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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'

#801

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well yeah their whole business model is convincing investors that logistic functions and exponentials are the same thing, actually.

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

#803

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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")?

That is an inaccurate, reductionist comment. I encourage folks to read that post if they are interested.

Having not-yet read the post, I appreciate your very practical response. “Read the thing you’re criticizing” is great advice.

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

#804

[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…

Ok but social clustering is how humans work. Culture translated to modern idiomatic language is “practice of a cult”. Ure translates to “practice of”, Ur being the first city so say historians; clusters of shared culture is our lived experience. Forever now there have been a statistical few who get stuck in a while loop “while alive recite this honorific code, kill perceived threats to memorized honorific chants”.

We’ve observed ourselves do this for centuries. Are your descriptions all that insightful?

How do you solve isolation? Can you? Will thermodynamics allow it? Or are we just neglecting a different cohort?

Again due to memory or social systems are always brittle. Everyone chafes over social evolution of some kind, no matter how brave a face they project in platitudes, biology self selects. So long as the economy prefers low skilled rhetoricians holding assets, an inflexible workforce constrains our ability to flex. Why is there not an “office worker” culture issue? Plainly self selecting for IT to avoid holding the mirror up to itself.

Growing up in farmland before earning to STEM degrees, working on hardware and software, I totally get the outrage of people breaking their ass to grow food while some general studies grad manages Google accounts and plays PS5 all night. Extreme addiction to a lived experience is the American way from top to bottom.

Grammatically correct analysis of someone else. But this all gets very 1984 feeling; trust posts online, ignore lived experience. It’s not hard to see your post as an algebraic problem; the issues of meatspace impact everyone regardless of the syntax sugar analysis we pad the explanation with. How do you solve for the endless churn of physics?

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

#805

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 expl…

To be honest I don't think that's really concerning. It's not unusual for people even into their late 20s to experiment and figure themselves out. And sometimes that experimentation is influenced by the people we surround ourselves with.

People have done this all the way back time eternal, the only thing that's different today is that people are allowed to be more open about it and that there are many discrete labels that allow people to easily describe what they are specifically feeling.

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

#806

[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."

Or David Hume, 300 years ago:

"Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions"

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

#807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "dialect…

> This is the same for most of the rest of the "postmodern" canon.

I genuinely can’t think of anyone less postmodern than Hegel. He’s a pure rational traditionalist who believed completely in objective truth and morality and grand narratives lol

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

#808
In addition to the tragedy of the killings, I worry that this will give rationalism _as a concept_ a bad name. Deep thought is so important to progress, and already is somewhat stigmatized. My church underwent a nasty split when I was a kid, and the reason I heard was “pastor Bobby read too many books”. Obviously it wasn’t as simple as that, but the message was clear — don’t read too many books. I suspect this will interpreted similarly.

It feels that our world has a resurgence of anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-data, etc movements. I hate that.

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

#809

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This person's 'weirdness' is, I think, a neurodivergence which I won't offer a diagnosis of. I don't think a gender transition will make this person whole, this person will just be a weird person who is also trans. The old problem will persist but now he (maybe she or something else later) will have additional side effects and other baggage not to mention lost opportunities such as not being able to be a father.

The goal is not to make yourself whole and even if it didn't work out, they could de-transition (and should be supported in doing so). Stopping HRT (as long as you at least temporarily take HRT in the opposite direction to kickstart things again) has little in the way of long term effects.

> not to mention lost opportunities such as not being able to be a father.

This isn't true. Even if you stay trans the entire rest of your life you can still often have kids. This goes for trans women, trans men, and nonbinary people. Generally at worst you'd just need to supplement with some hormones to support fertility but often even that isn't necessary.

But supposing someone de-transitioned, fertility generally returns completely or near completely within 6 months to a year.

The only case where you can't "undo" any degree of loss of fertility is with an orchiectomy (testicle removal) but even then the standard procedure is to preserve sufficient semen in cold storage for future use.

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

#810
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brilliant summary, thanks. I'm interested in #4, is there anywhere you know of to read more about that? I don't think I've seen that described except obliquely in eg sayings about the relationship between genius and madness.

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. ----…

Interesting, this is the first argument I've heard that emotional instability is actually good for your mental health.
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