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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   20900 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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So a border patrol agent was killed by a trans vegan-extremist terror cult that came out of Bay Area rationalist culture. they seem to be responsible for at least 3 other deaths (including family members and a former landlord who was going to testify against one of their members on a felony murder charge), but have taken 40% casualties in the process.

Here is an archive link to the leader's blog

As usual Andy ngo is the only person talking about the case at all, although his summary seems to miss a lot of important details.

This is the same group that got arrested in Sonoma a few years ago while raiding a CFAR camp. I predicted at the time that this group would make the news again, so you can imagine that I am Steve's Complete Lack Of Surprise.

So, thoughts. San Francisco continues to generate weird murder suicide cults just as it has for the past... 80 years? This really needs to be investigated because the effect has persisted over numerous different ideological movements. My running theory outside of "something in the water" is that selective migration brings a lot of that sort of person to SF (with flowers in their hair); you'll notice the men in this group were from all over the country (and one from Germany), but were all the sorts of people who were looking for some militant cult to give them a sense of belonging.

Second, and this might be beating a dead horse here, consider the reaction of the "rationalist community" to this group over the years. Even after the murders started, the "horrible dangers of moldbug and why reactionaries must be purged from the community" got oceans of ink spilled compared to one or two blog posts about this group. Meanwhile rationalist groups were still awarding these guys grants. Here is another trans-vegan-r/sneerclub-LW activist who still supports them because murdering landlords is good.
The ability to selectively "problematize" and craft narratives continues to be the main source of leftist power, and seems to be almost completely impervious to evidence-based arguments.

Lastly, it seems like literally every member of this group was a transexual (it's hard to be sure when the news steadfastly refuses to notice "Emma's" Adam's apple) Considering this case alongside the now-infamous "trans-alpaca ranch holocaust", it really does seem like sexual ideologies act as a social technology that allows disturbed and dysfunctional men to overcome social atomization and organize into warbands. "Cut off your family but keep demanding money from them to fund the group" seems to be the main way the cult leaders both control people and fund their lifestyles, when they're not getting grants or NPR fundraisers organized for them.

I have more to say about Ziz's horrible decision theory framework. From zizians.info:

The theoretical basis for Zizian social conduct is Yudkowsky and Soare's "functional decision theory". "Functional decision theory" is designed as an answer to Newcomb-like problems where the actions of others are conditional on which decision theory an agent uses. In normal English, it's about situations where the environment will change depending on who you are. The classic example is a choice between two boxes full of money. The first box has much more money in it but only if you're the sort of person who will take that box and leave the other behind. Functional decision theory says the solution to this problem is to choose a strategy which responds to this situation by only taking the first box. It asserts an acausal theory of decisions, where you do not make choices between outcomes but choices between strategies. Instead of saying "now that I'm here I'll take both boxes" an FDT agent says "I know I only get to be here if I one box; so I'll one box".

In Zizian thought this concept is expanded to justify behavior that would make a Sovereign Citizen blush. Zizians do not think it is ever valid to surrender. The reasoning goes that if someone is trying to extract a surrender from you, giving in is choosing a strategy that gets coerced into surrender. If you fight bitterly you prevent the coercion in the first place by making it too costly to fight you. (Associated phrases: "nosell"; "collapse the timeline";)

It is superficially compelling, however, everyone can sense that something is not quite right about the argument, and it's this (among other problems) - For functional decision theory to work, it has to be possible for other parties to infer your strategy/"policy". In Newcomb's paradox, Omega is capable of inferring your strategy through advanced technology or magic. In the real world, other people have to guess based on your words or actions.

So option one is to make a verbal commitment: "If you cross me in any way, I'll kill you!" But there are some problems:

  • Problem 1: They don't know what you mean by "crossing you," so you have to get more specifically. Maybe "crossing you" means "making you pay rent" (as was apparently the case). So you're going to have to be more specific: "If you make me pay rent, I'll kill you!"
  • Problem 2: That's illegal, and will earn you at least a restraining order. So you have to stay vague, but if you're vague, then they will not know your strategy.
  • Problem 3: Almost nobody uses the "never surrender" strategy, and for the most part, if somebody tells you they are using this strategy, they are lying or exaggerating. Especially if they are keeping it vague.

So your own real option in action - That's right, for somebody to be convinced that you will kill them, you're going to have to kill someone else first. But we face the same basic problems as above:

  • Problem 1: If you kill somebody, but keep it secret, then other people still won't know that your strategy is murder. So you are going to have to do it openly.
  • Problem 2: If you kill somebody openly, you are going to jail, and you will not have the resources to retaliate against the entire government.

So you are still screwed. Either you keep your strategy a secret, so nobody believes you and crosses you anyway, or you exercise your strategy openly and go to jail (or get killed in retaliation by someone else).

If you are still committed to this strategy, you are essentially forced to live the life of a mob boss: Other people kill and take the fall on your behalf, and even though everyone knows it was you, it can't quite be proven in a court of law that you were responsible. It is a precarious situation to be in, to say the least. Maybe Ziz is in this zone now, but it doesn't seem to going very well.

Lastly, even if somehow you execute the above perfectly, you still have the problem that nobody sane will want to associate with you. Most people actually don't want to be around people that will murder them if they make a mistake that is perceived as a slight.

or you exercise your strategy openly and go to jail (or get killed in retaliation by someone else).

I mean that's ultimately the problem, right? It's a disgenic ethos. It leads directly to compromise or death.

"making you pay rent" (as was apparently the case)

My read was the landlord was going to rat one of 'em out for murder and stabbed with a sword.

Thanks for the Ziz analysis. I was blissfully unaware of these turkeys.

Lastly, it seems like literally every member of this group was a transexual

It looks like they're all biologically male except the actual killer, which I find surprising. A 21-year-old computer science student named Teresa who is part of a rationalist-adjacent cult screams "transwoman", but it seems from the reporting that she's a transman ("Milo").

Meanwhile rationalist groups were still awarding these guys grants.

Which person awarded a grant was a member of this cult?

The one highlighted in the grant link.

(it's hard to be sure when the news steadfastly refuses to notice "Emma's" Adam's apple)

Yesterday I collected my very first Reddit Warning for promoting "hate": noting on /r/slatestarcodex that said individual didn't look like an "Emma". I had hoped that Reddit's "transocracy" didn't extend as far as SSC. Guess I was wrong.

You're not safe anywhere on reddit -- anyone you happen to offend can report a post to admins, and anything to do with noticing insane trans-stuff is one thing that the admins are perfectly willing to just bannhammer.

