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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'

#611

Post by novok »

ericd wrote: post #406
rachofsunshine wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't, that one's me speaking from my own speculation. It's a working model I've had for a while about the nature of a lot of kinds of mental illness (particularly my own tendencies towards depression), which I guess I should explain more thoroughly! This gets a bit abstract, so stick with me: it's a toy model, and I don't mean it to be definitive truth, but it seems to do well at explaining my own tendencies. ----…

Thanks very much for typing all that out! >These external forcing functions tend to be pretty similar among people of a comparable environment. But the internal equilibria seem to be quite different. So when the external forcing is strong, it tends to pull people in similar directions, and people whose innate tendencies are extreme tend to get pulled along with the majority anyway. But when external forcing is weak (…

A lot of rationalists that go deep are on the autistic spectrum. Their feedback loops are often classic autistic thought traps of people who end up "committing to the bit". Add anxiety to it and you get autistic style rumination loops that go nuts.

Edit: Funny enough, when I wrote "autistic thought traps", I thought I just made it up to describe something, but it is common terminology. An AI summary of what they are:

Autistic people may experience thought traps, which are unhelpful patterns of thinking that can lead to anxiety and stress. These traps can include catastrophizing, all-or-nothing thinking, and perseverative cognition.

Catastrophizing: Jumping to the worst-case scenario; Imagining unlikely or improbable scenarios; Focusing on negative aspects of a situation; Having difficulty letting go of negative thoughts;

All-or-nothing thinking: Categorizing people or things as entirely good or bad; Having a tendency to think in black and white;

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

#612

Post by hollerith »

nullc wrote: post #574
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…

> 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.

>being a doomsayer brought him a lot more more money, power, and worship per unit of effort

I thought someone would bring that up, so I attempted to head it off in the second paragraph of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42904625

He was already getting enough donations and attention from being an AI booster, enough to pay himself and pay a research team, so why would he suddenly start spouting AI doom before he had any way of knowing that doomsaying would also bring in donations? (There were no AI doomsayers that Eliezer could learn that from when Eliezer started his AI doomsaying: Bill Joy wrote an article in 2000, but never followed it up by asking for donations.)

Actually, my guess is that doomsaying never did bring in as much as AI boosterism: his org is still living off of donations made many years ago by crypto investors and crypto founders, who don't strike me as the doom-fearing type: I suspect they had fond memories of him from his optimistic AI-boosterism days and just didn't read his most recent writings before they donated.

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

#613

Post by titanomachy »

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #495
PaulHoule wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> He's taking a cocktail of drugs that gets prescribed via telemedicine and was telling us about the serious side effects he was suffering: one of these drugs, spironolactone, is primarily a drug that alters your mineral metabolism but has the effect of suppressing testosterone if you take 20x the normal dose. (My doc gives it to me for my blood pressure.) He has insatiable cravings for salt as a result. It's worth n…

I don't think it's the spironolactone part that was concerning, but that the idea of the new gender identity came from someone else and lots of convincing was required.

It reminds me of a friend I have who is quite severely depressed and has gone through a wide range of sexual identities. Straight, to asexual, then gay, then polyamorously bisexual, and now back to monogamously straight. Each change she excitedly explained to me that she had unlocked some deep secret to her identity and now her whole life made sense. This happened well into her adult years, not adolescence.

Some people seem to have a strong sense of a "missing piece" in their lives, and might be susceptible to latching on to almost any identity or community if it can explain that feeling.

EDIT: Because of the current barrage that trans people are under, I should clarify that I know trans people who have a deep and abiding certainty that their gender is different from what it says on their birth certificate; my above comment is not meant to include those people.

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

#614

Post by skissane »

card_zero wrote: post #590
skissane wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It seems to go like this: Compatibilists: free will is a term for something real that we do. Incompatibilists: no, that thing is trivial and should have a different name. Free will is a term for something impossible. But despite being impossible it's a meaningful concept. And it's somehow hugely important and deserves a name. I'm unclear about the motivation for this, especially the last part.

