(Re)introduction of a rationalist dragon, and clarifications on Ziz’s character
Hello.
This is both a (re)introduction post and an attempt to tell the story of my interaction with Ziz in a way that I hope will clarify matters and mend some bridges.
I’m Gwen Danielson, a neuroscientist and bioengineer, who decided as a child that I would end Death (and bring people back if I could) and that I would become a dragon and help generally facilitate a fantastical transhumanist future.
I pivoted in 2014 to AGI development, then to AI safety research. I was briefly active in the Bay area rationality community in late 2016 and early 2017, then co-founded a housing startup with boats (named Rationalist Fleet) intended to free up a lot of rationalist brain-power away from corporate jobs so there would be more work on AI safety. In 2019, I shut the project down, in favor of open designs for custom RVs.
Late in that year I and my co-founder Ziz, along with a couple other rationalists, attempted to do a peaceful but annoying protest at the CFAR alumni reunion where I planned to give a series of talks about mental tech, about how to build off-grid RVs designed to support intellectual work, some things I had learned about psychology, some things that troubled me about the community, and how the community could pivot to improve AI outcomes.
We were immediately SWATted with a false report of a firearm, and then subject to what is hard for me to describe but I could call mobbing, discrediting, gaslighting, harassment, death threats. It was an incredible source of trauma, and deeply shook my faith in humanity, especially the rationalist community. I attempted to document it a few months later in this post.
I stayed in contact with Ziz and the other two who had joined us (Emma and Somni) for a couple years, while largely retreating from the internet, then I parted ways with all of them in March 2022, moved across the country, found a very caring community to which I’m deeply thankful, and spent the next few years focused on personal healing, thinking deeply about philosophy, and returning to threads of my alignment research that I had been neglecting for years due to the hectic conditions.
In terms of mental health and psychology, I’m doing more or less better than I ever have. And my research has advanced well, by my subjective evaluation.
After I parted ways, Emma and Somni and a few people that later affiliated with them did some horrible things, and Ziz has gotten a lot of the blame in the press, and I’ve caught a few strays in the process from people who don’t know I parted ways.
For a few years, I was lying low and taking what precautions I needed to to protect myself from the death threats I had received. Early last year, when the author of the threat I took most seriously (Jamie Zajko) ended up in jail, I quietly returned to the Bay and have been dealing with the old legal headache that followed the peaceful protest at the alumni reunion.
I haven’t had contact with Ziz, Emma, Somni, et al since March 2022. Or at least, I’ve gotten no response to my attempts to reach out. Most of the people involved in the events that made the news, I never knew on a personal level, they seem to have become involved after I left.
My social trauma was the slowest thing to heal. These last six months or so, I have started talking again in some rationalist discussion groups, and had some great discussions where ideas that I find exciting were taken well, and I’ve started to feel a bit more comfortable with the prospect of returning to the community more generally.
I very desperately want this world to live on. I think I have important things to contribute to that effort. I am sad that I was basically ineffective from 2018 through 2022. But I’m here now, and I hope that I’m not too late.
I’m seeking employment or volunteer work in the field, or I may publish independently. My ideas do little good remaining only in my own head.
I need to address the elephant in the room. My old friend and Rationalist Fleet co-founder Ziz has been on the receiving end of possibly the worst press a person could realistically receive. While there are a few concrete events floating around in that press, a lot of it is speculation, and some people have incorrectly dragged me into it. I think Ziz is being maligned far more than she should be, though I have little comment on anyone else. So I’d like to explain some things the community and the press have been ignorant of.
(This post is not centrally how I wish to be seen/understood, but it is something that must be said before I can talk about the things that I care about.)
Outline
How we met
After the reunion
How I healed
On Ziz’s character
A couple more clarifications
My Case Study: CFAR post
On my philosophical divergence
How this came about
My vision
How we met
I came to the Bay area rationalist community in 2016 and met Ziz at Berkeley Less Wrong meetups. I was living on a sailboat I had bought as an attempted clever plan for inexpensive housing.
