There are at least types of people that the term “Zizian” might refer to:
Someone who has read Sinceriously.fyi and is generally sympathetic to Ziz’s philosophy.
A member of a relatively tightly-coordinated anarchist conspiracy, that has (allegedly) planned and carried out a series of violent crimes.
Octavia is a Zizian in the first sense, but is not (to my knowledge) a Zizian in the second sense. In fact, she seems unaware or disbelieving that a network of Zizians of the second sense exists. She appears to think that there are only ‘people who have benefited from reading Ziz’s blog’, and no coordinated criminal network to speak of.
I would be very surprised if there was no “inner Ziz crew”, as inner circles around leaders / prominent figures in a community seem like a default thing that forms in movements/cultural groups.
But is it true that you don’t think this inner circle is a coordinated group responsible for the murders?
i think an important thing to remember is that i recorded this interview prior to Audere’s arrest and the link between Jamie and Ziz and Ophelia being made public. At the time the situation was a lot more open ended and proposing that everything was linked in a conspiratorial manner seemed like somewhat of a stretch to justify without evidence. That said, a lot of new evidence has in fact come to light, which presents the events as being fairly interrelated, and so at this point to claim there’s no connection between any of these things would be kinda dumb of me. How organized is this inner group? idk, but it seems pretty clear that people are at least talking to each other and coordinating on things in some way.
Why is it the case that a majority of Zizians that we hear about in the news is trans/nb/queer? (If this is representative of Zizians in general, why is it true of Zizians in general?)
“Zizian ideology” is a cross between rationalist ideas (the historical importance of AI, a warped version timeless decision theory, that more is possible with regards to mental tech) and radical leftist/anarchist ideas (the state and broader society are basically evil oppressive systems, strategic violence is morally justified, veganism), plus some homegrown ideas (all the hemisphere stuff, the undead types, etc).
That mix of ideas is compelling primarily to people who are already deeply invested in both rationality ideas and leftist / social justice ideas, an demographic which is predominantly trans women.
Further, I guess there’s a lot of bigoted / oppressive societal dynamics that are more evident to trans people than they are to, say, me, because they have more direct experience with those dynamics. If you personally feel marginalized and oppressed by society, it’s an easier sell that society is broadly an oppressive system.
Plus very straightforward social network effects, where I think many trans rationalists tend to hang out with other trans rationalist (for normal “people like to hang out to people they relate to” reasons), and so this group initially formed from that social sub-network.
All four of the people arrested as part of Ziz’s protest were transgender women (the fifth was let go without charges). This is far from coincidence as Ziz seems to go out of her way to target transgender people. In terms of cult indoctrination such folks are an excellent fit. They’re often:
Financially vulnerable.
Newly out transgender people are especially likely to already be estranged from friends or family.
It is common for them to lack stable housing.
Many traditional social services (illegally) reject them for cultural or religious reasons (e.g., Christian homeless shelters).
Intolerant attitudes among the underclass hit twice: they can’t rely on strangers for help and being transgender often makes them a target for violence; making them outcasts even among outcasts.
Already creating a new identity.
During transition people change their name. This creates an opportunity for Ziz to insert themselves into a recruits ongoing transition. By showing them their “double personhood” as they’re abandoning an old identity it’s possible to convince recruits to adopt a Zizian name (e.g., left hemisphere / right hemisphere) as their new social identity.
As the name implies transition is a time of transition; old patterns and habits tend to fall away. People who have spent years repressing important parts of themselves suddenly have the opportunity to completely change their social presentation. This does not always mean someone wants to play the same role as before but a different gender. With the radical changes that can accompany transition come strong opportunities for radicalization.
All of these factors combine to make Ziz, themselves a transgender woman, more credible to recruits than she might otherwise be. A privileged cis person with close family and stable housing might reject boat housing out of hand: “I don’t know, that sounds iffy to me”. For someone facing mortal danger after their rude ejection into the underclass it’s an easier pill to swallow: “It can’t be worse than sleeping on the street right?”
Another important concept Ziz uses to manipulate people is the idea of being “bigender”. Ziz claims that each hemisphere has a gender and that fairly often people have opposing gender identities between hemispheres. This provides a convenient basis for her to undermine the identity of people she’s recruiting. If the target is cis, tell them their other half is trans, if the target is trans tell them their other half is cis. It’s a similar disorienting trick to the idea of single and double good. If the target identifies as good tell them their other half is irredeemably evil, if they identify amorally insist that half of them is a saint. The pattern is to take aspects of folks identities that they’re invested in and disrupt them by creating a domain of self which Ziz (and only Ziz) has knowledge about so the target is forced to trust their interpretation.
Regarding your point about being bigender, I recall that Suri Dao, as I knew them on Tumblr around 2016-2019-ish, identified as bigender, and indeed it was the first time I’d ever heard of the term or concept. I’m not sure I’ve heard anyone else describe themself that way since, and I never really understood the concept then as Dao tried to explain it or since then either. (The closest I can approximate it to a gender identity I do kind of understand is “genderfluid”.) I don’t think Dao ever mentioned the hemispheric stuff in connection to it. Is/was this a widespread gender identity among rationalists or even in the wider population that I’ve been ignorant of? Or is it mainly a concept found among those who subscribe to Ziz’s ideas?
Thanks! That’s both a more coherent explanation of the term than I’ve seen, and solid evidence (even mentioning studies from 2016) that it’s quite independent from Zizianism. Kind of dumb that I didn’t just Google it or Wikipedia it in the first place, in place of my last comment.
