To those reading the recent comments: I have unvoted this comment; please don’t read it if you aren’t ready for some of humanity’s more difficult topics. It’s… not a fun time.
wow that post sure is something. I think I mostly find it good enough and don’t feel the need to call for new posts like it to clarify at this time, though I hope the history will exist to be resolved in further detail later on. but wow, you’re not kidding about the content warnings; it’s a sad history, and I’m glad I knew what it was going in. I might have called it a content warning instead of an infohazard, I think it’s only an “infohazard” if one is highly credulous about it. It certainly contains references to ziz’s impassioned speech.
the post walks through some … some stuff. I sure understand her perspective about a lot of it, but phew, some of that is a lot… lot. severe misunderstandings of game theory in practice, false assumption that everyone is rational, severe misunderstanding of why weight personhood of ants (I do think they have nonzero personhood! but … humans all have almost exactly the same amount of personhood in relative terms, but I’m pretty sure it takes an anthill to even approach the personhood level of a single mouse.) I agree with the direction of some of her criticisms of those orgs! but PHEW she took it way too far and, like, idk, seems like she violated her own principles without realizing because of radicalizing too hard? it’s also interesting how traditional her radicalization seems to have been. Seems like [edit: comment from a friend off less wrong: the aesthetics of] destructive anarchism without sufficient praxis or constructive anarchism to make up for it [and with a high degree of actual authoritarianism seeded by the authority basilisk’s authority]; I’m personally not really a fan of destructive anything, in my view vegans should be pragmatic about how to permanently end the death and torture industry. I sure agree that only a vegan singularity would be worth it, but I think we can also do away with post-hoc torture as part of that. like… dang, I hope she doesn’t get to ruin everything she believed, because phew, she had a lot of kinda based takes, but the ones about “never surrender, no matter what” are just… just… dang.
and especially hearing what’s happened with some of those folks in the past few months, is just. they didn’t deserve to end up being the kind of people who would end up on this path… none of them did. that’s always how I feel about those who cause serious harm. but also, from what I’ve heard of recent events, I … understand how it happened… they did things nobody should ever do, trying to protect ants… talk about making a mountain out of a molehill? some of those people were once my friends, including her, and I never understood until reading this what decisions made them choose to turn against society quite so hard. I don’t think I can ever encourage those choices, but I also do think it’s wise to understand why they, and a great many radicals over the long history of human radicalism before them, made the choices they did. And the fact that there are better, more ethical ways to end the forms of suffering they’d chosen to. If only they’d understood boundedly rational game theory enough to be willing to forgive those who are products of their time, and instead aim for a singularity that offers society improved bargaining algorithms and an end to material scarcity for those who did the work...
I do think she’s somewhat right about some forms of liberalism. If your liberalism isn’t always pushing at the minarchist edge, your coprotection algorithms aren’t seeking to heal. But for the same reason, I hope those of them who are still alive survive to see a future far better than the one they hoped to create...
damn...
I feel like I should downvote this post just to keep it off the front page. I certainly hope there are no more than about five comments on it, personally.
Seems like destructive anarchism without sufficient praxis or constructive anarchism to make up for it
Channeling my inner Jordan Peterson, life is a combination of creating good things and destroying bad things. If you only do the latter, the good things are not going to appear magically. Instead you will find yourself surrounded by ruins. The thing you destroyed will be replaced by… whatever is the baseline… which is probably not as good as you hoped for, and often much worse than the thing you destroyed.
Judging by the outcomes… hey, I may be getting filtered information, but can anyone tell me one good thing Ziz ever did? (No, yelling at “evil” people does not count, especially from someone who considers virtually everyone evil.) All I see is people getting turned to zombies, some of them killing themselves afterwards.
trying to protect ants...
I had to read the story again, but Ziz didn’t actually save those ants. They merely considered saving them… but then did not. So much for the only doubleplus-good person in the entire universe!
(It’s just everyone else who kills animals, who deserves to be tortured for eternity.)
A nirvana fallacy personified. Or rather, a deeply narcissistic person.