We discussed the ideas that later became the early posts on her blog, what I might call the Fusion sequence, about internal cohesion and self-trust. This sequence was partially a continuation of CFAR’s ideals as well as rebuttal to the self-extortion mindset that was common in the community at the time, that gave rise to things like Beeminder.
In January 2017, she offered to pay my docking expenses if she could stay on the boat with me, and I agreed. A couple months later, after I had some conversations with Eric Bruylant about the AI safety accelerator project he was part of, we had the idea to create a small fleet of boats as a low-cost housing project for people working on AI safety and in effective altruism.
Ziz has always had a tendency to express her ideas through metaphors in fiction that are familiar to her. We spoke at length about Contessa and Doctor Mother from Worm; the Wardens from World of Warcraft; Frisk, Sans, and especially Undyne from Undertale; Tassadar from Starcraft; Harry and Dumbledore from HPMOR; Iji.
But a frequent topic was the light side sith from Star Wars (in the pre-Disney canon). They were an avenue for her to express the fusion of the altruistic motive of the jedi with the passion and power-seeking of the sith. They were, for her, an expression of the idea that truly meaningful altruism comes from the heart rather than from societal pressure, and that it is not strengthened by self-restraint—an extension of the idea that “power reveals” and magnifies what a person already is. For many people, power reveals motives like Vader’s or Sidius’, but sometimes it reveals compassionate motive.
She also introduced me to the Gervais Principle sequence by Venkatesh Rao of Ribbonfarm, which expresses cynicism about institutions, and argues that it’s necessary when interacting with institutions to have a sensitivity to a kind of abject dynamic of power through strength. This led both of us to adopt a ‘Karen’-like set of methods with ordinary institutions, although we remained committed to earnest principle within the broader effective altruist community.
I’m getting ahead of myself, but I do today see flaws in these starting ideas. Even though, Ziz before the alumni reunion was committed to finding ways to cooperate with those to whom she applied her cynicism.
After the reunion
Jumping ahead, in 2020 and 2021 I was still living with Ziz, and with Somni and Emma who had moved in together with us. I kind of psychologically deteriorated, and largely withdrew from the internet and from anything other than fixing myself or building my RV.
I was deeply traumatized by how several members of the rationality community treated me/us following the reunion, as well as by the sexual assault and torture I experienced at the hands of the police (which I have described elsewhere and filed a lawsuit about). Among other things, I developed a stutter, for the only time in my life, and for a while struggled to speak. It was a years long process for me to rebuild the ability to trust anyone again.
In March 2022, I parted ways, due to a combination of mental collapse and a relational falling out. I ended up homeless for a while, then moved across the country to a place I had no connections, and encountered very kind people who helped me heal, to whom I am deeply thankful.
There have been some reports that I faked my suicide, but that’s not true. I was considering suicide, and I never said anything contrary to that. I never reported anything, I just left a note for Ziz and left on foot and had a very bad time for a while. If I had committed suicide, the purpose would have been to contain the harm I might cause, as in my deteriorated state I was not much good at doing good despite my deepest wishes. Instead I identified, then walked, a path to heal myself without causing harm.
I got a job in the trades to support myself. I focused on psychological healing and revisiting and reevaluating cached philosophy from all stages of my life, and ended up healing quite rapidly. I had many long conversations with a new friend about philosophy, and I started talk with a not-formally-a-therapist. I am now, in most ways, doing better psychologically than I ever have before. My mind works better than it ever has before.
To the few who actually understand my hemi theory (which still has not been published), both of my hemis are in great health, and we function well as a fused unit, something which had not been the case from 2018 until 2023.
