The possible involvement of Daniel Blank is the most surprising to me. As the linked article notes, Daniel seems like about the least likely person to commit a homicide. I’ve not had contact with him in a few years, but I recall Daniel as sensitive, serious, and caring, and a person who would go out of his way to avoid causing someone else harm. I don’t know what’s happened in the intervening time to lead to his involvement here.
Part of the process that Ziz seems to advocate involves inducing alternative personalities in people. The process that unleashed the Maia personality in Chris Pazek led in Ziz’s words to their suicide.
This process could easily lead to a personality being active in a person that has very different characteristics among various axis than the personality you knew years earlier.
“Least likely person to do X” is an interesting concept. People who deal with a shadow that has an attribute they despise often overcompensate to fight that shadow. That shadow might provide a substance based on which the alternative personality that acts very differently can be built.
“Least likely person to do X” is an interesting concept. People who deal with a shadow that has an attribute they despise often overcompensate to fight that shadow. That shadow might provide a substance based on which the alternative personality that acts very differently can be built.
I feel complicated about this; in a world where everyone is doing split-and-commit (or something similar) by default, this feels straightforwardly good to note.
But like. In this world, this feels like fodder for “you should interpret evidence that someone is unusually unlikely to X as evidence that they’re actually quite likely to X, given some trigger.”
And I think this is the sort of thing that is true in some very small minority of cases and an outright (and false) weapon all the other times.
I think we should be real careful about interpreting evidence against X as evidence of X, even given that the psychological structure you just described is one that exists.
I do agree that it’s not an easy subject to speak about.
There are two separate issues at hand:
What happens if you have multiple personalities
Suppressed anger and its effects
Sometimes abused children develop multiple-personality disorders where they develop new personalities to deal with situations where the characteristics.
I have one friend who has the multiple-personality disorder and is able to switch between them. According to him, he often faced situations where a person was used to dealing with one of his personalities and really surprised when he switched to another personality that has different personality characteristics.
The technique that Ziz advocates seems to intentionally created something that’s similar to multiple personality disorder and I would expect that the same pattern hold where at least one of the personalities is able to do things that are far outside of what the old unified self would do.
I think good evidence that someone is unlikely to cause harm is about observing that they have functional strategies for taking care of boundary violations. If someone’s reaction is instead to ignore their own needs, repress any anger that comes up and go out of his way to avoid causing someone else harm, that strategy is not stable.
Many people would have thought that Mother Thresa is the “least likely person to doubt in God”, but that’s what she did. Her outward presentation of extreme belief in God was not something stable.
It’s a mistake to take the fact that someone is extreme along an axis as evidence of stability.
That’s fair from a mental POV, but Daniel Blank physically has poor hand-eye coordination and bad reflexes, meaning that if he tried to shoot somebody he’d be extremely likely to miss at all but the shortest of ranges. (the murder in question was definitely gunshot based)
While he could be a part of the conspiracy his ability to have physically committed the actual act is questionable.
Is this an empirical question? Like, could you gather 1000 people, measure how violent they are, then somehow summon their shadows, and measure again?
My guess would be that the shadow is on average more violent than the original person, but it is not true that less violent person = more violent shadow. (I would probably expect something like: each shadow gets a bonus +5 on violence compared to the original person; including people who already started very violent.)
I think that this misidentifies the crux of the internal argument Ziz created and the actual chain of events a bit.
imo, Maia was trans and the components of her mind (the alter(s) they debucketed into “Shine”) saw the body was physically male and decided that the decision-theoretically correct thing to do was to basically ignore being trans in favor of maximizing influence to save the world. Choosing to transition was pitted against being trans because of the cultural oppression against queers. I’ve run into this attitude among rationalist queers numerous times independently from Ziz and “I can’t transition that will stop me from being a good EA” seems troubling common sentiment.
Prior to getting involved with Ziz, the “Shine” half of her personality had basically been running her system on an adversarial ‘we must act or else’ fear response loop around saving the multiverse from evil using timeless decision theory in order to brute force the subjunctive evolution of the multiverse.
