I am reading about Zizians on Hacker News, and I wonder what is the lesson we are supposed to take from this. (1, 2)
People sometimes make mistakes. If they survive them, they are supposed to learn. I believe that the rationality community as a whole makes many mistakes. But I am confused about what is the specific lesson about Zizians.
From the PR perspective, they are a disaster. Literal murderers, interesting enough to make news. Described by journalists as if they are a part of the rationality community, and as if their actions somehow reflect on us. Do they? Or are the journalists just making up stuff? Maybe; but that just sounds too convenient. A story can be mostly false, and still contain a small piece of truth. I don’t want to miss that piece, if there is any. But I don’t see it.
A long version of the history (without the recent events) is at zizians.info. Ziz participated at some CFAR workshops. Was told that she was “net negative”. She started recruiting followers. They made a protest; the rationalists called cops on them. Later, they have murdered a few people.
Is there an avoidable mistake, on the side of the rationality community? If ten years ago we knew the future (but without too specific details—even the latest version of chronophone replaces “Jack LaSota” with “a certain person”, and “trans women” with “people with a certain trait”), what could have been done differently?
How do you operationalize “make sure you don’t invite a future murderous cult leader to a rationality workshop”? You can interview them before the workshop. But that is what actually happened; I was at one of those workshops, and I was interviewed online before that. Were there any specific red flags that in retrospective people at CFAR wish they paid more attention to? (I don’t know. It’s a question. But even if something feels like a red flag when you have the benefit of hindsight, it is not obvious that reasonable people would have seen it as a sufficient reason to ban someone from participating at a workshop.)
Then what. Telling someone that they are “net negative”—is that a mistake? What would you have said instead? Different words? Or nothing? Let the person participate until they hopefully get bored and find a different hobby (as opposed to keeping a grudge against you)? Just ban the person without any explanation? It is not obvious that any of these options would change the outcome.
Was it a mistake to call cops on them back then? Here I think the message from chronophone would make this a more likely reaction. I mean, if I told you that the people barricading off your event are future murderers that will be in the news, that would only make calling the cops seem like obviously the right action. I mean, what is the alternative? Wait indefinitely and hope that they get bored and go away? Or just… try walking around them, and hope that nothing bad happens? You know they are violent, they are masked, and they hate you with a passion. (And the chronophone says they are literally willing to murder.)
Was there any other possible mistake that I missed?
Some commenters on Hacker News consider it obvious that the mistake was discussing decision theory. Because, you know, if you discuss decision theory seriously, that makes you responsible for people who decide that their own version of decision theory is to kill the people they don’t like. Is CFAR indirectly responsible for the murders? Is Jeremy Bentham? Am I missing some nuance here?
Or is this all just bad luck… that if you make a workshop, and a future murderer decides to go there, and they decide to use some of your keywords in their later manifesto… then it doesn’t really matter what you do, even if you tell them to fuck off and call cops on them, you will forever be connected to them, and it’s up to journalists whether they decide to spin it as: the murderer is just an example of everything that is wrong with this community.
Yeah, one possible answer is “don’t do anything weird, ever”. That is the safe way, on average. No one will bother writing a story about you, because no one would bother reading it.
I need some perspective on this. On one hand, I don’t see what could have been handled better here. On the other hand, saying “we are not responsible for Ziz, we are not responsible for Leverage, we are not responsible SBF” sounds like too much of a coincidence. But SBF and Leverage were at least more or less aligned, ideologically. With Ziz, both sides considered each other “evil”/”net negative”, they protested / called cops on each other. If that means nothing, what does?
I’ve participated in several alternative communities over the course of my life, and all became mired in scandal. The first was my college, where tolerance of hard drug use by the administration resulted in multiple OD deaths in my time there. The second was in my 20s in an intentional living and festival culture, when a major community figure was accused by multiple women of drugging and raping them while unconscious. The third was the EA and rationality community, which of course has had one scandal after another for years.
