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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.
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.
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.
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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.
[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
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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.
As someone who drank like a fish when I was younger, but then had an experience which reduced my alcohol consumption to a few glasses per year, I have to wholeheartedly agree with you that modifying behavior is in fact possible.
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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.
What does that mean? Is it using the term in a BDSM context, or referring to the Charli XCX album?
TV Tropes needs an update.
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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.
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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.
As the meme goes, you are like a little baby. Watch this.
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".)
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?):
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
evilself-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.I just can’t imagine being so much of a loser that I’m going to base my moral convictions on characters in a video game. That’s the thing that really strikes me here, not the murder and the consequentialism or even the rationalism, it’s that this is a person of obvious intelligence who has founded their entire worldview on video games and the Matrix movies.
I don't think they're founding their moral convictions on video games, only using video games and their connotations to smooth communication. It's no different than HPMOR, in my view.
I think you're underselling the phenomenon by just rounding all this off to crazy. I think it's entirely possible that Ziz and their accolytes have, among them, some significant neurological abnormalities. But it's hard to escape the impression that they're not losing their minds so much as intentionally throwing them away. They are actively taking concrete, premeditated action to undermine and compromise their own sanity, because they've bought into enough reasoning convolutions that they've committed to it being a good idea. I have some minor personal experience with cult shit, and this is definitely cult shit.
Yeah, and I also think HPMOR is very silly and shouldn't be treated as serious. Harry Potter fanfiction is not the means by which serious people discuss or disseminate philosophical treatises; it insults Harry Potter by trying to make it something it isn't, and insults philosophical treatises by trying to make them something they're not. That Yudkowsky used Harry Potter fanfiction to distribute his ideas indicates to me an unwillingness to choose the right register in which to communicate, a bit like TYPING IN ALL CAPS LIKE YOU'RE A BOOMER WITH A BROKEN CAPS LOCK or refusng 2 us propper gramar to rite yur txt bc its to hard 2 rite n propr inglish. It indicates a disrespect to your content and your audience, while also implying you don't believe your work is strong enough to stand on its own without adding a gimmick.
And that's exactly what I charge our cultists here are doing: they're disrespecting themselves by describing extremely significant and important themes in metaphysics and social reality through video game references, which aren't reality, indicating that either they can't justify their views in more complex terms or don't have the patience, lucidity, and self-control to choose to do so, both of which are damning.
Sure, maybe. But I don't see "cult shit" as meaningfully distinguished from crazy; by crazy I don't simply mean schizophrenia or something along those lines, but simply that these are people whose reasoning and behavior are separated from reality and whose ramblings are therefore fruitless and best to be ignored. I don't really care, Margaret, whether the delusions came from neurological abnormalities or from manipulation as part of a cult.
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I knew about Undertale's general outline but couldn't piece it together, so thanks for doing that. So, in essence, ziz identifies one-to-one with Chara, an avatar of utilitarianism. He excuses his actions by simply asserting that his "true self" is a soulless consequentialist; he by-passes moral deliberation or crisis of principles by simply saying that whatever actions that puts him into conflict with himself are expressions of his true self. And because they are expressions of his true self, and therefore out of his control, he should not feel guilt over them. Determinism taken to its logical conclusions. Rationalism is just its beast.
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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.
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:
<...>
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:
...I admit I have no idea what the fuck that means but I do see related words...?
I think it’s describing a situation where you engineer a threatening environment so that you don’t need to use explicit force at the moment of decision. I think ziz is trying to say once you recognize that the environment was designed to corner someone into compliance, you can view it as morally similar to actually using violence, because the threat itself is doing the work of forcing their hand.
Why ziz didn't just say that- I may never know.
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Man this is a very convoluted way of describing the concept of persuasion.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Lol someone reported your comment.
I looked it up.
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.
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Of course they reported it lol. Thanks for the extended cite, I was still looking for it in this giant pile of tabs
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Islamists so the same thing but I doubt they have such sophisticated sounding justification for it.
It'd be working out pretty well for Zizians if there were 50 million of them.
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