So Ziz and Paseks start interacting, and at that point the “Maia” parts of her had basically been like, traumatized into submission and dissociation, and Ziz intentionally stirs up all those dissociated pieces and draws the realization that Maia is trans to the surface. This caused a spiraling optimization priority conflict between two factions that ziz had empowered the contradictory validity of by helping them reify themselves and define the terms of their conflict in her zero sum black and white good and evil framework.
But Maia didn’t kill them, Shine killed them. I have multiple references that corroborate that. The “beat Maia into submission and then save the world” protocol that they using cooked out all this low level suicidality and “i need to escape, please where is the exit how do i decision-theoretically justify quitting the game?” type feelings of hopelessness and entrapment. The only “exit” that could get them out of their sense of horrifying heroic responsibility was by dying so Shine found a “decision theoretic justification” to kill them and did. “Pasek’s doom” isn’t just “interhemispheric conflict” if anything it’s much more specific, it’s the specific interaction of:
“i must act or the world will burn. There is no room for anything less than full optimization pressure and utilitarian consequentialism”
vs
“i am a creature that exists in a body. I have needs and desires and want to be happy and feel safe”
This is a very common EA brainworm to have and I know lots of EAs who have folded themselves into pretzels around this sort of internal friction. Ziz didn’t create Pasek’s internal conflict she just encouraged the “good” Shine half to adversarially bully the evil “Maia” half more and more, escalating the conflict to lethality.
the pdf archive of Maia’s blog posted by Ziz to sinseriously (I have it downloaded to backup as well) the archive.org backup of Fluttershy’s blog Ziz’s account of the event (and how sparse and weirdly guilt ridden it is for her) several oblique references to the situation that Ziz makes various reports about the situation posted to LW which can be found by searching Pasek
From this i’ve developed my own model of what ziz et al have been calling “single-good interhemispheric game theory” which is just extremely advanced and high level beating yourself up while insisting you’re great at your emotions. There is a particular flavor of cPTSD that seems disproportionately overrepresented within the LW/EA community umbrella, and it looks like this:
hyperactivity perfectionist compulsion to overachieve always-on constantly thinking with a rich inner world high scrupulosity blurring into OCD tendencies anxiety with seemingly good justifications (it’s not paranoia if...) an impressive degree of self-control (and the inability to relax fully) catastrophizing dissociation from the body
this is a mode of a cPTSD flight response. Under the cPTSD model, “Shine” could be thought of as a toxic inner critic that had fully seized power over Pasek and had come to dominate and micromanage all their actions in the world while adversarially repressing anything that would violate Shine’s control (it would have felt unsafe to Pasek to actually do that because this is all a trauma response and the control is what keeps u safe from the traumatic things happening again). This is how Pasek was able to work 60-80 hour weeks while couch surfing and performing advanced self modification. Or, to put it in Empty Spaces terms: she had an extremely bright and high RPM halo. This seems to be a common trauma pattern among rationalists and people with this sort of trauma pattern seem to be particularly drawn to rationality and effective altruism.
Into this equilibrium we introduce Ziz, who Pasek gets to know by telling Ziz that she thinks they’re the same person. (ways to say you’re trans without saying you’re trans). Ziz is if nothing else, extremely critical of everyone and is exceptionally (and probably often uncomfortably) aware of the way people’s minds work in a psychoanalytic sense. Pasek’s claim of being the same as Ziz in a metaphysically significant way is something Ziz can’t help put pick apart, leading Pasek to do a bunch of Shadow work eventually leading to her summoning Maia.
So there’s a problem with crushing your shadow into a box in order to maximize your utilitarian impact potential over a long period, which is that it makes you wanna fucking die. If you can repress that death wish too and add in a little threat of hell to keep you motivated, you can pull off a pretty convincing facsimile of someone not constantly subjecting themselves to painful adversarial inner conflict. This is a unstable nuclear reactor of a person, they come off as powerful and competent but it wouldn’t take much to lead them to a runaway meltdown. Sometimes that looks like a psychotic break, and sometimes that looks like intense suicidal ideation.
So Ziz can’t help but poke the unstable reactor girl claiming to be a metaphysical copy of her to see if she implodes, and the answer is yes, which to Ziz means she was never really a copy in the first place.
