AprilSR

• AprilSRMay 30, 2025, 3:43 AM

  3 points

  −1

  in reply to: thedudeabides’s comment on: Why Were We Wrong About China and AI? A Case Study in Failed Rationality

  ...You do not appear to me to have very much regard for the truth, given the whole thing where you declared that someone had not updated when they obviously had based only on them refusing to talk to you when you were being kind of rude.

• AprilSRApr 2, 2025, 1:45 AM

  8 points

  1

  in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: PauseAI and E/​Acc Should Switch Sides

  I think it’s obvious that you should not pursue 3D chess without investing serious effort in making sure that you play 3D chess correctly. I think there is something to be said for ignoring the shiny clever ideas and playing simple virtue ethics.

  But if a clever scheme is in fact better, and you have accounted for all of the problems inherent to clever schemery, of which there are very many, then… the burden of proof isn’t literally insurmountable, you’re just unlikely to end up surmounting it in practice.

  (Unless it’s 3D chess where the only thing you might end up wasting is your own time. That has a lower burden of proof. Though still probably don’t waste all your time.)

• AprilSRApr 2, 2025, 1:27 AM

  9 points

  2

  on: LessWrong has been ac­quired by EA

  Why do I have dozens of strong upvote and downvote strength, but no more agreement strength than before I began my strength training? Does EA not think agreement is importance?

• AprilSRApr 2, 2025, 1:24 AM

  8 points

  5

  on: I’m re­sign­ing as Meetup Czar. What’s next?

  While I would hate to besmirch the good name of the fewerstupidmistakesist community, I cannot help but feel that misunderstanding morality and decision theory enough to end up doing a murder is a stupider mistake than drawing a gun once a firefight has started, though perhaps not quite as stupid as beginning the fight in the first place.

• AprilSRMar 16, 2025, 9:15 AM

  3 points

  6

  in reply to: Cole Wyeth’s comment on: Help make the orca lan­guage ex­per­i­ment happen

  Maybe it should have 1 in a billion priors, but that isn’t very relevant. The question isn’t actually decided by precisely how many bits of evidence you’d need to conclude it, it’s trivial to come by strong evidence supporting the idea.

• AprilSRMar 8, 2025, 3:13 AM

  4 points

  3

  on: Why Peo­ple Com­mit White Col­lar Fraud (Ozy linkpost)

  looks like the first paragraph was accidentally put in the quote block, but isn’t from ozy

• AprilSRFeb 5, 2025, 1:07 AM

  2 points

  1

  in reply to: Matrice Jacobine’s comment on: Thread for Sense-Mak­ing on Re­cent Mur­ders and How to Sanely Respond

  That is such a bizarre claim to make but admittedly including Cosmism at all is really odd

• AprilSRFeb 3, 2025, 6:24 PM

  3 points

  2

  in reply to: A_donor’s comment on: Thread for Sense-Mak­ing on Re­cent Mur­ders and How to Sanely Respond

  I could imagine something vaguely sorta like this being true but that isn’t like, something I’d confidently predict is a common sort of altered mental state to fall into, having been in altered states somewhere around that cluster.

  I’d suspect that like, maybe there’s a component where they intuitively overestimate the dependence relative to other people, but probably it involves deliberate decisions to try to see things a certain way and stuff like that. (Though actually I have no idea what “strength of subjunctive dependence” really means, I think there are unsolved philosophical problems there.)

• AprilSRFeb 2, 2025, 12:42 AM

  5 points

  1

  in reply to: lc’s comment on: Thread for Sense-Mak­ing on Re­cent Mur­ders and How to Sanely Respond

  Yeah, I haven’t heard of this person, though it’s possible someone I know knows them—that definitely sounds like the kind of person someone should be trying to check in on to me.

  I think there are a lot of people out there who will be willing to tell the Ziz sympathetic side of the story. (I mean, I would if asked, though “X did little wrong” seems pretty insane for most people involved and especially for Ziz). Like, I think there’s a certain sort of left anarchismish person who is just, going to be very inclined to take the broke crazy trans women’s side as much as it’s possible to do so. It doesn’t seem possible or even necessarily desirable to track every person with a take like that… whereas with people very very into Zizianism, it seems like important information.

  I don’t know exactly what update should be drawn from the fact that people I know were collectively 3 for 3 on having known the people who showed up in recent incidents, information on the topic hasn’t generally been shared freely enough for me to have a whole picture.

  Edit: To be thorough about the “everyone I can think of” part, there is this tweet I saw, and you could argue @Slimepriestess hasn’t technically been mentioned in articles or alerts. I don’t really believe either of these people to be dangerous (more confident on Slimepriestess I don’t know much about that Twitter user) but they have explicitly described themselves as Zizian even after recent events, so.

  I’ll also explicitly specify that I’m not really inclined to like, list every person I know who is half-fluent in hemisphere nonsense or who has read Sinceriously, there are rather a lot of people who’ve done those things. It’s stuff like, under what situations does this person endorse violence, do they do ideological purity tests for who they’ll be friends with, do they explicitly call themselves a Zizian, and especially whether they’ve started being more reclusive lately.

• AprilSRFeb 1, 2025, 2:12 PM

  15 points

  −6

  on: Thread for Sense-Mak­ing on Re­cent Mur­ders and How to Sanely Respond

  I think it is worth knowing that—I haven’t heard of any examples of people who have been radicalizing in a Zizianish direction, lately, who are unaccounted for. I and people I know thought about it when we heard about the border patrol shootout, and the only person we came up with was Audere /​ Maximilian Snyder, who is now under arrest for the murder of Curtis Lind.

  Seeing the one person you and your partner have been kind of worried about for a while… end up being the one who did a murder… it’s, well, a hell of an observation to have to update on. Apparently a ball was dropped.

