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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'

#771

Post by zozbot234 »

Aurornis wrote: post #751
hackandthink wrote: post #743

On the fringes of the rationalist community, there are obviously questionable figures who may be playing an evil game (Bankman Fried) or have lost their way intellectually and morally. My impression from occasional visits to astral codex ten, however, is that the vast majority of people are reasonable and sometimes succeed to make the world a better place. Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

> My impression from occasional visits to astral codex ten, however, is that the vast majority of people are reasonable and sometimes succeed to make the world a better place. The rationalist bloggers are very good at optics and carefully distance themselves from the fringes at the surface. They have a somewhat circular definition of rationalism that defines rationalists as being reasonable, which makes it easy to cr…

Slate Star Codex's engagement with neoreactionary thought is not exactly a secret. He wrote both "Reactionary philosophy in an enormous, planet-sized nutshell" https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy... (a sympathetic treatment of these ideas) and "The Anti-Reactionary FAQ" https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-f...

There's also plenty of good reasons to be aware of these political ideas, given that, e.g. New Confucianism, which just happens to be quite influential in China is essentially a kind of "Neo-Reaction with Chinese Characteristics". And some people argue that the highly controversial Project 2025 - which seems to be driving policy in the new Trump administration - may be inspired by neo-reactionary ideas.

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

#772

Post by shadowgovt »

titanomachy wrote: post #622
shadowgovt wrote: post #597

By "string" here, we mean one. Not to imply the Zizians aren't embracing some dangerous ideas, but this is the strangest use of "string of killings" I've ever seen. Author could have gone with "wave of violence," but even then they'd be talking about a "wave" of three incidents in three years.

Four killings. The landlord in Villejo, Michelle Zajko's parents Richard and Rita in Pennsylvania, and now the border patrol agent in Vermont.

Ah, thank you. Developing story; I'd only heard of the two, and now we seem to be investigating six.

Six is a lot, but still a bit unclear whether we have a Manson Family situation or a One Serial Killer Who Read Too Much Nietzsche situation.

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

#773

Post by moolcool »

sublimefire wrote: post #681
mikhmha wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So did Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Yes, exactly, “Crime and punishment” or ”Demons” or others. Some of the dialogues are exactly about the ideologies and how different characters think and apply them, how reason manifests in violence.

This made me think of C&P as well. Specifically how Raskolnikov developed his own half baked ideology where “great men” were free to act with impunity. It’s not hard to draw parallels with “longtermism” and effective altruism.

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

#774

Post by Der_Einzige »

hackandthink wrote: post #733
bowsamic wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even Aristotle knew that reason was just an aspect of being a human and not the whole thing To be honest the only philosopher I know of who convincingly argued that everything is reason is Hegel, but he did so more by making the idea of reason so broad that even empiricism (and emotion, humour, love, the body, etc.) falls under it...

Hegel still has a really bad reputation regarding atrocities and his Philosophy of history. "History as the slaughter-bench" - and yet the aims of reason are accomplished." But there are also Hegel scholars (Walter Jaeschke for example) who simply consider these accusations to be uneducated and that he does not see the atrocities of history as reasonable, but on the contrary makes criticism possible in the first plac…

All of Hegel, and most of his descendants, are fashionable nonsense. All types of "Dialectics" are fake and don't exist. It's telling that the most common version of the term "Dialectics" that everyone thinks Hegel coined was actually coined by one of his (many butthurt) students, Fitche.

Philosophy will continue to be bankrupt for as long as Hegel's stranglehold on Philosophy remains. Kill his thought, Kill "dialectics", Kill the "world spirit" or "Geist". Otherwise philosophy continues down the "post modern neo marxism" loony world that has led so many to turn reactionary.

Edit (in response to the comment cus I can't reply faster since Dang's HN policies are bad):

I cover to cover read his shitty books. They weren't worth opening, let alone reading. This is the same for most of the rest of the "postmodern" canon.

Competitive debate meant that we weaponized these long dead idolaters for our own needs. I've (unfortunately) read Zizek, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Sartre, Heidigger, etc. I regret most of the time I spent reading these authors. They are all intellectually bankrupt and many of them are straight up pseudo-scientific charlatan snake oil salespeople (Lacan).

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

#775

Post by Der_Einzige »

Aurornis wrote: post #169
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…

> 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…

The whole internet mainstream zeitgeist with dating among men has become identical to incel talking points from 5 years ago.