In many not really but pretending to be healthy adults, the way their shadow parts get their needs met is by slipping around the edges of the light side social narrative and lying about what they’re actually doing. There’s a degree of “narrative smoothing” allowed by social reality that gets read by certain schizo-spectrum types as adversarial gaslighting and they’ll feel compelled to point it out. To someone who is firmly controlled by their self-narrative interacting earnestly with Ziz directly feeds the inner critic and leads to an escalating spiral of inner adversariality between a dominating and compulsively perfectionist superego and the more and more cornered feeling id.
That is all to say that there is a model of EA burnout going around LW right now of which numerous recountings can be found. I think a severely exacerbated version of that model is the best fit for what happened to Maia, not “Ziz used spooky cult leader mind control to split Pasek into two people and turn her trans thus creating an inner conflict” ziz didn’t create anything, the inner conflict was there from the start, it’s the same inner conflict afflicting the entire EA egregore.
Less predictive and more observational, but sorta yeah? Like, if someone is lying to themselves and playing all these weird internal denial/repression games internally, there are tells for that which you can learn to notice. After a while it gets pretty obvious what the behaviors you observe in someone actually mean (vs what they say those behaviors mean). Why I say “uncomfortably so” is that speaking from my own experiences, once you learn to read people this way, it’s not really something you can turn off again. That can add a lot of friction to social interactions, where it seems like everyone is just constantly trying to bullshit you.
Do you have any indication that Pasek was trans before they spoke with Ziz?
Pasek couch-surfed at my place for a few days around a LessWrong Community weekend he attended and we had deep conversations then. I think that was 1-2 years before he got into contact with Ziz.
At that time he was using heavy optimization pressure on himself. In my memory, he had some logging where he wrote something every hour to measure his productivity. He was also heavily into timeless decision theory-based utilitarian consequentialism at that time.
I’d buy it that there was an internal conflict at the time. I believe that process that Ziz proposed took that internal conflict and create the Shine and Maia personalities out of them.
If a person is putting an extraordinary amount of effort into being nice (which is what Gordon Seidoh Worley observed) there’s likely an internal conflict. What Ziz is doing allows transforming that internal conflict into two parts, one that’s very nice and one that’s opposed to being nice.
This is a very common EA brainworm to have and I know lots of EAs who have folded themselves into pretzels around this sort of internal friction.
Usually, people who do that have a lot of akrasia. Pasek is different in that they managed not to have that. Most people would be blocked by internal friction from doing the kind of productivity optimization that Pasek did.
I think that Pasek was smart enough to know that it’s good to give the part of him that “i am a creature that exists in a body. I have needs and desires and want to be happy and feel safe” things to satisfy it. That part wanted to be happy, so they did some body work intervention to feel happy (and wrote on the blog that someone that didn’t solve the issue and that people aren’t really seeking happiness). That part wanted that they identified themselves publically as Maia, so they did that. That part wanted to transition, so they took hormones.
The only “exit” that could get them out of their sense of horrifying heroic responsibility was by dying so Shine found a “decision theoretic justification” to kill them and did.
Shine did find a justification. The way they committed suicide however was not done in a way that sounds like TDT was involved. They could have written an actual suicide note to the people that cared about them and send it the day they died but they didn’t.
Random fact: I just assumed Pasek was trans, based on some vague writing style / username, and then one day met with them on Google Hangouts to discuss some AI stuff, and they brought up that just yesterday they had decided/realized they were female. I brought up “uh, oh, I had just kinda assumed you were a trans woman this whole time” and they said “well, bayes points to you I guess”.
I separately knew Ziz but I think didn’t know there was a connection there at the time.
and then one day met with them on Google Hangouts to discuss some AI stuff they had decided/realized they were female
Do you know when that was?
According to Ziz the connection in the beginning used to be that they exchanged emails. From speaking to one of Pasek’s roommates about his death, there was zero mention of Ziz so I don’t think Pasek talked to other people about his connection to Ziz.
According to Ziz’s timeline her first contact with Pazek was after Pasek commented on her blog in Dezember 2017.
Looking through messages from Pazek for his writing style, there’s a certain kind of positivity in their writing style.