Is it deadnaming or misgendering to call a transwoman’s cartilaginous protuberance around the larynx the “Adam’s apple”? Should we call it an “Eve’s apple” instead? Or perhaps we should go with “primordial human’s apple” to be extra safe

"Lilith's apple" might be more appropriate statistically

I spoke to someone who got to San Francisco in 1962 and stayed there through some of its weirder history.
He independently agreed that it's mostly a matter of what sorts of people the city attracts.

The other factor he raised is that there were entire communities there where working a real job was social death: if you had one you desperately tried to hide it. Everyone was a writer, a musician, an artist, living off family money, side jobs, government handouts, drug dealing, or some sort of grift. Those environments become a breeding ground for exploitative cults as the Beatnik Geeks give way to Hippie Mops and Sociopaths.
Guys would show up, become gurus, and instantly end up running a cult living in someone else's rent-controlled apartment and spending the family pocket money or welfare of the loser marks who joined up.

Of course these days the pattern is totally different because everyone is a Freelance Journalist, a social media corp Inclusion Evangelist, or Serious AI Human Extinction Risk Theorist...

Everyone was a writer, a musician, an artist

Its damning, because any serious creative will move to LA / NYC. The ones left in SF are the untalented and fickle kind.

t'wern't always so

Nobody talking about it? I saw it on the SSC subreddit for obvious reasons. Source appears to be a garden-variety local news site, though I suppose it could have some connection to Mr. Ngo.

The ability to selectively "problematize" and craft narratives continues to be the main source of power, and seems to be almost completely impervious to evidence-based arguments.

I can only hope you’re aware of the irony. Twenty thousand Americans murdered each year, and the only one you’re talking about is the one which best flatters your politics.

The really funny part is they're still trying to blame motters for their own terrorists. Remember this guy? https://old.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/1id8pd7/string_of_recent_killings_linked_to_bay_area/m9xjb5h/

The dedication to realty-warping spin is incredible.

Twenty thousand Americans murdered each year, and the only one you’re talking about is the one which best flatters your politics.

George Floyd, the antifa protestor who was intentionally ran over were both merely one person each, but both received mainstream media coverage far exceeding this victim of veganocommunism.

Nobody talking about it?

That the subreddit closely associated with the subculture from which that cult spun off, has a post on the murder, is the weakest possible claim to coverage there is.

Source appears to be a garden-variety local news site,

From my understanding of American media a murder is considered a notable enough event that each one is reported in local media. The question is how far up will the coverage spread: will the state-level media report it, will the US-wide media report it. If the answer to both is no, then I think it is fair to consider forgotten by the journalists. Reasons ranging from truly unremarkable, unique but overlooked, to unique but buried.

the only one you're talking about

Is the one done by a community member who many people on here have actually met.
I can only hope you're aware of the irony of whining about this after years of us being subjected to "reactionary incel motte users sure to commit a mass shooting any day now" takes.

I got my start in this sphere thanks to being exposed to Rat Tumblr and Scott Alexander in the 2010's, I for one have never even freaking heard of Ziz until now.

Im online-only and Ive heard of it years ago, even read some of the blog when it was still up. Not hard to find from the Vassarites.

15-20 years ago, during the great internet atheism wars, it was popular to argue that morality is 'obvious' and that any rational person could easily determine its rough outlines. Is anyone still arguing this?

I was an atheist then and people kept referring me to Harris's The Moral Landscape. So I read that. His argument seemed to be roughly the same: we all sort of just know what's right and don't need reference to any kind of overarching moral framework. He intrigued me by granting that some people clearly just don't see things the way the rest of us do, e.g. psychopaths, but that he'll address this problem later in the book. AFAICT he never actually does, though.

Found it disturbing then and I find it disturbing now. Ran into a guy on reddit quite a while ago who suggested that atheism is best classified as a 'moral parasite'; that it relies upon existing metaphysical systems to generate a socially-agreed upon moral framework, at which point of course an atheist can conform to that and 'be a good person' according to whatever their society thinks that means -- but that atheists also tend to work to undermine the roots of that system itself, resulting in moral collapse.

No real point here; just musing.

ETA:

trans-alpaca ranch holocaust

Is /r/bandnames still a thing?

we all sort of just know what's right and don't need reference to any kind of overarching moral framework.

FWIW that isn't remotely close to what he argues. He claims that apropos of nothing, we could/should define "bad" as the worst possible misery for everyone. Any step away from that lowest valley is in the direction of "good". He argues that this is the overarching moral framework we need. Many consider several steps in this to be bad philosophy.

I'm not sure how atheism itself could be a moral parasite any more than not collecting stamps could be parasitic hobby.

I'm not sure how atheism itself could be a moral parasite any more than not collecting stamps could be parasitic hobby.

The implication, I think, is that sustainable morality is necessarily downstream of religion.

That's kind of how I interpret it, but as written its nonsensical as is it misunderstands or misuses the term 'atheism' at a very basic level. Atheism doesn't necessitate any specific moral stance. Moreover, some religious are atheistic.

Atheism doesn't necessitate any specific moral stance.

That's the point. If you think a shared, mostly rigid moral framework is necessary for societies to hold together (you don't need to be religious to think this), and that atheism can't really compellingly argue for any moral stance in particular, the obvious conclusion is that a society of atheists will reliably fragment and struggle working towards any meaningful shared goal. Which means that if a society holds together, it is in spite of the atheists in it. As an atheist, I consider the fate of the early atheism internet wars and the atheism plus fights clear vindication of this theory.

The counterpoint is that there are nowadays a decent number of non-religious ideologies that can hold atheists together. The counterpoint to that is that once you spent any time around ideologues, it becomes clear that ideology serves a function and form near-identical to religion for them, including the archetypical esoteric, nonsensical and/or unprovable assumptions and claims.

De Maistre argued that a fully rational basis for society would always undermine its own stability because people would disagree over the implications.

My point is that atheism doesn't preclude (or necessitate) "a mostly rigid moral framework". It need not even interact with morality at all. It's the wrong word for what is being argued. Atheism itself does not compellingly argue for a moral stance. It can't parasitize something doesn't interact with, and it isn't liable for something it never claimed to do.

To the extent I see what people are trying to say, I actually agree. I especially think that a shared somewhat rigid moral framework is necessary for a society to hold together. An all atheist society could have a shared moral framework, and could even be based on religion. The A vs A-plus schism didn't say anything about atheism itself.

I think this is pretty clear to me. Science cannot by nature decide what “Good” is. It can tell you how to do things you decide are good, but it cannot tell you that some goal is actually good. A lot of that framework comes in, often unconsciously, from the personal beliefs of the individual. Those beliefs would be absorbed from the culture and the dominant belief systems of that culture.

