Here’s a podcast with @Slimepriestess on the whole affair. I’m not particularly involved in any of this, and had some violent disagreements with things said in the podcast[1], but found it informative on the whole. Listen with a critical ear.
E.g. that the right thing to do wrt to people in the Ziz-egregome is to talk to them—if there is a social scene near yours where people start dropping like flies then it’s good & wise to say “I will leave and not interact with those people, leaving them alone.” Put on your own mask first. (Also the claim that Ziz “did the math” with relation to making decisions using FDT-ish theories—which IIUC isn’t possible because (1) FDT-ish theories aren’t fully formalized yet and (2) the formalized parts are extremely computationally demanding to execute.) Plus a smattering of other things.
I think that Octavia is confused / mistaken about a number of points here, such that her testimony seems likely to be misleading to people without much context.
[I could find citations for many of my claims here, but I’m going to write and post this fast, mostly without the links, for the time being. I am largely going off of my memory of blog post comments that I read months to years ago, and my memory is fallible. I’ll try to accurately represent my epistemic status inline. If anyone knows the links that I’m referring to, feel free to put them in the comments. Same if you think that I’m misremembering something.
To Octavia, if I’ve gotten any of the following wrong, I encourage you to correct it. I apologize for any rudeness. I’m speaking somewhat more bluntly here than I often would, because it seems more important than usual to help people get clear models of the situation, urgently.]
Octavia is not a Zizian in the relevant sense
Most importantly, I think she is mistaken about whether or not she is “a Zizian”.
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. [1]
Because she claims to be a Zizian, one might reasonably expect that she’s an authority on what Zizians believe or do. Insofar as people are interested in what the members of the criminal conspiracy believe, I currently think that she is not much of an authority. (Though again, I don’t know what kind of contact she’s had with who, and maybe they’re closer than I know.)
I don’t know, but I would guess that Octavia has either not spoken to Ziz at all since Ziz faked her death in 2022, or that the two have minimally conversed. (Octavia obviously has more info about this than I do, and is welcome to correct me.)
Based on comments that I saw on Sinceriously.fyi, when it was up, I guess that Ziz does not endorse Octavia’s take on her philosophy, or regard Octavia as a member of her Vegan Sith crew (though I may be misremembering, and their relationship may have changed since the blog was taken down).
Octavia gets a lot wrong about what Ziz wrote
Furthermore, Octavia says a number of things that are, by my memory, either outright contradicted by the text of sinceriously.fyi, or seem to me to be importantly mistaken misreadings.
For instance,
Does Ziz think that core values can change?
Octavia mostly seems to miss the point of Ziz’s arguments that core values are immutable. She says that Ziz never stated explicitly that core values don’t change (and that JD tries to heavily imply this without justification), or that Ziz is only making a technical point that if you choose good than that means you were good all along. (Although a few minutes later she does agree that core is “the aspect of yourself that doesn’t change, and if you can change it’s not the core”, so I’m not totally sure what she’s saying and maybe I’m just misunderstanding her.)
Ziz does say in the first line of Choices Made Long Ago, “I don’t know how mutable core values are. My best guess is, hardly mutable at all or at least hardly mutable predictably.” and goes on to elucidate why apparent changes in values are actually not that.
Additionally, in her glossary, Ziz defines core: “Core is something in the mind that has infinite energy. Contains terminal values you would sacrifice all else for, and then do it again infinity times with no regret. Seems approximately unchanging across lifespan. Figuratively, the deepest frame in the call stack of the mind, capable of aborting any train of thought, everything the mind does is because it decided for it to happen.”
I don’t think it’s correct to say that Ziz never explicitly said that core values couldn’t change.
(Furthermore, Octavia states in the interview that Ziz sometimes dares the reader to stop being evil. At the end of Choices Made Long Ago, Ziz says “If you have done do lamentable things for bad reasons (not earnestly misguided reasons), and are despairing of being able to change, then either embrace your true values, the ones that mean you’re choosing not to change them, or disbelieve.” This is just about the opposite of daring the reader to stop being evil. It’s more like daring the reader, who’s done bad things and is horrified by that, to stop rationalizing and just admit that they’re actually evil.)
This is an extremely key piece of Ziz’s moral philosophy. According to my understanding, Ziz and co. feel justified in taking violent action against most people, not just because they happen to do bad things (but could be redeemed), but because they have fundamentally evil values. The Zizians sidestep a bunch of conventional ethical dilemmas, because in their view, almost everyone is an irredeemable moral monster, that not just kills and eats animals, but ultimately desires the destruction of the multiverse.
I’ve also seen Octavia post elsewhere that if you’re evil you can just choose to not to be evil anymore (and change your actions). I believe she’s aware that this a deviation from Ziz’s view, but she seems to understate how big a difference it makes to the whole worldview.
Does Zizian “debucketing” involve unihemspheric sleep?
She seems to think that her style of “parts work” practice is the same kind of thing that Ziz and Gwen were doing with “debucketing”, then says that she doesn’t do any weird unihempishpheric sleep stuff when she’s working with people, suggesting that reports of weird cult-like sleep deprivation practices are false or exaggerations. She says “it’s so goofy, it’s kind of woo, and unnecessarily cult ritual vibes”.