He wrote Ziz at the time You say all the right things! I cannot marry you right now but let’s be best friends forever. In June 2016 Pasek wrote me “I’ve recently been doing a little project in which I talk with random LW users on Skype. (This has turned out to be a lot of fun!) So if you feel like it and have the time—please let me know and we an arrange to talk sometime.”, so that behavior seems to be older.
This is an untypical style of communicating and there are likely some transwomen who choose that style to signal their feminity.
Pasek didn’t adopt it for that signaling purpose. At the same time factors that pointed toward trans might also made that communication style attractive to him. Another explanation for him communicating like that is that it’s what he learned to fit-in in Japan where a lot of politeness is called for. His conscious analysis also likely pointed into the direction of this style being useful for connecting with people.
Knowing what I know about Daniel, I could easily psychologically manipulate him into doing terrible acts if need be. I can easily see a person who is a master of being a cult leader (which Ziz is a top tier cult leader) mentally breaking Daniel. He (at least was) a socially awkward person who took things extremely literally and was easy to push around. He’s definitely up there on the “easy” category, and cult leaders like Ziz need somebody like that. Going over Ziz’s tactics, while Daniel is unlikely to have developed multiple personalities, he’d easily enter a few of the states Ziz mentions.
However I have no clue how Daniel would physically be able to commit certain acts his hand eye coordination is bad, and he’s physically not very strong. If he tried to knife me to death he’d get knocked out by my overhand right or heel hooked into submission well before he got enough stabs in (I’m not a great boxer),
I imagine him being manipulated into giving them a place to live. I have trouble imagining him being manipulated into conspiring towards a specific goal of murder. I wouldn’t be surprised if the police care little for such a distinction.
AFAIK most religious people don’t start suddenly committing homicide. It more seems like the relevant factor is specific to Zizianism, which appears to compel people who adopt it to take extreme actions, even if they are sensitive, serious, caring, and would go out of their way to avoid causing someone else harm.
Or perhaps, especially if they are like that? I had interacted with somnilogical a while ago, and I was quite suprised that ey had joined Zizianism as that was not my impression of the kind of person ey were. But I didn’t interact hugely much with somni so I may have misjudged em.
People can do bad things if they think something much larger is at stake. Some but not all religions suggest that. Some non religious philosophies do as well, notably utilitarianism. Many, but not all, utilitarians solve the problem by not fully believing in it. Zizians adopt extreme utilitarianism about animal welfare.
It is-for a certain type of unstable person. Ziz would likely have come up with different crazy ideas without Less Wrong. Compare Deepak Chopra on quantum mechanics: he pushes all manner of “quantum” bullshit, yet you can hardly blame physics for this, and if physics weren’t known, Chopra would almost certainly just be pushing a different flavor of insanity.
I know nothing about Daniel Blank, but the picture of him in the full article looks…odd. What am I looking at here, Williams Syndrome? He and most of the others look like people I wouldn’t want to sit next to on a bus.
I get that we all want understanding in a situation like this but let’s not go after people’s appearances, cripes. Most people look weird in one way or another and are gonna be fine to sit next to on a bus. Come on.
You can have lazy eye without Williams Syndrome (it is very common and WS is very rare), and I would be surprised by WS: he’s missing some of the more striking WS features like goblin teeth or a wide face or sunken nose aside from the wide lower lip, and since it’s an intellectual disability, that would be a rather surprising thing for people who ‘have spent many years around the rationality community’ (eg WP notes that out of a sample of >300, the highest reported raw IQ was 112). Plus, people with WS are strange in many ways, so I’d expect people who knew him to describe that instead of just generally saying “very prone to being sucked in by charismatic and manipulative Dark Triad types”—people can be fatally gullible without having Williams Syndrome, you know.
As for the other photos: no one looks good in a mugshot, not even models.
Ok, not Williams Syndrome. There’s more going on in his face than the strabismus, though, and I am unsurprised by the further comments on his physical and mental character from Edmund Nelson.
Nelson’s description mostly just reads ‘autism spectrum’ to me. (High prior probability unlike WS, poor theory of mind, literalness, gullibility, small/weak/poor health, all pretty ordinary, nor is facial oddness odd for many genetic/developmental disorders including all of the autisms.) Williams Syndrome is very different, to the extent that people sometimes try to describe it as ‘the opposite of autism’, which illustrates the hazards of trying to make diagnoses online based on cursory information...