  I haven’t made a particular point of going around thoroughly asking everyone who might plausibly know someone, but—all three of the people who recently got in conflicts were known by someone or another I’ve spoken with, to at least plausibly be at risk. So I think there’s some chance that we mostly do collectively have eyes on the “new people becoming Zizian” part.

  Of course, maybe it becoming a national news story entirely changes the dynamics there, I don’t know what the situation will look like in a year. But—despite there having been three new people here that haven’t been discussed in any previous community alerts on Zizians, which maybe most people around hadn’t heard of at all, I don’t currently worry much that there’s some substantial number of unknown Zizians out there or something.

• AprilSRJan 26, 2025, 10:00 PM

  26 points

  8

  in reply to: eukaryote’s comment on: [Link] A com­mu­nity alert about Ziz

  I am, and am friends with, many trans rationalists, and a bunch of them are lovely people, and also yes in fact the rationalist trans community does sorta tend to be fewer steps removed from the terribleness than other parts of the rationalist community.

  I do not think this calls for judging people based on that one fact, it’d be kind of incredibly terrible overall if everyone who happened to know someone who did a terrible thing was shunned over it, and Ic seems to be making a relatively uncharitable read of Jessica Taylor there or something, but I can’t actually say the heuristic is totally useless; if I had stayed far away from trans rats, I wouldn’t have met my girlfriend and also I would be far further removed from the Ziz issues.

• AprilSRJan 26, 2025, 3:23 AM

  9 points

  6

  in reply to: DanielFilan’s comment on: [Link] A com­mu­nity alert about Ziz

  Teresa Youngblut, the other person with Ophelia at the shootout, is also known to be a Ziz fan (and in November filed a marriage application to @Audere, also a Ziz fan.) You can see most of this if you look through Jessica’s Twitter.

• AprilSRJan 2, 2025, 4:58 AM

  3 points

  6

  on: Read The Se­quences As If They Were Writ­ten Today

  Oh this sounds fun

• AprilSRJan 1, 2025, 9:11 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: lucid_levi_ackerman’s comment on: So you want to be a witch

  I have not heard of any of these people yet

• AprilSRDec 31, 2024, 11:35 PM

  3 points

  1

  on: So you want to be a witch

  oh come on, you can’t just be the kind of person who talks about the thing where sometimes people end up seeing way too many synchronicities, explicitly tell me to treat everything as an ARG clue and that if it seems referential it probably is, link a bunch of youtube videos about the time i helped write a statistics paper accusing someone of cheating at minecraft, and look directly at the readers while mention guessing a birthday when your ao3 account was registered on my birthday?

  i am well aware by this point that if you look hard enough you’re always bound to find something that seems slightly weird but jeez

• AprilSRDec 9, 2024, 9:32 AM

  10 points

  2

  in reply to: dawnlightmelody’s comment on: deluks917′s Shortform

  I don’t necessarily agree with every line in this post—I’d say I’m better off and still personally kinda like Olivia, though it’s of course been rocky at times—but it does all basically look accurate to me. She stayed at my apartment for maybe a total of 1-2 months earlier this year, and I’ve talked to her a lot. I don’t think she presented the JD Pressman thing as about “lying” to me, but she did generally mention him convincing people to keep her out of things.

  There is a lot more I could say, and I am as always happy to answer dms and such, but I am somewhat tired of all this and I don’t right at this moment really want to either figure out exactly what things I feel are necessary to disclose about a friend of mine or try to figure out what would be a helpful contribution to years old drama, given that it’s 1:30am. But I do want to say that I basically think Melody’s statements are all more-or-less reasonable.

• AprilSRDec 9, 2024, 5:04 AM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: ToasterLightning’s comment on: deluks917′s Shortform

  Yeah, I don’t think it’s correct to call it baseless per se, and I continue to have a lot of questions about the history of the rationality community which haven’t really been addressed publicly, but I would very much not say that there’s good reason to like, directly blame Michael for anything recent!

• AprilSRDec 9, 2024, 4:19 AM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: deluks917′s Shortform

  I’d already been incredibly paranoid about how closely they follow my online activities for years and years. I dunno if that counts as “conspiratorial”, but to the extent it does it definitely made me less conspiratorial.

  I think when I was at my most psychotic some completely deranged explanations for the “rationalists tend to be first borns” thing crossed my mind, which I guess maybe counts, but that was quickly rejected.

  I have conspiratorial interpretations of things at times, which I sorta attribute to the fact that rationalists talk about conspiracies quite a lot and such?

• AprilSRDec 8, 2024, 3:52 AM

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: deluks917′s Shortform

  Nope. I’ve never directly interacted with Vassar at all, and I haven’t made any particular decisions at all due to his ideas. Like, I’ve become more familiar with his work as of the past several months, but it was one thing of many.

  I spent a lot of time thinking about ontology and anthropics and religion and stuff… mostly I think the reason weird stuff happened to me at the same time as I learned more about Vassar is just that I started rethinking rather a lot of things at the same time, where “are Vassar’s ideas worth considering?” was just one specific question that came up of many. (Plausibly the expectation that Vassar’s ideas might be dangerous turned slightly into a self-fulfilling prophecy by making it more likely for me to expand on them in weirder directions or something.)

• AprilSRDec 8, 2024, 2:11 AM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: niplav’s comment on: Hazard’s Short­form Feed

  I want to say I have to an extent (for all three), though I guess there’s been second-hand in person interactions which maybe counts. I dunno if there’s any sort of central thesis I could summarize, but if you pointed me at like any more specific topics I could take a shot at translating. (Though I’d maybe prefer to avoid the topic for a little while.)

  In general, I think an actual analysis of the ideas involved and their merits /​ drawbacks existing would’ve been a lot more helpful for me than just… people having a spooky reputation was.