My model is that drugs, extreme ideas, mental illness, economic precarity, alternative cultures and institutions, power differences, and violent behavior are mutually reinforcing. Rationalists may drastically underestimate how intensely the recruitment funnel they’ve created selects for interest by disturbed people. Or the extent to which features correlated with the movement, like lifestyle experimentation, alternative spirituality or drug use, may be the central attractions for some, using rationality as a pretext. It’s the opposite of evaporative cooling—it’s condensation of crazy.
My belief is that to counteract this, it’s necessary to promote some level of conformism and convention to the standards and norms of society at large. Think of academia in STEM. Yes, the people and jobs are unusual. But the requirement for participants to repeatedly integrate into new departments at new universities repeatedly and work with many collaborators and a constant churn of new students from around the world makes for a melting pot culture where condensation of crazy is mitigated on a per capita basis.
In short, it seems to me that it’s in the very nature of niche movements and alternative communities to generate scandal for systematic sociological reasons. There is probably no way to retain the niche alt community structure without the scandal. Individuals will have to choose whether or not they prioritize a low frequency of scandal, or having the community exist in its present form.
A question I ask when sizing up a community is “do these people seem likely to be much more scandal-prone than the average church, sports team or workplace?” I also ask this for people I am considering getting to know. I go with my intuition and choose how to engage accordingly.
Rationalists may drastically underestimate how intensely the recruitment funnel they’ve created selects for interest by disturbed people.
Yeah. I wish we had an explicit discussion about this a decade ago.
I guess we didn’t, because it started slowly, and we didn’t sufficiently update about how it changes the situation when a very small mostly online group becomes a larger, partially offline group.
(This is not just our specific blindness, but a general human bias. In some sense, ISO 9001 is about solving a similar situation in business: many business owners fail to notice that you cannot manage a company with 200 employees the same way you did when you had 20.)
And we know how Mensa is a magnet for crazy people, except that in their case those are mostly harmless cranks who want to debunk the theory of relativity, or promote their own theory of quantum physics based on some misunderstood YouTube videos. Unlike Mensa, Less Wrong talks about existential risks, which attracts a different, more dangerous kind of crazy.
So I guess, we should have noticed that community building is a thing that requires domain expertise that we apparently didn’t have. People with more experience might have predicted some problems.
My model is that drugs, extreme ideas, mental illness, economic precarity, alternative cultures and institutions, power differences, and violent behavior are mutually reinforcing.
Extreme ideas are kind of what makes us us, not sure how much we can do about it. But that means we should have pushed harder about the remaining factors.
Drugs seem to be the obvious problem from many people’s perspective… but good luck getting that uncool message across in a group of proud contrarians living in the drug junkie capital of the planet. Mental illness is a difficult topic in a community full of aspies (also, talking about crazy is ableist).
Some problems seem downstream from making Bay Area the center of the rationality community.
My belief is that to counteract this, it’s necessary to promote some level of conformism and convention to the standards and norms of society at large. [...] In short, it seems to me that it’s in the very nature of niche movements and alternative communities to generate scandal for systematic sociological reasons.
I think this is also related to age. Young people are more like “what could possibly go wrong?” and old people are more like “let me tell you a few stories about my friends who died young”. The problems with drugs often fix themselves: people either grow out of it, or they die, or they become the kind of drug junkie who doesn’t inspire others to emulate them. Similarly, a 20 years old crazy person may seem interesting, but a 40 years old crazy person is just obviously failing at life. The older people are, the more you can see the long-term consequences of their lifestyle by looking at them.
Another thing that e.g. the academia has is an explicit membership list, with legible roles. Everyone understands the difference between “a professor of University U did it”, “a student of University U did it”, and “a crazy homeless guy who sometimes sleeps on the bench in front of University U did it”. It doesn’t all collapse to a vague “someone associated with University U did it”. Rationalists do not have any such list, therefore we cannot legibly argue that Ziz is not one of us.
They made a protest; the rationalists called cops on them.
I don’t think that claim is true. As far as I remember the owner of the venue that was rented in by the rationalist in question called the cops.
Was there any other possible mistake that I missed?
Coliving communities that are focused on doing strong experimentation in changing human cognition are risky. That goes for both Ziz’s Rationalist Fleet and for Leverage.