I don't identify as an incompatibilist, but to try to steelman their position:

Some incompatiblist determinists might view metaphysical libertarianism as a logically coherent possibility, albeit a false one. They might then view "free will" as useful in naming a way the universe coherently could have been, but turned out to actually not be – much like they might view Ptolemaic epicycles, phlogiston, the luminiferous aether, and steady state theory. And, much as a person might object to the position "the luminiferous aether is actually true, if we redefine all the terms involved to refer to concepts from special and general relativity" as a form of unhelpful obscurantism, they might view compatibilist determinism as doing the same kind of thing to metaphysically libertarian free will.

There's also the other kind of incompatibilism: metaphysical libertarianism is itself a form of incompatibilism. Both incompatibilist determinists and metaphysical libertarians agree that determinism and free will are incompatible. They just disagree on whether that means we should junk free will or junk determinism.

Although I think here "determinism" is a bit of a misnomer. Most physical determinists don't actually have a problem with the idea that there might be irreducible quantum indeterminism (whether or not they believe there actually is). An incompatibilist determinist would say "a clock doesn't have free will, and a roulette wheel doesn't either, so neither can some hybrid between the two". A compatibilist determinist will say that whether it is a clock or a roulette wheel or a hybrid of them, if it gets sufficiently complicated in the right ways, then it will have free will. For both, the real objection is to metaphysically libertarian ideas that human choice involves some irreducible "third thing" which is neither deterministic causation nor impersonal chance, nor any mere combination of the two. There are also claims (e.g. by Roger Penrose) that quantum indeterminism operates in some special way within the human brain, different from how it operates normally, and that human free will is somehow rooted in that. Many "determinists" (whether compatibilist or incompatibilist) would view that as uncomfortably close to metaphysical libertarianism, even if it does attempt to partly replace the transcendental metaphysics with something closer to the realm of the empirically testable (even if not quite there). But, while "quantum indeterminism operates in a very special way in the human brain" makes them uncomfortable, I don't think most of them view in the same way "quantum indeterminism is real and irreducible, but it doesn't operate in the human brain in any way differently from how it operates anywhere else"–again, whether or not they actually believe it. Some will prefer purely deterministic interpretations of quantum theory instead, such as many worlds or de Broglie–Bohm theory–but that debate has no inherent connection to the topic of human free will.

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

#615

Post by taurath »

esperent wrote: post #576
taurath wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Here’s one - 90% of autistic teens w mood problems reported at least one trauma. 4x likelihood of having PTSD. Perhaps I exaggerated the totality but I do think the science is in on whether autistic people are more traumatized.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK573608/

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

#617

Post by Duwensatzaj »

timmytokyo wrote: post #580
LeroyRaz wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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")?

The ones who want to confront reality even when it has unpleasant truths rather than believing comfortable lies.

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

#618

Post by waveBidder »

lostdog wrote: post #176
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…

Wow, what a perfect description of why their probability-logic leads to silly beliefs. I've been wondering how to argue within their frame for a while, and here's what I've come up with: Is the likelihood that aliens exist, are unfriendly, and AGI will help us beat them higher or lower than the likelihood that the AGI itself that we develop is unfriendly to us and wants to FOOM us? Show your work.

the term you're looking for is pascal's mugging, and it originates from within rationalism

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

#619

Post by sunshowers »

card_zero wrote: post #590
skissane wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It seems to go like this: Compatibilists: free will is a term for something real that we do. Incompatibilists: no, that thing is trivial and should have a different name. Free will is a term for something impossible. But despite being impossible it's a meaningful concept. And it's somehow hugely important and deserves a name. I'm unclear about the motivation for this, especially the last part.

My specific issue is with moral responsibility, which I believe is out of one's control. (So for example I don't think developers are to morally blame for writing bad code.)

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

#620

Post by noslacknoops »

YurgenJurgensen wrote: post #468
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.

"'He had a samurai sword stuck to his back with about a foot of it sticking out in front, his face cut up all over,' said his friend Patrick McMillan."

https://www.ktvu.com/news/two-held-in-death-of-fellow-squatt...

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