(not the OP) Well, Ziz is trans. So if you are trans and rationalist, there are only a few people like that literally in the entire world, so you will probably feel a strong connection.
Founder effects? like, i don’t exactly think it’s anything “about the ideology” that makes it more appealing to trans/queer ppl, and there are non-trans zizians, so it seems to me more like it’s just a consequence of who ziz is and where she was originally recruiting from (queer rationalist discord servers)
I disagree but not confident I could write an explanation that’s both legible and not losing lots of info by simplifying into “oppressed people more likely to want to oppose oppression”. When I saw the question I was looking forwards to you writing a good answer to it, actually. To hint at some starting points, why is queer anarchism a thing? How do different minds decide who they are?
Transsexual people, let’s face it, do seem to have problems than the general population. We have to deal with GD for one thing, which I know all about firsthand. Hence the term FNT (Fucking Neurotic Transsexual) that used to circulate. (Yes, I prefer for various reasons to use the out-of-favor term “transsexual”.) We also have high rates of autism. Anecdotally, I think that all but a few of the autogynephilic trans women I have met have had some variety of autism.I think we have more than usual capacity to get involved in cults.
I have a lot to say about cults, generally, but will not get into it.
Trans people are over-represented in the rationalist community, relative to general population. It should be evident to anybody who hangs out with a lot of rationalists (at least in “big rationality hubs”) or attends big rationality meetups. But I think I also saw some census data (either SSC/ACX or the LW census) confirming that.
“Over-represented relative to general population” and “only a few” can both be simultaneously true.
Like, if in the general population on average 1 in 1000 is trans, and among the rationalists it is 1 in 100, and you have 1000 rationalists living in the Bay Area… that still means only 10 trans rationalists you can talk to if you live in the Bay Area, one of them is Ziz. (The numbers are made up, just as an example.)
In the largest LW survey, 10.5% of users were transgender. This also increase the most deep in the community you are: 18% restricting to those who are either “sometimes” or “all the times” in the community, 21% restricting to those who are “all the times” in the community.
I guess it makes more sense this way. Like, the more transgenders there are in the community, the smaller the fraction of Zizians among them. With the numbers I originally assumed, Ziz’s conversion ratio would be shockingly high. Now it makes more sense.
Thank you, this changes my perspective on the situation.
Without having looked at the survey numbers recently, I think the percentage of rationalists who identify as trans in the United States are a lot higher than what you see in Europe.
If you only have been at European meetups, it’s natural to assume lower rates.
Source? I thought 2016 had the most takers but that one seems to have ~5% trans. The latest one with results out (2023) has 7.5% trans. Are you counting “non-binary” or “other” as well? Or referring to some other survey.
(not OP) high base rates of transgenderism in LW-rationalism, particularly the sections that would be the most sensible to tenets of Ziz’s ideology (high interest in technical aspects of mathematical decision theory, animal rights, radical politics), while being on average more socially vulnerable, and Ziz herself apparently believed that trans women were inherently more capable of accepting her “truth” for more mystical g/acc-ish reasons (though I can’t find first-hand confirmation rn)
I don’t really want to go through sinceriously.fyi at this point but it’s implicit in her attacks on CFAR as “transphobic” for not accepting her belief system at least.
No specific link either, but if you know the usual “female brain in a male body” explanation, Ziz kinda has a more nuanced version of this, where each brain hemisphere is a separate personality, so you can have e.g. one male and one female hemisphere in a male body.
(And “if you don’t believe an X person when they interpret their own lived experience, that makes you X-phobic” is a standard woke trope.)
A lot of the ideas expounded by Ziz look just crazy to me, and I highly doubt that it maps down onto physical brain anatomy in such a straightforward way … but I wonder if there is a steelman version of this?
E.g. take the Buddhist doctrines of no-self, that no one actually has a coherent self, humans just don’t work that way, and then note that any one individual person is usually neither wholly stereotypically-male or stereotypically-female.
I think there is a conflation of two different things:
Human brain has two hemispheres which communicate through a relatively lower-bandwidth channel, which means they process a lot of things independently.
There is the dissociative identity disorder / alter ego / tulpa phenomenon, where a human can produce two or more identities. This is probably something that exists on a spectrum, where the extreme forms are full different personalities with dissociative amnesia; imaginary friends and brainwashing are somewhere in the middle; and the everyday forms are role-playing or different moods.
If I understand it correctly, Ziz assumes that these two are the same thing. Which is pseudoscientific, and in my opinion clearly wrong.
First, because there can be more than two identities (but no one has more than two brain hemispheres, I suppose). Yes, two is the most famous number, but that’s simply because two is the smallest integer that is greater than one, and more personalities are less frequent.
Second, even if there are exactly two identities, there is no evidence mapping them to two hemispheres (as opposed to each of them using both hemispheres), and a lot of obvious evidence against that, for example the fact that each personality can use both hands etc.
However the idea of “left brain, right brain” is quite popular in our culture. And there were a few experiments showing that the hemispheres can be separated, and then weird things happen. Which means that Ziz’s theory may sound plausible to many people, even in the rationalist community.
Ziz assumes that there are (1) exactly two (2) permanent “cores” in every human. The number two and the permanence are the crucial parts of her ideology; in my opinion this is incompatible with any Buddhist doctrine, which would actually put the emphasis on their impermanence.
The permanence of the “cores”, and the Manichean perspective that each of them is either perfectly good or perfectly evil, is the basis of social control that Ziz has over her followers. You can’t meaningfully disagree with Ziz, because she is 100% good, and you are 50% good and 50% evil, which means that any disagreement must obviously originate in your evil half, and therefore you should mobilize your good half to fight against it (or kill yourself, if you cannot win). The only moral choice is to believe and obey Ziz unconditionally.