There are questions about how to deal with the topic of trans-identity. You could say that especially ten years ago, the discourse around that topic wasn’t as rational as we would hope it to be.
On that topic, it’s worth noting that Pazek was a few months into taking hormones when they killed themselves (a fact that the summary on zizians.info leaves out but at least one of Pazek’s roommates considered to be causally connected to his suicide.
Salamon told Open Vallejo that LaSota attended three CFAR events between 2014 and 2018. Concerned by their “weird” behavior and interactions with other CFAR attendees, Salamon tried to convince a joint admissions committee between the Machine Intelligence Learning Institute and CFAR to not admit LaSota into their month-long summer fellowship in 2018. Salamon, however, was overruled.
“When LaSota attended the final program in summer 2018, I was physically afraid in a way I’ve never been with anyone else,” Salamon said in an email to Open Vallejo.
[...] Salamon told Open Vallejo that she requested Bauckholt not be invited back for similar reasons as LaSota. LaSota and Bauckholt did not attend any events at the same time, according to Salamon, and it is not clear if they had ever met in person.
OK, so Anna Salamon obviously was the smart one in the room. The rest of the team should update about listening to her concerns. (Added: Eh, this was needlessly harsh. Different smart people have different strengths and weaknesses. But, at least in this case, Anna seems like a good judge of character, and that is a thing that seems to be in a very short supply. The others are probably too easy to impress by someone being smart and contrarian, and fail to notice that the person also is insane.)
I am updating towards “yes, there are things the rationalist community could have done better (in addition to being less lenient towards drug junkies).”
EDIT:
Actually, the Zizians’ version of the story is that MIRI/CFAR called the cops. That’s probably where I originally got that information from.
I informed the team that I thought Ziz and some other people had arrived. The venue staff member assured us that the venue could handle it, and I think that the venue staff had called the police.
As far as I remember (it’s been while since I read through all the information), there were children who attended a previous event at the location that were inside of the location when Ziz and her crew showed up. Then the person responsible for the venue called the cops. Ziz at al were charged with false imprisonment for preventing the children from leaving. That collateral damage is quite inconvenient for Ziz’s narrative of the situation.
The rest of the team should update about listening to her concerns.
I believe (though my memory in general is very very fuzzy) that I was the one who most pushed for Ziz and Gwen to be at that workshop. (I don’t recall talking with Anna about that at all before the workshop, and don’t see anything about that in my emails on a quick look, though I could very easily have forgotten. I do recall her saying at the workshop that she thought Ziz shouldn’t be there.) I did indeed update later (also based on other things) quite strongly that I really truly cannot detect various kinds of pathology, and therefore have to be much more circumspect, deferent to others about this, not making lots of decisions like this, etc. (I do think there was good reason to have Ziz at the workshop though, contra others; Ziz was indeed smart and an interesting original insightful thinker, which is in short supply. I’m also unclear on what evidence Anna had at the time, and the extent to which the community’s behavior with Ziz was escalatorily causing Ziz’s eventual fate.)
Anna seems like a good judge of character,
Uh, for the record, I would definitely take it very seriously, probably as pretty strong or very strong evidence, if Anna says that someone is harmful / evil / etc.; but I would not take it as strong evidence of someone not being so, if she endorses them.
Or is this all just bad luck… that if you make a workshop, and a future murderer decides to go there, and they decide to use some of your keywords in their later manifesto… then it doesn’t really matter what you do, even if you tell them to fuck off and call cops on them, you will forever be connected to them, and it’s up to journalists whether they decide to spin it as: the murderer is just an example of everything that is wrong with this community.
I think this is a strange description of the mainstream media coverage when most of the articles talking about Zizian ideology are nearly entirely sourced from interviews with rationalists and talk about their conflict with mainline rationalists at length.
The lesson I can glean is probably that considering the high rate of cult creation in the community and the flashing warning signs about them, rationalists should have been far more proactive in adopting normal procedures of cult and terrorism prevention (e.g. surveilling their activities, preventing the isolation of potential recruits, and looking for any suspiciously missing person).
normal procedures of cult and terrorism prevention (e.g. surveilling their activities, preventing the isolation of potential recruits, and looking for any suspiciously missing person).