I strongly suspect Octavia’s parts work practice is not at all like the debucketing process that Ziz and Gwen used, and that Ziz and Gwen would not endorse the conflation between them. Trying to draw conclusions about the one based on the other is probably an apples to oranges comparison.
Furthermore, Ziz and Gwen were experimenting with “sleep tech”. That’s reported in the blog—even the interviewer points that out!
And in Punching Evil, Ziz writes “Humans are weak creatures; we spend third of our lives incapacitated. (Although, I stumbled into using unihemispheric sleep as a means of keeping restless watch while alone).”
She claims that JD Pressman made up the specific procedure for unihemispheric sleep in zizians.info, which I have no particular reason to doubt, but I don’t think it’s valid to claim that the Zizians didn’t do anything like that.
Is Ziz a Benthemite utilitarian?
She derides Zizians.info as a hit piece, but then says that she doesn’t disagree with any of the specific claims, she just dislikes the framing. Which is all the weirder, because at least some of it is wrong. According to my memory, Ziz explicitly stated in some comment that she’s not a Benthemite, and never said that she was, whereas Octavia thinks that [paraphrased] ’it’s a reductive simplification to call her a Benthemite”. It’s not a reductive simplification. It’s just false.
Overall, it seems to me that Octivia has her own take on Ziz’s philosophy, which is different in several crucial aspects, and that she is either confused about how much her take differ’s from those expressed by Ziz, or is (by my lights) underestimating how important those differences are.
I don’t think that bystanders should regard her as representing the views of Ziz or the others that are alleged to have been involved in various crimes.
Additionally, it’s suggestive to me that she offers that Youngblut and Bauckholt were wearing tactical gear because they’re autistic nerds who thought that it looked cool.
That hypothesis is inconsistent with other details about the situation—that they were carrying guns and that the wrapped their phones in aluminum foil (presumably to prevent government authorities from tracking them via their phones). Those details make it seem likely to me that they were attempting oppose or circumvent government authorities, either because they were planning to commit a crime, or because they were generally paranoid of being persecuted. The “maybe just wanted to look cool” hypothesis, in contrast, to suggests that Octavia is very much out of the loop regarding the activities of the hardcore criminal Zizians.
i think “actually most of your situations do not have that much subjunctive dependence” is pretty compelling personally
it’s not so much that most of the espoused decision theory is fundamentally incorrect but rather that subjunctive dependence is an empirical claim about how the world works, can be tested empirically, and seems insufficiently justified to me
however i think the obvious limitation of this kind of approach is that it has no model for ppl behaving incoherent ways except as a strategy for gaslighting ppl about how accountable you are for your actions. this is a real strategy ppl often do but is not the whole of it imo
this is implied by how, as soon as ppl are not oppressing you “strategically”, the game theory around escalation breaks. by doing the Ziz approach, you wind up walking into bullets that were not meant for you, or maybe anyone, and have exerted no power here or counterfactually
For reasons that maybe no normal person really understands, in an outcome that the theory’s inventors found very surprising, some people seem to be insane in a way that seizes very hard on a twisted version of this theory.
In a certain class of altered state,[1] a person’s awareness includes a wider part of their predictive world-model than usual. Rather than perceiving primarily the part of the self model which models themselves looking out into a world model, the normal gating mechanisms come apart and they perceive much more of their world-model directly (including being able to introspect on their brain’s copy of other people more vividly).
This world model includes other agents. Those models of other agents in their world model are now existing in an much less sandboxed environment. It viscerally feels like there is extremely strong entanglement between their actions and those of the agents that might be modelling them, because their model of the other agents is able to read their self-model and vice versa, and in that state they’re kinda running it right on the bare-metal models themselves. Additionally, people’s models of other people generally use themselves as a template. If they’re thinking a lot about threats and blackmail and similar, it’s easy for that to leak into expecting others are modelling this more than they are.
So their systems strongly predict that there is way more subjunctive dependence than is real, due to how the brain handles those kind of emergencies.[2]
Add in the thing where decision theory has counterintuitive suggestions and tries to operate kinda below the normal layer of decision process, plus people not being intuitively familiar with it, and yea, I can see why some people can get to weird places. Not reasonably predictable in advance, it’s a weird pitfall, but in retrospect fits.
Maybe it’s a good idea to write an explainer for this to try and mitigate this way people seem to be able to implode. I might talk to some people.
The schizophrenia/psychosis/psychedelics-like cluster, often caused by being in extreme psychological states like those caused by cults and extreme perceived thread, especially with reckless mind exploration thrown in the mix.
[epistemic status: very speculative] it seems plausible this is in part a feature evolution built for handling situations where you seem to be in extreme danger, taking a large chance of doing quite badly and damaging your epistemics or acting in wildly bad ways in order to try and get some chance of finding a path through whatever put you in that state by running a bunch of unsafe cognitive operations which might hit upon a way out of likely death. it sure seems like the common advice is things like “eat food”, “drink water”, “sleep at all”, “be around people who feel safe”, which feel like the kinds of things that would turn down those alarm bells. though also this could just be an entirely natural consequence of stress on a cognitive system
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.)
