356

Post by rexpop »

EA-3167 wrote: post #283
rexpop wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, perhaps, we're very far from an adequate society.

That's probably true, but the larger issue is that we're unlikely to redefine society in the name of making less than 1% of the population feel better. The US has struggled for centuries with the question of how to better treat far more number minorities, such as black people... and women. At some point the, "change society" approach is bound to create backlash that such a small movement can't sustain, and frankly we…

> we're unlikely to redefine society in the name of making less than 1% of the population feel better

Believe it or not, there are actually many popular, far-reaching political ideologies centered around helping "the least of us." It's not such a foreign concept.

Furthermore, the particular ways in which the transgender population is oppressed happen to coincide with many of the ways in which cis women are infamously burdened. It's not "special treatment" that will make this <1% population feel better but a dissolution of the bonds which torment us all. "Nothing to lose but our chains" type shit, yadada?

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

#357

Post by almostgotcaught »

radpanda wrote: post #331
sterlind wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's been an exhausting couple of weeks for me, as a trans person. one executive order after another, explicitly attacking us. scrambling to update all my documents, navigating a Kafkaesque bureaucracy with constantly shifting rules. now this. there are like six Zizians. there are millions of trans people. I'm sure that many of the Zizians being trans says something about the Ziz cult, but Ziz doesn't say anything ab…

I’m not a big George W Bush fan but this quote of his has stuck with me for years: > Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_erro...

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

#358

Post by notjoemama »

dgfitz wrote: post #291
xereeto wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that’s a drastic oversimplification.

And yet trump is president.

I follow the thread and can agree in large parts. But given multiple news anchors, news programs, both traditional and online, in combination with social media, content creators and late night TV, I am wholly exhausted by Trump somehow being a magical monster responsible for (just as you’ve demonstrated) in some way every ill in modern society.

If he is a narcissist and we are aware narcissists feed on attention and drama and starve in the absence of those things, shouldn’t the best version of activism against him be to deny him mention or attribution? Regardless of how cathartic it might be to openly complain? Imagine getting to the end of this next 4 years and despite what he does, nothing of note can be said about the man. Despite all the EOs, nothing interesting could be discussed. His presidency could be a footnote in history, except for the “activists” going emotionally boneless and apoplectic at every word he says.

TBF, it’s not Trump that exhausts me, it’s this. The maniacal blaming for every problem. The incessant injection of Trump and secondarily politics into every conversation and every facet of life. This…neo-activism is as caustic of a solution as the disease it attempts to inoculate. It’s as if everyone has forgetten how to problem solve in the face of adversity. A social fragility whose only method of communication is abject outrage.

Ugh.

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

#359

Post by wruza »

nataliste wrote: post #226
Aurornis wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Sophistry is actually really really old: >In the second half of the 5th century BCE, particularly in Athens, "sophist" came to denote a class of mostly itinerant intellectuals who taught courses in various subjects, speculated about the nature of language and culture, and employed rhetoric to achieve their purposes, generally to persuade or convince others. Nicholas Denyer observes that the Sophists "did ... have one…

Yudkowsky texts represent my mental image of a vector continuously scanning a latent space in some general direction. Changes just pile on and on until you come from concept A to concept B without ever making a logical step, but there’s nothing to criticise cause every step was a seemingly random nuance. Start at some rare values in most dimensions, crank up the temperature and you get yourself Yudkowsky.

> our coherent extrapolated volition is "our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together; where the extrapolation converges rather than diverges, where our wishes cohere rather than interfere; extrapolated as we wish that extrapolated, interpreted as we wish that interpreted (…) The appeal to an objective through contingent human nature (perhaps expressed, for mathematical purposes, in the form of a utility function or other decision-theoretic formalism), as providing the ultimate criterion of "Friendliness", is an answer to the meta-ethical problem of defining an objective morality; extrapolated volition is intended to be what humanity objectively would want, all things considered, but it can only be defined relative to the psychological and cognitive qualities of present-day, unextrapolated humanity.

I doubt that a guy who seriously produces this can say something meaningful at all.

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

#360

Post by Levitz »

Muromec wrote: post #297
__turbobrew__ wrote: post #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.

>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. I don't exactly see how it's different from a group of habitual alcoholics discussing politics and having a fatal disagreement, which is a normal day of the week in any police department with enough demographics to have…

>I don't exactly see how it's different from a group of habitual alcoholics discussing politics and having a fatal disagreement

Intent, premeditation, possibly being designated a terrorist group depending on other factors. Big differences.

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