Surveilling whose activities?
For example, there is a YouTube video with Slimepriestess, who defends Zizians a bit too much, in my opinion. Should we be surveilling Slimepriestess?
I chose a specific person and an exaggerated example on purpose. Because, in real situation, it will always be a specific person, and unless the behavior is really bad (which means it is already late), any proposed action will seem excessive to some people. And it will feel virtuous to err on the side of letting people do whatever they want.
(And if the police is already looking for Ziz, you don’t need to surveil. If you see Ziz, pick up the phone and call the cops, don’t try anything heroic, or the next story might be about you.)
I think we still haven’t reached a consensus on whether Nonlinear are bad guys. That was a year ago.
So… yeah, we should do something like that, but it is difficult to get the details right.
Core Zizians (and, in general, any group determined to be a cult or terror threat to the community), as the US doesn’t really have an equivalent of, say, the French MIVILUDES to do that job (else US society would be fairly different). Potential recruits are addressed in the next comma.
I think there may be some things to re-examine about the role of self-experimentation in the rationalist community. Nootropics, behavioral interventions like impractical sleep schedules, maybe even meditation. It’s very possible these reflect systematic mistakes by the rationalist community, that people should mostly warned away from.
Yeah. I mean, there were problems with drugs already at the early rationality minicamps in 2014, and yet somehow this topic remains open to discussion...
I am not opposed to self-experimentation per se, as long as people acknowledge the risks.
But if we simply treat self-experimentation as high status, and talking about risks as low-status...
Yeah, one possible answer is “don’t do anything weird, ever”. That is the safe way, on average. No one will bother writing a story about you, because no one would bother reading it.
You laugh, but I really think a group norm of “think for yourself, question the outside world, don’t be afraid to be weird” is part of the reason why all of these groups exist. Doing those things is ultimately a luxury for the well-adjusted and intelligent. If you tell people over and over to question social norms some of those people will turn out to be crazy and conclude crime and violence is acceptable.
I don’t know if there’s anything to do about that, but it is a thing.
I’m not sure if the rationalists did anything they shouldn’t do re: Ziz. Going forward though, I think epistemic learned helplessness/memetic immune systems should be among the first things to introduce to newcomers to the site/community. Being wary that some ideas are, in a sense, out to get you, is a central part of how I process information.
Not exactly sure how to implement that recommendation though. You also don’t want people to use it as a fully general counterargument to anything they don’t like.
Ranting a bit here, but it just feels like the collection of rationalist thought is so complex and, even with the various attempts at organizing everything. Thinking well is hard, and involves many concepts, and we haven’t figured it all out yet! It’s kind of sad to see journalists trying to understand the rationalist community and TDT.
Another thing that comes to mind is the FAIR site (formerly mormon apologetics), where members of the latter day saints church tries to correct various misconceptions people have about the church.[1] There’s a ton of writing on there, and provides an example of how people have tried to, uh, improve their PR through writing stuff online to clear up misconceptions.
And did it work? I suspect it probably had a small positive effect. I know very little about this, but my hunch would be that the popularity of mormons comes from having lots of them everywhere in society, and people get to meet them and realize that those people are pretty nice.
(See also Scott Alexander’s book review on The Secrets to Our Success)
Why are people so bad at reasoning? For the same reason they’re so bad at letting poisonous spiders walk all over their face without freaking out. Both “skills” are really bad ideas, most of the people who tried them died in the process, so evolution removed those genes from the population, and successful cultures stigmatized them enough to give people an internalized fear of even trying.
They also provide various evidence for their faith. The one I find particularly funny concerns whether Joseph Smith could have written the book of mormon. It states that Smith (1) had limited education (2) was not a writer and that (3) the book of mormon was very long and had 258k words.
This calls to mind a certain other author, with limited formal education, little fiction writing experience, non-mainstream sexual preferences, and also wrote a very long book (660k words!) that reached many people in the world who ended up finding him very convincing…
In companies where I worked, we sometimes had a security training, which included stories about the things that went wrong in the past. Some examples were from the industry in general, but some of them were from that specific company (with specific names removed).
