we can tell from the externally observed effect—the crazy stuff they got up to—that the technique had a bad effect.
This is probably only convincing from outside. From inside, there is probably a perfectly good explanation, and what seems to us as craziness would seem to them as advanced rationality.
I think Ziz believes in some form of quantum suicide, so from that perspective, even getting killed is not necessarily a bad outcome, because if you apply your timeless algorithm across all Everett branches, of course you are going to win some and lose some, so this just happens to be a losing branch.
Mixing two metaphors together, we get a quantum suicide by a cop, where you boldly keep escalating to achieve your goals, and you either achieve them, or you are no longer in that specific Everett branch. Also, killing the people you consider bad is justified, because they survive in the parallel branches where they pissed you off less, so you just made them less bad on average (they probably should have thanked you).
...which is why it felt so important to me to make it clear that the things about hemispheres are plainly wrong in all Everett branches. Just in case someone who is tempted by their ideology is reading this.
That’s a good article, thanks. I had much the same thought when I read about he Ziz stuff, namely that
(A) dissociated identities don’t correspond to brain hemispheres in the way the Zizians seem to think they do
(B) sleep deprivation is well known to be bad for you
(C) whatever technique they used, we can tell from the externally observed effect—the crazy stuff they got up to—that the technique had a bad effect.
This is probably only convincing from outside. From inside, there is probably a perfectly good explanation, and what seems to us as craziness would seem to them as advanced rationality.
I think Ziz believes in some form of quantum suicide, so from that perspective, even getting killed is not necessarily a bad outcome, because if you apply your timeless algorithm across all Everett branches, of course you are going to win some and lose some, so this just happens to be a losing branch.
Mixing two metaphors together, we get a quantum suicide by a cop, where you boldly keep escalating to achieve your goals, and you either achieve them, or you are no longer in that specific Everett branch. Also, killing the people you consider bad is justified, because they survive in the parallel branches where they pissed you off less, so you just made them less bad on average (they probably should have thanked you).
...which is why it felt so important to me to make it clear that the things about hemispheres are plainly wrong in all Everett branches. Just in case someone who is tempted by their ideology is reading this.