Major claims in the podcast that go against the way many people have been describing the situation:
It’s not a “cult” in the sense of demanding unquestioning obedience to an authority figure who enforces a dogma. (Though it fits other definitions of “cult” like “insular group with unusual beliefs”.) It’s a loose group of people who read each others’ blogs and argued with each other on the same Discord servers. Ziz isn’t in charge in any meaningful sense.
The group’s extreme actions aren’t primarily due to the esoteric beliefs that take 100 pages of jargon-filled blog posts to explain, but due to Taking Seriously things like radical veganism (“Everyone who isn’t vegan is complicit in the horrors of factory farming, and therefore evil.”) and left-anarchism (“The government’s authority is illegitimate, landlords are parasites, vigilante justice is cool and good.”)
Few people who take radical veganism and left-anarchism seriously either ever kill anyone, or are as weird as the Zizians, so that can’t be the primary explanation. Unless you set a bar for ‘take seriously’ that almost only they pass, but then, it seems relevant that (a) their actions have been grossly imprudent and predictably ineffective by any normal standard + (b) the charitable[1] explanations I’ve seen offered for why they’d do imprudent and ineffective things all involve their esoteric beliefs.
I do think ‘they take [uncommon, but not esoteric, moral views like veganism and anarchism] seriously’ shouldn’t be underrated as a factor, and modeling them without putting weight on it is wrong.
Violence by radical vegans and left-anarchists has historically not been extremely rare. Nothing in Zizians’ actions strike me as particularly different (in kind if not in competency) than, say, the Belle Époque illegalists like the Bonnot Gang, or the Years of Lead leftist groups like the Red Army Fraction or the Weather Underground.
due to Taking Seriously things like radical veganism
I take seriously radical animal-suffering-is-bad-ism[1], but we would only save a small portion of animals by trading ourselves off 1-for-1 against animal eaters, and just convincing one of them to go vegan would prevent at least as many torturous animal lives in expectation, while being legal. I think there must be additional causes, like the weird decision theory people have mentioned, although I think even that is insufficiently explanatory, as I explain near the end.
That said, taking animal suffering seriously does change the moral status of killing an average knowing animal-eater to something which is deontologically understandable, even if it’s still strategically very bad.
So while I don’t endorse the actions, I mostly feel empathy for Ophelia and the others and hope that they’ll be okay. Maybe it’s like how I’d feel empathy for an altruist who couldn’t handle living in this world and committed suicide, cause that’s also strategically bad and reckless.. but very understandable to me, as one who knows how alienating it can be.
I haven’t seen others on LW with this sentiment, maybe they’ve felt afraid to express it (as I do). In which they were alienated altruists who couldn’t handle this world and seemingly went a little insane (given the incorrect beliefs about decision theory). Most people struggle to stay dispassionately rational when faced with something which they regard as very morally bad. It is hard to live in a world one believes to contain atrocities.
It was once harder for me to live in this world too, but I adapted myself into a better consequentialist. That is a grueling and non-default thing to do; “There will soon be horror in front of you, young altruist, but you are not allowed to directly intervene, because if you do you will be arrested, and you won’t be able to stop others from doing the same horror. That’s right, there are many, many others doing the same horror, and you will often have to not voice objection to it while you plan how to make it stop in a lasting way.” That is not the kind of situation a standard human is capable of handling well.
Now combine this with the default human bias of ignoring things outside one’s own story (a standard example being suffering in another country); a decision theory that always says ‘escalate conflict’[2] cannot itself support escalating conflicts only with the ones around them in particular (a friend’s abusive parents, a cop stopping your car, a landlord[3]), instead of e.g. animal farming CEOs. Indeed, this kind of scope-sensitivity, when taken sufficiently seriously, generalizes to “do the altruistically best action, whatever it is, whether or not it looks like fighting back.”
I doubt that this is the full explanation. For example, I imagine they were aware of the concept of scope sensitivity and agreed with it. Maybe it plays a part, though, since being aware of biases doesn’t make you fully immune to them. I see no other explanation for this.
Given the purpose of this thread as sense-making, and that courage is listed as a virtue which it did take to post this, I hope this will be welcomed and help with sense-making.
(Disclaimer: I am not associated with the social cluster in question)
For a valid analogy between how bad this is in my morality and something that would be equally bad in a human-focused morality, you can imagine being born into a world with widespread human factory farms. Or the slaughter and slavery of human-like orcs, in case of this EY fiction.
Edit: SlimePriestess in the podcast says Ziz didn’t believe this, although she then says something about rebels being supposed to not surrender, I didn’t catch if it was a reductio or not (decision theory does not care what you value; if rebels don’t surrender, they either have plot armor, have chosen their battles smartly, or, alas, are acting recklessly)
Edit: This tumblr thread linked in a more recent comment says the original attack on the landlord was done in self-defense against a (successful) murder attempt
I take seriously radical animal-suffering-is-bad-ism[1], but we would only save a small portion of animals by trading ourselves off 1-for-1 against animal eaters, and just convincing one of them to go vegan would prevent at least as many torturous animal lives in expectation, while being legal.