We probably should write a short report on “the things that went wrong in the rationalist community”, written from our perspective, without specific names, and… it could be an interesting topic for the new members.
One lesson that occurs to me a day after reading this shortform is “figure out the lesson and apply it after the first time.” For example, I now see people proposing to check in on one’s Ziz-sympathetic friends and discourage killing humans. The rationalist community already had notice of something similar happening in Feb 2023, though.
P.S.: I suggest linking or copying this shortform to that thread so it’s easier to find.
What exactly do you have in mind? Semi-regular check-ins with every member to see what they’re up to, what their thinking processes are, what recently piqued their interest, what rabbit holes they’ve gone into?
I am reading about Zizians on Hacker News, and I wonder what is the lesson we are supposed to take from this. (1, 2)
People sometimes make mistakes. If they survive them, they are supposed to learn. I believe that the rationality community as a whole makes many mistakes. But I am confused about what is the specific lesson about Zizians.
From the PR perspective, they are a disaster. Literal murderers, interesting enough to make news. Described by journalists as if they are a part of the rationality community, and as if their actions somehow reflect on us. Do they? Or are the journalists just making up stuff? Maybe; but that just sounds too convenient. A story can be mostly false, and still contain a small piece of truth. I don’t want to miss that piece, if there is any. But I don’t see it.
A long version of the history (without the recent events) is at zizians.info. Ziz participated at some CFAR workshops. Was told that she was “net negative”. She started recruiting followers. They made a protest; the rationalists called cops on them. Later, they have murdered a few people.
Is there an avoidable mistake, on the side of the rationality community? If ten years ago we knew the future (but without too specific details—even the latest version of chronophone replaces “Jack LaSota” with “a certain person”, and “trans women” with “people with a certain trait”), what could have been done differently?
How do you operationalize “make sure you don’t invite a future murderous cult leader to a rationality workshop”? You can interview them before the workshop. But that is what actually happened; I was at one of those workshops, and I was interviewed online before that. Were there any specific red flags that in retrospective people at CFAR wish they paid more attention to? (I don’t know. It’s a question. But even if something feels like a red flag when you have the benefit of hindsight, it is not obvious that reasonable people would have seen it as a sufficient reason to ban someone from participating at a workshop.)
Then what. Telling someone that they are “net negative”—is that a mistake? What would you have said instead? Different words? Or nothing? Let the person participate until they hopefully get bored and find a different hobby (as opposed to keeping a grudge against you)? Just ban the person without any explanation? It is not obvious that any of these options would change the outcome.
Was it a mistake to call cops on them back then? Here I think the message from chronophone would make this a more likely reaction. I mean, if I told you that the people barricading off your event are future murderers that will be in the news, that would only make calling the cops seem like obviously the right action. I mean, what is the alternative? Wait indefinitely and hope that they get bored and go away? Or just… try walking around them, and hope that nothing bad happens? You know they are violent, they are masked, and they hate you with a passion. (And the chronophone says they are literally willing to murder.)
Was there any other possible mistake that I missed?
Some commenters on Hacker News consider it obvious that the mistake was discussing decision theory. Because, you know, if you discuss decision theory seriously, that makes you responsible for people who decide that their own version of decision theory is to kill the people they don’t like. Is CFAR indirectly responsible for the murders? Is Jeremy Bentham? Am I missing some nuance here?
Or is this all just bad luck… that if you make a workshop, and a future murderer decides to go there, and they decide to use some of your keywords in their later manifesto… then it doesn’t really matter what you do, even if you tell them to fuck off and call cops on them, you will forever be connected to them, and it’s up to journalists whether they decide to spin it as: the murderer is just an example of everything that is wrong with this community.
Yeah, one possible answer is “don’t do anything weird, ever”. That is the safe way, on average. No one will bother writing a story about you, because no one would bother reading it.