In the West, Christianity has colored western concepts of truth, Justice, rights, laws, and ethical values for nearly two millennia. We don’t think about it because even today, it’s still in the water we swim in. But the concept of individual rights and liberty comes out of the Christian idea that only a person’s own beliefs can save them. We don’t see the point of forcing people into Christianity because especially in Protestant Christianity, you have to decide for yourself to believe. Other systems have absolutely no problem with holding a knife to the throat of an infidel and saying “declare yourself a Muslim or your head comes off.” Or “just obey the emperor and all will be well.” We believe in restraint in war and in mercy. Watching the Israel/Gaza conflict, it’s clear that this isn’t a universal virtue. Nobody wants to show mercy, so it’s a constant revenge fest.

Sam Harris would not agree that:

we all sort of just know what's right and don't need reference to any kind of overarching moral framework.

His book was focused on countering the argument that science cannot inform morality in some objective way as nonoverlapping magisteria, not outlining a moral framework in any real detail beyond "well-being of conscious creatures." Harris is a consequentialist and very influenced by Derek Parfitt and the overall liberal/humanist tradition. Given the state of the world, no one should argue that liberalism/humanism is humanity's default and indeed Harris's original project was pointing out how badly Islam is opposed to that moral framework.

Atheism by itself is no moral system. Communists were atheists and had/have a moral system quite different from liberalism/humanism. Western atheists today see a big split between classic liberals and post-liberals (i.e. progressives and "Atheism+") split along Culture War lines.

"well-being of conscious creatures."

But this begs the question, does it not? Given that we arbitrarily establish some kind of objective quantifiable framework for evaluating well-being (which I'm sure I don't need to tell you is itself difficult and unsolved to say the least), sure, science can definitely be of use there. Doesn't help with the first part.

Well not begging that question is one of the main points of the book, so no it doesn’t. (Many disagree that he succeeds in the philosophical grounding of his moral frame, but he does try.)

Of course, many people take issue with even the second part where you agree science can help. The “how” as opposed to the underlying “what/why.”

Any moral system requires some axiom to start from and Harris explains how we can use reason to arrive at that rather broad one. The lack of other sensible contenders helps here (for those with proper priors, anyway). Of course, there have been materialist contenders, such as communism and whatever we want to call the anti-human environmentalist ideology.

Admittedly it's been a dozen years since I read it but I mainly remember him vaguely gesturing at the possibility in a very unconvincing way.

Is anyone still arguing this?

For the most part, the internet atheism wars have just died, so it doesn't come up much. Scott's relevant explanation suggests:

Most movement atheists weren’t in it for the religion. They were in it for the hamartiology [the study of sin, in particular, how sin enters the universe]. Once they got the message that the culture-at-large had settled on a different, better hamartiology, there was no psychological impediment to switching over. We woke up one morning and the atheist bloggers had all quietly became social justice bloggers. Nothing else had changed because nothing else had to; the underlying itch being scratched was the same. They just had to CTRL+F and replace a couple of keywords.

When it was 'obvious' and 'any rational person could easily determine its rough outlines', a good chunk of folks up and decided that the New, Obvious rough outlines were just wokeness. There was a bit of a schism, and I've found that many of the folks who were disaffected by the schism and went anti-woke instead have mostly rejected the idea that it's so obvious and such. If it was so obvious, then why are so many of their former brethren getting it so wrong? The most common result I've seen is a form of naive relativism, sometimes sprinkled with moral error theory or even just power politics dressed up as game theory (if you don't agree with "society", then we have reason to suppress and even kill you, moving the population toward some sort of 'equilibrium').

But for the most part, aside from a few old hats who went anti-woke, I'd really say that the question just mostly hasn't been considered by many of the masses. They're just not exposed to the concepts; it's not even a meaningful question to them. As Scott says, they're in it for hamartiology, not meta-ethics. They just don't even really conceive of the idea that there is meta-ethics to be done prior to hamartiology. It's just not a question that they would even think to ask, so they mostly don't care whether various schools have a position on it one way or another deep down in the theology. Yes, if you ask a queer theory prof, they can probably tell you the sect's doctrine, just as surely as if you ask a priest whether the holy spirit flows independently from both the father and the son or just from the father through the son, they can probably manage to dig up the doctrine... but who's asking? Who cares? No one thinks they can gain adherents by trying to distinguish themselves on this issue.

The thing with existing metaphysical systems is that they, too, evolved from something at some point - unless you are one of their proponents who believe that moral knowledge was literally passed down to [First Human] from [Divine Authority]. What is the source? All I know points to "animal intuition", which I expect to only differ from person to person as much as other animal aspects of us do: not that much.

I think the key advantage existing metaphysical systems have is that they've proven themselves to be capable to be followed by a civilization that survives longer than one generation (or X generations, depending on whatever new metaphysical system you're talking about). Past performance isn't a guarantee of future performance, especially in what appears to be a particularly volatile time like right now, but lack of past performance is even less of a guarantee. And certainly, with the power of our intelligence, we could fast-forward through the trial-and-error of tradition and get to a superior system that's equally based off of animal intuition but more refined and "better" for some meaning of "better," but it's also true that hubris is one of the most powerful forces known to man, and the empirical proof of this system at the very least allowing civilization to survive, even if not thrive perhaps, is a huge advantage compared to any new system. Probably not insurmountable, but certainly a huge one, given how many ways there are for civilization to crumble relative to how few ways there are for it to continue forward.

This appears obviously incorrect. Pretty much the entirely of traditional western morality (and a good chunk of eastern morality) seems to be oriented around reigning in or redirecting our "baser" (ie more animalistic) impulses and intuitions.

Society? Going backwards modern western morality is basically reformation, germanic conversion to christianity, roman conversion, greek + judaic philophy, fertile crescent society, etc. Thousands of years of iteration that animals don't have?

Animals do iterate, they are just slower about it because their memory is strictly genetic as opposed to civilizational.

Also, what was the first society then and where did it come from?

Well I think the most advanced societies that we know about that existed the earliest were in the fertile crescent, presumably they have some kind of lineage going back. I agree animals iterate but the question is whether they have some kind of upper bound which our lineage surpassed, which I'd argue we did, probably around when we learned to make fire and passed that knowledge on to our descendants

Sort of. I'm a Christian now and as I understand the Christian perspective it's a bit different. Christianity posits that God is apparent in nature, modulo the Fall; that creation is fundamentally good (i.e. in alignment with God's good nature). That humans can perceive much of divinity simply by observing nature and ourselves. And then, on top of that, there's direct revelation of the type to which you seem to be referring, e.g. divine entities directly communicating with humans.

Actually something which surprised me is that in my church there's a strong sentiment that Taoism is ~Christianity sans Christ. That is, Taoism is as far as human beings can correctly discern the nature and order of things without the direct revelation of Jesus. There's even a pretty cool book about it which definitely changed my perspective on a lot of this. The Tao <-> Logos connection is sublime.

I don't know about that. If the Fall did subtract from nature, it subtracted quite a lot, to the point where most of creation we can access is far from fundamentally good.

