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.
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.