I need some perspective on this. On one hand, I don’t see what could have been handled better here. On the other hand, saying “we are not responsible for Ziz, we are not responsible for Leverage, we are not responsible SBF” sounds like too much of a coincidence. But SBF and Leverage were at least more or less aligned, ideologically. With Ziz, both sides considered each other “evil”/”net negative”, they protested / called cops on each other. If that means nothing, what does?
What can we do better the next time?
EDIT: Oh, I somehow failed to notice that there was already a thread about this topic.
I’ve participated in several alternative communities over the course of my life, and all became mired in scandal. The first was my college, where tolerance of hard drug use by the administration resulted in multiple OD deaths in my time there. The second was in my 20s in an intentional living and festival culture, when a major community figure was accused by multiple women of drugging and raping them while unconscious. The third was the EA and rationality community, which of course has had one scandal after another for years.
My model is that drugs, extreme ideas, mental illness, economic precarity, alternative cultures and institutions, power differences, and violent behavior are mutually reinforcing. Rationalists may drastically underestimate how intensely the recruitment funnel they’ve created selects for interest by disturbed people. Or the extent to which features correlated with the movement, like lifestyle experimentation, alternative spirituality or drug use, may be the central attractions for some, using rationality as a pretext. It’s the opposite of evaporative cooling—it’s condensation of crazy.
My belief is that to counteract this, it’s necessary to promote some level of conformism and convention to the standards and norms of society at large. Think of academia in STEM. Yes, the people and jobs are unusual. But the requirement for participants to repeatedly integrate into new departments at new universities repeatedly and work with many collaborators and a constant churn of new students from around the world makes for a melting pot culture where condensation of crazy is mitigated on a per capita basis.
In short, it seems to me that it’s in the very nature of niche movements and alternative communities to generate scandal for systematic sociological reasons. There is probably no way to retain the niche alt community structure without the scandal. Individuals will have to choose whether or not they prioritize a low frequency of scandal, or having the community exist in its present form.
A question I ask when sizing up a community is “do these people seem likely to be much more scandal-prone than the average church, sports team or workplace?” I also ask this for people I am considering getting to know. I go with my intuition and choose how to engage accordingly.
Yeah. I wish we had an explicit discussion about this a decade ago.
I guess we didn’t, because it started slowly, and we didn’t sufficiently update about how it changes the situation when a very small mostly online group becomes a larger, partially offline group.
(This is not just our specific blindness, but a general human bias. In some sense, ISO 9001 is about solving a similar situation in business: many business owners fail to notice that you cannot manage a company with 200 employees the same way you did when you had 20.)
And we know how Mensa is a magnet for crazy people, except that in their case those are mostly harmless cranks who want to debunk the theory of relativity, or promote their own theory of quantum physics based on some misunderstood YouTube videos. Unlike Mensa, Less Wrong talks about existential risks, which attracts a different, more dangerous kind of crazy.
So I guess, we should have noticed that community building is a thing that requires domain expertise that we apparently didn’t have. People with more experience might have predicted some problems.
Extreme ideas are kind of what makes us us, not sure how much we can do about it. But that means we should have pushed harder about the remaining factors.
Drugs seem to be the obvious problem from many people’s perspective… but good luck getting that uncool message across in a group of proud contrarians living in the drug junkie capital of the planet. Mental illness is a difficult topic in a community full of aspies (also, talking about crazy is ableist).
Some problems seem downstream from making Bay Area the center of the rationality community.
I think this is also related to age. Young people are more like “what could possibly go wrong?” and old people are more like “let me tell you a few stories about my friends who died young”. The problems with drugs often fix themselves: people either grow out of it, or they die, or they become the kind of drug junkie who doesn’t inspire others to emulate them. Similarly, a 20 years old crazy person may seem interesting, but a 40 years old crazy person is just obviously failing at life. The older people are, the more you can see the long-term consequences of their lifestyle by looking at them.
Another thing that e.g. the academia has is an explicit membership list, with legible roles. Everyone understands the difference between “a professor of University U did it”, “a student of University U did it”, and “a crazy homeless guy who sometimes sleeps on the bench in front of University U did it”. It doesn’t all collapse to a vague “someone associated with University U did it”. Rationalists do not have any such list, therefore we cannot legibly argue that Ziz is not one of us.