The Patrician took a sip of his beer. “I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect I never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”

Which is to say, the order of things in nature absent our, the humans', vigorous actioned disagreement, does not always seem very good for us.

That take requires all sorts of assumptions which I not only think are unwarranted from any standpoint but definitely don't match up with the broader picture of Christian philosophy.

For one, do you imagine that most humans who have ever lived would have considered it evil for a fish to be eaten alive? Indeed there are plenty of extant cultures which eat live animals habitually. The real question is why it seems evil to us.

For another, it conflates evil with suffering, or pain, or even unpleasantness. This is often a locally-useful conflation but in the big picture it doesn't make a lot of sense. Neither does it make sense to equate platonic goodness with pleasure.

It assumes that animals are having the same sort of internal experience as we are. While they certainly have minds like ours, it's not clear that they have consciousnesses like ours. Indeed one take on Eden and the Fall is that the 'Garden' was a state in which we existed just like we do now but for awareness of such evil; that we weren't intended to take on the burden of temporal sapience until some future point at which such problems would have already been solved.

But what really bugs me about it is that it assumes that anything ought to be other than as it currently is, which implies telos, which implies a creator. Only by standing on the shoulders of God can one conceive of making moral complaints about the universe, and deciding that we see the full picture and are capable of independently evaluating such things occurs to me as downright conceited and petulant. Prideful, would be the Christian term.

What ought Man to be? Is a future in which we're all reduced to constantly-euphoric sludge a worthy one? I consider the Super-Happies of Three Worlds Collide. On the other hand, if Man is intended to become divine and unite with God, reducing morality to avoiding pain and enjoying pleasure would seem to be contraindicated.

Ziz is like a real life Light Yagami, except instead of punishing criminals he murders everyone who doesn’t support trans vegan communism, and instead of having an all-powerful Death Note he had three trans friends with a fake samurai sword, and instead of being Japan’s top student he’s an internet schizo.

His game theory is retarded. Five trans cultists aren’t going to successfully terrorize hundred of millions of landlords into giving tenants free rent, or 7 billion people into becoming vegans, or whatever. They aren’t going to respect and fear the almighty Ziz for his game theoretic commitment to murder, they’re simply going to call the police, or simply shoot him and his companions. Even having a game theoretic commitment to murdering anyone who slights you will mean that only psychotic people are even willing to hang around you, and greatly increases your chances of ending up murdered or imprisoned.

Indeed, I suspect that had he tried to form this cult in the median American city he would have just been murdered by hardened criminals. This is probably why San Francisco is the only place these cults seem to bloom.

Or shot by an intended victim.

Several of them were in fact killed in self defense by intended victims. As it turns out, transgender vegans are not very good at fighting.

Several of these cult members did manage it. The victim was quite a badass.

That happened to another of the cult members: three of them got together to try and murder their 80 year old landlord by stabbing him multiple times with a fake samurai sword, knocked him out, couldn't figure out how to decapitate him and dissolve his body before he regained consciousness, and then on coming to he shot two of them, killing one.

Well, at least he is definitely making it to Valhalla.

Do you think these guys could have been saved somehow through information? Like if you had the magic ability to sit them down for an hour, what would you tell them? It’s scary that a group of apparently intelligent people could have their explicit aim as improving the world, and know that rationalists exist, and then just do… this. Note that the glossary is huge, and that developing new words is a hallmark of cults, probably because it allows you to define all of the connotation and ambience and dimensions of words which affect cognition invisibly.

As I understand it, there may be genuine self-induced brain damage in play, so probably no.

It wasn't a lack of information that drove them to this, but a sense of humiliation and resentment.

Rationalists have always had the ability to rationalize their conclusions. It's in the moniker, even as leagues of human behavioral science and decades of examples have demonstrated that rationalization is often done to justify what people wanted to do anyway, i.e. rationality is often a cover rather than a cause of behavior. People who pride themselves on their ability to rationalizeare in some ways more vulnerable to self-deception or rationalizing their irrationalities due propensity to confirmation bias on the basis of their own presumed rationality/IQ compared to those opposing them, particularly those who don't engage on the paradigm they're claiming from the start.

Just like it's hard to convince people who believe they will go to heaven for an eternity of bliss if they die killing the right people that living in the flawed reality is better, it's hard to convince people who have abstracted their actions and consequences into independent / imaginary spaces (parallel world lines, abstract group-level competition) that they are working against their defined interest. It doesn't matter if the consequence negatively affects this current context- the promise / payoff is outside your bounding context.

People who pride themselves on their ability to rationalize

Of course they do not.

Rationalists pride themselves on their ability to spill oceans of ink denouncing rationalization, trying to figure out how best to uncover one's own past rationalizations, and trying to come up with ways to avoid rationalizing.

You could argue that they're not completely successful at this (and they'll agree), or that they're not at all successful (and they'll hear you out), but to argue that they're doing the opposite is just weirdly wrong.

My opinion is that, per another commenter's allusion to geeks, MOPs and sociopaths, the rationalist community currently comprises three groups:

  1. People who really value the truth for its own sake, even if it's uncomfortable, and who sincerely want to get better at reasoning and recognising their own biases - "not an ivory tower for people with no biases or strong emotional reactions... a dojo for people learning to resist them."
  2. People who are self-aware enough to recognise that many of their beliefs are probably false or rest on extremely shaky reasoning, but are reluctant to abandon them, typically because it would be socially disadvantageous to do so. Instead, they turn to rationalism in search of ever more outré and convoluted reasoning with which they can justify clinging to their obviously erroneous belief in beliefs, aiming to suppress their nagging doubts about them via overwhelming streams of abstruse jargon - essentially Gish-galloping themselves in addition to the people around them. I think @Dean is absolutely correct in describing what this group does as "rationalisation".
  3. Cargo-cultists who lack even the self-awareness of the second group, and who dress up the beliefs they hold (which they arrived at via the typical algorithms of social conformity) using the superficial language associated with the rationalist community, with zero understanding of the more complex and reflective insights and concepts generated by the first group. Rationalism as a community and fashion statement, and nothing more.

What's interesting is that some people who are scrupulously in group 1 most of the time can fall into group 2 only for certain specific beliefs, typically if the social pressure is great enough. Coming out and saying you're not onboard with gender ideology is a great way to get yourself disinvited from parties in the Bay Area.

I suspect that every sufficiently large community eventually undergoes such a process of degeneration, in much the same way that the moral principles explicitly endorsed by Christianity don't necessarily tell you much about the moral character of the religion's adherents. And rationalists, of all people, should know better than pulling the No True Rationalist schtick - a community is only as good as the people in it, and this episode makes it abundantly clear that the rationalist community (just like any other sufficiently large community) contains some pretty odious people who can hide in plain sight by adopting the vernacular and parroting the appropriate shibboleths. See also effective altruism and Sam Bankman-Fried.

