Do you have any indication that Pasek was trans before they spoke with Ziz?
Pasek couch-surfed at my place for a few days around a LessWrong Community weekend he attended and we had deep conversations then. I think that was 1-2 years before he got into contact with Ziz.
At that time he was using heavy optimization pressure on himself. In my memory, he had some logging where he wrote something every hour to measure his productivity. He was also heavily into timeless decision theory-based utilitarian consequentialism at that time.
I’d buy it that there was an internal conflict at the time. I believe that process that Ziz proposed took that internal conflict and create the Shine and Maia personalities out of them.
If a person is putting an extraordinary amount of effort into being nice (which is what Gordon Seidoh Worley observed) there’s likely an internal conflict. What Ziz is doing allows transforming that internal conflict into two parts, one that’s very nice and one that’s opposed to being nice.
This is a very common EA brainworm to have and I know lots of EAs who have folded themselves into pretzels around this sort of internal friction.
Usually, people who do that have a lot of akrasia. Pasek is different in that they managed not to have that. Most people would be blocked by internal friction from doing the kind of productivity optimization that Pasek did.
I think that Pasek was smart enough to know that it’s good to give the part of him that “i am a creature that exists in a body. I have needs and desires and want to be happy and feel safe” things to satisfy it. That part wanted to be happy, so they did some body work intervention to feel happy (and wrote on the blog that someone that didn’t solve the issue and that people aren’t really seeking happiness). That part wanted that they identified themselves publically as Maia, so they did that. That part wanted to transition, so they took hormones.
The only “exit” that could get them out of their sense of horrifying heroic responsibility was by dying so Shine found a “decision theoretic justification” to kill them and did.
Shine did find a justification. The way they committed suicide however was not done in a way that sounds like TDT was involved. They could have written an actual suicide note to the people that cared about them and send it the day they died but they didn’t.
Random fact: I just assumed Pasek was trans, based on some vague writing style / username, and then one day met with them on Google Hangouts to discuss some AI stuff, and they brought up that just yesterday they had decided/realized they were female. I brought up “uh, oh, I had just kinda assumed you were a trans woman this whole time” and they said “well, bayes points to you I guess”.
I separately knew Ziz but I think didn’t know there was a connection there at the time.
and then one day met with them on Google Hangouts to discuss some AI stuff they had decided/realized they were female
Do you know when that was?
According to Ziz the connection in the beginning used to be that they exchanged emails. From speaking to one of Pasek’s roommates about his death, there was zero mention of Ziz so I don’t think Pasek talked to other people about his connection to Ziz.
According to Ziz’s timeline her first contact with Pazek was after Pasek commented on her blog in Dezember 2017.
Looking through messages from Pazek for his writing style, there’s a certain kind of positivity in their writing style.
He wrote Ziz at the time You say all the right things! I cannot marry you right now but let’s be best friends forever. In June 2016 Pasek wrote me “I’ve recently been doing a little project in which I talk with random LW users on Skype. (This has turned out to be a lot of fun!) So if you feel like it and have the time—please let me know and we an arrange to talk sometime.”, so that behavior seems to be older.
This is an untypical style of communicating and there are likely some transwomen who choose that style to signal their feminity.
Pasek didn’t adopt it for that signaling purpose. At the same time factors that pointed toward trans might also made that communication style attractive to him. Another explanation for him communicating like that is that it’s what he learned to fit-in in Japan where a lot of politeness is called for. His conscious analysis also likely pointed into the direction of this style being useful for connecting with people.
Do you have any indication that Pasek was trans before they spoke with Ziz?
Pasek couch-surfed at my place for a few days around a LessWrong Community weekend he attended and we had deep conversations then. I think that was 1-2 years before he got into contact with Ziz.
At that time he was using heavy optimization pressure on himself. In my memory, he had some logging where he wrote something every hour to measure his productivity. He was also heavily into timeless decision theory-based utilitarian consequentialism at that time.
I’d buy it that there was an internal conflict at the time. I believe that process that Ziz proposed took that internal conflict and create the Shine and Maia personalities out of them.
If a person is putting an extraordinary amount of effort into being nice (which is what Gordon Seidoh Worley observed) there’s likely an internal conflict. What Ziz is doing allows transforming that internal conflict into two parts, one that’s very nice and one that’s opposed to being nice.
Usually, people who do that have a lot of akrasia. Pasek is different in that they managed not to have that. Most people would be blocked by internal friction from doing the kind of productivity optimization that Pasek did.
I think that Pasek was smart enough to know that it’s good to give the part of him that “i am a creature that exists in a body. I have needs and desires and want to be happy and feel safe” things to satisfy it. That part wanted to be happy, so they did some body work intervention to feel happy (and wrote on the blog that someone that didn’t solve the issue and that people aren’t really seeking happiness). That part wanted that they identified themselves publically as Maia, so they did that. That part wanted to transition, so they took hormones.
Shine did find a justification. The way they committed suicide however was not done in a way that sounds like TDT was involved. They could have written an actual suicide note to the people that cared about them and send it the day they died but they didn’t.
Random fact: I just assumed Pasek was trans, based on some vague writing style / username, and then one day met with them on Google Hangouts to discuss some AI stuff, and they brought up that just yesterday they had decided/realized they were female. I brought up “uh, oh, I had just kinda assumed you were a trans woman this whole time” and they said “well, bayes points to you I guess”.
I separately knew Ziz but I think didn’t know there was a connection there at the time.
Do you know when that was?
According to Ziz the connection in the beginning used to be that they exchanged emails. From speaking to one of Pasek’s roommates about his death, there was zero mention of Ziz so I don’t think Pasek talked to other people about his connection to Ziz.
Early 2018
According to Ziz’s timeline her first contact with Pazek was after Pasek commented on her blog in Dezember 2017.
Looking through messages from Pazek for his writing style, there’s a certain kind of positivity in their writing style.
He wrote Ziz at the time You say all the right things! I cannot marry you right now but let’s be best friends forever. In June 2016 Pasek wrote me “I’ve recently been doing a little project in which I talk with random LW users on Skype. (This has turned out to be a lot of fun!) So if you feel like it and have the time—please let me know and we an arrange to talk sometime.”, so that behavior seems to be older.
This is an untypical style of communicating and there are likely some transwomen who choose that style to signal their feminity.
Pasek didn’t adopt it for that signaling purpose. At the same time factors that pointed toward trans might also made that communication style attractive to him. Another explanation for him communicating like that is that it’s what he learned to fit-in in Japan where a lot of politeness is called for. His conscious analysis also likely pointed into the direction of this style being useful for connecting with people.