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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'

#841

Post by dinkumthinkum »

lupusreal wrote: post #709
shoo wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humanity long time ago decided that infinity * 0 = 0 I'm guessing you don't mean this in any formal mathematical sense, without context, infinity multiplied by zero isn't formally defined. There could be various formulations and contexts where you could define / calculate something like infinity * zero to evaluate to whatever you want. (e.g. define f(x) := C x and g(x) := 1/x, What does f(x) * g(x) evaluate to in t…

It's true in the informal sense. Normal people, when considering an "infinitely" bad thing happening (being killed, losing their home, etc) with a very low probability will round that probability to zero ( "It won't happen to ME" ), multiply the two and resultantly spend zero time worrying about it, planning for it, etc. For instance, a serial killer could kill me (infinitely bad outcome) but the chance of that happe…

> It's true in the informal sense. Normal people, when considering an "infinitely" bad thing happening (being killed, losing their home, etc) with a very low probability will round that probability to zero ("It won't happen to ME"), multiply the two and resultantly spend zero time worrying about it, planning for it, etc.

Is this the kind of thing that is part of the Less Wrong cult? I see this "multiply" word being used which I understand is part of the religious technology of LW. It all seems very sophomoric. I don't know what talking about "Infinity * 0" means in an informal sense means. What I can tell you is that "Normal people" are not multiplying "infinitely bad" with a "very low probability rounded to 0". For one, this is conflating multiple senses of infinite. I'm not sure anyone thinks likes bad outcomes are "infinitely bad", maybe in a schoolyard silly-talk kind of way, they just think it is bad. I think that's basically what Less Wrong is, a lot of fancy words and Internet memes and loose-talk about AI all strewn together in a "goth for adults" or some other kind of nerd social club.

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

#842

Post by kelseyfrog »

subsistence234 wrote: post #673
kelseyfrog wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps. Rationalists are also known for updating[changing] their beliefs. They do this under the guise of "doing" Bayesian reasoning. It may be that susceptibility to cults is an edge case of this meta-congnitive position. Or in other words, stubbornness of beliefs may be a defense mechanism against cults.

let's stigmatize admitting when you were wrong. never changing your mind is the only way to avoid joining a murder cult!

Pointing out a tradeoff isn’t the same as arguing for the other extreme. That’s splitting[1], a well-documented cognitive distortion. A bit of therapy can be great for catching these patterns—sharpening your reasoning toolkit, so to speak.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)

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

#843

Post by tbrownaw »

rendall wrote: post #825
pinkmuffinere wrote: post #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 i…

> ...our world has a resurgence of anti-intellectual... That's the US, not the world. There has always been an anti-intellectual strain in American culture.

I believe Stalin's purges included intellectuals as a group.

Mao's hundred flowers thing was a purge of people who dared think they knew better than him.

Or for current popular things, the US is far from alone in seeing the electorate reject the standard academic position on national borders.

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

#844

Post by immibis »

watwut wrote: post #682
llm_trw wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The complaint here seems to be that rationalists don't take progressive pieties as axiomatic. A trans vegan gang murdering police officers is what's come out of this milieu. I don't see how anyone can say they aren't taking "progressive pieties as axiomatic". The OP is just taking the "everything I don't like is fascist" trope to it's natural conclusion. Up next: Stalin actually a Nazi.

> The OP is just taking the "everything I don't like is fascist" trope to it's natural conclusion. Historically, good 90% of times I have seen what you say, the person or group in question turned out to actually be fascists later on. They just packed their fascism to nicer words at the time of the accusation. It kind of happened that those saying "everything I don't like is fascist" either a.) assumed the claim can n…

It's very worrying about society that people only think Elon is a Nazi because he did the Nazi salute, when everyone was saying he was well before then. What if someone is a Nazi and is smart enough to never do a salute? We might put them in charge of the country?

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

#845

Post by kragen »

ben_w wrote: post #678
djur wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I mean is that a superintelligence powerful enough that it could create a simulation of a long-dead human being so accurate as to raise continuity-of-consciousness questions would be powerful enough that it would consider every thought any human in history has ever thought within moments.

The specific detail of digital resurrection, I'd agree. I don't think that's plausible. I'm conflating the original with a much lighter form of it, a dumb-smart AI that's role-playing as one with all the power of a government: sure, compared to the original this is vastly less bad, but still so bad as to be incomprehensibly awful. Merely Pol Pot on steroids rather than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_a…

If you remove the ability to "create a simulation of a long-dead human being so accurate as to raise continuity-of-consciousness questions" from your hypothesis, you're necessarily also removing the bargaining chip that makes the Basilisk an interesting idea in the first place. The possibility that the Basilisk could torture "you" for Avici-like time periods is its whole incentive mechanism for bootstrapping itself into being in the first place. (Arguably it also depends on you calculating probabilities incorrectly, though the arguments I've seen so far in this thread on the matter are reminiscent of five-year-olds who just learned the word "infinity".)

Absent that threat, nobody would have any incentive to work on creating it. So you're really talking about something completely unrelated.

I feel like doing the calculations properly requires summing over all possible strategies that posthuman superintelligences might apply in timeless decision theory. The Basilisk bootstrapping itself into being doesn't require that today's humans do that calculation correctly, but it does require that many of them come to an agreement on the calculation's results. This seems implausible to me.

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

#846

Post by pizzalife »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #774
hackandthink wrote: post #733

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…

At least Zizek can be funny sometimes.

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

#847

Post by kragen »

tbrownaw wrote: post #843
rendall wrote: post #825

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...our world has a resurgence of anti-intellectual... That's the US, not the world. There has always been an anti-intellectual strain in American culture.

I believe Stalin's purges included intellectuals as a group. Mao's hundred flowers thing was a purge of people who dared think they knew better than him. Or for current popular things, the US is far from alone in seeing the electorate reject the standard academic position on national borders.

Pol Pot tried to kill anyone who wore glasses, and Boko Haram are literally named after anti-intellectualism.

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

#849

Post by kragen »

concordDance wrote: post #306
__turbobrew__ wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears the ven diagram of the beliefs and crimes overlap quite a bit. Sometimes the beliefs are that certain crimes should be committed. This is a free country (disputably) and you should be able to think and say whatever you want, but I also think it is reasonable for law enforcement in the investigation of said crimes to also investigate links to other members in the movement.

> It appears the ven diagram of the beliefs and crimes overlap quite a bit. There are hundreds of thousands of rationalists (to a greater or lesser extent). Very few go shoot people.

The Zizians are the ones whose beliefs said that shooting people was justified, not the "rationalists".

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

#850

Post by tbrownaw »

datadeft wrote: post #702
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…

Many people were curious here that the perpetrators were using Vim or Emacs.

  ed is the standard editor
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