Rationalism is a rationalization.

As usual Andy ngo is the only person talking about the case at all,

I'm sure I'm not the first one to notice that this has usually been the case from the beginning. Apart from obscure conservative or alt-light-adjacent sites and blogs, nobody reports on antifa activities or portrays those in the most favorable light possible.

I was long in falling out with my antifa/goth/LARP friends but I think the call of, "death to Andy Ngo," was the final straw. If he's wrong...show the world he's wrong. Instead they prove him right over and over and over.

I had nothing to do with his beating, wasn't even within 2000 miles. I don't hold truck with any antifa people anymore either. And yet I feel a deep shame for the violence that was enacted upon him. It's likely similar to the shame some folks felt at watching the George Floyd videos. Good people...bad people--a true person should feel sadness at the death at another, not delight.

The weird thing is that he gets called a grifter.

That's the worst take possible. There are a million ways to grift that don't involve exposing oneself to bodily harm or murder from cultists. More accurately, he should be called a hero.

moldbug and why reactionaries must be purged from the community

When I first read about neoreaction, I thought it was really interesting that Bay Area computer scientists were getting into monarchism and treating it seriously. Then I read more deeply into it, and realized it was this bizarre monarchical system where kingdoms compete like corporations under a CEO and the fittest survive, like somehow social darwinism but worse, a capitalist abomination of monarchism. They make no reference to the actual historical reasons people support(ed) monarchies, like divine right of kings, providing a social ideal, which are just cooler and more passionate reasons someone might like monarchism. As it stands the neoreaction people offer nothing to the heart, belying its engineering origins. I regard it as what happens when libertarians who read Hacker News and Ayn Rand stop believing in liberty.

With respect to our rationalist posters, I think of the broader rationalist sphere as a bunch of very crazy people, most of whom have bad ideas that rarely diverge from their social mileu. People will disagree with me on this, but Scott is the singular exception, and the only one I respect: he seems like a basically normal, if very intelligent, guy who got caught up with the wrong kinda smart people and let them rot his prodigious knack for observation and empathy.

the broader rationalist sphere as a bunch of very crazy people

Awesome fiction tho

I regard it as what happens when libertarians who read Hacker News and Ayn Rand stop believing in liberty.

No, it's more that they stop believing in the ability of democracy to deliver liberty. The whole point of competitive government is that exit is a better guarantee of liberty than voice.

Sure- what does liberty mean? This question quite literally isn’t rhetorical.

In this context, the unmolested enjoyment of one's Natural Rights. In particular Private Property. In particular of oneself.

The observation that monarchy can better secure such things than democracy isn't even a novelty, it dates back to Aristostle and it's the foundational belief of one of the major currents of the enlightenment. What history would come to call "the right wing" because of where they sat.

You can read Bastiat and Jefferson make very similar points to Hoppe. The characterization of that skepticism of both democracy and equality as a newfangled libertarian affabulation is without merit. It's been in a constant battle with republicanism in the hearts of people who love freedom forever.

I find it odd to claim that one's right over oneself is private property. Does that mean that you can sell the right (or have it confiscated to pay a debt)?

No. This is what it means to say that it is inalienable.

You can read Locke if you want the full extant of the argument, but natural rights being derived from self ownership is the classical Liberal position.

Some people believe in such rights being transferrable (to the State, typically), but they are on the "left wing" of the Enlightenment.

Back in the late 00s and early 10s there was a professor who lived in Santa Clara and would throw some of the most interesting house parties in the bay area

These house parties were arguably some of the earliest in-person rationalist meet-ups, but because this professor was a gregarious outgoing sort with eclectic interests as well a man of import in the the West Coast SCA and BJJ communities, the crowd at these parties tended to be wildly diverse.

As a result early LessWrong had a lot of weird overlaps, Navy SEALs, Catholic Priests, UFC fighters, and Rocket Scientists all sharing a space, talking to (and occasionally getting high with) Silicon Valley billionaires, work-a-day code monkeys, and activitist college kids.

That was the environment in which rationalism got its start, but as rationalism became increasingly exclusive, trans, poly, and frankly "culty", and those with more diverse views relative to the bay-area activist set who formed the core clique quietly cut ties, and either returned to or started thier own groups resulting in "evaporative cooling" of the rationalist sphere and increasingly cult-like dynamics.

CFAR and Ziz are names that i haven't thought about in 10+ years and it feels odd to think that i used to know some these people, and simultaneously gratifying and tragic to have old intuitions confirmed.

One of these cultists described as an "Oxford trained computer scientist" recently (17th of january) killed the 82 year old landlord who previously fought off an attack by Zizians and survived a sword through his chest. He had a gun, of course.

https://openvallejo.org/2025/01/28/man-accused-of-killing-witness-in-vallejo-could-face-death-penalty-da-says/

An Oxford-trained computer scientist could face the death penalty for allegedly killing an 82-year-old Vallejo landlord to prevent him from testifying in a murder case against his former tenants, according to the Solano County District Attorney’s Office.

Prosecutors allege in a complaint filed Monday that 22-year-old Maximilian Snyder was “lying in wait” for Curtis Lind before stabbing him outside his property around 2:18 p.m. Jan. 17 near Lemon and Third streets in Vallejo. The complaint charges Snyder, who made his first court appearance Tuesday afternoon, with first-degree murder with special circumstances. He is being held without bail at the Solano County Jail in Fairfield.

It's a seemingly pretty irrational cult as these guys first attacked a guy with knives and then stabbed him to death. Quietly poisoning him with something that'd look like a natural death seems far more rational and within the abilities of computer scientists, yet..

One of their beliefs is that unrelenting violence against oppressors such as BBQers, landlords, and elderly parents who keep calling you their son is justified even if it's not effective, because it can improve your ideology's bargaining position averaged across every other reality in the multiverse.

It's sort of like dying in a game of chicken and saying "yeah but committing to that head-on collision helped me win in other worldlines"

There’s a periodic right wing Twitter meme that goes like this- Blacks and transgenders both use the threat of violence to discourage calling them the wrong thing. The difference in effectiveness is due to, well, duh.

It's sort of like dying in a game of chicken and saying "yeah but committing to that head-on collision helped me win in other worldlines"

This whole line of thinking looks taken straight out of the trilogy of visual novel/escape room/choose-your-own-adventure games 999: 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors, Virtue's Last Reward, and Zero Time Dilemma. Especially that last one, which has a sequence where you are tasked with rolling a 3 with a roll of 3 standard dice or else you are shot to death, and the game progresses with the explicit note that this is one of the 1-in-216 timelines where you did roll 3 ones. ZTD is also where I learned of the Sleeping Beauty Paradox, IIRC.

