So, I started off with the idea that Ziz’s claims about MIRI were frankly crazy...because Ziz was pretty clearly crazy (see their entire theory of hemispheres, “collapse the timeline,” etc.) so I marked most of their claims as delusions or manipulations and moved on, especially since their recounting of other events on the page where they talked about miricult (which is linked in OP) comes off as completely unhinged.
But Zack confirming this meeting happened and vaguely confirming its contents completely changes all the probabilities. I now need to go back and recalculate a ton of likelihoods here starting from “this node with Vassar saying this event happened.”
From Ziz’s page:
LessWrong dev Oliver Habryka said it would be inappropriate for me to post about this on LessWrong, the community’s central hub website that mostly made it. Suggested me saying this was defamation.
It’s obviously not defamation since Ziz believes its true.
<insert list of rationality community platforms I’ve been banned from for revealing the statutory rape coverup by blackmail payout with misappropriated donor funds and whistleblower silencing, and Gwen as well for protesting that fact.>
Inasmuch as this is true, this is weak Bayesian evidence that Ziz’s accusations are more true than false because otherwise you would just post something like your above response to me in response to them. “No, actually official people can’t talk about this because there’s an NDA, but I’ve heard second hand there’s an NDA” clears a lot up, and would have been advantageous to post earlier, so why wasn’t it?
It’s obviously not defamation since Ziz believes its true.
We’re veering dangerously close into dramaposting here, but just FYI habyka has already contested that they ever said this. I would like to know if the ban accusations are true, though.
Can confirm that I don’t believe I said anything about defamation, and in general continue to think that libel suits are really quite bad and do not think they are an appropriate tool in almost any circumstance.
I don’t think we ever took any other moderation action, though I would likely ban then again, since like, I really don’t want them around on LessWrong and they have far surpassed thresholds for acceptable behavior.
I would not ban anyone writing up details of the miricult stuff (including false accusations, and relatively strong emotions). Indeed somewhat recently I wrote like 3-5 pages of content here on a private Facebook thread with a lot of rationality community people on it. I would be up for someone extracting the parts that seem shareable more broadly. Seems good to finally have something more central and public.
The author shares how terrible it feels that X is true, without bringing arguments for X being true in the first place (based on me skimming the post). That can bypass the reader’s fact-check (because why would he write about how bad it made him feel that X is true if it wasn’t?).
It feels to me like he’s trying to combine an emotional exposition (no facts, talking about his feelings) with an expository blogpost (explaining a topic), while trying to grab the best of both worlds (the persuasiveness and emotions of the former and the social status of the latter) without the substance to back it up.
So, I started off with the idea that Ziz’s claims about MIRI were frankly crazy...because Ziz was pretty clearly crazy (see their entire theory of hemispheres, “collapse the timeline,” etc.) so I marked most of their claims as delusions or manipulations and moved on, especially since their recounting of other events on the page where they talked about miricult (which is linked in OP) comes off as completely unhinged.
But Zack confirming this meeting happened and vaguely confirming its contents completely changes all the probabilities. I now need to go back and recalculate a ton of likelihoods here starting from “this node with Vassar saying this event happened.”
From Ziz’s page:
It’s obviously not defamation since Ziz believes its true.
Inasmuch as this is true, this is weak Bayesian evidence that Ziz’s accusations are more true than false because otherwise you would just post something like your above response to me in response to them. “No, actually official people can’t talk about this because there’s an NDA, but I’ve heard second hand there’s an NDA” clears a lot up, and would have been advantageous to post earlier, so why wasn’t it?
We’re veering dangerously close into dramaposting here, but just FYI habyka has already contested that they ever said this. I would like to know if the ban accusations are true, though.
Can confirm that I don’t believe I said anything about defamation, and in general continue to think that libel suits are really quite bad and do not think they are an appropriate tool in almost any circumstance.
We banned some of them for three months when they kept spamming the CFAR AMA a while ago: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/96N8BT9tJvybLbn5z/we-run-the-center-for-applied-rationality-ama?commentId=5W86zzFy48WiLcSg6
I don’t think we ever took any other moderation action, though I would likely ban then again, since like, I really don’t want them around on LessWrong and they have far surpassed thresholds for acceptable behavior.
I would not ban anyone writing up details of the miricult stuff (including false accusations, and relatively strong emotions). Indeed somewhat recently I wrote like 3-5 pages of content here on a private Facebook thread with a lot of rationality community people on it. I would be up for someone extracting the parts that seem shareable more broadly. Seems good to finally have something more central and public.
Two points of order, without going into any specific accusations or their absence:
The post is transphobic, which anticorrelates with being correct/truthful/objective.
It seems optimized for smoothness/persuasion, which, based on my experience, also anticorrelates with both truth and objectivity.
What seems optimized for smoothness/persuasion?
The author shares how terrible it feels that X is true, without bringing arguments for X being true in the first place (based on me skimming the post). That can bypass the reader’s fact-check (because why would he write about how bad it made him feel that X is true if it wasn’t?).
It feels to me like he’s trying to combine an emotional exposition (no facts, talking about his feelings) with an expository blogpost (explaining a topic), while trying to grab the best of both worlds (the persuasiveness and emotions of the former and the social status of the latter) without the substance to back it up.
Sorry, you’re going to need to be more specific. What particular claim X have I asserted is true without bringing arguments for it? Reply!
I agree that I’m combining emotional autobiography with topic exposition, but the reason I’m talking about my autobiography at all is because I tried object-level topic exposition for years—in such posts as “The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions” (2018), “Where to Draw the Boundaries?” (2019), “Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception” (2021), and “Challenges to Yudkowsky’s Pronoun Reform Proposal” (2022)—and it wasn’t working. From my perspective, the only thing left to do was jump up a metal level and talk about why it wasn’t working. If your contention is that I don’t have the substance to back up my claims, I think you should be able to explain what I got wrong in those posts. Reply!
Reply!