.
I kinda assume that multiple personalities are “just” a stronger form of what people normally do, and that different personalities can present as different genders (including agender etc.).
I reject the “exactly two” and “it maps to hemispheres” parts, the permanence of the personalities, and the Manichean ethics.
Epistemic status: Confidence: Strong idea, weakly held. Provenance: My own lived experience, put down in words by myself before even hearing about Ziz. All I know about Zizianism I have learned very recently (mostly from this thread), and I have a very negative opinion of it.
Masculinity and feminity have a biological basis, but most people’s experience of them are strongly influenced by cultural factors. These cultural factors have been selected for being economically beneficial to agrarian societies. They are quite misaligned with what is beneficial for the happiness of post-industrial individuals. Poor societies made up of dumb people could not afford to not pigeonhole everyone into “straight men” and “straight women”. We can now afford to have those categories and also the whole LGBTQ set of categories, although sometimes with a bit of friction when it bumps against the poorest and dumbest parts of our society. These frictions (and also in some cases a descriptive inadequacy of the LGBTQ labels) hurt people. Still, most individuals who are confident that their environment affords them to do so would probably benefit from a bit of experimentation / de-pigeon-holing.
When/if we get to a good post-TAI future, we will be able to afford to drop the concepts of discrete genders and discrete sexual orientations altogether. This will be a good thing, because it will make individuals freer.
I think the hemisphere stuff is quite literal. I think it’s general knowledge that the right eye feeds into the left side of the brain, and vice versa (Actually, looking it up, it is the case that the left is controlled by the right and vice versa, but I see some claims that the information feeds into both sides, in a nearly balanced manner[1]; but I don’t know if Ziz knows that); and Ziz’s whole “unihemispheric sleep” thing tells you to keep one eye closed and distract the other eye so that eventually one hemisphere falls asleep.
Claude sez: “When nerve fibers cross at the optic chiasm, approximately 53-55% of nerve fibers cross to the opposite hemisphere, while 45-47% remain on the same side. This means that each hemisphere receives slightly different proportions of visual information from both eyes.” Wiki on Optic chiasm confirms: “The number of axons that do not cross the midline and project ipsilaterally depends on the degree of binocular vision of the animal (3% in mice and 45% in humans do not cross)”.
It’s not about the eyes, it’s about the part of the visual field.
The image from the right half of the visual field (left part of each retina) feeds into the left hemisphere and the image from the left half of the visual field (right part of each retina) feeds into the right hemisphere.
Since in humans each eye observes both sides of the visual field, you need to have ~50% of each eye’s fibers (each corresponding to something like a pixel) to go to each hemisphere.
In vertebrates where the overlap in visual fields of each eye is minimal (e.g. horses, rabbits), each eye serves mostly one half of the visual field exclusively, so the entire image from the left eye feeds into the right hemisphere and ditto right eye → left hemisphere.
So the Zizian technology, which involves sleep deprivation and then having one eye closed and the other eye open (as a way to make one personality sleep), seems completely unsupported by what we know about human biology.
It’s just creating a split personality, in a way that has nothing to do with the hemispheres. But if you believe that your personalities are already there, waiting in the hemispheres until you find them, it probably helps with the process of creating them (which then feels like a confirmation of the theory).
The process of creating alternative personalities is one that works via hypnotic suggestion if you get the critical factor out of the way. Making someone sleep derivated and dosing off a bit does sound like a trance induction. Of course, creating expectancy by having that neat theory, also helps with the process of creating additional personalities.
So the Zizian technology, which involves sleep deprivation and then having one eye closed and the other eye open (as a way to make one personality sleep), seems completely unsupported by what we know about human biology.
To the extent that they tried to ground this tech in this particular neuro stuff, then yeah sure but did they even? (These threads are getting long, I’m not remembering everything that was said upstream nor am I reading all of this very carefully.)
This “”unihemispheric sleep” thing seems like it came from crazy and is an excellent way to produce even more crazy. A tale as old as time: small group of people produce some interesting ideas and all is mostly fine until they either take too many drugs or get the bright idea of intentionally messing up their sleep. This starts a self reinforcing loop of drugs / messed up sleep causing crazy causing drugs / messed up sleep causing even more crazy.
Sleep deprivation is a traditional mind-control technique in cults; makes it difficult to disbelieve.
Of course you can’t just tell your recruits “I need you to be sleep-deprived so that you will find my teaching more credible”. Instead, there is so little time and so much work to do. Also, waking up early is healthy (but somehow we forget that going to bed early is healthy, too).
Using sleep deprivation as a way to “know yourself” is an interesting new take. You don’t even have to organize the work and the early meditations/prayers, your recruits will voluntarily keep themselves sleep-deprived even when there is absolutely nothing to do. Amazing!
The title “infohazardous glossary” sounds pretty insane. The contents of that webpage also strike me as pretty insane. The page is also structured as a glossary, and the concepts explained within it have very likely contributed to the insanity of the people who have heavily interacted with them. Therefore, the title “infohazardous glossary” seems pretty accurate after all.
My policy with this kind of stuff is to consider it harmful but also to consider it harmful to be scared of it’s harmfulness. Generally disregard, but also maybe play with it for a little bit if I’m feeling curious and sane. It is interesting yes, but also mostly wrong and can be harmful to those who are on an epistemically/emotionally shaky place right now.
I am thankful that the glossary exists, because it makes it easier to decode various Zizian writings, and makes it more difficult to sanewash Ziz.