The possible involvement of Daniel Blank is the most surprising to me. As the linked article notes, Daniel seems like about the least likely person to commit a homicide. I’ve not had contact with him in a few years, but I recall Daniel as sensitive, serious, and caring, and a person who would go out of his way to avoid causing someone else harm. I don’t know what’s happened in the intervening time to lead to his involvement here.
Part of the process that Ziz seems to advocate involves inducing alternative personalities in people. The process that unleashed the Maia personality in Chris Pazek led in Ziz’s words to their suicide.
This process could easily lead to a personality being active in a person that has very different characteristics among various axis than the personality you knew years earlier.
“Least likely person to do X” is an interesting concept. People who deal with a shadow that has an attribute they despise often overcompensate to fight that shadow. That shadow might provide a substance based on which the alternative personality that acts very differently can be built.
I feel complicated about this; in a world where everyone is doing split-and-commit (or something similar) by default, this feels straightforwardly good to note.
But like. In this world, this feels like fodder for “you should interpret evidence that someone is unusually unlikely to X as evidence that they’re actually quite likely to X, given some trigger.”
And I think this is the sort of thing that is true in some very small minority of cases and an outright (and false) weapon all the other times.
I think we should be real careful about interpreting evidence against X as evidence of X, even given that the psychological structure you just described is one that exists.
I do agree that it’s not an easy subject to speak about.
There are two separate issues at hand:
What happens if you have multiple personalities
Suppressed anger and its effects
Sometimes abused children develop multiple-personality disorders where they develop new personalities to deal with situations where the characteristics.
I have one friend who has the multiple-personality disorder and is able to switch between them. According to him, he often faced situations where a person was used to dealing with one of his personalities and really surprised when he switched to another personality that has different personality characteristics.
The technique that Ziz advocates seems to intentionally created something that’s similar to multiple personality disorder and I would expect that the same pattern hold where at least one of the personalities is able to do things that are far outside of what the old unified self would do.
I think good evidence that someone is unlikely to cause harm is about observing that they have functional strategies for taking care of boundary violations. If someone’s reaction is instead to ignore their own needs, repress any anger that comes up and go out of his way to avoid causing someone else harm, that strategy is not stable.
Many people would have thought that Mother Thresa is the “least likely person to doubt in God”, but that’s what she did. Her outward presentation of extreme belief in God was not something stable.
It’s a mistake to take the fact that someone is extreme along an axis as evidence of stability.
That’s fair from a mental POV, but Daniel Blank physically has poor hand-eye coordination and bad reflexes, meaning that if he tried to shoot somebody he’d be extremely likely to miss at all but the shortest of ranges. (the murder in question was definitely gunshot based)
While he could be a part of the conspiracy his ability to have physically committed the actual act is questionable.
Is this an empirical question? Like, could you gather 1000 people, measure how violent they are, then somehow summon their shadows, and measure again?
My guess would be that the shadow is on average more violent than the original person, but it is not true that less violent person = more violent shadow. (I would probably expect something like: each shadow gets a bonus +5 on violence compared to the original person; including people who already started very violent.)
I think that this misidentifies the crux of the internal argument Ziz created and the actual chain of events a bit.
imo, Maia was trans and the components of her mind (the alter(s) they debucketed into “Shine”) saw the body was physically male and decided that the decision-theoretically correct thing to do was to basically ignore being trans in favor of maximizing influence to save the world. Choosing to transition was pitted against being trans because of the cultural oppression against queers. I’ve run into this attitude among rationalist queers numerous times independently from Ziz and “I can’t transition that will stop me from being a good EA” seems troubling common sentiment.
Prior to getting involved with Ziz, the “Shine” half of her personality had basically been running her system on an adversarial ‘we must act or else’ fear response loop around saving the multiverse from evil using timeless decision theory in order to brute force the subjunctive evolution of the multiverse.
So Ziz and Paseks start interacting, and at that point the “Maia” parts of her had basically been like, traumatized into submission and dissociation, and Ziz intentionally stirs up all those dissociated pieces and draws the realization that Maia is trans to the surface. This caused a spiraling optimization priority conflict between two factions that ziz had empowered the contradictory validity of by helping them reify themselves and define the terms of their conflict in her zero sum black and white good and evil framework.