That is a justification for not personally being Ziz. But obviously it would have cut no ice with Ziz. And why should it? An individual must choose whether to pursue peaceful or violent action, because if you are Taking the Ideas Seriously then either one will demand your whole life, and you can’t do everything. A movement, on the other hand, can divide its efforts, fighting on all fronts while maintaining a more or less plausible deniability of any connection between them. This is a common strategy. For example, Sinn Fein and the IRA, respectively the legal and illegal wings of one side of the conflict over Northern Ireland.
It doesn’t even have to be explicitly organised. Some will take the right-hand path and some the left anyway. And so here we are.
it would have cut no ice with Ziz. And why should it? An individual must choose whether to pursue peaceful or violent action
But this isn’t me arbitrarily choosing peacefulness, I’m saying that killing ~random people is ineffective, this argument should go through for anyone who cares about effectiveness.
I can see a version of your argument that’s limited to when peaceful actions are over-saturated enough that additional units of effort would be most effective when put into violent actions. I wouldn’t be surprised to see historical examples of this across movements. (Obviously this claim wouldn’t be particular to animal suffering reduction)
I can see a version of your argument that’s limited to when peaceful actions are over-saturated enough that additional units of effort would be most effective when put into violent actions.
Synergy is a thing. Multiple ways of opposing the enemy, deployed together, not sequentially: peaceful and violent, legal and illegal, public and covert, good cop and bad cop, club and open hand, talk peace and carry a big stick.
There are people who require multiple methods of persuasion before they act in the way you want. One category is decisionmakers for an organization, who have actually been persuaded by intimidation, but they can’t just say that, because they would look weak and possibly as though they’re defecting against the organization or its aims, so they need to sell it as some high-minded decision they’ve come to of their own accord. Or it could be the reverse: decisionmakers who are persuaded by your ideological arguments, but are funded / otherwise kept in charge by those who don’t care or have contempt for the ideology, so they need to sell it to their funders (presumably in private) as, “Hey, look, let’s be realistic here, if we do this then they’ll do that and we absolutely can’t afford that. But if we do this other thing, that won’t happen, and would it really be so bad? And we’ll tell the public that recent events have made us realize how important [...]”.
In both cases, it’s essential for you to have someone doing the intimidation and someone publicizing the high-minded arguments, and usually it works best if these are different people. (For example, if an intellectual who is respected by the mainstream (but only agreed with by a minority) starts making threats, that seems likely to lose them mainstream acceptance—such an ugly thing to be involved with, carrying out the threats even more so—and thus, for that reason among others, making the threats credible is more difficult than it would be for a thug who has nothing to lose.)
So, for those decisionmakers, if you have intimidation but not a public-friendly face (a book-publishing intellectual, an organization doing charity events, etc.), you get nothing, and if you have the friendly face but not intimidation, you also get nothing, but if you have both, then you win their support. It’s not a matter of “intimidation and friendliness each independently get diminishing marginal returns, and if you over-invest in one or even saturate it then that’s inefficient”; rather, you need both to have any success.
Incidentally, although violence was the subject above, I’ve used “intimidation”, which may be interpreted to also cover things like social shaming or threatening to arbitrarily cancel business deals. That makes the above patterns cover a lot of things done in recent years.
Another aspect: Frequently, the group doing the intimidation will claim it’s justified. One man’s threat of aggressive violence may be another man’s statement that he’ll act in self-defense or justified punishment, if they have different theories of rights, or perhaps disagreement about what happened.
The more mainstream-friendly group who is on their side… If they want to defend the behavior, then, depending on the circumstances, they have lots of options for their official position: the ideological, “It’s justified” or “It’s an overreaction but you do have to understand where they’re coming from”; the conversation-tactical, “Hey, look over there! Something more important is happening” or “Anyone who complains about this has contemptible traits XYZ and should be attacked”; the associational, “It wasn’t our people”, or even “It was a false flag”; the evidentiary, “It’s not as bad as they claim”, occasionally even “It didn’t happen”; and so on. (Any of these stances might have been chosen honestly, and might be correct, but, especially for the most sophisticated and the most ideological, one’s priors should be skeptical. Sometimes “Bounded Distrust” is applicable; it can be interesting to think through “If they could have taken and defended stance A, they probably would have, so the fact that they picked stance B tells me …”.)
Not that I have particularly clear evidence about the inner workings of the sphere here, but, what’s your reasoning for thinking:
It’s a loose group of people who read each others’ blogs and argued with each other on the same Discord servers. Ziz isn’t in charge in any meaningful sense.
To be clear these are just patterns of claims made by Slimepriestess in the linked podcast, and I have no corroborating evidence. But for example at 2:06:00 in the video she says:
At least as far as, like, Ziz et al goes, I don’t think that’s a remotely accurate description of… Like, there’s no organization, there’s no centralization, it’s not like we have Ziz on, on speed dial and ask her what to do every day. Like, we’re just a bunch of anarchist trans leftists that are, like, trying to exist in Current Year
With other variations of the same claims elsewhere in the video.