I don’t think that claim is true. As far as I remember the owner of the venue that was rented in by the rationalist in question called the cops.
Coliving communities that are focused on doing strong experimentation in changing human cognition are risky. That goes for both Ziz’s Rationalist Fleet and for Leverage.
There are questions about how to deal with the topic of trans-identity. You could say that especially ten years ago, the discourse around that topic wasn’t as rational as we would hope it to be.
On that topic, it’s worth noting that Pazek was a few months into taking hormones when they killed themselves (a fact that the summary on zizians.info leaves out but at least one of Pazek’s roommates considered to be causally connected to his suicide.
Thanks for the interesting facts. The news articles I’ve looked at were like “cops were called” without specifying by whom exactly.
It was a perfect shield that Ziz used with great skill. And yeah, we should have been smarter about it.
EDIT:
Found this:
OK, so Anna Salamon obviously was the smart one in the room. The rest of the team should update about listening to her concerns. (Added: Eh, this was needlessly harsh. Different smart people have different strengths and weaknesses. But, at least in this case, Anna seems like a good judge of character, and that is a thing that seems to be in a very short supply. The others are probably too easy to impress by someone being smart and contrarian, and fail to notice that the person also is insane.)
I am updating towards “yes, there are things the rationalist community could have done better (in addition to being less lenient towards drug junkies).”
EDIT:
Actually, the Zizians’ version of the story is that MIRI/CFAR called the cops. That’s probably where I originally got that information from.
Yes, Ziz does make that claim.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CJPdj0eBg-lII9KKkCAImxkg7x4-Kc4XxfrZTnVfS5c/edit?tab=t.0 is an account from Elizabeth from CFAR about what happened that day and it states:
As far as I remember (it’s been while since I read through all the information), there were children who attended a previous event at the location that were inside of the location when Ziz and her crew showed up. Then the person responsible for the venue called the cops. Ziz at al were charged with false imprisonment for preventing the children from leaving. That collateral damage is quite inconvenient for Ziz’s narrative of the situation.
I believe (though my memory in general is very very fuzzy) that I was the one who most pushed for Ziz and Gwen to be at that workshop. (I don’t recall talking with Anna about that at all before the workshop, and don’t see anything about that in my emails on a quick look, though I could very easily have forgotten. I do recall her saying at the workshop that she thought Ziz shouldn’t be there.) I did indeed update later (also based on other things) quite strongly that I really truly cannot detect various kinds of pathology, and therefore have to be much more circumspect, deferent to others about this, not making lots of decisions like this, etc. (I do think there was good reason to have Ziz at the workshop though, contra others; Ziz was indeed smart and an interesting original insightful thinker, which is in short supply. I’m also unclear on what evidence Anna had at the time, and the extent to which the community’s behavior with Ziz was escalatorily causing Ziz’s eventual fate.)
Uh, for the record, I would definitely take it very seriously, probably as pretty strong or very strong evidence, if Anna says that someone is harmful / evil / etc.; but I would not take it as strong evidence of someone not being so, if she endorses them.
I think this is a strange description of the mainstream media coverage when most of the articles talking about Zizian ideology are nearly entirely sourced from interviews with rationalists and talk about their conflict with mainline rationalists at length.
The lesson I can glean is probably that considering the high rate of cult creation in the community and the flashing warning signs about them, rationalists should have been far more proactive in adopting normal procedures of cult and terrorism prevention (e.g. surveilling their activities, preventing the isolation of potential recruits, and looking for any suspiciously missing person).
Surveilling whose activities?
For example, there is a YouTube video with Slimepriestess, who defends Zizians a bit too much, in my opinion. Should we be surveilling Slimepriestess?
I chose a specific person and an exaggerated example on purpose. Because, in real situation, it will always be a specific person, and unless the behavior is really bad (which means it is already late), any proposed action will seem excessive to some people. And it will feel virtuous to err on the side of letting people do whatever they want.
