I think this is a horrible thing to say. The murderers are associated with each other; that gives you much more information than just knowing that someone is trans or not. There are many, many stellar trans rationalists. I’m thinking you maybe are thinking of the standout dramatic cases you’ve heard of and don’t know a lot of trans people to provide a baseline.
Let’s see what the base rate for murder is. After some googling… Since the “clearance rate” for homicides is 50% (as of a recent year), even if we know there were N murders, it’s hard to say how many distinct murderers there were. But some source says it’s a small percentage of murderers who kill again, so let’s just assume that N murders = N murderers. Both “taking the homicide rate (7.5 per 100k per year in 2022) and multiplying by a lifetime (we’ll say 80 years)”, and “googling for the percentage of deaths that are caused by homicide”, yield roughly 0.6%. So 6 per thousand.
I haven’t kept count of the numerator, but if you were going to argue that the murderer rate is no different than among the American general population, the denominator would need to be in the high hundreds at least. (It might also be interesting to control for other demographics of rationalists.)
A better counterargument would be that Ziz’s associates just happened to be trans, because that’s a shared quality that can be quite important to people in ways that may make them tend to stick together, which is also true of, say, having a shared hobby like Magic: The Gathering. So when Ziz became a murder cult leader, and several associates committed murder, then that shared quality ends up being highly correlated with murder, and this could happen just as easily with any other …
But that’s not quite true. Ziz’s writings have talked a lot about trans stuff, and I have the impression (it’s been a couple of years since I read the blog, and this might not necessarily be written too explicitly) that Ziz made a point of seeking out trans people or, probably most especially, pre-trans or gender-questioning people. (At least, that was the result; it could have happened for other reasons; but I think there was an optimization process pointing in this direction.) Because someone in that stage, in the process of majorly rethinking their identity and how they relate to the world, possibly experiencing significant gender dysphoria and associated issues… Is probably much more vulnerable than average to a cult leader saying, “I understand people like you, I can tell you all kinds of things (probably many true things!) about our kind, I have this whole philosophy that I’ve written out, and you should spend lots of time with me as I explain it to you… And by the way the philosophy says the world is mostly evil and we should lose any aversion to violence and also extreme violence is obligatory in certain cases.” It is much less plausible that one could do all that with Magic: The Gathering buddies.[1]
So, if this model is correct, that (a) Ziz specifically targeted early-stage trans people and (b) early-stage trans people are especially vulnerable to cult recruitment[2], then the results are less surprising. A compassionate response would be to do something like make a point of warning young trans and maybe-trans people about cult recruitment in general, and perhaps about Ziz specifically (though if most haven’t already heard about Ziz, it might be best to keep it that way). I guess a less-compassionate response is to exclude them completely.
A somewhat similar crop of potential recruits, in terms of psychological vulnerability, would be, well, psychiatric patients. Have there been therapist cults? Oh yes, Dianetics and things derived from it such as Re-evaluation Counseling come to mind. (Was L. Ron Hubbard himself a therapist? He did apparently volunteer at a mental health clinic, but I’m not sure how much professional training he got.)
Research question: Are there other cases of cults that targeted trans / gender-questioning people? I think I’ve heard things, but don’t have good pointers to find out frequency and severity.
That’s definitely a good point and model vis-a-vis “this group/ideology is targeting these people specifically”.
I would also point out that specifically rejecting demographically-vulnerable people is likely to push more of them towards this ideology—though even if that effect weren’t in play, it would still be shitty to tarnish a broad group of generally fine community members by common demographic.
I am, and am friends with, many trans rationalists, and a bunch of them are lovely people, and also yes in fact the rationalist trans community does sorta tend to be fewer steps removed from the terribleness than other parts of the rationalist community.
I do not think this calls for judging people based on that one fact, it’d be kind of incredibly terrible overall if everyone who happened to know someone who did a terrible thing was shunned over it, and Ic seems to be making a relatively uncharitable read of Jessica Taylor there or something, but I can’t actually say the heuristic is totally useless; if I had stayed far away from trans rats, I wouldn’t have met my girlfriend and also I would be far further removed from the Ziz issues.
You’re probably right, I don’t actually know many/haven’t actually interacted personally with many trans people. But also, I’m not really talking about the Zizians in particular here, or the possibility of getting physically harmed? It just seems like being trans is like taking LSD, in that it makes a person ex-ante much more likely to be someone who I’ve heard of having a notoriously bizarre mental breakdown that resulted in negative consequences for the people they’ve associated themselves with.