For example, now I have a convenient proof that Ziz literally believes that there are two persons in each human. Not as a vague metaphor for “people are complicated”. Literally two. Literally in everyone. Literally persons, in a way that it makes sense to describe them individually as male or female, good or “nongood”. Literally believing that you can talk with the individual persons, make them argue against each other, make one murder another.
Which is convenient, because currently I am working on an article explaining how the popular “left brain, right brain” theory is complete bullshit from the scientific perspective. Which means, the Zizian model is bullshit, because it builds on the popular misconception. -- Without the glossary, if I succeed to write the article and it turned out to be convincing, fans of Ziz could simply say “but of course Ziz didn’t mean it that way, stop strawmanning her”. But now we have written evidence that yes, Ziz meant it literally that way, therefore all the supposed insights people gained from talking to their individual hemispheres should be attributed to some form of dissociative identity disorder, rather then each hemisphere being a person.
The title “infohazardous glossary” sounds pretty insane. The contents of that webpage also strike me as pretty insane.
That’s the way Zizians speak. Everything must be said in the most hysterical way possible. Everything they don’t like is slavery or something. Every disagreement is addressed by a death threat (though they usually do not act on them). First it seemed like they were just hysterical idiots. Then they actually killed some people. Now it’s more like: murderous hysterical idiots.
Ziz believes her entire hemisphere theory is an infohazard (IIRC she believes it was partially responsible for Pasek’s death), so terms pertaining to it are separate from the rest of her glossary.
Not sure about the literal meaning of the gender of the hemispheres. But the idea that there are two fundamentally different people in your brain is a central thing in Zizianism—that each “core” can be good or evil, and therefore there are double-good people (Ziz), single-good people (followers of Ziz), and evil people (most of the population).
From my perspective, this entire thing is completely crazy. But if someone already takes it for true, then… I suppose adding the “different parts of your brain can have different gender” part does not increase the total implausibility significantly.
Now that I think about it, this sounds very much like “every person is born with the original sin and need our technology sacraments to be saved from damnation”.
My visual metaphor is the angel and the devil sitting on your shoulders, each whispering in one of your ears. Except, they live inside your respective brain hemispheres, because obviously literal angels and devils are unscientific, but left and right brain are the Science™.
That makes Ziz like Jesus, born without sin. Explained by having two angels, conveniently.
(Also, both the angels and the devils can be male or female, which provides a theological Rationalist foundation for explaining trans-sexuality. Makes it easier to recruit among trans-sexual rationalists. Know yourself, by listening to the only person who has the knowledge.)
You said in the interview with Ken, that the Zizian.info explanation of unihermispheric sleep does not match the concepts as they are actually used. From the outside, it seems like the unihermispheric sleep model could make one find confidence that the two different personality that come out of the debucketing process actually resemble the two hemispheres.
If the theory about unihermispheric sleep is unimportant, what makes Ziz believe that the debucketing process actually has anything to do with brain hemispheres?
hi ! as you can probably infer i don’t use LW , but i wanted to reach out and this seemed to be the most reasonable place . sorry if i don’t format or reason in the way expected here , i’m not a rationalist nor do i know the site culture .
anyway , about a month ago , the fediverse instance eightpoint.app was nuked and defaced , as far as i can tell , by Laurelai Bailey (LB) , over claims of the admin referencing you (and abstractWeapon , not sure what the relationship between the two of you is) , claiming in a pastebin (that has since been deleted , but is available via the internet archive) that you’re affiliated with “cult that’s confirmed to have two kills to its name and has actively shielded a cis man raping his way through the west coast trans community” . the tumblr links she(?) provided have a very lengthy essay about your alleged affiliation with the people Zizzians clashed with and tells the story of Linds confrontation with them from the Zizzians perspective , from what i can tell . the whole text is not written very clearly i’m not that sure .
i got reminded of this this from Rebecca Watson’s video on the Zizzians and i’m trusting her research , especially as the way she described her research doesn’t sound especially pleasant , with those tumblr writeups appearing to reinforce that . honestly i’m still confused over what LB ment .
well uh....that pastebin seems exceptionally confused in addition to being written by notorious serial rapist and federal informant Lauralei Bailey? let’s go through the claims here anyway though just for consistency
it seems to be implying that i’m “the leader of the cult” or something to that effect? which is an absolutely hilarious claim.
i have no idea who this “12” that is being referred to is.
the pastebin seems to be implying that i/”the cult” am protecting/allied with “a cis man raping his way through the west coast trans community” which i am guessing is an extremely confused reference to JD? also a hilarious claim for anyone who actually knows the situation.
The flowerbynoothername post linked where i confess to having worked with JD was written after i wrote my own callout of JD where i also declared myself a zizian before someone pulled me aside and was like ‘it’s not very anarchist to put that much weight in one person’s perspective’ which, fair enough.
LB seems extremely confused about the situation overall and i would not consider her a reliable source of information, which also makes it extremely sus that she seems to have used this extremely confused understanding of the situation to justify defacing that fediverse instance.
12 aka freya (it/its pronouns) is the admin of 8P and has enjoyed your work from what i’m aware of , causing LB (who has also been on 8P in the past , though she hid her identity) to lash out for some reason . also RW’s telling of the story paints the Zizzians as attacking Lind , whole that post instead only mentions Lind killing Emma . honestly considering that the daisy account is also gone now , i’m not sure there will be any resolution with 12 also saying its confused why LB is against you , except “her being just, well, a bitch” in its DMs to me .
probably not gonna add more unless i can find LB’s 8P 2 that she mentioned
It seems like “Zizian” isn’t a title people this cluster like, since that implies things are more centralized around Ziz. It does seem like there’s a social cluster here though. What’s a name that you (or the group) would suggest?
