No specific link either, but if you know the usual “female brain in a male body” explanation, Ziz kinda has a more nuanced version of this, where each brain hemisphere is a separate personality, so you can have e.g. one male and one female hemisphere in a male body.
(And “if you don’t believe an X person when they interpret their own lived experience, that makes you X-phobic” is a standard woke trope.)
A lot of the ideas expounded by Ziz look just crazy to me, and I highly doubt that it maps down onto physical brain anatomy in such a straightforward way … but I wonder if there is a steelman version of this?
E.g. take the Buddhist doctrines of no-self, that no one actually has a coherent self, humans just don’t work that way, and then note that any one individual person is usually neither wholly stereotypically-male or stereotypically-female.
I think there is a conflation of two different things:
Human brain has two hemispheres which communicate through a relatively lower-bandwidth channel, which means they process a lot of things independently.
There is the dissociative identity disorder / alter ego / tulpa phenomenon, where a human can produce two or more identities. This is probably something that exists on a spectrum, where the extreme forms are full different personalities with dissociative amnesia; imaginary friends and brainwashing are somewhere in the middle; and the everyday forms are role-playing or different moods.
If I understand it correctly, Ziz assumes that these two are the same thing. Which is pseudoscientific, and in my opinion clearly wrong.
First, because there can be more than two identities (but no one has more than two brain hemispheres, I suppose). Yes, two is the most famous number, but that’s simply because two is the smallest integer that is greater than one, and more personalities are less frequent.
Second, even if there are exactly two identities, there is no evidence mapping them to two hemispheres (as opposed to each of them using both hemispheres), and a lot of obvious evidence against that, for example the fact that each personality can use both hands etc.
However the idea of “left brain, right brain” is quite popular in our culture. And there were a few experiments showing that the hemispheres can be separated, and then weird things happen. Which means that Ziz’s theory may sound plausible to many people, even in the rationalist community.
Ziz assumes that there are (1) exactly two (2) permanent “cores” in every human. The number two and the permanence are the crucial parts of her ideology; in my opinion this is incompatible with any Buddhist doctrine, which would actually put the emphasis on their impermanence.
The permanence of the “cores”, and the Manichean perspective that each of them is either perfectly good or perfectly evil, is the basis of social control that Ziz has over her followers. You can’t meaningfully disagree with Ziz, because she is 100% good, and you are 50% good and 50% evil, which means that any disagreement must obviously originate in your evil half, and therefore you should mobilize your good half to fight against it (or kill yourself, if you cannot win). The only moral choice is to believe and obey Ziz unconditionally.
.
I kinda assume that multiple personalities are “just” a stronger form of what people normally do, and that different personalities can present as different genders (including agender etc.).
I reject the “exactly two” and “it maps to hemispheres” parts, the permanence of the personalities, and the Manichean ethics.
Epistemic status: Confidence: Strong idea, weakly held. Provenance: My own lived experience, put down in words by myself before even hearing about Ziz. All I know about Zizianism I have learned very recently (mostly from this thread), and I have a very negative opinion of it.
Masculinity and feminity have a biological basis, but most people’s experience of them are strongly influenced by cultural factors. These cultural factors have been selected for being economically beneficial to agrarian societies. They are quite misaligned with what is beneficial for the happiness of post-industrial individuals. Poor societies made up of dumb people could not afford to not pigeonhole everyone into “straight men” and “straight women”. We can now afford to have those categories and also the whole LGBTQ set of categories, although sometimes with a bit of friction when it bumps against the poorest and dumbest parts of our society. These frictions (and also in some cases a descriptive inadequacy of the LGBTQ labels) hurt people. Still, most individuals who are confident that their environment affords them to do so would probably benefit from a bit of experimentation / de-pigeon-holing.
When/if we get to a good post-TAI future, we will be able to afford to drop the concepts of discrete genders and discrete sexual orientations altogether. This will be a good thing, because it will make individuals freer.
I think the hemisphere stuff is quite literal. I think it’s general knowledge that the right eye feeds into the left side of the brain, and vice versa (Actually, looking it up, it is the case that the left is controlled by the right and vice versa, but I see some claims that the information feeds into both sides, in a nearly balanced manner[1]; but I don’t know if Ziz knows that); and Ziz’s whole “unihemispheric sleep” thing tells you to keep one eye closed and distract the other eye so that eventually one hemisphere falls asleep.