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

#776

Post by harrison_clarke »

saagarjha wrote: post #633
novok wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed years ago too that AI doomers and rationalist type were very prone to (infinity * 0 = infinity) types of traps, which is a fairly autistic way of thinking. Humanity long time ago decided that infinity * 0 = 0 for very good practical reasons.

No, humanity decided that infinity doesn't exist and anyone trying to tell you about it is selling you religion.

not exactly a rationalist thing, but a lot of bay-area people will tell you that exponential growth exists, and it's everywhere

i can't think of any case where exponential growth actually happens, though. exponential decay and logistic curves are common enough, but not exponential growth

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

#777

Post by tacitusarc »

IshKebab wrote: post #698
close04 wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “quadrillion days of happiness” offered to a rational person gives away that such allegories are anthropomorphized just for the sake of presentation. For the sake of what the philosophers mean, you should probably imagine this as an algorithm running on a machine (no AGI). It’s a mental tease, not a manual on how to react when faced with a mugger who forgot his weapon at home but has an interesting proposition to…

> The “quadrillion days of happiness” offered to a rational person gives away that such allegories are anthropomorphized just for the sake of presentation. So what? It's still presented as if it's a interesting problem that needs to be "remedied", when in fact it's just a basic maths mistake. If I said "ooo look at this paradox: 1 + 1 = 2, but if I add another one then we get 1 + 1 + 1 = 2, which is clearly false! I…

Interestingly, the trolley problem is decided every day, and humanity does not change tracks.

There are people who die waiting for organ donors, and a single donor could match multiple people. We do not find an appropriate donor and harvest them. This is the trolley problem, applied.

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

#778

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

close04 wrote: post #687
IshKebab wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> coined this term to refer to the category of reasoning mistake. That's not at all what the Wikipedia article for it says. It presents it as an interesting paradox with several potential (and incorrect!) "remedies" rather than a category of basic logical errors.

The “quadrillion days of happiness” offered to a rational person gives away that such allegories are anthropomorphized just for the sake of presentation. For the sake of what the philosophers mean, you should probably imagine this as an algorithm running on a machine (no AGI). It’s a mental tease, not a manual on how to react when faced with a mugger who forgot his weapon at home but has an interesting proposition to…

> Similarly the trolley problem isn’t really about real humans in that situation, or else the correct answer would always be “do nothing”.

The correct answer in case of it being about real people, of course, is to switch immediately after the front bogey makes it through. This way, the trolley will derail and make a sharp turn before it runs over anyone, and stop.

The passengers will get shaken, but I don’t remember fatalities being reported when such things happened for real with real trams.

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

#779

Post by Der_Einzige »

__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.

Rest assured, I'm pretty sure among the easiest ways to make yourself the target of surveillance is to do anything interesting at all involving technology. All serious AI researchers, for example, should assume that they are the victims of this.

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

#780

Post by hollerith »

benreesman wrote: post #754
the_af wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What puzzles me about Eliezer Yudkowsky is this: He has no formal education. He hasn't produced anything in the actual AI field, ever, except his very general thoughts (first that it would come, then about alignment and doomsday scenarios). He isn't an AI researcher except he created an institution that says he is one , kind of as if I created a club and declared myself president of that club. He has no credentials (…

He’s basically a PR person for OpenAI and Anthropic, the latter of which is fucking deep in with these long-termer creeps. He was writing fan fiction and creepy torture shit one for ages until there was big money in influencing public policy on AI.

He has received a salary for working on AI since 2000 (having the title "research fellow"). In contrast, he didn't start publishing his Harry Potter fan-fiction till 2010. I seem to recall his publishing a few sci-fi short stories before then, but his non-fiction public written output has always greatly exceeded his fiction output until a few years ago after he became semi-retired due to chronic health problems.

>He’s basically a PR person for OpenAI and Anthropic

How in the world did you arrive at that belief? If it was up to him, OpenAI and Anthropic would be shut down tomorrow and their assets returned to shareholders.

Since 2004 or so, he has been of the view that most research in AI is dangerous and counterproductive and he has not been shy about saying so at length in public, e.g., getting a piece published in Time Magazine a few years ago opining that the US government should shut down all AI labs and start pressuring China and other countries to shut down the labs there.

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