I know you’re not endorsing the quoted claim, but just to make this extra explicit: running terrorist organizations is illegal, so this is the type of thing you would also say if Ziz was leading a terrorist organization, and you didn’t want to see her arrested.
Oh, I see, one could reasonably misinterpret the bullet points in my original comment as being about “the way many people have been describing the situation” rather than “major claims in the podcast”. Sorry for the ambiguity.
Here’s a podcast with @Slimepriestess on the whole affair. I’m not particularly involved in any of this, and had some violent disagreements with things said in the podcast[1], but found it informative on the whole. Listen with a critical ear.
E.g. that the right thing to do wrt to people in the Ziz-egregome is to talk to them—if there is a social scene near yours where people start dropping like flies then it’s good & wise to say “I will leave and not interact with those people, leaving them alone.” Put on your own mask first. (Also the claim that Ziz “did the math” with relation to making decisions using FDT-ish theories—which IIUC isn’t possible because (1) FDT-ish theories aren’t fully formalized yet and (2) the formalized parts are extremely computationally demanding to execute.) Plus a smattering of other things.
I think that Octavia is confused / mistaken about a number of points here, such that her testimony seems likely to be misleading to people without much context.
[I could find citations for many of my claims here, but I’m going to write and post this fast, mostly without the links, for the time being. I am largely going off of my memory of blog post comments that I read months to years ago, and my memory is fallible. I’ll try to accurately represent my epistemic status inline. If anyone knows the links that I’m referring to, feel free to put them in the comments. Same if you think that I’m misremembering something.
To Octavia, if I’ve gotten any of the following wrong, I encourage you to correct it. I apologize for any rudeness. I’m speaking somewhat more bluntly here than I often would, because it seems more important than usual to help people get clear models of the situation, urgently.]
Octavia is not a Zizian in the relevant sense
Most importantly, I think she is mistaken about whether or not she is “a Zizian”.
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. [1]
Because she claims to be a Zizian, one might reasonably expect that she’s an authority on what Zizians believe or do. Insofar as people are interested in what the members of the criminal conspiracy believe, I currently think that she is not much of an authority. (Though again, I don’t know what kind of contact she’s had with who, and maybe they’re closer than I know.)
I don’t know, but I would guess that Octavia has either not spoken to Ziz at all since Ziz faked her death in 2022, or that the two have minimally conversed. (Octavia obviously has more info about this than I do, and is welcome to correct me.)
Based on comments that I saw on Sinceriously.fyi, when it was up, I guess that Ziz does not endorse Octavia’s take on her philosophy, or regard Octavia as a member of her Vegan Sith crew (though I may be misremembering, and their relationship may have changed since the blog was taken down).
Octavia gets a lot wrong about what Ziz wrote
Furthermore, Octavia says a number of things that are, by my memory, either outright contradicted by the text of sinceriously.fyi, or seem to me to be importantly mistaken misreadings.
For instance,
Does Ziz think that core values can change?
Octavia mostly seems to miss the point of Ziz’s arguments that core values are immutable. She says that Ziz never stated explicitly that core values don’t change (and that JD tries to heavily imply this without justification), or that Ziz is only making a technical point that if you choose good than that means you were good all along. (Although a few minutes later she does agree that core is “the aspect of yourself that doesn’t change, and if you can change it’s not the core”, so I’m not totally sure what she’s saying and maybe I’m just misunderstanding her.)
Ziz does say in the first line of Choices Made Long Ago, “I don’t know how mutable core values are. My best guess is, hardly mutable at all or at least hardly mutable predictably.” and goes on to elucidate why apparent changes in values are actually not that.
Additionally, in her glossary, Ziz defines core: “Core is something in the mind that has infinite energy. Contains terminal values you would sacrifice all else for, and then do it again infinity times with no regret. Seems approximately unchanging across lifespan. Figuratively, the deepest frame in the call stack of the mind, capable of aborting any train of thought, everything the mind does is because it decided for it to happen.”
I don’t think it’s correct to say that Ziz never explicitly said that core values couldn’t change.
(Furthermore, Octavia states in the interview that Ziz sometimes dares the reader to stop being evil. At the end of Choices Made Long Ago, Ziz says “If you
have donedo lamentable things for bad reasons (not earnestly misguided reasons), and are despairing of being able to change, then either embrace your true values, the ones that mean you’re choosing not to change them, or disbelieve.” This is just about the opposite of daring the reader to stop being evil. It’s more like daring the reader, who’s done bad things and is horrified by that, to stop rationalizing and just admit that they’re actually evil.)This is an extremely key piece of Ziz’s moral philosophy. According to my understanding, Ziz and co. feel justified in taking violent action against most people, not just because they happen to do bad things (but could be redeemed), but because they have fundamentally evil values. The Zizians sidestep a bunch of conventional ethical dilemmas, because in their view, almost everyone is an irredeemable moral monster, that not just kills and eats animals, but ultimately desires the destruction of the multiverse.