Claude sez: “When nerve fibers cross at the optic chiasm, approximately 53-55% of nerve fibers cross to the opposite hemisphere, while 45-47% remain on the same side. This means that each hemisphere receives slightly different proportions of visual information from both eyes.” Wiki on Optic chiasm confirms: “The number of axons that do not cross the midline and project ipsilaterally depends on the degree of binocular vision of the animal (3% in mice and 45% in humans do not cross)”.
It’s not about the eyes, it’s about the part of the visual field.
The image from the right half of the visual field (left part of each retina) feeds into the left hemisphere and the image from the left half of the visual field (right part of each retina) feeds into the right hemisphere.
Since in humans each eye observes both sides of the visual field, you need to have ~50% of each eye’s fibers (each corresponding to something like a pixel) to go to each hemisphere.
In vertebrates where the overlap in visual fields of each eye is minimal (e.g. horses, rabbits), each eye serves mostly one half of the visual field exclusively, so the entire image from the left eye feeds into the right hemisphere and ditto right eye → left hemisphere.
So the Zizian technology, which involves sleep deprivation and then having one eye closed and the other eye open (as a way to make one personality sleep), seems completely unsupported by what we know about human biology.
It’s just creating a split personality, in a way that has nothing to do with the hemispheres. But if you believe that your personalities are already there, waiting in the hemispheres until you find them, it probably helps with the process of creating them (which then feels like a confirmation of the theory).
The process of creating alternative personalities is one that works via hypnotic suggestion if you get the critical factor out of the way. Making someone sleep derivated and dosing off a bit does sound like a trance induction. Of course, creating expectancy by having that neat theory, also helps with the process of creating additional personalities.
So the Zizian technology, which involves sleep deprivation and then having one eye closed and the other eye open (as a way to make one personality sleep), seems completely unsupported by what we know about human biology.
To the extent that they tried to ground this tech in this particular neuro stuff, then yeah sure but did they even? (These threads are getting long, I’m not remembering everything that was said upstream nor am I reading all of this very carefully.)
This “”unihemispheric sleep” thing seems like it came from crazy and is an excellent way to produce even more crazy. A tale as old as time: small group of people produce some interesting ideas and all is mostly fine until they either take too many drugs or get the bright idea of intentionally messing up their sleep. This starts a self reinforcing loop of drugs / messed up sleep causing crazy causing drugs / messed up sleep causing even more crazy.
Sleep deprivation is a traditional mind-control technique in cults; makes it difficult to disbelieve.
Of course you can’t just tell your recruits “I need you to be sleep-deprived so that you will find my teaching more credible”. Instead, there is so little time and so much work to do. Also, waking up early is healthy (but somehow we forget that going to bed early is healthy, too).
Using sleep deprivation as a way to “know yourself” is an interesting new take. You don’t even have to organize the work and the early meditations/prayers, your recruits will voluntarily keep themselves sleep-deprived even when there is absolutely nothing to do. Amazing!
The title “infohazardous glossary” sounds pretty insane. The contents of that webpage also strike me as pretty insane. The page is also structured as a glossary, and the concepts explained within it have very likely contributed to the insanity of the people who have heavily interacted with them. Therefore, the title “infohazardous glossary” seems pretty accurate after all.
My policy with this kind of stuff is to consider it harmful but also to consider it harmful to be scared of it’s harmfulness. Generally disregard, but also maybe play with it for a little bit if I’m feeling curious and sane. It is interesting yes, but also mostly wrong and can be harmful to those who are on an epistemically/emotionally shaky place right now.
I am thankful that the glossary exists, because it makes it easier to decode various Zizian writings, and makes it more difficult to sanewash Ziz.
For example, now I have a convenient proof that Ziz literally believes that there are two persons in each human. Not as a vague metaphor for “people are complicated”. Literally two. Literally in everyone. Literally persons, in a way that it makes sense to describe them individually as male or female, good or “nongood”. Literally believing that you can talk with the individual persons, make them argue against each other, make one murder another.
