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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'

#571

Post by adastra22 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #529
adastra22 wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gwen, not Gwern. Gwen Danielson, if he is still alive, is wanted for his possible involvement in multiple homicides related to the Ziz cult. Not Gwern. And unihemispheric sleep (Gwen’s word for what they do; they like to invent their own terms) is one of the techniques the Ziz cult uses.

Thanks for correcting that mixup! So there's no source whatsoever for this bizarre notion other than the Zizian death cult itself. That makes it even crazier that some people (whether here or in the news media) seem to be taking it at face value, though.

Correct.

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

#572

Post by dang »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #304
dang wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Posting slurs like this will get you banned here. Please don't do it again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What was the slur? Mental illness?

In this case yes, describing entire populations of people that way is a slur.

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

#573

Post by dang »

abecedarius wrote: post #248
dang wrote: post #84

After puzzling over the threads on this head-spinning story, my sense is that maybe the most neutral thing to do is re-up this submission of a news report and merge most of the comments hither. The other recent threads are/were: The Zizians (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42898323 The Zizians and the rationalist death cult - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897871 Suspects in 2 murder cases shared…

The submitter of this story inserted 'rationalist' into the title; it's not in the headline and IMO it's calumny. Would you take it back out?

Sure.

Edit: I think "death cult" is linkbaity though, so I replaced it with "Zizians". I hope that's neutral enough for everybody because I'll be offline soon.

(Replacing a general-sensational term with a proper noun is often a good debaiting trick.)

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

#574

Post by nullc »

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…

> What is your explanation?

A combination of a psychological break when his sibling died and that being a doomsayer brought him a lot more more money, power, and worship per unit of effort and particularly per unit of meaningful work-like effort.

It's a lot easier to be a doomsayer bullshiter than other kinds of bullshitters, the fomer just screams stop the latter is expected to accomplish something now and again.

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

#575

Post by skissane »

sunshowers wrote: post #565
skissane wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one chooses to be anything. There is no free will and there never has been. I think this is a very confused remark. You are mixing up the existence of choices with the philosophical question of the nature and existence of "free will". I had a real choice as to what to eat for breakfast this morning. There were several live options and I chose one of them and discarded the others. Was that choice of mine "free"?…

I'm not confused at all. I just don't think compatibilism is legitimate :) I absolutely do not believe anyone chooses to be of any religion. It's just luck.

Plenty of incompatibilist determinists agree that choices exist, they just deny that they are in any meaningful sense "free"

Whereas you said "No one chooses to be anything", which is a denial of the existence of choice altogether

Whether or not you are confused inside your own head, you are expressing yourself in an imprecise and confusing way

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

#576

Post by esperent »

taurath wrote: post #559
cjbgkagh wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know I sound crazy saying what I'm about to say but it is the truth as I understand it and I think it's important. It appears to me that there is a certain modality of thought that occurs much more often in people with hEDS, specifically those with TNXB SNPs. If you're super deep into type theory the odds substantially increase that you have hEDS - it's how I found out that I had it. And this same group is far more…

In my experience, it can often be trauma that causes the auto immunes. Seeing everything from a chemical standpoint only looks at half the picture. It’s hard to find a not traumatized autistic person for example.

> It’s hard to find a not traumatized autistic person for example.

This is an extraordinary claim and needs evidence. Do you have a source for this?

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

#577

Post by nullc »

smeeger wrote: post #472
wslh wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there isnt a single well founded argument to dismiss AI alarmism. I don't think that's entirely true. A well-founded argument against AI alarmism is that, from a cosmic perspective, human survival is not inherently more important than the emergence of AGI. AI alarmism is fundamentally a humanistic position: it frames AGI as a potential existential threat and calls for defensive measures. While that perspective is v…

the discussion is about what will happen, not the value of human life. even if human life is worthless, my predictions about the outcome of AI are correct and theirs are not

> my predictions about the outcome of AI are correct and theirs are not

How very zizian of you.

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

#578

Post by nicecountry »

PaulHoule wrote: post #460
LeoPanthera wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

My best friend in college knew she was a woman when she was a small child (though her mom and her birth certificate disagreed.) Nobody was going to talk her out of it. She got kicked out of the Air Force Academy on account of it. The nation's loss was my gain because she was the most awesome engineering student and science fiction fan and after working in many military-industrial complex jobs she's working on a proje…

[dead]

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

#579

Post by mikhmha »

emmelaich wrote: post #186
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…

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."

So did Fyodor Dostoevsky.

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

#580

Post by timmytokyo »

LeroyRaz wrote: post #439
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…

I think astral codex ten did a survey recently and the majority of respondents were politically left

What kind of political leftist would you say resonates most acutely with Scott Alexander's January paean to the scientific racism of Emil Kirkegaard and Richard Lynn ("How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Lynn's National IQ Estimates")?
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