I think this is a horrible thing to say. The murderers are associated with each other; that gives you much more information than just knowing that someone is trans or not. There are many, many stellar trans rationalists. I’m thinking you maybe are thinking of the standout dramatic cases you’ve heard of and don’t know a lot of trans people to provide a baseline.
Let’s see what the base rate for murder is. After some googling… Since the “clearance rate” for homicides is 50% (as of a recent year), even if we know there were N murders, it’s hard to say how many distinct murderers there were. But some source says it’s a small percentage of murderers who kill again, so let’s just assume that N murders = N murderers. Both “taking the homicide rate (7.5 per 100k per year in 2022) and multiplying by a lifetime (we’ll say 80 years)”, and “googling for the percentage of deaths that are caused by homicide”, yield roughly 0.6%. So 6 per thousand.
I haven’t kept count of the numerator, but if you were going to argue that the murderer rate is no different than among the American general population, the denominator would need to be in the high hundreds at least. (It might also be interesting to control for other demographics of rationalists.)
A better counterargument would be that Ziz’s associates just happened to be trans, because that’s a shared quality that can be quite important to people in ways that may make them tend to stick together, which is also true of, say, having a shared hobby like Magic: The Gathering. So when Ziz became a murder cult leader, and several associates committed murder, then that shared quality ends up being highly correlated with murder, and this could happen just as easily with any other …
But that’s not quite true. Ziz’s writings have talked a lot about trans stuff, and I have the impression (it’s been a couple of years since I read the blog, and this might not necessarily be written too explicitly) that Ziz made a point of seeking out trans people or, probably most especially, pre-trans or gender-questioning people. (At least, that was the result; it could have happened for other reasons; but I think there was an optimization process pointing in this direction.) Because someone in that stage, in the process of majorly rethinking their identity and how they relate to the world, possibly experiencing significant gender dysphoria and associated issues… Is probably much more vulnerable than average to a cult leader saying, “I understand people like you, I can tell you all kinds of things (probably many true things!) about our kind, I have this whole philosophy that I’ve written out, and you should spend lots of time with me as I explain it to you… And by the way the philosophy says the world is mostly evil and we should lose any aversion to violence and also extreme violence is obligatory in certain cases.” It is much less plausible that one could do all that with Magic: The Gathering buddies.[1]
So, if this model is correct, that (a) Ziz specifically targeted early-stage trans people and (b) early-stage trans people are especially vulnerable to cult recruitment[2], then the results are less surprising. A compassionate response would be to do something like make a point of warning young trans and maybe-trans people about cult recruitment in general, and perhaps about Ziz specifically (though if most haven’t already heard about Ziz, it might be best to keep it that way). I guess a less-compassionate response is to exclude them completely.
A somewhat similar crop of potential recruits, in terms of psychological vulnerability, would be, well, psychiatric patients. Have there been therapist cults? Oh yes, Dianetics and things derived from it such as Re-evaluation Counseling come to mind. (Was L. Ron Hubbard himself a therapist? He did apparently volunteer at a mental health clinic, but I’m not sure how much professional training he got.)
Research question: Are there other cases of cults that targeted trans / gender-questioning people? I think I’ve heard things, but don’t have good pointers to find out frequency and severity.
That’s definitely a good point and model vis-a-vis “this group/ideology is targeting these people specifically”.
I would also point out that specifically rejecting demographically-vulnerable people is likely to push more of them towards this ideology—though even if that effect weren’t in play, it would still be shitty to tarnish a broad group of generally fine community members by common demographic.
I am, and am friends with, many trans rationalists, and a bunch of them are lovely people, and also yes in fact the rationalist trans community does sorta tend to be fewer steps removed from the terribleness than other parts of the rationalist community.
I do not think this calls for judging people based on that one fact, it’d be kind of incredibly terrible overall if everyone who happened to know someone who did a terrible thing was shunned over it, and Ic seems to be making a relatively uncharitable read of Jessica Taylor there or something, but I can’t actually say the heuristic is totally useless; if I had stayed far away from trans rats, I wouldn’t have met my girlfriend and also I would be far further removed from the Ziz issues.
You’re probably right, I don’t actually know many/haven’t actually interacted personally with many trans people. But also, I’m not really talking about the Zizians in particular here, or the possibility of getting physically harmed? It just seems like being trans is like taking LSD, in that it makes a person ex-ante much more likely to be someone who I’ve heard of having a notoriously bizarre mental breakdown that resulted in negative consequences for the people they’ve associated themselves with.
I fear that, while it might be a good idea to discourage LSD, it would make things even worse to discourage transitioning.