Ziz’s writing was tremendously helpful to me, even with as much as it also messed me up and caused me to spiral on a bunch of things, I did on balance come out better for having interacted with her content. There are all sorts of huge caveats around that of course, but I think to dismiss her as completely bad would be a mistake. After all
Say not, she told the people, that anything has worked only evil, that any life has been in vain. Say rather that while the visible world festers and decays, somewhere beyond our understanding the groundwork is being laid for Moschiach, and the final victory.
wish Petersen would stop considering people bad things to destroy. but yeah, reasonable component of a good take.
the main actual could-have-been-good material action thing in my view is the off grid living attempt. it instead seems to have amplified their isolation. I do think their commentary about how everyone needs their own spaceship is on the right track; the train of thought derails shortly after that. everythingtosaveit.how actually came up while I was looking for off grid living stuff.
but I don’t disagree with your assessment at all, and my comment wasn’t intended to. I’m mourning the failure at the things they said they wanted, by nature of the things they actually did.
I might have called it a content warning instead of an infohazard, I think it’s only an “infohazard” if one is highly credulous about it.
From how I have know Chris Pazek (one of the people who committed suicide) he didn’t seem highly credulous to me. There’s a sense of him being open to experimenting with weird ideas but credulous seems like the wrong word.
Yeah, the actual danger seems to be exposing yourself to strong social / mental / emotional pressure while sleep deprived, rather than some baseline credulity.
Some people probably underestimate how vulnerable they can feel when they are tired and surrounded by people who suddenly turn hostile if they oppose their brainwashing. From outside, it probably seems like “hey, I could walk away any time I want to; and even if they tried to stop me, it might be unpleasant, but they wouldn’t literally kill me, so after some time they would have to let me go anyway”. But when you actually are in that situation, sleep deprivation makes you too weak to resist physically or figure out a clever escape plan, and every minute feels like eternity. Your instincts are screaming at you that you are completely helpless, your life is in their hands, and if you want to survive, you need to appease them, and if the only thing that can appease them is sincerely adopting their ideology, then just fucking do it.
Still, given enough time and interaction with other people, you could probably snap out of it. But you are not going to get that time, because you must immediately start working hard to save the world, and besides, everyone else is evil, so you rather not talk to them lest their evil contaminates your soul.
It’s more complex than that. Developing an alternative personality is more complex than just adopting ideology, not resisting physically, or thinking about escape plans.
There’s also the belief involved that a person who says they are trans should not be questioned in their identity and questioning them for that identity choice is evil.
so that’s something I’d push back on gently. I can understand the concern, id prefer to see both names used if you’re highly concerned about that. I’ve -karma +agree voted your comments with only that person’s old name and I think someone else had too.
agree vote. I’d met several of them. I’m just saying that of the reasoning errors, erroneous transition is the one I’d express the most uncertainty about. I wouldn’t object to you using the name Chris, just to not respecting the possibility that that might have been real. enough of them were actually trans women; I wouldn’t be surprised if this was ziz using a person’s genetic predisposition for transition to manipulate them, for example, in which case they probably would have eventually transitioned anyway once it became convenient in normal life. I would remove karma downvotes if you were to express uncertainty. it’s ok to question, but it seems like concerning jumping to conclusions to assert you know for sure.
Most trans women you meet likely didn’t identify highly that way because of a high invasive psychological process involving sleep derivation with the intent of awakening an internal part that has its own identity.
If you think that this process just surfaced what’s already there, it’s odd to call the sleep deprivation manipulative. It seems like you have certainty that the sleep deprivation was manipulative, but don’t take the logical conclusion that the result of it is problematic.
just to not respecting the possibility that that might have been real. enough of them were actually trans women
This is belief in belief. Belief in the meme of some platonic realness. It’s a thought-stopper. The fact that this is a potent tool for stopping people from engaging in critical thinking is one of the dynamics that Ziz used to protect against criticism.
This is a story about a bunch of naive people who fell for Ziz. It’s about highly sophisticated intelligent people doing so, and the tools used to get people to stop to think are at that level.
It’s also about the complex process of inducing alternative personalities. I have an idea of how that works in hypnosis and can extrapolate from that to how the process Ziz describes for splitting people’s identity into two (supposedly one for each hemisphere) could do that whether or not Ziz’s idea of bihemispherec identity is correct.
If you want one example of someone having a problem with induced personalities take this reddit thread. Do you call the guy his legal name or do you call him Bambi? If the Bambi personality wins out gets a lot of power and then commits suicide, should you refer to him by his legal name or by Bambi when you speak about him?
