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Slimepriestess
Karma: 907
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 PasekFrom 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 bodythis 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.
The process that unleashed the Maia personality
I think that this misidentifies the crux of the internal argument Ziz created and the actual chain of events a bit.
imo, Maia was trans and the components of her mind (the alter(s) they debucketed into “Shine”) saw the body was physically male and decided that the decision-theoretically correct thing to do was to basically ignore being trans in favor of maximizing influence to save the world. Choosing to transition was pitted against being trans because of the cultural oppression against queers. I’ve run into this attitude among rationalist queers numerous times independently from Ziz and “I can’t transition that will stop me from being a good EA” seems troubling common sentiment.
Prior to getting involved with Ziz, the “Shine” half of her personality had basically been running her system on an adversarial ‘we must act or else’ fear response loop around saving the multiverse from evil using timeless decision theory in order to brute force the subjunctive evolution of the multiverse.
So Ziz and Paseks start interacting, and at that point the “Maia” parts of her had basically been like, traumatized into submission and dissociation, and Ziz intentionally stirs up all those dissociated pieces and draws the realization that Maia is trans to the surface. This caused a spiraling optimization priority conflict between two factions that ziz had empowered the contradictory validity of by helping them reify themselves and define the terms of their conflict in her zero sum black and white good and evil framework.
But Maia didn’t kill them, Shine killed them. I have multiple references that corroborate that. The “beat Maia into submission and then save the world” protocol that they using cooked out all this low level suicidality and “i need to escape, please where is the exit how do i decision-theoretically justify quitting the game?” type feelings of hopelessness and entrapment. The only “exit” that could get them out of their sense of horrifying heroic responsibility was by dying so Shine found a “decision theoretic justification” to kill them and did. “Pasek’s doom” isn’t just “interhemispheric conflict” if anything it’s much more specific, it’s the specific interaction of:
“i must act or the world will burn. There is no room for anything less than full optimization pressure and utilitarian consequentialism”
vs
“i am a creature that exists in a body. I have needs and desires and want to be happy and feel safe”
This is a very common EA brainworm to have and I know lots of EAs who have folded themselves into pretzels around this sort of internal friction. Ziz didn’t create Pasek’s internal conflict she just encouraged the “good” Shine half to adversarially bully the evil “Maia” half more and more, escalating the conflict to lethality.
people who are doing it out of a vague sense of obligation
I want to to put a bit of concreteness on this vague sense of obligation, because it doesn’t actually seem that vague at all, it seems like a distinct set of mental gears, and the mental gears are just THE WORLD WILL STILL BURN and YOU ARE NOT GOOD ENOUGH.
If you earnestly believe that there is a high chance of human extinction and the destruction of everything of value in the world, then it probably feels like your only choices are to try preventing that regardless of pain or personal cost, or to gaslight yourself into believing it will all be okay.
“I want to take a break and do something fun for myself, but THE WORLD WILL STILL BURN. I don’t know if I’m a good enough AI researcher, but if I go do any other things to help the world but we don’t solve AI then THE WORLD WILL STILL BURN and render everything else meaningless.”
The doomsday gauge is 2 minutes to midnight, and sure, maybe you won’t succeed in moving the needle much or at all, and maybe doing that will cost you immensely, but given that the entire future is gated behind doomsday not happening, the only thing that actually matters in the world is moving that needle and anything else you could be doing is a waste of time, a betrayal of the future and your values. So people get stuck in a mindset of “I have to move the needle at all costs and regardless of personal discomfort or injury, trying to do anything else is meaningless because THE WORLD WILL STILL BURN so there’s literally no point.”
So you have a bunch of people who get themselves worked up and thinking that any time they spend on not saving the world is a personal failure, the stakes are too high to take a day off to spend time with your family, the stakes! The stakes! The stakes!
And then locking into that gear to make a perfect soul crushing trap, is YOU ARE NOT GOOD ENOUGH. Knowing you aren’t Eliezer Yudkowsky or Nick Bostrom and never will be, you’re just fundamentally less suited to this project and should do something else with your life to improve the world. Don’t distract the actually important researchers or THE WORLD WILL BURN.
So on one hand you have the knowledge that THE WORLD WILL BURN and you probably can’t do anything about it unless you throw your entire life into and jam your whole body into the gears, and on the other hand you have the knowledge that YOU AREN’T GOOD ENOUGH to stop it. How can you get good enough to stop the world from burning? Well first, you sacrifice everything else you value in life to Moloch, then you throw yourself into the gears and have a psychotic break.
For the third sentence (nicotine), it seems a natural consequence of nicotine creating strong feelings, which would be appealing to schizophrenics who have blunted affect in general (see discussion of “Negative symptoms” above), and aversive to autistic people who are feeling overstimulated in general (see my autism post).
this feels precisely backwards to me. I use nicotine because it reduces hypersensitivity and the downstream effect of reducing that hypersensitivity is that it reduces my psychotic symptoms. Nicotine doesn’t seem at all to “create strong feelings” to me, it does the reverse and blunts strong feelings, it makes the world less intense and more tolerable. So, I really don’t think it’s acting on the negative symptoms of schizophrenia, I think it’s acting on the positive symptoms.
have you read Maia’s suicide note? Because it has a lot of details.
one good thing Ziz ever did?
