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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'

#461

Post by olalonde »

wesapien wrote: post #405
iamthepieman wrote: post #59

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…

After seeing this news, I recall watching a video by Julia Galef about "what is rationality". Would it be fair to say that in this situation, they lack epistemic rationality but are high in instrumental rationality?

If they had high instrumental rationality, they would be effective at achieving their goals. That doesn’t seem to be the case - by conventional standards, they would even be considered "losers": jobless, homeless, imprisoned, or on the run.

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

#462

Post by hipadev23 »

zmgsabst wrote: post #414
thrance wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

This is headline news stuff for the past two weeks. Nobody needs to cite it.

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

#463

Post by LeroyRaz »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #195
nullc wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> But they don't apply formal or "formalist" approaches, they invoke the names of formal methods but then extract from them just a "vibe". 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. > In…

What you describe (doing basic market analysis) is pretty much unrelated to 'rationality.'

'Rationality' hasn't really made any meaningful contributions to human knowledge or thinking. The things you describe, are all products of scientists and statisticians, etc...

Bayesian statistics is not rationality. It is just Bayesian statistics... And it is mathematicians who should get the credit not less wrong!!

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

#464

Post by guerrilla »

dvaun wrote: post #262
mickelsen wrote: post #37

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.

I especially enjoy how the author from the substack series described the singularity as “The Rapture of the Nerds”.

I really loved the language describing the singularity as "an inescapable runaway feedback loop which leads to the ascension of an enemy god". Beautiful.

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

#465

Post by bashmelek »

t_mann wrote: 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…

It bothers me also how the word “rationalist” suddenly means the LW crowd, while I keep thinking Leibniz

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

#466

Post by Workaccount2 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #385
anon84873628 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling them a roaming band or "tactical death squad" is giving far too much credit. It is a handful of crazy people who convinced themselves that a couple murders would solve their problems. In particular the attack on border patrol was obviously random and illogical. And the fact that no one was convicted of the Pennsylvania murders seems to reflect more on the police and prosecutors than the intelligence of the pe…

Speaking of random and illogical, what prompted the Border Patrol to stop their car in the first place, I wonder? None of the news stories have elaborated on that.

I don't know, but this is ripe material for a documentaries and podcasts, so I'm sure there will be a lot more coming out in the future.

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

#467

Post by smeeger »

liftIO wrote: post #142

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…

any violence that is adjacent to rationalism will see a media response like this and a healthy dose of astroturfing to support it. the cia is very eager to make rationalists persona non grata because they provide a cultural nucleation point for anti-AI sentiment. they want to suppress these ideas so that our victory in the AI arms race is secure — unhindered by pesky human rights nonsense. they killed suchir balaji, too.

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

#468

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

oguz-ismail wrote: post #53

How does a 27-year-old fail to kill an 80-year-old with a samurai sword?

Most ‘samurai swords’ on the market are barely-functional wall-hangers. And the article describes it as a stabbing. Curved swords are actually quite hard to effectively stab with, so it’s hardly surprising that an untrained user using a poor-quality weapon incorrectly couldn’t cause a lethal wound.

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

#469

Post by SubiculumCode »

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…

Thank you for being you. Stay safe; the consequences of this election are ugly.

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

#470

Post by bigstrat2003 »

nappy-doo wrote: post #440
sterlind wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

conservative media has the opposite rule: make every story about a trans person into a narrative about trans ideology. this should be a story about an ideological cult with trans members, but instead it's a story about the cult of trans ideology. it's called "nut picking" - use the worst examples of a group to tarnish the group as a whole. a good example of this is attacks against Muslim Americans after 9/11.

Is it the same for judging all MAGA as Nazis? I ask that in all earnestness. I am not a MAGA or a MAGA apologist.

It is much the same thing, yes. The reality that I have experienced is that most Trump voters are decent people who simply disagree with me on the best way to solve the issues facing our country. Not at all a pack of hate-filled Nazis. But humans love to pick on their outgroup, so people simply round "Trump supporter" off to "Nazi bigot" and never bother to reflect that they are simply giving into tribalism.
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