I don’t want to keep defending this because you’re almost entirely right and as a trans person myself I just personally cringe at the idea of being certain that someone in distress was Actually Not Trans Because They Were Manipulated. that’s… really the extent of it. We won’t reach a resolution on this because it doesn’t matter, the key point is there was intense manipulation and a split personality was intentionally created by manipulation. Whether that person was truly trans underneath is unknowable and I am quite willing to admit the reason I’m cringing against refusing to acknowledge that, but it really is mostly about those besides the person in question, so … shrug. If they’d been a woman to start with it would still be just as bad.
I’ve turned my downvote into an upvote because −6 seems too low for just this. The fact that people’s self-expression can be manipulated does in fact make it ambiguous whether that occurred or whether there was real self-expression. some people really are bullied. it’s also extremely likely that a group of trans people collected people who seemed at a minimum naturally inclined to not be cis, so I am inclined to bet that this person really had some gender stuff going on. regardless, ziz destroyed them, and chris or maia, we must mourn the one known as pazek.
I would in fact bet that the sleep deprivation thing made them more inclined to transition when they did, but would personally roll to disbelieve that it was the only cause of transition. That’s really it.
This is a story about a bunch of naive people who fell for Ziz. It’s about highly sophisticated intelligent people doing so, and the tools used to get people to stop to think are at that level.
Is there a missing “not” in the first sentence?
ETA: Or a missing “not only” in the first and an “also” in the second.
I’m not sure what you mean with their suicide notice. They wrote a post on their blog arguing for life being meaningless because all the memories being forgotten after death anyway. Do you mean that document?
I read that at the time it was posted and there was time between that document and the actual suicide. I got to know about the suicide itself a substantial amount of time later and got deeper information by talking to one of their roommates. The version of events that their roommate told me did not include Ziz. Later, I read Ziz account and assume that Ziz had no good reason to lie about a lot of the involved details as they don’t make Ziz look good.
If there’s a separate suicide note, I’d be happy to read it.
To those reading the recent comments: I have unvoted this comment; please don’t read it if you aren’t ready for some of humanity’s more difficult topics. It’s… not a fun time.
wow that post sure is something. I think I mostly find it good enough and don’t feel the need to call for new posts like it to clarify at this time, though I hope the history will exist to be resolved in further detail later on. but wow, you’re not kidding about the content warnings; it’s a sad history, and I’m glad I knew what it was going in. I might have called it a content warning instead of an infohazard, I think it’s only an “infohazard” if one is highly credulous about it. It certainly contains references to ziz’s impassioned speech.
the post walks through some … some stuff. I sure understand her perspective about a lot of it, but phew, some of that is a lot… lot. severe misunderstandings of game theory in practice, false assumption that everyone is rational, severe misunderstanding of why weight personhood of ants (I do think they have nonzero personhood! but … humans all have almost exactly the same amount of personhood in relative terms, but I’m pretty sure it takes an anthill to even approach the personhood level of a single mouse.) I agree with the direction of some of her criticisms of those orgs! but PHEW she took it way too far and, like, idk, seems like she violated her own principles without realizing because of radicalizing too hard? it’s also interesting how traditional her radicalization seems to have been. Seems like [edit: comment from a friend off less wrong: the aesthetics of] destructive anarchism without sufficient praxis or constructive anarchism to make up for it [and with a high degree of actual authoritarianism seeded by the authority basilisk’s authority]; I’m personally not really a fan of destructive anything, in my view vegans should be pragmatic about how to permanently end the death and torture industry. I sure agree that only a vegan singularity would be worth it, but I think we can also do away with post-hoc torture as part of that. like… dang, I hope she doesn’t get to ruin everything she believed, because phew, she had a lot of kinda based takes, but the ones about “never surrender, no matter what” are just… just… dang.
and especially hearing what’s happened with some of those folks in the past few months, is just. they didn’t deserve to end up being the kind of people who would end up on this path… none of them did. that’s always how I feel about those who cause serious harm. but also, from what I’ve heard of recent events, I … understand how it happened… they did things nobody should ever do, trying to protect ants… talk about making a mountain out of a molehill? some of those people were once my friends, including her, and I never understood until reading this what decisions made them choose to turn against society quite so hard. I don’t think I can ever encourage those choices, but I also do think it’s wise to understand why they, and a great many radicals over the long history of human radicalism before them, made the choices they did. And the fact that there are better, more ethical ways to end the forms of suffering they’d chosen to. If only they’d understood boundedly rational game theory enough to be willing to forgive those who are products of their time, and instead aim for a singularity that offers society improved bargaining algorithms and an end to material scarcity for those who did the work...