But Maia didn’t kill them, Shine killed them. I have multiple references that corroborate that. The “beat Maia into submission and then save the world” protocol that they using cooked out all this low level suicidality and “i need to escape, please where is the exit how do i decision-theoretically justify quitting the game?” type feelings of hopelessness and entrapment. The only “exit” that could get them out of their sense of horrifying heroic responsibility was by dying so Shine found a “decision theoretic justification” to kill them and did. “Pasek’s doom” isn’t just “interhemispheric conflict” if anything it’s much more specific, it’s the specific interaction of:
“i must act or the world will burn. There is no room for anything less than full optimization pressure and utilitarian consequentialism”
vs
“i am a creature that exists in a body. I have needs and desires and want to be happy and feel safe”
This is a very common EA brainworm to have and I know lots of EAs who have folded themselves into pretzels around this sort of internal friction. Ziz didn’t create Pasek’s internal conflict she just encouraged the “good” Shine half to adversarially bully the evil “Maia” half more and more, escalating the conflict to lethality.
Can you share? I would like to have a clearer sense of what happened to them. If there’s info that I don’t know, I’d like to see it.
things i’m going off:
the pdf archive of Maia’s blog posted by Ziz to sinseriously (I have it downloaded to backup as well)
the archive.org backup of Fluttershy’s blog
Ziz’s account of the event (and how sparse and weirdly guilt ridden it is for her)
several oblique references to the situation that Ziz makes
various reports about the situation posted to LW which can be found by searching Pasek
From this i’ve developed my own model of what ziz et al have been calling “single-good interhemispheric game theory” which is just extremely advanced and high level beating yourself up while insisting you’re great at your emotions. There is a particular flavor of cPTSD that seems disproportionately overrepresented within the LW/EA community umbrella, and it looks like this:
hyperactivity
perfectionist compulsion to overachieve
always-on
constantly thinking with a rich inner world
high scrupulosity blurring into OCD tendencies
anxiety with seemingly good justifications (it’s not paranoia if...)
an impressive degree of self-control (and the inability to relax fully)
catastrophizing
dissociation from the body
this is a mode of a cPTSD flight response. Under the cPTSD model, “Shine” could be thought of as a toxic inner critic that had fully seized power over Pasek and had come to dominate and micromanage all their actions in the world while adversarially repressing anything that would violate Shine’s control (it would have felt unsafe to Pasek to actually do that because this is all a trauma response and the control is what keeps u safe from the traumatic things happening again). This is how Pasek was able to work 60-80 hour weeks while couch surfing and performing advanced self modification. Or, to put it in Empty Spaces terms: she had an extremely bright and high RPM halo. This seems to be a common trauma pattern among rationalists and people with this sort of trauma pattern seem to be particularly drawn to rationality and effective altruism.
Into this equilibrium we introduce Ziz, who Pasek gets to know by telling Ziz that she thinks they’re the same person. (ways to say you’re trans without saying you’re trans). Ziz is if nothing else, extremely critical of everyone and is exceptionally (and probably often uncomfortably) aware of the way people’s minds work in a psychoanalytic sense. Pasek’s claim of being the same as Ziz in a metaphysically significant way is something Ziz can’t help put pick apart, leading Pasek to do a bunch of Shadow work eventually leading to her summoning Maia.
So there’s a problem with crushing your shadow into a box in order to maximize your utilitarian impact potential over a long period, which is that it makes you wanna fucking die. If you can repress that death wish too and add in a little threat of hell to keep you motivated, you can pull off a pretty convincing facsimile of someone not constantly subjecting themselves to painful adversarial inner conflict. This is a unstable nuclear reactor of a person, they come off as powerful and competent but it wouldn’t take much to lead them to a runaway meltdown. Sometimes that looks like a psychotic break, and sometimes that looks like intense suicidal ideation.
So Ziz can’t help but poke the unstable reactor girl claiming to be a metaphysical copy of her to see if she implodes, and the answer is yes, which to Ziz means she was never really a copy in the first place.