I appreciated your call to have people talk to you all instead of cutting off contact, and your willingness to talk! I agree with it in spirit. I also think someone might want zero stabbings or shootings happening nearby. Especially for physical communities where would you suggest drawing the line of who is not going to do any stabbing or shooting?
Do you think there’s going to be another death within this social graph? Do you think there’s going to be another person killed by this social graph, even in self-defense?
Someone else dies within this cluster, in any circumstancesSomeone else gets killed by this cluster, in any circumstances
Do you think the zizian philosophy, with its particular interpretation of TDT, will cause Teresa to reject a plea deal and go to trial? I’d love to see more details of the shootout come out, but that really only seems likely if there is a trial, and as far as I can tell Teresa is the only one alive to try. Or maybe also Jamie as the one who provided the guns used?
okay AMA i guess.
Eli wrote:
I would be very surprised if there was no “inner Ziz crew”, as inner circles around leaders / prominent figures in a community seem like a default thing that forms in movements/cultural groups.
But is it true that you don’t think this inner circle is a coordinated group responsible for the murders?
i think an important thing to remember is that i recorded this interview prior to Audere’s arrest and the link between Jamie and Ziz and Ophelia being made public. At the time the situation was a lot more open ended and proposing that everything was linked in a conspiratorial manner seemed like somewhat of a stretch to justify without evidence. That said, a lot of new evidence has in fact come to light, which presents the events as being fairly interrelated, and so at this point to claim there’s no connection between any of these things would be kinda dumb of me. How organized is this inner group? idk, but it seems pretty clear that people are at least talking to each other and coordinating on things in some way.
Why is it the case that a majority of Zizians that we hear about in the news is trans/nb/queer? (If this is representative of Zizians in general, why is it true of Zizians in general?)
My read:
“Zizian ideology” is a cross between rationalist ideas (the historical importance of AI, a warped version timeless decision theory, that more is possible with regards to mental tech) and radical leftist/anarchist ideas (the state and broader society are basically evil oppressive systems, strategic violence is morally justified, veganism), plus some homegrown ideas (all the hemisphere stuff, the undead types, etc).
That mix of ideas is compelling primarily to people who are already deeply invested in both rationality ideas and leftist / social justice ideas, an demographic which is predominantly trans women.
Further, I guess there’s a lot of bigoted / oppressive societal dynamics that are more evident to trans people than they are to, say, me, because they have more direct experience with those dynamics. If you personally feel marginalized and oppressed by society, it’s an easier sell that society is broadly an oppressive system.
Plus very straightforward social network effects, where I think many trans rationalists tend to hang out with other trans rationalist (for normal “people like to hang out to people they relate to” reasons), and so this group initially formed from that social sub-network.
From zizians.info:
Regarding your point about being bigender, I recall that Suri Dao, as I knew them on Tumblr around 2016-2019-ish, identified as bigender, and indeed it was the first time I’d ever heard of the term or concept. I’m not sure I’ve heard anyone else describe themself that way since, and I never really understood the concept then as Dao tried to explain it or since then either. (The closest I can approximate it to a gender identity I do kind of understand is “genderfluid”.) I don’t think Dao ever mentioned the hemispheric stuff in connection to it. Is/was this a widespread gender identity among rationalists or even in the wider population that I’ve been ignorant of? Or is it mainly a concept found among those who subscribe to Ziz’s ideas?
It’s not unique to Zizians or some slightly broader rationalist circle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-binary_gender#Bigender
Thanks! That’s both a more coherent explanation of the term than I’ve seen, and solid evidence (even mentioning studies from 2016) that it’s quite independent from Zizianism. Kind of dumb that I didn’t just Google it or Wikipedia it in the first place, in place of my last comment.
(not the OP) Well, Ziz is trans. So if you are trans and rationalist, there are only a few people like that literally in the entire world, so you will probably feel a strong connection.
Founder effects? like, i don’t exactly think it’s anything “about the ideology” that makes it more appealing to trans/queer ppl, and there are non-trans zizians, so it seems to me more like it’s just a consequence of who ziz is and where she was originally recruiting from (queer rationalist discord servers)
I disagree but not confident I could write an explanation that’s both legible and not losing lots of info by simplifying into “oppressed people more likely to want to oppose oppression”. When I saw the question I was looking forwards to you writing a good answer to it, actually. To hint at some starting points, why is queer anarchism a thing? How do different minds decide who they are?
Transsexual people, let’s face it, do seem to have problems than the general population. We have to deal with GD for one thing, which I know all about firsthand. Hence the term FNT (Fucking Neurotic Transsexual) that used to circulate. (Yes, I prefer for various reasons to use the out-of-favor term “transsexual”.) We also have high rates of autism. Anecdotally, I think that all but a few of the autogynephilic trans women I have met have had some variety of autism.I think we have more than usual capacity to get involved in cults.
I have a lot to say about cults, generally, but will not get into it.
Trans people are over-represented in the rationalist community, relative to general population. It should be evident to anybody who hangs out with a lot of rationalists (at least in “big rationality hubs”) or attends big rationality meetups. But I think I also saw some census data (either SSC/ACX or the LW census) confirming that.
“Over-represented relative to general population” and “only a few” can both be simultaneously true.