I’ve also seen Octavia post elsewhere that if you’re evil you can just choose to not to be evil anymore (and change your actions). I believe she’s aware that this a deviation from Ziz’s view, but she seems to understate how big a difference it makes to the whole worldview.
Does Zizian “debucketing” involve unihemspheric sleep?
She seems to think that her style of “parts work” practice is the same kind of thing that Ziz and Gwen were doing with “debucketing”, then says that she doesn’t do any weird unihempishpheric sleep stuff when she’s working with people, suggesting that reports of weird cult-like sleep deprivation practices are false or exaggerations. She says “it’s so goofy, it’s kind of woo, and unnecessarily cult ritual vibes”.
I strongly suspect Octavia’s parts work practice is not at all like the debucketing process that Ziz and Gwen used, and that Ziz and Gwen would not endorse the conflation between them. Trying to draw conclusions about the one based on the other is probably an apples to oranges comparison.
Furthermore, Ziz and Gwen were experimenting with “sleep tech”. That’s reported in the blog—even the interviewer points that out!
And in Punching Evil, Ziz writes “Humans are weak creatures; we spend third of our lives incapacitated. (Although, I stumbled into using unihemispheric sleep as a means of keeping restless watch while alone).”
She claims that JD Pressman made up the specific procedure for unihemispheric sleep in zizians.info, which I have no particular reason to doubt, but I don’t think it’s valid to claim that the Zizians didn’t do anything like that.
Is Ziz a Benthemite utilitarian?
She derides Zizians.info as a hit piece, but then says that she doesn’t disagree with any of the specific claims, she just dislikes the framing. Which is all the weirder, because at least some of it is wrong. According to my memory, Ziz explicitly stated in some comment that she’s not a Benthemite, and never said that she was, whereas Octavia thinks that [paraphrased] ’it’s a reductive simplification to call her a Benthemite”. It’s not a reductive simplification. It’s just false.
Overall, it seems to me that Octivia has her own take on Ziz’s philosophy, which is different in several crucial aspects, and that she is either confused about how much her take differ’s from those expressed by Ziz, or is (by my lights) underestimating how important those differences are.
I don’t think that bystanders should regard her as representing the views of Ziz or the others that are alleged to have been involved in various crimes.
Additionally, it’s suggestive to me that she offers that Youngblut and Bauckholt were wearing tactical gear because they’re autistic nerds who thought that it looked cool.
That hypothesis is inconsistent with other details about the situation—that they were carrying guns and that the wrapped their phones in aluminum foil (presumably to prevent government authorities from tracking them via their phones). Those details make it seem likely to me that they were attempting oppose or circumvent government authorities, either because they were planning to commit a crime, or because they were generally paranoid of being persecuted. The “maybe just wanted to look cool” hypothesis, in contrast, to suggests that Octavia is very much out of the loop regarding the activities of the hardcore criminal Zizians.
IMO Eliezer correctly identifies a crucial thing Ziz got wrong about decision theory:
also:
and:
Oh… huh. @Eliezer Yudkowsky, I think I figured it out.
In a certain class of altered state,[1] a person’s awareness includes a wider part of their predictive world-model than usual. Rather than perceiving primarily the part of the self model which models themselves looking out into a world model, the normal gating mechanisms come apart and they perceive much more of their world-model directly (including being able to introspect on their brain’s copy of other people more vividly).
This world model includes other agents. Those models of other agents in their world model are now existing in an much less sandboxed environment. It viscerally feels like there is extremely strong entanglement between their actions and those of the agents that might be modelling them, because their model of the other agents is able to read their self-model and vice versa, and in that state they’re kinda running it right on the bare-metal models themselves. Additionally, people’s models of other people generally use themselves as a template. If they’re thinking a lot about threats and blackmail and similar, it’s easy for that to leak into expecting others are modelling this more than they are.
So their systems strongly predict that there is way more subjunctive dependence than is real, due to how the brain handles those kind of emergencies.[2]
Add in the thing where decision theory has counterintuitive suggestions and tries to operate kinda below the normal layer of decision process, plus people not being intuitively familiar with it, and yea, I can see why some people can get to weird places. Not reasonably predictable in advance, it’s a weird pitfall, but in retrospect fits.
Maybe it’s a good idea to write an explainer for this to try and mitigate this way people seem to be able to implode. I might talk to some people.
The schizophrenia/psychosis/psychedelics-like cluster, often caused by being in extreme psychological states like those caused by cults and extreme perceived thread, especially with reckless mind exploration thrown in the mix.
[epistemic status: very speculative] it seems plausible this is in part a feature evolution built for handling situations where you seem to be in extreme danger, taking a large chance of doing quite badly and damaging your epistemics or acting in wildly bad ways in order to try and get some chance of finding a path through whatever put you in that state by running a bunch of unsafe cognitive operations which might hit upon a way out of likely death. it sure seems like the common advice is things like “eat food”, “drink water”, “sleep at all”, “be around people who feel safe”, which feel like the kinds of things that would turn down those alarm bells. though also this could just be an entirely natural consequence of stress on a cognitive system
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.)