In many not really but pretending to be healthy adults, the way their shadow parts get their needs met is by slipping around the edges of the light side social narrative and lying about what they’re actually doing. There’s a degree of “narrative smoothing” allowed by social reality that gets read by certain schizo-spectrum types as adversarial gaslighting and they’ll feel compelled to point it out. To someone who is firmly controlled by their self-narrative interacting earnestly with Ziz directly feeds the inner critic and leads to an escalating spiral of inner adversariality between a dominating and compulsively perfectionist superego and the more and more cornered feeling id.
That is all to say that there is a model of EA burnout going around LW right now of which numerous recountings can be found. I think a severely exacerbated version of that model is the best fit for what happened to Maia, not “Ziz used spooky cult leader mind control to split Pasek into two people and turn her trans thus creating an inner conflict” ziz didn’t create anything, the inner conflict was there from the start, it’s the same inner conflict afflicting the entire EA egregore.
What do you mean by this? Like, she’s better than average at predicting people’s behavior in various circumstances?
Less predictive and more observational, but sorta yeah? Like, if someone is lying to themselves and playing all these weird internal denial/repression games internally, there are tells for that which you can learn to notice. After a while it gets pretty obvious what the behaviors you observe in someone actually mean (vs what they say those behaviors mean). Why I say “uncomfortably so” is that speaking from my own experiences, once you learn to read people this way, it’s not really something you can turn off again. That can add a lot of friction to social interactions, where it seems like everyone is just constantly trying to bullshit you.
Do you have any indication that Pasek was trans before they spoke with Ziz?
Pasek couch-surfed at my place for a few days around a LessWrong Community weekend he attended and we had deep conversations then. I think that was 1-2 years before he got into contact with Ziz.
At that time he was using heavy optimization pressure on himself. In my memory, he had some logging where he wrote something every hour to measure his productivity. He was also heavily into timeless decision theory-based utilitarian consequentialism at that time.
I’d buy it that there was an internal conflict at the time. I believe that process that Ziz proposed took that internal conflict and create the Shine and Maia personalities out of them.
If a person is putting an extraordinary amount of effort into being nice (which is what Gordon Seidoh Worley observed) there’s likely an internal conflict. What Ziz is doing allows transforming that internal conflict into two parts, one that’s very nice and one that’s opposed to being nice.
Usually, people who do that have a lot of akrasia. Pasek is different in that they managed not to have that. Most people would be blocked by internal friction from doing the kind of productivity optimization that Pasek did.
I think that Pasek was smart enough to know that it’s good to give the part of him that “i am a creature that exists in a body. I have needs and desires and want to be happy and feel safe” things to satisfy it. That part wanted to be happy, so they did some body work intervention to feel happy (and wrote on the blog that someone that didn’t solve the issue and that people aren’t really seeking happiness). That part wanted that they identified themselves publically as Maia, so they did that. That part wanted to transition, so they took hormones.
Shine did find a justification. The way they committed suicide however was not done in a way that sounds like TDT was involved. They could have written an actual suicide note to the people that cared about them and send it the day they died but they didn’t.
Random fact: I just assumed Pasek was trans, based on some vague writing style / username, and then one day met with them on Google Hangouts to discuss some AI stuff, and they brought up that just yesterday they had decided/realized they were female. I brought up “uh, oh, I had just kinda assumed you were a trans woman this whole time” and they said “well, bayes points to you I guess”.
I separately knew Ziz but I think didn’t know there was a connection there at the time.
Do you know when that was?
According to Ziz the connection in the beginning used to be that they exchanged emails. From speaking to one of Pasek’s roommates about his death, there was zero mention of Ziz so I don’t think Pasek talked to other people about his connection to Ziz.
Early 2018
According to Ziz’s timeline her first contact with Pazek was after Pasek commented on her blog in Dezember 2017.
Looking through messages from Pazek for his writing style, there’s a certain kind of positivity in their writing style.
He wrote Ziz at the time You say all the right things! I cannot marry you right now but let’s be best friends forever. In June 2016 Pasek wrote me “I’ve recently been doing a little project in which I talk with random LW users on Skype. (This has turned out to be a lot of fun!) So if you feel like it and have the time—please let me know and we an arrange to talk sometime.”, so that behavior seems to be older.