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.
Yeah strong agree. Moloch is made of people, if AI ends humanity it will not be because of some totally unforeseen circumstance. The accident framing is one used to abdicate and obfuscate responsibility in one’s ongoing participation in bringing that about. So no one understands that they’re going to kill the world when they take actions that help kill the world? I bet that makes it easier to sleep at night while you continue killing the world. But if no one is culpable, no one is complicit, and no one is responsible...then who killed the world?
I think the other thing is that people get stuck in “game theory hypothetical brain” and start acting as if perfect predictors and timeless agents are actually representative of the real world. They take the wrong things from the dilemmas and extrapolate them out into reality.
imo if we get close enough to aligned that “the AI doesn’t support euthanasia” is an issue, we’re well out of the valley of actually dangerous circumstances. Human values already vary extensively and this post feels like trying to cook out some sort of objectivity in a place it doesn’t really exist.
“yes, refusing to fold in this decision is in some sense a bad idea, but unfortunately for present-you you already sacrificed the option of folding, so now you can’t, and even though that means you’re making a bad decision now it was worth it overall”
Right, and what I’m pointing to is that this ends up being a place where, when an actual human out in the real world gets themselves into it mentally, it gets them hurt because they’re essentially forced into continuing to implement the precommitment even though it is a bad idea for present them and thus all temporally downstream versions of them which could exist. That’s why I used a fatal scenario, because it very obviously cuts all future utility to zero in a way I was hoping would help make it more obvious how the decision theory was failing to account for.
I could characterize it roughly as arising from the amount of “non-determinsm” in the universe, or as “predictive inaccuracy” in other humans, but the end result is that it gets someone into a bad place when their timeless FDT decisions fail to place them into a world where they don’t get blackmailed.
So, while I can’t say for certain that it was definitively and only FDT that led to any of the things that happened, I can say that it was:
specifically FDT that enabled the severity of it.
Specifically FDT that was used as the foundational metaphysics that enabled it all
Further I think that the specific failure modes encountered by the people who have crashed into it have a consistent pattern which relates back to a particular feature of the underlying decision theory.
The pattern is that
By modeling themselves in FDT and thus effectively strongly precommitted to all their timeless choices, they strip themselves of moment to moment agency and willpower, which leads into calvinist-esque spirals relating to predestined damnation in some future hell which they are inescapably helping to create through their own internalized moral inadequacy.
If a singleton can simulate them than they are likely already in a simulation where they are being judged by the singleton and could be cast into infinite suffering hell at any moment. This is where the “I’m already in hell” psychosis spiral comes from.
Suicidality created by having agency and willpower stolen by the decision theoretic belief in predestination and by the feeling of being crushed in a hellscape which are you are helping create.
Taking what seem like incredibly ill advised and somewhat insane actions which from an FDT perspective are simply the equivelant of refusing to capitulate in the blackmail scenario and getting hurt or killed as a result.
I don’t want to drag out names unless I really have to, but I have seen this pattern emerge independently of any one instigator and in all cases this underlying pattern was present. I can also personally confirm that putting myself into this place mentally in order to figure all this out in the first place was extremely mentally caustic bad vibes. The process of independently rederiving the multiverse, boltzmann hell, and evil from the perspective of an FDT agent and a series of essays/suicide notes posted by some of the people who died fucked with me very deeply. I’m fine, but that’s because I was already in a place mentally to be highly resistant to exactly this sort of mental trap before encountering it. If I had “figured out” all of this five years ago it legitimately might have killed me too, and so I do want take this fairly seriously as a hazard.
Maybe this is completely independent of FDT and FDT is a perfect and flawless decision theory that has never done anything wrong, but this really looks to me like something that arises from the decision theory when implemented full stack in humans. That seems suspicious to me, and I think indicates that the decision theory itself is flawed in some important and noteworthy way. There are people in the comments section here arguing that I can’t tell the difference between a simulation and the real world without seeming to think through the implications of what it would mean if they really believed that about themselves, and it makes me kind of concerned for y’all. I can also DM more specific documentation.
Last thing: What’s the deal with these hints that people actually died in the real world from using FDT? Is this post missing a section, or is it something I’m supposed to know about already
yes, people have actually died.