Like, if in the general population on average 1 in 1000 is trans, and among the rationalists it is 1 in 100, and you have 1000 rationalists living in the Bay Area… that still means only 10 trans rationalists you can talk to if you live in the Bay Area, one of them is Ziz. (The numbers are made up, just as an example.)
In the largest LW survey, 10.5% of users were transgender. This also increase the most deep in the community you are: 18% restricting to those who are either “sometimes” or “all the times” in the community, 21% restricting to those who are “all the times” in the community.
Oh. I somehow missed/forgot that.
I guess it makes more sense this way. Like, the more transgenders there are in the community, the smaller the fraction of Zizians among them. With the numbers I originally assumed, Ziz’s conversion ratio would be shockingly high. Now it makes more sense.
Thank you, this changes my perspective on the situation.
Without having looked at the survey numbers recently, I think the percentage of rationalists who identify as trans in the United States are a lot higher than what you see in Europe.
If you only have been at European meetups, it’s natural to assume lower rates.
Source? I thought 2016 had the most takers but that one seems to have ~5% trans. The latest one with results out (2023) has 7.5% trans. Are you counting “non-binary” or “other” as well? Or referring to some other survey.
I’m using the 2016 survey and counting non-binary yes.
(not OP) high base rates of transgenderism in LW-rationalism, particularly the sections that would be the most sensible to tenets of Ziz’s ideology (high interest in technical aspects of mathematical decision theory, animal rights, radical politics), while being on average more socially vulnerable, and Ziz herself apparently believed that trans women were inherently more capable of accepting her “truth” for more mystical g/acc-ish reasons (though I can’t find first-hand confirmation rn)
I’m aware of high rates among LWers but it’s still far from what we see among Zizians that we hear a lot about.
interesting
@Matrice Jacobine do you have a link to where Ziz talks about that?
I don’t really want to go through sinceriously.fyi at this point but it’s implicit in her attacks on CFAR as “transphobic” for not accepting her belief system at least.
No specific link either, but if you know the usual “female brain in a male body” explanation, Ziz kinda has a more nuanced version of this, where each brain hemisphere is a separate personality, so you can have e.g. one male and one female hemisphere in a male body.
(And “if you don’t believe an X person when they interpret their own lived experience, that makes you X-phobic” is a standard woke trope.)
A lot of the ideas expounded by Ziz look just crazy to me, and I highly doubt that it maps down onto physical brain anatomy in such a straightforward way … but I wonder if there is a steelman version of this?
E.g. take the Buddhist doctrines of no-self, that no one actually has a coherent self, humans just don’t work that way, and then note that any one individual person is usually neither wholly stereotypically-male or stereotypically-female.
I think there is a conflation of two different things:
Human brain has two hemispheres which communicate through a relatively lower-bandwidth channel, which means they process a lot of things independently.
There is the dissociative identity disorder / alter ego / tulpa phenomenon, where a human can produce two or more identities. This is probably something that exists on a spectrum, where the extreme forms are full different personalities with dissociative amnesia; imaginary friends and brainwashing are somewhere in the middle; and the everyday forms are role-playing or different moods.
If I understand it correctly, Ziz assumes that these two are the same thing. Which is pseudoscientific, and in my opinion clearly wrong.
First, because there can be more than two identities (but no one has more than two brain hemispheres, I suppose). Yes, two is the most famous number, but that’s simply because two is the smallest integer that is greater than one, and more personalities are less frequent.
Second, even if there are exactly two identities, there is no evidence mapping them to two hemispheres (as opposed to each of them using both hemispheres), and a lot of obvious evidence against that, for example the fact that each personality can use both hands etc.
However the idea of “left brain, right brain” is quite popular in our culture. And there were a few experiments showing that the hemispheres can be separated, and then weird things happen. Which means that Ziz’s theory may sound plausible to many people, even in the rationalist community.
Ziz assumes that there are (1) exactly two (2) permanent “cores” in every human. The number two and the permanence are the crucial parts of her ideology; in my opinion this is incompatible with any Buddhist doctrine, which would actually put the emphasis on their impermanence.
The permanence of the “cores”, and the Manichean perspective that each of them is either perfectly good or perfectly evil, is the basis of social control that Ziz has over her followers. You can’t meaningfully disagree with Ziz, because she is 100% good, and you are 50% good and 50% evil, which means that any disagreement must obviously originate in your evil half, and therefore you should mobilize your good half to fight against it (or kill yourself, if you cannot win). The only moral choice is to believe and obey Ziz unconditionally.
.
I kinda assume that multiple personalities are “just” a stronger form of what people normally do, and that different personalities can present as different genders (including agender etc.).
I reject the “exactly two” and “it maps to hemispheres” parts, the permanence of the personalities, and the Manichean ethics.
Epistemic status:
Confidence: Strong idea, weakly held.
Provenance: My own lived experience, put down in words by myself before even hearing about Ziz. All I know about Zizianism I have learned very recently (mostly from this thread), and I have a very negative opinion of it.
Masculinity and feminity have a biological basis, but most people’s experience of them are strongly influenced by cultural factors. These cultural factors have been selected for being economically beneficial to agrarian societies. They are quite misaligned with what is beneficial for the happiness of post-industrial individuals. Poor societies made up of dumb people could not afford to not pigeonhole everyone into “straight men” and “straight women”. We can now afford to have those categories and also the whole LGBTQ set of categories, although sometimes with a bit of friction when it bumps against the poorest and dumbest parts of our society. These frictions (and also in some cases a descriptive inadequacy of the LGBTQ labels) hurt people. Still, most individuals who are confident that their environment affords them to do so would probably benefit from a bit of experimentation / de-pigeon-holing.