Which is convenient, because currently I am working on an article explaining how the popular “left brain, right brain” theory is complete bullshit from the scientific perspective. Which means, the Zizian model is bullshit, because it builds on the popular misconception. -- Without the glossary, if I succeed to write the article and it turned out to be convincing, fans of Ziz could simply say “but of course Ziz didn’t mean it that way, stop strawmanning her”. But now we have written evidence that yes, Ziz meant it literally that way, therefore all the supposed insights people gained from talking to their individual hemispheres should be attributed to some form of dissociative identity disorder, rather then each hemisphere being a person.
The title “infohazardous glossary” sounds pretty insane. The contents of that webpage also strike me as pretty insane.
That’s the way Zizians speak. Everything must be said in the most hysterical way possible. Everything they don’t like is slavery or something. Every disagreement is addressed by a death threat (though they usually do not act on them). First it seemed like they were just hysterical idiots. Then they actually killed some people. Now it’s more like: murderous hysterical idiots.
Ziz believes her entire hemisphere theory is an infohazard (IIRC she believes it was partially responsible for Pasek’s death), so terms pertaining to it are separate from the rest of her glossary.
Not sure about the literal meaning of the gender of the hemispheres. But the idea that there are two fundamentally different people in your brain is a central thing in Zizianism—that each “core” can be good or evil, and therefore there are double-good people (Ziz), single-good people (followers of Ziz), and evil people (most of the population).
From my perspective, this entire thing is completely crazy. But if someone already takes it for true, then… I suppose adding the “different parts of your brain can have different gender” part does not increase the total implausibility significantly.
Now that I think about it, this sounds very much like “every person is born with the original sin and need our technology sacraments to be saved from damnation”.
My visual metaphor is the angel and the devil sitting on your shoulders, each whispering in one of your ears. Except, they live inside your respective brain hemispheres, because obviously literal angels and devils are unscientific, but left and right brain are the Science™.
That makes Ziz like Jesus, born without sin. Explained by having two angels, conveniently.
(Also, both the angels and the devils can be male or female, which provides a theological Rationalist foundation for explaining trans-sexuality. Makes it easier to recruit among trans-sexual rationalists. Know yourself, by listening to the only person who has the knowledge.)
No specific link either, but if you know the usual “female brain in a male body” explanation, Ziz kinda has a more nuanced version of this, where each brain hemisphere is a separate personality, so you can have e.g. one male and one female hemisphere in a male body.
(And “if you don’t believe an X person when they interpret their own lived experience, that makes you X-phobic” is a standard woke trope.)
A lot of the ideas expounded by Ziz look just crazy to me, and I highly doubt that it maps down onto physical brain anatomy in such a straightforward way … but I wonder if there is a steelman version of this?
E.g. take the Buddhist doctrines of no-self, that no one actually has a coherent self, humans just don’t work that way, and then note that any one individual person is usually neither wholly stereotypically-male or stereotypically-female.
I think there is a conflation of two different things:
Human brain has two hemispheres which communicate through a relatively lower-bandwidth channel, which means they process a lot of things independently.
There is the dissociative identity disorder / alter ego / tulpa phenomenon, where a human can produce two or more identities. This is probably something that exists on a spectrum, where the extreme forms are full different personalities with dissociative amnesia; imaginary friends and brainwashing are somewhere in the middle; and the everyday forms are role-playing or different moods.
If I understand it correctly, Ziz assumes that these two are the same thing. Which is pseudoscientific, and in my opinion clearly wrong.
First, because there can be more than two identities (but no one has more than two brain hemispheres, I suppose). Yes, two is the most famous number, but that’s simply because two is the smallest integer that is greater than one, and more personalities are less frequent.
Second, even if there are exactly two identities, there is no evidence mapping them to two hemispheres (as opposed to each of them using both hemispheres), and a lot of obvious evidence against that, for example the fact that each personality can use both hands etc.
However the idea of “left brain, right brain” is quite popular in our culture. And there were a few experiments showing that the hemispheres can be separated, and then weird things happen. Which means that Ziz’s theory may sound plausible to many people, even in the rationalist community.
Ziz assumes that there are (1) exactly two (2) permanent “cores” in every human. The number two and the permanence are the crucial parts of her ideology; in my opinion this is incompatible with any Buddhist doctrine, which would actually put the emphasis on their impermanence.
