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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'

#411

Post by EA-3167 »

hollerith wrote: post #401
EA-3167 wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A great example of superficially smart people creating echo chambers which then turn sour, but they can't escape. There's a very good reason that, "Buying your own press" is a cliched pejorative, and this is an extreme end of that. More generally it's just a depressing example of how rationalism in the LW sense has become a sort of cult-of-cults, with the same old existential dread packaged in a new "rational" form.…

My explanation for why Eliezer went from vocal AI optimist to AI pessimist is that he became more knowledgeable about AI. What is your explanation? I've seen the explanation that AI pessimism helped Eliezer attract donations, but that does not work because his biggest donor when he started going public with his pessimism (2003 through 2006) was Peter Theil, who responded to his turn to pessimism by refusing to contin…

> My explanation for why Eliezer went from vocal AI optimist to AI pessimist is that he became more knowledgeable about AI. What is your explanation?

He spoke to businessmen posing as experts, became increasingly self-referential, and frankly the quasi-religious subtext became text.

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

#412

Post by zmgsabst »

notjoemama wrote: post #358
dgfitz wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

#413

Post by wrsh07 »

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 suspect the answer is closer to "one trans person preyed upon the trust and vulnerability of people in their circle" and that happened to include multiple other trans people (who were likely extremely vulnerable to the charismatic charms of a cult leader).

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

#414

Post by zmgsabst »

thrance wrote: post #369
notjoemama wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The guy is passing budgetary laws without congress, has been made untouchable by the supreme court, pardoned the violent Jan 6 rioters (despite claiming to be "pro-order"), constantly scape-goats minorites and leftists, threatens war with allies, colludes with foreign fascists, is doing a thousand illegal sh*t a minute, but somehow this is no big deal and we should just ignore it. Scrutiny and accountability for this…

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

#415

Post by CSMastermind »

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?

I was unacquainted with the term but after searching it seems that Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote several posts on a BDSM website where he fantasized about recruiting a harem of highly educated women to service him which he called "math pets".

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

#416

Post by djur »

ben_w wrote: post #287
djur wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the kind of (highly improbable) world-spanning superintelligence that would be necessary (and probably still insufficient) to make the Basilisk possible would be in any way limited by the ideas expressed in LLM training data today.

In so far as it's an incompetent basalisk, this is a good thing. Trouble is, people are highly motivated to make the AI ever smarter. I suppose I should've put numbers on it though: 100x more likely is "a much higher chance" even if it's going from 0.01% to 1%.

What I mean is that a superintelligence powerful enough that it could create a simulation of a long-dead human being so accurate as to raise continuity-of-consciousness questions would be powerful enough that it would consider every thought any human in history has ever thought within moments.

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

#417

Post by JumpCrisscross »

chroma wrote: post #183
duxup wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If marginalization were the main cause

I think they're crazy first, trans second. They were marginalised for being crazy. Then they found each other because they're trans. Many cults have random attributes shared by the members, whether it be race or sexual preferences. Their race or sexual preference didn't cause them to join a cult, they had other things going on that drove that. But when it came time to join one, they gravitated towards the one that identified with them.

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

#418

Post by transmission77 »

sterlind wrote: post #295
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…

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…

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

#419

Post by hollerith »

EA-3167 wrote: post #411
hollerith wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My explanation for why Eliezer went from vocal AI optimist to AI pessimist is that he became more knowledgeable about AI. What is your explanation? I've seen the explanation that AI pessimism helped Eliezer attract donations, but that does not work because his biggest donor when he started going public with his pessimism (2003 through 2006) was Peter Theil, who responded to his turn to pessimism by refusing to contin…

> My explanation for why Eliezer went from vocal AI optimist to AI pessimist is that he became more knowledgeable about AI. What is your explanation? He spoke to businessmen posing as experts, became increasingly self-referential, and frankly the quasi-religious subtext became text.

Businessmen like Elon and Sam Altman, you mean?

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

#420

Post by llamaimperative »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #382
gerdesj wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that you need to be a Christian to empathise with anyone. The big geezer's (JC) teachings imply to me that keeping quiet about your faith and simply doing good (for a given value of good) is the Way. Declaring a religion might rile someone, before you have even engaged. I suggest that you simply proffer a hand. Empathise as best you can. Be careful. At best, with mentioning religion, you have declared y…

> don't think that you need to be a Christian to empathise They're saying that a minority of evangelists and rapey priests have been making Christianity look bad for decades.

FWIW I don't think it's so much the minority of directly guilty parties, but the institutional circling of the wagons when someone is caught. This often seems to extend to literally the tippy top of whatever congregation it occurs in (including e.g. the Pope).

But in any case, yeah: you don't have enough information from this type of stuff to make good judgments about individuals in any scenario.

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