I do think she’s somewhat right about some forms of liberalism. If your liberalism isn’t always pushing at the minarchist edge, your coprotection algorithms aren’t seeking to heal. But for the same reason, I hope those of them who are still alive survive to see a future far better than the one they hoped to create...
damn...
I feel like I should downvote this post just to keep it off the front page. I certainly hope there are no more than about five comments on it, personally.
Channeling my inner Jordan Peterson, life is a combination of creating good things and destroying bad things. If you only do the latter, the good things are not going to appear magically. Instead you will find yourself surrounded by ruins. The thing you destroyed will be replaced by… whatever is the baseline… which is probably not as good as you hoped for, and often much worse than the thing you destroyed.
Judging by the outcomes… hey, I may be getting filtered information, but can anyone tell me one good thing Ziz ever did? (No, yelling at “evil” people does not count, especially from someone who considers virtually everyone evil.) All I see is people getting turned to zombies, some of them killing themselves afterwards.
I had to read the story again, but Ziz didn’t actually save those ants. They merely considered saving them… but then did not. So much for the only doubleplus-good person in the entire universe!
(It’s just everyone else who kills animals, who deserves to be tortured for eternity.)
A nirvana fallacy personified. Or rather, a deeply narcissistic person.
Ziz’s writing was tremendously helpful to me, even with as much as it also messed me up and caused me to spiral on a bunch of things, I did on balance come out better for having interacted with her content. There are all sorts of huge caveats around that of course, but I think to dismiss her as completely bad would be a mistake. After all
wish Petersen would stop considering people bad things to destroy. but yeah, reasonable component of a good take.
the main actual could-have-been-good material action thing in my view is the off grid living attempt. it instead seems to have amplified their isolation. I do think their commentary about how everyone needs their own spaceship is on the right track; the train of thought derails shortly after that. everythingtosaveit.how actually came up while I was looking for off grid living stuff.
but I don’t disagree with your assessment at all, and my comment wasn’t intended to. I’m mourning the failure at the things they said they wanted, by nature of the things they actually did.
Frontpaging a post is a moderator decision. I don’t think this post will be frontpaged no matter it’s karma.
err. there are two types of front page, and I actually meant “keep it off the front page of personal blogs”.
From how I have know Chris Pazek (one of the people who committed suicide) he didn’t seem highly credulous to me. There’s a sense of him being open to experimenting with weird ideas but credulous seems like the wrong word.
it seems that being highly credulous can be induced by skilled manipulators for more people than one might expect, such as by using sleep deprivation
Yeah, the actual danger seems to be exposing yourself to strong social / mental / emotional pressure while sleep deprived, rather than some baseline credulity.
Some people probably underestimate how vulnerable they can feel when they are tired and surrounded by people who suddenly turn hostile if they oppose their brainwashing. From outside, it probably seems like “hey, I could walk away any time I want to; and even if they tried to stop me, it might be unpleasant, but they wouldn’t literally kill me, so after some time they would have to let me go anyway”. But when you actually are in that situation, sleep deprivation makes you too weak to resist physically or figure out a clever escape plan, and every minute feels like eternity. Your instincts are screaming at you that you are completely helpless, your life is in their hands, and if you want to survive, you need to appease them, and if the only thing that can appease them is sincerely adopting their ideology, then just fucking do it.
Still, given enough time and interaction with other people, you could probably snap out of it. But you are not going to get that time, because you must immediately start working hard to save the world, and besides, everyone else is evil, so you rather not talk to them lest their evil contaminates your soul.
It’s more complex than that. Developing an alternative personality is more complex than just adopting ideology, not resisting physically, or thinking about escape plans.