(And if the police is already looking for Ziz, you don’t need to surveil. If you see Ziz, pick up the phone and call the cops, don’t try anything heroic, or the next story might be about you.)
I think we still haven’t reached a consensus on whether Nonlinear are bad guys. That was a year ago.
So… yeah, we should do something like that, but it is difficult to get the details right.
Core Zizians (and, in general, any group determined to be a cult or terror threat to the community), as the US doesn’t really have an equivalent of, say, the French MIVILUDES to do that job (else US society would be fairly different). Potential recruits are addressed in the next comma.
I think there may be some things to re-examine about the role of self-experimentation in the rationalist community. Nootropics, behavioral interventions like impractical sleep schedules, maybe even meditation. It’s very possible these reflect systematic mistakes by the rationalist community, that people should mostly warned away from.
Yeah. I mean, there were problems with drugs already at the early rationality minicamps in 2014, and yet somehow this topic remains open to discussion...
I am not opposed to self-experimentation per se, as long as people acknowledge the risks.
But if we simply treat self-experimentation as high status, and talking about risks as low-status...
You laugh, but I really think a group norm of “think for yourself, question the outside world, don’t be afraid to be weird” is part of the reason why all of these groups exist. Doing those things is ultimately a luxury for the well-adjusted and intelligent. If you tell people over and over to question social norms some of those people will turn out to be crazy and conclude crime and violence is acceptable.
I don’t know if there’s anything to do about that, but it is a thing.
I’m not sure if the rationalists did anything they shouldn’t do re: Ziz. Going forward though, I think epistemic learned helplessness/memetic immune systems should be among the first things to introduce to newcomers to the site/community. Being wary that some ideas are, in a sense, out to get you, is a central part of how I process information.
Not exactly sure how to implement that recommendation though. You also don’t want people to use it as a fully general counterargument to anything they don’t like.
Ranting a bit here, but it just feels like the collection of rationalist thought is so complex and, even with the various attempts at organizing everything. Thinking well is hard, and involves many concepts, and we haven’t figured it all out yet! It’s kind of sad to see journalists trying to understand the rationalist community and TDT.
Another thing that comes to mind is the FAIR site (formerly mormon apologetics), where members of the latter day saints church tries to correct various misconceptions people have about the church.[1] There’s a ton of writing on there, and provides an example of how people have tried to, uh, improve their PR through writing stuff online to clear up misconceptions.
And did it work? I suspect it probably had a small positive effect. I know very little about this, but my hunch would be that the popularity of mormons comes from having lots of them everywhere in society, and people get to meet them and realize that those people are pretty nice.
(See also Scott Alexander’s book review on The Secrets to Our Success)
They also provide various evidence for their faith. The one I find particularly funny concerns whether Joseph Smith could have written the book of mormon. It states that Smith (1) had limited education (2) was not a writer and that (3) the book of mormon was very long and had 258k words.
This calls to mind a certain other author, with limited formal education, little fiction writing experience, non-mainstream sexual preferences, and also wrote a very long book (660k words!) that reached many people in the world who ended up finding him very convincing…
In companies where I worked, we sometimes had a security training, which included stories about the things that went wrong in the past. Some examples were from the industry in general, but some of them were from that specific company (with specific names removed).
We probably should write a short report on “the things that went wrong in the rationalist community”, written from our perspective, without specific names, and… it could be an interesting topic for the new members.
One lesson that occurs to me a day after reading this shortform is “figure out the lesson and apply it after the first time.” For example, I now see people proposing to check in on one’s Ziz-sympathetic friends and discourage killing humans. The rationalist community already had notice of something similar happening in Feb 2023, though.
P.S.: I suggest linking or copying this shortform to that thread so it’s easier to find.
I think the solution would be something like adopting a security mindset with respect to preventing community members going off the rails.
The costs would be great because then everyone would be under suspicion by default, but maybe it would be worth it.
What exactly do you have in mind? Semi-regular check-ins with every member to see what they’re up to, what their thinking processes are, what recently piqued their interest, what rabbit holes they’ve gone into?
Yeah I guess, but actually the more I think about it, the more impractical it seems.