When/if we get to a good post-TAI future, we will be able to afford to drop the concepts of discrete genders and discrete sexual orientations altogether. This will be a good thing, because it will make individuals freer.
Did Ziz intend this to be seen as a metaphor (or) to be taken literally?
I think the hemisphere stuff is quite literal. I think it’s general knowledge that the right eye feeds into the left side of the brain, and vice versa (Actually, looking it up, it is the case that the left is controlled by the right and vice versa, but I see some claims that the information feeds into both sides, in a nearly balanced manner[1]; but I don’t know if Ziz knows that); and Ziz’s whole “unihemispheric sleep” thing tells you to keep one eye closed and distract the other eye so that eventually one hemisphere falls asleep.
Claude sez: “When nerve fibers cross at the optic chiasm, approximately 53-55% of nerve fibers cross to the opposite hemisphere, while 45-47% remain on the same side. This means that each hemisphere receives slightly different proportions of visual information from both eyes.” Wiki on Optic chiasm confirms: “The number of axons that do not cross the midline and project ipsilaterally depends on the degree of binocular vision of the animal (3% in mice and 45% in humans do not cross)”.
It’s not about the eyes, it’s about the part of the visual field.
The image from the right half of the visual field (left part of each retina) feeds into the left hemisphere and the image from the left half of the visual field (right part of each retina) feeds into the right hemisphere.
Since in humans each eye observes both sides of the visual field, you need to have ~50% of each eye’s fibers (each corresponding to something like a pixel) to go to each hemisphere.
In vertebrates where the overlap in visual fields of each eye is minimal (e.g. horses, rabbits), each eye serves mostly one half of the visual field exclusively, so the entire image from the left eye feeds into the right hemisphere and ditto right eye → left hemisphere.
So the Zizian technology, which involves sleep deprivation and then having one eye closed and the other eye open (as a way to make one personality sleep), seems completely unsupported by what we know about human biology.
It’s just creating a split personality, in a way that has nothing to do with the hemispheres. But if you believe that your personalities are already there, waiting in the hemispheres until you find them, it probably helps with the process of creating them (which then feels like a confirmation of the theory).
The process of creating alternative personalities is one that works via hypnotic suggestion if you get the critical factor out of the way. Making someone sleep derivated and dosing off a bit does sound like a trance induction. Of course, creating expectancy by having that neat theory, also helps with the process of creating additional personalities.
To the extent that they tried to ground this tech in this particular neuro stuff, then yeah sure but did they even? (These threads are getting long, I’m not remembering everything that was said upstream nor am I reading all of this very carefully.)
I don’t know. (Which is a convenient way to end this thread.)
Some information is at https://zizians.info/ but it is far from complete, when it comes to the technical details of Zizianism.
This “”unihemispheric sleep” thing seems like it came from crazy and is an excellent way to produce even more crazy. A tale as old as time: small group of people produce some interesting ideas and all is mostly fine until they either take too many drugs or get the bright idea of intentionally messing up their sleep. This starts a self reinforcing loop of drugs / messed up sleep causing crazy causing drugs / messed up sleep causing even more crazy.
Sleep deprivation is a traditional mind-control technique in cults; makes it difficult to disbelieve.
Of course you can’t just tell your recruits “I need you to be sleep-deprived so that you will find my teaching more credible”. Instead, there is so little time and so much work to do. Also, waking up early is healthy (but somehow we forget that going to bed early is healthy, too).
Using sleep deprivation as a way to “know yourself” is an interesting new take. You don’t even have to organize the work and the early meditations/prayers, your recruits will voluntarily keep themselves sleep-deprived even when there is absolutely nothing to do. Amazing!
See the Zizian “Infohazardous Glossary”:
Seems quite literal.
The title “infohazardous glossary” sounds pretty insane. The contents of that webpage also strike me as pretty insane. The page is also structured as a glossary, and the concepts explained within it have very likely contributed to the insanity of the people who have heavily interacted with them. Therefore, the title “infohazardous glossary” seems pretty accurate after all.
My policy with this kind of stuff is to consider it harmful but also to consider it harmful to be scared of it’s harmfulness. Generally disregard, but also maybe play with it for a little bit if I’m feeling curious and sane. It is interesting yes, but also mostly wrong and can be harmful to those who are on an epistemically/emotionally shaky place right now.
I am thankful that the glossary exists, because it makes it easier to decode various Zizian writings, and makes it more difficult to sanewash Ziz.
For example, now I have a convenient proof that Ziz literally believes that there are two persons in each human. Not as a vague metaphor for “people are complicated”. Literally two. Literally in everyone. Literally persons, in a way that it makes sense to describe them individually as male or female, good or “nongood”. Literally believing that you can talk with the individual persons, make them argue against each other, make one murder another.
Which is convenient, because currently I am working on an article explaining how the popular “left brain, right brain” theory is complete bullshit from the scientific perspective. Which means, the Zizian model is bullshit, because it builds on the popular misconception. -- Without the glossary, if I succeed to write the article and it turned out to be convincing, fans of Ziz could simply say “but of course Ziz didn’t mean it that way, stop strawmanning her”. But now we have written evidence that yes, Ziz meant it literally that way, therefore all the supposed insights people gained from talking to their individual hemispheres should be attributed to some form of dissociative identity disorder, rather then each hemisphere being a person.
That’s the way Zizians speak. Everything must be said in the most hysterical way possible. Everything they don’t like is slavery or something. Every disagreement is addressed by a death threat (though they usually do not act on them). First it seemed like they were just hysterical idiots. Then they actually killed some people. Now it’s more like: murderous hysterical idiots.