For people who enjoy bizarre time travel/alternate universe shenanigans and/or classic point-and-click adventure game puzzles and/or anime trope characters, I recommend them highly, though the middle game, Virtue's Last Reward, stands out to me as the only one that's truly great. VLR has the prisoner's dilemma as a core gameplay/narrative device.

The.insanity of the presented beliefs honestly is one of the more baffling aspects of Educated Cultists. A similar thing can be seen in girls who get REALLY into witchcraft and astrology, delving deep into objectively insane woo like your Third Eye being opened to the Aura around you and how shamanistic spirituality reconnects one to the astral plane. It is way too easy to attribute this to irreligiosity among the educated finding another conceptual escape valve, and the common thing I notice is that the Educated who buy into this woo never ever hang out with the original lower class practitioners of the art. No wiccan feminist ever speaks with an actual Louisiana or Haitian Voodoo witch doctor, no dharmic spiritualist ever prays at a shrine next to the old grandma burning hell notes, no Rajneesee actually interacted with ayurvedic doctor.

And how many angels can fit on the head of a pin, anyway?

From the outsider’s view, the unreasonableness isn’t exactly limited to folk paganism.

no dharmic spiritualist ever prays at a shrine next to the old grandma burning hell notes

Do you have the correct religion here? This is the first thing I found when looking up "hell notes," and it's more a Taoist(?) thing.

Im just halfassing the different terms. Point is that irreligious PMC practice their interpretation of pseudoreligion apart from the people that practice the religion to begin sith.

No wiccan feminist ever speaks with an actual Louisiana or Haitian Voodoo witch doctor

I don’t know very much about Wicca but voodoo is not a particularly lower class phenomenon in Louisiana; it’s solidly in the domain of weird shit, yes, and black coded, but usually associated with batty old women with more money than sense(this may not be a particularly large amount of money) or else grifters separating tourists from their money, not the sort of thing normal people have anything to do with.

No wiccan feminist ever speaks with an actual Louisiana or Haitian Voodoo witch doctor

? I've never known wiccans to think of themselves as having anything to do with voodoo. If you're going to liken it to a traditional form of witchcraft it's much more like satanism with all the goth stuff taken out.

unrelenting violence ... can improve your ideology's bargaining position

It worked for Islam. Because Islam has a lot of people behind it. Some of which kill detractors. Make a documentary criticizing Islam at your own risk.

The difference being that Islam already has a critical mass of adherents, a sufficiently large subset of whom are willing and able to do violence on its behalf.

The entire global population of self-identified rationalists could probably fit into a single stadium with plenty of room left over; the proportion of them who are willing to do violence to further the community's goals is vanishingly small; the proportion of them who are able to do violence is smaller still.

On the other hand, Mohammed drawing competitions seem pretty safe.

That ended in a shootout with two would-be mass killers shot to death by the police. And of course it was an FBI op with FBI agents following them to observe the mass killing.

So I would not say it is all that safe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Culwell_Center_attack

Unless you're holding them at Charlie Hebdo, that is.

Violence from minorities also works because progressivism has paralyzed the threat response mechanisms. As long as one party can accumulate points in the progressive stack, it is forbidden to actually address invalidities of the presented positions. So long as progressives hold levers of power, especially mindspace discourse via the universities and its agents of transmission in the media, there will be no way to communicate objections to stack abusers. Note that as we can see with Big Techs shift that many modern 'conservatives', and I dare say a fair few on this board, are ex-progressives who paused too long at the line for the koolaid and realized something eas going wrong. This means that antiprogressives who are proximate to the levers of power progressives are in charge of are naturally a subset of progressives, and in a time weighted distribution will never have enough numbers to stop the insanity.

It always worked. Sectarian revolts predate Christianity, let alone the Enlightenment. The Romans lost cities to chariot racers.

Edit: my mistake—the Nika riots were in 532 AD. I think they still support the general point, but I guess another example would be better. Maybe Rome’s Social War?

The Social War was core vs. periphery, not sectarian - socii is the Latin word for ally, and in context referred to citizens of what were de jure independent Roman client states in Italy, who rebelled because they wanted equal rights with Roman citizens.

There was a major Jewish revolt against the Seleucids- it's an interesting set of books in the (Catholic and Orthodox)bible in which Judas Maccabeus kills an elephant single-handedly.

This is literally as old as Reconstruction, or older. It comes and goes in cycles.

I guess this social equilibrium works as long as there do not arise minorities sworn to unrelenting violence against each other?

Wait, is this actually what they believe, or are you exaggerating? This is Scientology levels of completely delusional.

From the dive I did, I'd say that sounds reasonably accurate. I linked the glossary below if you want to dive yourself. That, combined with the report on the attempted murder of their landlord and the personal accounts related to it, were more than enough to identify Ziz as ten pounds of crazy in a two-pound sack.

I'm not sure "timeless-decision-theoretic-blackmail-absolute-morality theory" is the term they actually used, but I'm not sure it's not the term either, and it seems like a reasonably accurate description from what I recall.

I linked the glossary below if you want to dive yourself.

Thanks, I appreciate it. I did look at the lesswrong post and I was bewildered at how seriously the commenters took the ideas of alternate personalities and behavior modification; for people who declare themselves scientific and anti-superstition they seem pretty stitious to me. Family systems therapy pervades the commentariat, which I find rather disturbing; I was sold that this was a tool to help people deal with mental illness and not a means to manipulate or explain the world in real terms, but they're treating it like they're talking about real-world magic. If this is what people mean by "therapy culture" then I agree wholeheartedly with the criticism of it. At this point, I'm ready to declare family systems therapy a cause of psychogenic illness, whatever good it might have done it's now clearly driving people mad.

That being said, I try to avoid prying too deeply into either delusional thinking or true crime; the former I fear might infest me (though I don't have a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia) and the latter just makes me angry. I have finite grey matter and I'd rather spend it on things that don't make me feel like the only sane man in an insane world. We need connection to reality and to other people and to average people and to people of different perspectives to remain sane, and this is a great example of why.

At this point, I'm ready to declare family systems therapy a cause of psychogenic illness, whatever good it might have done it's now clearly driving people mad.

Scott had a whole book review where he strongly suggested this was true. One of the main practitioners of family systems therapy wrote a book claiming demons are real and he was literally exorcising spirits. Scott thought he was just creating psychogenic illness in people.

In and of itself, there is nothing particularly weird about having fictional characters in your head: many famous authors talk to their characters while they're out and about in order to round out said characters' personalities. Children have imaginary friends, artists have muses. And it seems entirely plausible that if you go on doing it for long enough, you will start habitually supporting this kind of 'virtual machine' of another person in your head in the same way that docker environments run on a virtual machine inside your pc. I tried it for a couple of weeks with my favourite character from the novel I was writing, until I realised that actually I didn't want to never be alone in my own head. It works, more or less.