The same interviewer has now done two more podcasts on Ziz.
With Adrusi:
With @jessicata:
Edit: Another one with toasterlighting/Celene Nightengale. This one is mostly about Audere, the alleged murderer of the landlord.
Major claims in the podcast that go against the way many people have been describing the situation:
It’s not a “cult” in the sense of demanding unquestioning obedience to an authority figure who enforces a dogma. (Though it fits other definitions of “cult” like “insular group with unusual beliefs”.) It’s a loose group of people who read each others’ blogs and argued with each other on the same Discord servers. Ziz isn’t in charge in any meaningful sense.
The group’s extreme actions aren’t primarily due to the esoteric beliefs that take 100 pages of jargon-filled blog posts to explain, but due to Taking Seriously things like radical veganism (“Everyone who isn’t vegan is complicit in the horrors of factory farming, and therefore evil.”) and left-anarchism (“The government’s authority is illegitimate, landlords are parasites, vigilante justice is cool and good.”)
Few people who take radical veganism and left-anarchism seriously either ever kill anyone, or are as weird as the Zizians, so that can’t be the primary explanation. Unless you set a bar for ‘take seriously’ that almost only they pass, but then, it seems relevant that (a) their actions have been grossly imprudent and predictably ineffective by any normal standard + (b) the charitable[1] explanations I’ve seen offered for why they’d do imprudent and ineffective things all involve their esoteric beliefs.
I do think ‘they take [uncommon, but not esoteric, moral views like veganism and anarchism] seriously’ shouldn’t be underrated as a factor, and modeling them without putting weight on it is wrong.
to their rationality, not necessarily their ethics
Violence by radical vegans and left-anarchists has historically not been extremely rare. Nothing in Zizians’ actions strike me as particularly different (in kind if not in competency) than, say, the Belle Époque illegalists like the Bonnot Gang, or the Years of Lead leftist groups like the Red Army Fraction or the Weather Underground.
I take seriously radical animal-suffering-is-bad-ism[1], but we would only save a small portion of animals by trading ourselves off 1-for-1 against animal eaters, and just convincing one of them to go vegan would prevent at least as many torturous animal lives in expectation, while being legal. I think there must be additional causes, like the weird decision theory people have mentioned, although I think even that is insufficiently explanatory, as I explain near the end.
That said, taking animal suffering seriously does change the moral status of killing an average knowing animal-eater to something which is deontologically understandable, even if it’s still strategically very bad.
So while I don’t endorse the actions, I mostly feel empathy for Ophelia and the others and hope that they’ll be okay. Maybe it’s like how I’d feel empathy for an altruist who couldn’t handle living in this world and committed suicide, cause that’s also strategically bad and reckless.. but very understandable to me, as one who knows how alienating it can be.
I haven’t seen others on LW with this sentiment, maybe they’ve felt afraid to express it (as I do). In which they were alienated altruists who couldn’t handle this world and seemingly went a little insane (given the incorrect beliefs about decision theory). Most people struggle to stay dispassionately rational when faced with something which they regard as very morally bad. It is hard to live in a world one believes to contain atrocities.
It was once harder for me to live in this world too, but I adapted myself into a better consequentialist. That is a grueling and non-default thing to do; “There will soon be horror in front of you, young altruist, but you are not allowed to directly intervene, because if you do you will be arrested, and you won’t be able to stop others from doing the same horror. That’s right, there are many, many others doing the same horror, and you will often have to not voice objection to it while you plan how to make it stop in a lasting way.” That is not the kind of situation a standard human is capable of handling well.
Now combine this with the default human bias of ignoring things outside one’s own story (a standard example being suffering in another country); a decision theory that always says ‘escalate conflict’[2] cannot itself support escalating conflicts only with the ones around them in particular (a friend’s abusive parents, a cop stopping your car, a landlord[3]), instead of e.g. animal farming CEOs. Indeed, this kind of scope-sensitivity, when taken sufficiently seriously, generalizes to “do the altruistically best action, whatever it is, whether or not it looks like fighting back.”
I doubt that this is the full explanation. For example, I imagine they were aware of the concept of scope sensitivity and agreed with it. Maybe it plays a part, though, since being aware of biases doesn’t make you fully immune to them. I see no other explanation for this.
Given the purpose of this thread as sense-making, and that courage is listed as a virtue which it did take to post this, I hope this will be welcomed and help with sense-making.
(Disclaimer: I am not associated with the social cluster in question)
For a valid analogy between how bad this is in my morality and something that would be equally bad in a human-focused morality, you can imagine being born into a world with widespread human factory farms. Or the slaughter and slavery of human-like orcs, in case of this EY fiction.