The permanence of the “cores”, and the Manichean perspective that each of them is either perfectly good or perfectly evil, is the basis of social control that Ziz has over her followers. You can’t meaningfully disagree with Ziz, because she is 100% good, and you are 50% good and 50% evil, which means that any disagreement must obviously originate in your evil half, and therefore you should mobilize your good half to fight against it (or kill yourself, if you cannot win). The only moral choice is to believe and obey Ziz unconditionally.
.
I kinda assume that multiple personalities are “just” a stronger form of what people normally do, and that different personalities can present as different genders (including agender etc.).
I reject the “exactly two” and “it maps to hemispheres” parts, the permanence of the personalities, and the Manichean ethics.
Epistemic status:
Confidence: Strong idea, weakly held.
Provenance: My own lived experience, put down in words by myself before even hearing about Ziz. All I know about Zizianism I have learned very recently (mostly from this thread), and I have a very negative opinion of it.
Masculinity and feminity have a biological basis, but most people’s experience of them are strongly influenced by cultural factors. These cultural factors have been selected for being economically beneficial to agrarian societies. They are quite misaligned with what is beneficial for the happiness of post-industrial individuals. Poor societies made up of dumb people could not afford to not pigeonhole everyone into “straight men” and “straight women”. We can now afford to have those categories and also the whole LGBTQ set of categories, although sometimes with a bit of friction when it bumps against the poorest and dumbest parts of our society. These frictions (and also in some cases a descriptive inadequacy of the LGBTQ labels) hurt people. Still, most individuals who are confident that their environment affords them to do so would probably benefit from a bit of experimentation / de-pigeon-holing.
When/if we get to a good post-TAI future, we will be able to afford to drop the concepts of discrete genders and discrete sexual orientations altogether. This will be a good thing, because it will make individuals freer.
Did Ziz intend this to be seen as a metaphor (or) to be taken literally?
I think the hemisphere stuff is quite literal. I think it’s general knowledge that the right eye feeds into the left side of the brain, and vice versa (Actually, looking it up, it is the case that the left is controlled by the right and vice versa, but I see some claims that the information feeds into both sides, in a nearly balanced manner[1]; but I don’t know if Ziz knows that); and Ziz’s whole “unihemispheric sleep” thing tells you to keep one eye closed and distract the other eye so that eventually one hemisphere falls asleep.
Claude sez: “When nerve fibers cross at the optic chiasm, approximately 53-55% of nerve fibers cross to the opposite hemisphere, while 45-47% remain on the same side. This means that each hemisphere receives slightly different proportions of visual information from both eyes.” Wiki on Optic chiasm confirms: “The number of axons that do not cross the midline and project ipsilaterally depends on the degree of binocular vision of the animal (3% in mice and 45% in humans do not cross)”.
It’s not about the eyes, it’s about the part of the visual field.
The image from the right half of the visual field (left part of each retina) feeds into the left hemisphere and the image from the left half of the visual field (right part of each retina) feeds into the right hemisphere.
Since in humans each eye observes both sides of the visual field, you need to have ~50% of each eye’s fibers (each corresponding to something like a pixel) to go to each hemisphere.
In vertebrates where the overlap in visual fields of each eye is minimal (e.g. horses, rabbits), each eye serves mostly one half of the visual field exclusively, so the entire image from the left eye feeds into the right hemisphere and ditto right eye → left hemisphere.
So the Zizian technology, which involves sleep deprivation and then having one eye closed and the other eye open (as a way to make one personality sleep), seems completely unsupported by what we know about human biology.
It’s just creating a split personality, in a way that has nothing to do with the hemispheres. But if you believe that your personalities are already there, waiting in the hemispheres until you find them, it probably helps with the process of creating them (which then feels like a confirmation of the theory).
The process of creating alternative personalities is one that works via hypnotic suggestion if you get the critical factor out of the way. Making someone sleep derivated and dosing off a bit does sound like a trance induction. Of course, creating expectancy by having that neat theory, also helps with the process of creating additional personalities.
To the extent that they tried to ground this tech in this particular neuro stuff, then yeah sure but did they even? (These threads are getting long, I’m not remembering everything that was said upstream nor am I reading all of this very carefully.)
I don’t know. (Which is a convenient way to end this thread.)