Of course, the true believers run away with it. 'My tulpa is real in the sense that this thought pattern currently exists in my brain' becomes 'my tulpa is an entity deserving of respect and ethical treatment' becomes 'I am a system of 32 personalities, none of whom claims precedence'. Imaginary friends, being imaginary, become whatever you imagine them to be. And if you're asking your imaginary friends to help you perform self-therapy on the already warped and delusional brain that spawned them, that isn't going to end well for anybody.

in the same way that docker environments run on a virtual machine inside your pc

[pushes up glasses]

Well actually, virtual machines and containers are different things. It is certainly possible to run containers inside a VM, but a VM is not strictly necessary.

(OK, in fairness, I think Docker in particular relies on features of the Linux kernel, namely cgroups and namespaces, so e.g. Docker Desktop on Mac or Windows will indeed spin up a Linux VM)

/pedantry

I was bewildered at how seriously the commenters took the ideas of alternate personalities and behavior modification; for people who declare themselves scientific and anti-superstition they seem pretty stitious to me.

These don't sound particularly anti-scientific to me. At least, not magically so.

Technobabble is indistinguishable from religious invocations. Chanting to the a Machine God is silly to us because the recognizable words we understand are mutated, but stringing technological sounding terms together into a single compound word like german gone wild is exactly that. Dressing up a wrong scientific concept, like 90% of your brain is unused or biohacking through blood transfusions, is just misreading of reality, like sacrificing virgins on the solstice for a good harvest.

See, your examples sound silly to me because those specific ones are implausible/debunked. Behaviour modification, on the other hand, sounds like this quaint "building a habit" thing.

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They called it timeless-decision-theoretic-blackmail-absolute-morality theory on lesswrong

Related discussion on LW, with linkbacks to the blog in question. The actual article titled "The Multiverse" somehow missing from every archive snapshot (but definitely existing at some point, judging by linkbacks from the post) is too ironic to be put into words, I'm actually curious now.

Thanks for killing a few hours of my wageslavery, fascinating rabbit hole.

Thanks for the link. Slimepriestess
(★ Postbrat ★ Ex-Rat ★ Anarchist ★ Antifascist ★ Vegan ★ Qualia Enjoyer ★ Queer Icon ★ Not A Person ★ it/its ★) is the main ziz advocate on LW, and is the one whose YouTube podcast I linked above who supported them murdering the elderly man.

★ Postbrat

What does that mean? Is it using the term in a BDSM context, or referring to the Charli XCX album?

★ Not A Person ★ it/its

TV Tropes needs an update.

Slimepriestess

What I expected / What I got

In seriousness, I instantly knew from le quirky nickname before I even checked the vid but it's not any less sad. Starting to think I really prefer gamepad-eating """nerdy""" girls of yore over the nerdy """girls""" of today. Monkey paw curls.

I'm pretty sure that's not how it works, since almost anything to do with timeless decision theory is basically incomprehensible and could never be dumbed down into something as concrete as stabbing your landlord with a sword. If you're killing someone in the name of Wittgenstein or Derrida, you're doing something wrong (on several levels). Maoism on the other hand smiles upon executing landlords.

could never be dumbed down into something as concrete as stabbing your landlord with a sword.

As the meme goes, you are like a little baby. Watch this.

The government is something that can be compromised by bad people. And so, giving it tools to “attack bad people” is dangerous, they might use them. Thus, pacts like “free speech” are good. But so is individuals who aren’t Nazis breaking those rules where they can get away with it and punching Nazis.

<...>

If you want to create something like a byzantine agreement algorithm for a collection of agents some of whom may be replaced with adversaries, you do not bother trying to write a code path, “what if I am an adversary”. The adversaries know who they are. You might as well know who you are too.

Alternatively, an extended Undertale reference that feels so on the nose it almost hurts (yes, fucking Chara is definitely the best person to mentally consult while trying to rationalize your actions).

Once you make "no-selling social reality" your professed superpower, I imagine the difference in performing Olympic-levels mental gymnastics to justify eating cheese sandwiches and coming up with legitimate reasons to stab your landlord is negligible. (I know the actual killer is a different person but I take the patient zero as representative of the "movement".)

Alternatively, an extended Undertale reference that feels so on the nose it almost hurts (yes, fucking Chara is definitely the best person to mentally consult while trying to rationalize your actions).

I'm not very well versed in Undertale lore, so can you point out how this is an extended Undertale reference?

[cw: spoilers for a 10 year old game]

In brief, Chara is the most straightforwardly evil entity in all of Undertale and the literal embodiment of soulless "number go up" utilitarian metagaming. One of the endings (in which your vile actions quite literally corporealize it) involves Chara directly taking over the player avatar, remarking that you-the-player have no say in the matter because "you made your choice long ago" - hypocrite that you are, wanting to save the world after having pretty much destroyed it in pursuit of numbers.

Hence the post's name and general thrust, with Ziz struggling over having to do evil acts (catching sentient crabs) to fund a noble goal (something about Bay Area housing?):

In deciding to do it, I was worried that my S1 did not resist this more than it did. I was hoping it would demand a thorough and desperate-for-accuracy calculation to see if it was really right. I didn’t want things to be possible like for me to be dropped into Hitler’s body with Hitler’s memories and not divert that body from its course immediately.

After making the best estimates I could, incorporating probability crabs were sentient, and probability the world was a simulation to be terminated before space colonization and there was no future to fight for, this failed to make me feel resolved. And possibly from hoping the thing would fail. So I imagined a conversation with a character called Chara, who I was using as a placeholder for override by true self. And got something like,

You made your choice long ago. You’re a consequentialist whether you like it or not. I can’t magically do Fermi calculations better and recompute every cached thought that builds up to this conclusion in a tree with a mindset fueled by proper desperation. There just isn’t time for that. You have also made your choice about how to act in such VOI / time tradeoffs long ago.

So having set out originally to save lives, I attempted to end them by the thousands for not actually much money.

I do not feel guilt over this.

It really can't be more explicit, I took it as an edgy metaphor (like most of his writing) at first reading but it really is a pitch-perfect parallel: a guy has a seemingly-genuine crisis of principles, consciously picks the most evil self-serving path imaginable out of it, fully conscious of each individual step, directly acknowledging the Chara influence (he fucking spells out "override by true self"!), and manages to reason himself out of what he just did anyway. Now this is Rationalism.

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Good points and I appreciate you bringing up the lore, I now understand better why people are repulsed by rationalists if this kind of thing is what they think of.