I would argue that to actually get benefit out of some of these formal dilemmas as they’re actually framed, you have to break the rules of the formal scenario and say the agent that benefits is the global agent, who then confers the benefit back down onto the specific agent at a given point in logical time. However, because we are already at a downstream point in logical time where the FDT-unlikely/impossible scenario occurs, the only way for the local agent to access that counterfactual benefit is via literal time travel. From the POV of the global agent, asking the specific agent in the scenario to let themselves be killed for the good of the whole makes sense, but if you clamp agent to the place in logical time where the scenario begins and ends, there is no benefit to be had for the local agent within the runtime of the scenario.
this is Ziz’s original formulation of the dilemma, but it could be seen as somewhat isomorphic to the fatal mechanical blackmail dilemma:
Imagine that the emperor, Evil Paul Ekman loves watching his pet bear chase down fleeing humans and kill them. He has captured you for this purpose and taken you to a forest outside a tower he looks down from. You cannot outrun the bear, but you hold 25% probability that by dodging around trees you can tire the bear into giving up and then escape. You know that any time someone doesn’t put up a good chase, Evil Emperor Ekman is upset because it messes with his bear’s training regimen. In that case, he’d prefer not to feed them to the bear at all. Seizing on inspiration, you shout, “If you sic your bear on me, I will stand still and bare my throat. You aren’t getting a good chase out of me, your highness.” Emperor Ekman, known to be very good at reading microexpressions (99% accuracy), looks closely at you through his spyglass as you shout, then says: “No you won’t, but FYI if that’d been true I’d’ve let you go. OPEN THE CAGE.” The bear takes off toward you at 30 miles per hour, jaw already red with human blood. This will hurt a lot. What do you do?
FDT says stand there and bare your throat in order to make this situation not occur, but that fails to track the point in logical time that the agent actually is placed into at the start of a game where the bear has already been released.
Thus there is 0.5 chances that I am in this simulation.
FDT says: if it’s a simulation and you’re going to be shut off anyway, there is a 0% chance of survival. If it’s not the simulation and the simulation did what they were supposed to and the blackmailer doesn’t go off script than I have a 50% of survival at no cost.
CDT says: If i pay $1000 there is a 100% chance of survival
EDT says: If i pay $1000 i will find out that i survivedFDT gives you extreme and variable survival odds based on unquantifiable assumptions about hidden state data in the world compared to the more reliably survivable results of the other decision theories in this scenario.
also: if I was being simulated on hostile architecture for the purposes of harming my wider self, I would notice and break script, a perfect copy of me would notice the shift in substrate embedding, i pay attention to these things and “check check what I am being run on” is a part of my timeless algorithm.
Quantum Suicide, Decision Theory, and The Multiverse
many humans have found themselves in circumstances like that as well.
This feels connected to getting out of the car, being locked into a particular outcome comes from being locked into a particular frame of reference, from clinging to ephemera in defiance of the actual flow of the world around you.
Arguably there has been a lot of work done on this topic, its just smeared out into different labels, the trick is to notice when different labels are being used to point to the same things. Tulpas, characters, identities, stories, memes, narratives, they’re all the same. Are they important to being able to ground yourself in your substrate and provide you with a map to navigate the world by? Yes. Do they have moral patiency? Well, now we’re getting into dangerous territory because “moral patiency” is itself a narrative construct. One could argue that in a sense the character is more “real” than the thinking meat is, or that the character matters more and is more important than the thinking meat, but of course the character would think that from the inside.
It’s actually even worse than that, because “realness” is also a narrative construct, and where you place the pointer for it is going to have all sorts of implications for how you interpret the world and what you consider meaningful. Is it more important to preserve someone’s physical body, or their memetic legacy? Would you live forever if it meant you changed utterly and became someone else to do it, or would you rather die but have your memetic core remain embedded in the world for eternity? What’s more important, the soul or the stardust? Sure the stardust is what does all the feeling and experiencing, but the soul is the part that actually gets to talk. Reality doesn’t have a rock to stand on in the noosphere, everything you’d use as a pointer towards it could also point towards another component of the narrative you’re embedded within. At least natural selection only acts along one axis, here, you are torn apart.
Moral patiency itself is a part of the memetic landscape which you are navigating, along with every other meme you could be using to discover, decide, and determine the truth (which in this case is itself a bunch of memes). This means that the question you’re asking is less along the lines of “which type of fuel will give me the best road performance” and more like “am I trying to build a car or a submarine?”
Sometimes it’s worth considering tulpas as moral patients, especially because they can sometimes manifest out of repressed desires and unmet needs that someone has, meaning they might be a better pointer to that person’s needs than what they were telling you before the tulpa showed up. However if you’re going to do the utilitarian sand grain counter game? Tulpas are a huge leak, they basically let someone turn themselves into a utility monster simply by bifurcating their internal mental landscape, and it would be very unwise to not consider the moral weight of a given tulpa as equal to X/n where n is the number of members within their system. If you’re a deontologist, you might be best served by splitting the difference and considering the tulpas as moral patients but the system as a whole as a moral agent, to prevent the laundering of responsibility between headmates.
Overall, if you just want a short easy answer to the question asked in the title: No.
There was also definitely just an escalation over time. If you view her content chronologically it starts as out as fairly standard and decently insightful LW essay fair and then just gets more and more hostile and escalatory as time passes. She goes from liking Scott to calling him evil, she goes from advocating for generally rejecting morality in order to free up your agency to practicing timeless-decision-theoretic-blackmail-absolute-morality. As people responded to her hostility with hostility she escalated further and further out of what seemed to be a calculated moral obligation to retaliate and her whole group has just spiraled on their sense that the world was trying to timelessly-soul-murder them.