Ziz believes her entire hemisphere theory is an infohazard (IIRC she believes it was partially responsible for Pasek’s death), so terms pertaining to it are separate from the rest of her glossary.
Oh. That’s nice of her.
Not sure about the literal meaning of the gender of the hemispheres. But the idea that there are two fundamentally different people in your brain is a central thing in Zizianism—that each “core” can be good or evil, and therefore there are double-good people (Ziz), single-good people (followers of Ziz), and evil people (most of the population).
From my perspective, this entire thing is completely crazy. But if someone already takes it for true, then… I suppose adding the “different parts of your brain can have different gender” part does not increase the total implausibility significantly.
Now that I think about it, this sounds very much like “every person is born with the original sin and need our
technologysacraments to be saved from damnation”.My visual metaphor is the angel and the devil sitting on your shoulders, each whispering in one of your ears. Except, they live inside your respective brain hemispheres, because obviously literal angels and devils are unscientific, but left and right brain are the Science™.
That makes Ziz like Jesus, born without sin. Explained by having two angels, conveniently.
(Also, both the angels and the devils can be male or female, which provides a
theologicalRationalist foundation for explaining trans-sexuality. Makes it easier to recruit among trans-sexual rationalists. Know yourself, by listening to the only person who has the knowledge.)You said in the interview with Ken, that the Zizian.info explanation of unihermispheric sleep does not match the concepts as they are actually used. From the outside, it seems like the unihermispheric sleep model could make one find confidence that the two different personality that come out of the debucketing process actually resemble the two hemispheres.
If the theory about unihermispheric sleep is unimportant, what makes Ziz believe that the debucketing process actually has anything to do with brain hemispheres?
Also, what makes Ziz believe that there are always “two [cores] per organism” (source)?
hi ! as you can probably infer i don’t use LW , but i wanted to reach out and this seemed to be the most reasonable place . sorry if i don’t format or reason in the way expected here , i’m not a rationalist nor do i know the site culture .
anyway , about a month ago , the fediverse instance eightpoint.app was nuked and defaced , as far as i can tell , by Laurelai Bailey (LB) , over claims of the admin referencing you (and abstractWeapon , not sure what the relationship between the two of you is) , claiming in a pastebin (that has since been deleted , but is available via the internet archive) that you’re affiliated with “cult that’s confirmed to have two kills to its name and has actively shielded a cis man raping his way through the west coast trans community” . the tumblr links she(?) provided have a very lengthy essay about your alleged affiliation with the people Zizzians clashed with and tells the story of Linds confrontation with them from the Zizzians perspective , from what i can tell . the whole text is not written very clearly i’m not that sure .
i got reminded of this this from Rebecca Watson’s video on the Zizzians and i’m trusting her research , especially as the way she described her research doesn’t sound especially pleasant , with those tumblr writeups appearing to reinforce that . honestly i’m still confused over what LB ment .
well uh....that pastebin seems exceptionally confused in addition to being written by notorious serial rapist and federal informant Lauralei Bailey? let’s go through the claims here anyway though just for consistency
it seems to be implying that i’m “the leader of the cult” or something to that effect? which is an absolutely hilarious claim.
i have no idea who this “12” that is being referred to is.
the pastebin seems to be implying that i/”the cult” am protecting/allied with “a cis man raping his way through the west coast trans community” which i am guessing is an extremely confused reference to JD? also a hilarious claim for anyone who actually knows the situation.
The flowerbynoothername post linked where i confess to having worked with JD was written after i wrote my own callout of JD where i also declared myself a zizian before someone pulled me aside and was like ‘it’s not very anarchist to put that much weight in one person’s perspective’ which, fair enough.
LB seems extremely confused about the situation overall and i would not consider her a reliable source of information, which also makes it extremely sus that she seems to have used this extremely confused understanding of the situation to justify defacing that fediverse instance.
12 aka freya (it/its pronouns) is the admin of 8P and has enjoyed your work from what i’m aware of , causing LB (who has also been on 8P in the past , though she hid her identity) to lash out for some reason . also RW’s telling of the story paints the Zizzians as attacking Lind , whole that post instead only mentions Lind killing Emma . honestly considering that the daisy account is also gone now , i’m not sure there will be any resolution with 12 also saying its confused why LB is against you , except “her being just, well, a bitch” in its DMs to me .
probably not gonna add more unless i can find LB’s 8P 2 that she mentioned
also 12 fangirling in my DMs about you lol .
tell 12 to DM me i am so curious what exactly all this is about.
It seems like “Zizian” isn’t a title people this cluster like, since that implies things are more centralized around Ziz. It does seem like there’s a social cluster here though. What’s a name that you (or the group) would suggest?
I appreciated your call to have people talk to you all instead of cutting off contact, and your willingness to talk! I agree with it in spirit. I also think someone might want zero stabbings or shootings happening nearby. Especially for physical communities where would you suggest drawing the line of who is not going to do any stabbing or shooting?
Do you think there’s going to be another death within this social graph? Do you think there’s going to be another person killed by this social graph, even in self-defense?
Presumably the “someone dies” means like, within a few years, and not because of x-risk or a major pandemic.
I interpreted it as: not by “usual means”, but rather something like suicide or murder.
Do you think the zizian philosophy, with its particular interpretation of TDT, will cause Teresa to reject a plea deal and go to trial? I’d love to see more details of the shootout come out, but that really only seems likely if there is a trial, and as far as I can tell Teresa is the only one alive to try. Or maybe also Jamie as the one who provided the guns used?