I still think this isn't real timeless decision theory though, this looks like a severe case of antifa syndrome with a heavy dose of being defective as a person. Timeless decision theory is about basilisks and multiple universes and real proper game theory not 'kill nazis'. The galaxy-brain version of antifa syndrome with all these weird blog posts about being an obnoxious creep and a weirdo that are hard to decrypt more specifically is still only antifa syndrome.

Gwen rediscovered debucketing. (A fact that had been erased from their mind long ago). Pasek was on the edge of discovering it independently, they both came to agreement shared terminology, etc.. I joined in. Intense internal conflict between Gwen’s and Pasek’s hemispheres broke out. I preserved the information before that conflict destroyed it (again.)

Pasek’s right hemisphere had been “mostly-dead”. Almost an undead-types ontology corpse. Was female. Gwen and Pasek were both lmrf log. I was df and dg. Pasek’s rh was suicidal over pains of being trans, amplified by pains of being single-female in a bigender head. Amplified by their left hemisphere’s unhealthy attitude which had been victorious in the culture we’d generated. They downplayed the suicidality a lot. I said the thing was a failed effort, we had our answer to the startup hypothesis, the project as planned didn’t work. Pasek disappeared, presumed to have committed suicide.

Like what is going on here? I think this is schizobabble, it sounds like schizobabble. Timeless decision theory is incomprehensible but seems vaguely meaningful in certain rare circumstances, like advanced science. Maybe wrong science, who can say? But there's something in it more than this. If you put weird inputs into a bad piece of software and it glitches out, it's not the fault of the input but of the software (in this case Ziz and gang).

I already dumped most of this schizo shit from my mental RAM so I can't be certain, but s/he does explicitly touch on this in the extended Undertale reference above:

Any choice you can be presented with, is a choice between some amounts of some things you might value, and some other amounts of things you might value. Amounts as in expected utility.

When you abstract choices this way, it becomes a good approximation to think of all of a person’s choices as being made once timelessly forever. And as out there waiting to be found.

<...>

If your reaction to this is to believe it and suddenly be extra-determined to make all your choices perfectly because you’re irrevocably timelessly determining all actions you’ll ever take, well, timeless decision theory is just a way of being presented with a different choice, in this framework.

If you have done do lamentable things for bad reasons (not earnestly misguided reasons), and are despairing of being able to change, then either embrace your true values, the ones that mean you’re choosing not to change them, or disbelieve.

Given this evidently failed to induce any disbelief, I parse e.g. the sandwich anecdote above as revealing one's focus to not actually be on the means (I am a vegan so I must not eat a cheese sandwich), but on the ends (to achieve my goals and save the world I need energy - fuck it, let it even be a cheese sandwich). Timeless ends justify the immediate means; extrapolate to other acts as needed. Sounds boring, normal even, when I put it this way, this is plain bog standard cope; would also track with the general attitude of those afflicted with antifa syndrome. Maybe I'm overthinking or sanewashing it, idk.

On the other hand, quoth glossary:

Timeless Gambit

What someone’s trying to accomplish and how in the way they shape common expectations-in-potential-outcomes, computations that exist in multiple people’s heads typically, and multiple places in time. Named from Timeless Decision Theory. For example, if you yell at someone (even for other things) when they withdraw sexual consent, it’s probably a timeless gambit to coerce them sexually: make possibility-space where they don’t want to have sex into probability space where they do have sex. In other words, your timeless gambit is how you optimize possibility logically preceding direct optimization of actuality.

...I admit I have no idea what the fuck that means but I do see related words...?

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I'm pretty sure that's not how it works

I think you're seriously underestimating rationalists' capacity to rationalize.

Timeless decision theory is (and always has been) an excuse to do what you were going to do anyway.

It's the old leftist fallacy of "society is to blame" writ at a metaphysical level. You can't blame me for the consequences of my actions, I was mearly a pawn of universal forces.

Rationalist here. Timeless decision theory was never explicitly designed for humans to use; it was always about "if we want to have AIs work properly, we'll need to somehow make them understand how to make decisions - which means we need to understand what's the mathematically correct way to make decisions. Hm, all the existing theories have rather glaring flaws and counterexamples that nobody seems to talk about."

That's why all the associated research stuff is about things like tiling, where AIs create successor AIs.

Of course, nowadays we teach AIs how to make decisions by plain reinforcement learning and prosaic reasoning, so this has all become rather pointless.

My understanding of timeless decision theory is that you are deciding for every entity sufficiently similar to you. So, you’re making decisions for yourself at different points in time, as well as anyone else who might be sufficiently similar to you at the same time. Well, technically, this would make backwards causality… Kind of a thing you could think about, it really doesn’t seem all that relevant to how you would use it to actually make decisions. Instead, it adds weight to the decisions you’re trying to make, by spreading the consequences farther than you would normally expect them to go.

But that was from over a decade ago. It’s entirely possible that it’s become a lot more insane since then.

Big yud did chime in on one of the LW posts to say they got it wrong, so I wouldn't be surprised if they were playing fast and loose with the philosophical side

Big Yud plays fast and loose with everything. If he says someone is wrong then I'm willing to strongly consider their position.

Lol someone reported your comment.

I looked it up.

The Zizians were a cult that focused on relatively extreme animal welfare, even by EA standards, and used a Timeless/Updateless decision theory, where being aggressive and escalatory was helpful as long as it helped other world branches/acausally traded with other worlds to solve the animal welfare crisis.

They apparently made a new personality called Maia in Pasek, and this resulted in Pasek's suicide.

They also used violence or the threat of violence a lot to achieve their goal.

This caused many problems for Ziz, and she now is in police custody.

His reply seemed indistinguishable from sarcasm to me, I thought he was inventing a term to tar them with. But you brought the receipts, and it does seem they are as disconnected from reality as he suggested.

At the same time, like all mass killers, the actual content of these people's delusions is irrelevant, and the only appropriate response is to medicate until sane and confine until natural death.

Of course they reported it lol. Thanks for the extended cite, I was still looking for it in this giant pile of tabs

Islamists so the same thing but I doubt they have such sophisticated sounding justification for it.

improve your ideology's bargaining position averaged across every other reality in the multiverse.

It'd be working out pretty well for Zizians if there were 50 million of them.

Damn. I was just reading up on Ziz a couple weeks ago; a commenter here linked their blog and I spent an evening dipping into the raw crazy. Reading through their glossary, the Rationalist influence was inescapable. Pure dark-mirror Scott, and deeply chilling.

Will you link the blog you’re talking about?

Here's the Glossary from the site linked above. I wish I'd taken the time to write more on the subject while doing the trawl, but the short of it is that Ziz is very, very clearly doing Rationalism just as hard as they can, and Rationalism is in turn doing its thing: converting human flaws into impending disaster.

There's a link to it in my post, but maybe not the specific article fc saw

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