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.
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.