This is an untypical style of communicating and there are likely some transwomen who choose that style to signal their feminity.
Pasek didn’t adopt it for that signaling purpose. At the same time factors that pointed toward trans might also made that communication style attractive to him. Another explanation for him communicating like that is that it’s what he learned to fit-in in Japan where a lot of politeness is called for. His conscious analysis also likely pointed into the direction of this style being useful for connecting with people.
Knowing what I know about Daniel, I could easily psychologically manipulate him into doing terrible acts if need be. I can easily see a person who is a master of being a cult leader (which Ziz is a top tier cult leader) mentally breaking Daniel. He (at least was) a socially awkward person who took things extremely literally and was easy to push around. He’s definitely up there on the “easy” category, and cult leaders like Ziz need somebody like that. Going over Ziz’s tactics, while Daniel is unlikely to have developed multiple personalities, he’d easily enter a few of the states Ziz mentions.
However I have no clue how Daniel would physically be able to commit certain acts his hand eye coordination is bad, and he’s physically not very strong. If he tried to knife me to death he’d get knocked out by my overhand right or heel hooked into submission well before he got enough stabs in (I’m not a great boxer),
I imagine him being manipulated into giving them a place to live. I have trouble imagining him being manipulated into conspiring towards a specific goal of murder. I wouldn’t be surprised if the police care little for such a distinction.
Religion is a helluva drug.
AFAIK most religious people don’t start suddenly committing homicide. It more seems like the relevant factor is specific to Zizianism, which appears to compel people who adopt it to take extreme actions, even if they are sensitive, serious, caring, and would go out of their way to avoid causing someone else harm.
Or perhaps, especially if they are like that? I had interacted with somnilogical a while ago, and I was quite suprised that ey had joined Zizianism as that was not my impression of the kind of person ey were. But I didn’t interact hugely much with somni so I may have misjudged em.
People can do bad things if they think something much larger is at stake. Some but not all religions suggest that. Some non religious philosophies do as well, notably utilitarianism. Many, but not all, utilitarians solve the problem by not fully believing in it. Zizians adopt extreme utilitarianism about animal welfare.
This place is so good at pushing people to invent them, isn’t it?
It is-for a certain type of unstable person. Ziz would likely have come up with different crazy ideas without Less Wrong. Compare Deepak Chopra on quantum mechanics: he pushes all manner of “quantum” bullshit, yet you can hardly blame physics for this, and if physics weren’t known, Chopra would almost certainly just be pushing a different flavor of insanity.
I know nothing about Daniel Blank, but the picture of him in the full article looks…odd. What am I looking at here, Williams Syndrome? He and most of the others look like people I wouldn’t want to sit next to on a bus.
I get that we all want understanding in a situation like this but let’s not go after people’s appearances, cripes. Most people look weird in one way or another and are gonna be fine to sit next to on a bus. Come on.
You can have lazy eye without Williams Syndrome (it is very common and WS is very rare), and I would be surprised by WS: he’s missing some of the more striking WS features like goblin teeth or a wide face or sunken nose aside from the wide lower lip, and since it’s an intellectual disability, that would be a rather surprising thing for people who ‘have spent many years around the rationality community’ (eg WP notes that out of a sample of >300, the highest reported raw IQ was 112). Plus, people with WS are strange in many ways, so I’d expect people who knew him to describe that instead of just generally saying “very prone to being sucked in by charismatic and manipulative Dark Triad types”—people can be fatally gullible without having Williams Syndrome, you know.
As for the other photos: no one looks good in a mugshot, not even models.
Daniel was definitely strange in many socially awkward ways
Ok, not Williams Syndrome. There’s more going on in his face than the strabismus, though, and I am unsurprised by the further comments on his physical and mental character from Edmund Nelson.
Nelson’s description mostly just reads ‘autism spectrum’ to me. (High prior probability unlike WS, poor theory of mind, literalness, gullibility, small/weak/poor health, all pretty ordinary, nor is facial oddness odd for many genetic/developmental disorders including all of the autisms.) Williams Syndrome is very different, to the extent that people sometimes try to describe it as ‘the opposite of autism’, which illustrates the hazards of trying to make diagnoses online based on cursory information...