Edit: SlimePriestess in the podcast says Ziz didn’t believe this, although she then says something about rebels being supposed to not surrender, I didn’t catch if it was a reductio or not (decision theory does not care what you value; if rebels don’t surrender, they either have plot armor, have chosen their battles smartly, or, alas, are acting recklessly)
Edit: This tumblr thread linked in a more recent comment says the original attack on the landlord was done in self-defense against a (successful) murder attempt
That is a justification for not personally being Ziz. But obviously it would have cut no ice with Ziz. And why should it? An individual must choose whether to pursue peaceful or violent action, because if you are Taking the Ideas Seriously then either one will demand your whole life, and you can’t do everything. A movement, on the other hand, can divide its efforts, fighting on all fronts while maintaining a more or less plausible deniability of any connection between them. This is a common strategy. For example, Sinn Fein and the IRA, respectively the legal and illegal wings of one side of the conflict over Northern Ireland.
It doesn’t even have to be explicitly organised. Some will take the right-hand path and some the left anyway. And so here we are.
But this isn’t me arbitrarily choosing peacefulness, I’m saying that killing ~random people is ineffective, this argument should go through for anyone who cares about effectiveness.
I can see a version of your argument that’s limited to when peaceful actions are over-saturated enough that additional units of effort would be most effective when put into violent actions. I wouldn’t be surprised to see historical examples of this across movements. (Obviously this claim wouldn’t be particular to animal suffering reduction)
Synergy is a thing. Multiple ways of opposing the enemy, deployed together, not sequentially: peaceful and violent, legal and illegal, public and covert, good cop and bad cop, club and open hand, talk peace and carry a big stick.
@Friendly Monkey , I’m replying to your reaction:
There are people who require multiple methods of persuasion before they act in the way you want. One category is decisionmakers for an organization, who have actually been persuaded by intimidation, but they can’t just say that, because they would look weak and possibly as though they’re defecting against the organization or its aims, so they need to sell it as some high-minded decision they’ve come to of their own accord. Or it could be the reverse: decisionmakers who are persuaded by your ideological arguments, but are funded / otherwise kept in charge by those who don’t care or have contempt for the ideology, so they need to sell it to their funders (presumably in private) as, “Hey, look, let’s be realistic here, if we do this then they’ll do that and we absolutely can’t afford that. But if we do this other thing, that won’t happen, and would it really be so bad? And we’ll tell the public that recent events have made us realize how important [...]”.
In both cases, it’s essential for you to have someone doing the intimidation and someone publicizing the high-minded arguments, and usually it works best if these are different people. (For example, if an intellectual who is respected by the mainstream (but only agreed with by a minority) starts making threats, that seems likely to lose them mainstream acceptance—such an ugly thing to be involved with, carrying out the threats even more so—and thus, for that reason among others, making the threats credible is more difficult than it would be for a thug who has nothing to lose.)
So, for those decisionmakers, if you have intimidation but not a public-friendly face (a book-publishing intellectual, an organization doing charity events, etc.), you get nothing, and if you have the friendly face but not intimidation, you also get nothing, but if you have both, then you win their support. It’s not a matter of “intimidation and friendliness each independently get diminishing marginal returns, and if you over-invest in one or even saturate it then that’s inefficient”; rather, you need both to have any success.
Incidentally, although violence was the subject above, I’ve used “intimidation”, which may be interpreted to also cover things like social shaming or threatening to arbitrarily cancel business deals. That makes the above patterns cover a lot of things done in recent years.
Another aspect: Frequently, the group doing the intimidation will claim it’s justified. One man’s threat of aggressive violence may be another man’s statement that he’ll act in self-defense or justified punishment, if they have different theories of rights, or perhaps disagreement about what happened.
The more mainstream-friendly group who is on their side… If they want to defend the behavior, then, depending on the circumstances, they have lots of options for their official position: the ideological, “It’s justified” or “It’s an overreaction but you do have to understand where they’re coming from”; the conversation-tactical, “Hey, look over there! Something more important is happening” or “Anyone who complains about this has contemptible traits XYZ and should be attacked”; the associational, “It wasn’t our people”, or even “It was a false flag”; the evidentiary, “It’s not as bad as they claim”, occasionally even “It didn’t happen”; and so on. (Any of these stances might have been chosen honestly, and might be correct, but, especially for the most sophisticated and the most ideological, one’s priors should be skeptical. Sometimes “Bounded Distrust” is applicable; it can be interesting to think through “If they could have taken and defended stance A, they probably would have, so the fact that they picked stance B tells me …”.)
Which other people have described the situation otherwise and where? Genuine question, I’m pretty much learning about all of this here.
Not that I have particularly clear evidence about the inner workings of the sphere here, but, what’s your reasoning for thinking:
To be clear these are just patterns of claims made by Slimepriestess in the linked podcast, and I have no corroborating evidence. But for example at 2:06:00 in the video she says:
With other variations of the same claims elsewhere in the video.
I know you’re not endorsing the quoted claim, but just to make this extra explicit: running terrorist organizations is illegal, so this is the type of thing you would also say if Ziz was leading a terrorist organization, and you didn’t want to see her arrested.
Oh, I maybe flipped the sign on what you meant to be saying.
Oh, I see, one could reasonably misinterpret the bullet points in my original comment as being about “the way many people have been describing the situation” rather than “major claims in the podcast”. Sorry for the ambiguity.