There’s also the belief involved that a person who says they are trans should not be questioned in their identity and questioning them for that identity choice is evil.
so that’s something I’d push back on gently. I can understand the concern, id prefer to see both names used if you’re highly concerned about that. I’ve -karma +agree voted your comments with only that person’s old name and I think someone else had too.
How much of the underlying details of what went on do you know and how much are you pattern-matching from other situations?
It seems to me inconsequent to say that sleep deprivation was a problem here but at the same time argue that the effect of it shouldn’t be questioned.
agree vote. I’d met several of them. I’m just saying that of the reasoning errors, erroneous transition is the one I’d express the most uncertainty about. I wouldn’t object to you using the name Chris, just to not respecting the possibility that that might have been real. enough of them were actually trans women; I wouldn’t be surprised if this was ziz using a person’s genetic predisposition for transition to manipulate them, for example, in which case they probably would have eventually transitioned anyway once it became convenient in normal life. I would remove karma downvotes if you were to express uncertainty. it’s ok to question, but it seems like concerning jumping to conclusions to assert you know for sure.
Most trans women you meet likely didn’t identify highly that way because of a high invasive psychological process involving sleep derivation with the intent of awakening an internal part that has its own identity.
If you think that this process just surfaced what’s already there, it’s odd to call the sleep deprivation manipulative. It seems like you have certainty that the sleep deprivation was manipulative, but don’t take the logical conclusion that the result of it is problematic.
This is belief in belief. Belief in the meme of some platonic realness. It’s a thought-stopper. The fact that this is a potent tool for stopping people from engaging in critical thinking is one of the dynamics that Ziz used to protect against criticism.
This is a story about a bunch of naive people who fell for Ziz. It’s about highly sophisticated intelligent people doing so, and the tools used to get people to stop to think are at that level.
It’s also about the complex process of inducing alternative personalities. I have an idea of how that works in hypnosis and can extrapolate from that to how the process Ziz describes for splitting people’s identity into two (supposedly one for each hemisphere) could do that whether or not Ziz’s idea of bihemispherec identity is correct.
If you want one example of someone having a problem with induced personalities take this reddit thread. Do you call the guy his legal name or do you call him Bambi? If the Bambi personality wins out gets a lot of power and then commits suicide, should you refer to him by his legal name or by Bambi when you speak about him?
I don’t want to keep defending this because you’re almost entirely right and as a trans person myself I just personally cringe at the idea of being certain that someone in distress was Actually Not Trans Because They Were Manipulated. that’s… really the extent of it. We won’t reach a resolution on this because it doesn’t matter, the key point is there was intense manipulation and a split personality was intentionally created by manipulation. Whether that person was truly trans underneath is unknowable and I am quite willing to admit the reason I’m cringing against refusing to acknowledge that, but it really is mostly about those besides the person in question, so … shrug. If they’d been a woman to start with it would still be just as bad.
I’ve turned my downvote into an upvote because −6 seems too low for just this. The fact that people’s self-expression can be manipulated does in fact make it ambiguous whether that occurred or whether there was real self-expression. some people really are bullied. it’s also extremely likely that a group of trans people collected people who seemed at a minimum naturally inclined to not be cis, so I am inclined to bet that this person really had some gender stuff going on. regardless, ziz destroyed them, and chris or maia, we must mourn the one known as pazek.
I would in fact bet that the sleep deprivation thing made them more inclined to transition when they did, but would personally roll to disbelieve that it was the only cause of transition. That’s really it.
Is there a missing “not” in the first sentence?
ETA: Or a missing “not only” in the first and an “also” in the second.
have you read Maia’s suicide note? Because it has a lot of details.
I’m not sure what you mean with their suicide notice. They wrote a post on their blog arguing for life being meaningless because all the memories being forgotten after death anyway. Do you mean that document?
I read that at the time it was posted and there was time between that document and the actual suicide. I got to know about the suicide itself a substantial amount of time later and got deeper information by talking to one of their roommates. The version of events that their roommate told me did not include Ziz. Later, I read Ziz account and assume that Ziz had no good reason to lie about a lot of the involved details as they don’t make Ziz look good.
If there’s a separate suicide note, I’d be happy to read it.
(re:linked document) I don’t think suicide note is a good name for that blog post as it was written some time before the actual suicide.
It also contains no details on the personality conflict.