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.
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.