Some information is at https://zizians.info/ but it is far from complete, when it comes to the technical details of Zizianism.
This “”unihemispheric sleep” thing seems like it came from crazy and is an excellent way to produce even more crazy. A tale as old as time: small group of people produce some interesting ideas and all is mostly fine until they either take too many drugs or get the bright idea of intentionally messing up their sleep. This starts a self reinforcing loop of drugs / messed up sleep causing crazy causing drugs / messed up sleep causing even more crazy.
Sleep deprivation is a traditional mind-control technique in cults; makes it difficult to disbelieve.
Of course you can’t just tell your recruits “I need you to be sleep-deprived so that you will find my teaching more credible”. Instead, there is so little time and so much work to do. Also, waking up early is healthy (but somehow we forget that going to bed early is healthy, too).
Using sleep deprivation as a way to “know yourself” is an interesting new take. You don’t even have to organize the work and the early meditations/prayers, your recruits will voluntarily keep themselves sleep-deprived even when there is absolutely nothing to do. Amazing!
See the Zizian “Infohazardous Glossary”:
Seems quite literal.
The title “infohazardous glossary” sounds pretty insane. The contents of that webpage also strike me as pretty insane. The page is also structured as a glossary, and the concepts explained within it have very likely contributed to the insanity of the people who have heavily interacted with them. Therefore, the title “infohazardous glossary” seems pretty accurate after all.
My policy with this kind of stuff is to consider it harmful but also to consider it harmful to be scared of it’s harmfulness. Generally disregard, but also maybe play with it for a little bit if I’m feeling curious and sane. It is interesting yes, but also mostly wrong and can be harmful to those who are on an epistemically/emotionally shaky place right now.
I am thankful that the glossary exists, because it makes it easier to decode various Zizian writings, and makes it more difficult to sanewash Ziz.
For example, now I have a convenient proof that Ziz literally believes that there are two persons in each human. Not as a vague metaphor for “people are complicated”. Literally two. Literally in everyone. Literally persons, in a way that it makes sense to describe them individually as male or female, good or “nongood”. Literally believing that you can talk with the individual persons, make them argue against each other, make one murder another.
Which is convenient, because currently I am working on an article explaining how the popular “left brain, right brain” theory is complete bullshit from the scientific perspective. Which means, the Zizian model is bullshit, because it builds on the popular misconception. -- Without the glossary, if I succeed to write the article and it turned out to be convincing, fans of Ziz could simply say “but of course Ziz didn’t mean it that way, stop strawmanning her”. But now we have written evidence that yes, Ziz meant it literally that way, therefore all the supposed insights people gained from talking to their individual hemispheres should be attributed to some form of dissociative identity disorder, rather then each hemisphere being a person.
That’s the way Zizians speak. Everything must be said in the most hysterical way possible. Everything they don’t like is slavery or something. Every disagreement is addressed by a death threat (though they usually do not act on them). First it seemed like they were just hysterical idiots. Then they actually killed some people. Now it’s more like: murderous hysterical idiots.
Ziz believes her entire hemisphere theory is an infohazard (IIRC she believes it was partially responsible for Pasek’s death), so terms pertaining to it are separate from the rest of her glossary.
Oh. That’s nice of her.
Not sure about the literal meaning of the gender of the hemispheres. But the idea that there are two fundamentally different people in your brain is a central thing in Zizianism—that each “core” can be good or evil, and therefore there are double-good people (Ziz), single-good people (followers of Ziz), and evil people (most of the population).
From my perspective, this entire thing is completely crazy. But if someone already takes it for true, then… I suppose adding the “different parts of your brain can have different gender” part does not increase the total implausibility significantly.
Now that I think about it, this sounds very much like “every person is born with the original sin and need our
technologysacraments to be saved from damnation”.My visual metaphor is the angel and the devil sitting on your shoulders, each whispering in one of your ears. Except, they live inside your respective brain hemispheres, because obviously literal angels and devils are unscientific, but left and right brain are the Science™.
That makes Ziz like Jesus, born without sin. Explained by having two angels, conveniently.
(Also, both the angels and the devils can be male or female, which provides a
theologicalRationalist foundation for explaining trans-sexuality. Makes it easier to recruit among trans-sexual rationalists. Know yourself, by listening to the only person who has the knowledge.)