I was afraid to return to the case in Sonoma because of the death threats I had received. The one that scared me the most was anonymous, but later Jamie Zajko admitted to having sent it. When I left, that was still the state of affairs, and I took precautions for years to protect myself from Zajko. The moment Zajko was in custody, I returned to Sonoma and have been setting my affairs straight this last year. It has been reduced to a misdemeanor and the worst two charges were found to have no basis even worth bringing to trial. I just pled ‘No Contest’ to trespassing, conspiracy, wearing a mask, and resisting arrest. I regret my actions, but I continue to maintain that I did not break the law. This just ended up being an acceptable resolution of the case that has taken up half of my adult life.
So, I have already been settling my outstanding affairs in what society considers the right way. With regards to the cases involving Ziz and the others in her circle, I don’t have anything to offer law enforcement, because I had no contact with anyone involved after March 2022, and I was living in a different part of the country doing my own thing. Nothing that happened was planned by my knowledge.
How I healed
When I parted ways with Ziz in March 2022, I was, I think, in a similar philosophical position to Ziz: majority but not total belief in a severely cynical model of the human spirit, though with caution around acting on it completely.
When I moved across the country, I ended up in a small town of kind, good-hearted people. At first I was hiding my extreme distrust of nonvegans for my own survival. But again and again people treated me with substantial degrees of kindness that I couldn’t trace back to a cynical selfish explanation—despite being people who ate meat. Kind in ways that I never saw in the Bay area, or growing up (that I can remember). This confused me, as it conflicted with my models, and I had to halt and reevaluate and reformulate new models that took the new evidence into account. I was also pondering neoplatonist philosophy at the time, by way of Mage the Ascension, and the mystic-optimism and unity of creation that expresses also influenced me.
Early 2022 was a psychological nadir for me, that I barely survived. The other major thing that caused me to update my model was watching my right hemisphere heal over the course of a few years from a place of extreme degradation and self-consumption to a place of joy and compassion exceeding the degrees I remember from even my childhood. Not the journey as an abstract whole, but watching from the inside the decisions, watching myself heal old philosophical knots and errors, including many that I had long since lost awareness of, served as an experimental confirmation of some of those mystic ideas and a refutation of Emma’s accelerationist ideas.
In 2024, I was mildly influenced by Contrapoints and Philosophy Tube, who both make interesting efforts to truly understand the people who believe positions they (and I) disagree with in a sympathetic way. And late that year I read the HPMOR fan sequel Harry Potter and the Prancing of Ponies, which presented some explicit models of how psychological errors arise mostly through childhood experiences in a way that added clarity to my models and presented a different path by which I could have healed myself.
I was lucky enough to heal; Ziz hasn’t had that luck yet but could if I could guide her. Prior to the reunion, she was a much kinder person, and she still believed in the human spirit in a way not too far from how I see it now.
On Ziz’s character
About the events that happened, I can only speculate, like everyone else. I knew Ziz when she was at her best, during Rationalist Fleet. I knew her then as a kind person, strongly motivated by compassion, lightly cynical about human nature but committed to finding ways to cooperate with those to whom she applied her cynicism.
Ziz has made mistakes, consequential ones even, but I cannot imagine her being responsible for a lot of what people have accused her of. I speculate that Emma and Jamie are the primary causes of what happened, as well as the bad judgment of the people Ziz associated with, and I suspect that Ziz was the moderate in that circle after I left.
First, to be clear, what happened was horrifying. Curt was a friend and minor mentor of mine, and no theory of justice I can support would have killed him, and I think the responsible parties owe the work of reassembling Curt atom by atom, however long that takes.
I knew Emma and Somni and silver-and-ivory. I don’t personally know the other people that got involved with that group. I don’t think Ziz would have caused the killing of Curt or of Zajko’s parents, and she obviously wasn’t involved in the border patrol shooting.
The point of distinction here is that I think Ziz’s actual beliefs and commitments are not the same as the actions of the people around her, and neither is the same as what the social consensus seems to think her ideas are.
With every set of ideals, there are those who apply them badly, through mistakes in the original philosophy combining with mistakes in the individual in a way that channels all of the negativity in the individual. The consequences of that can be magnified by the nature of the philosophy.
A ‘perfect’ philosophy would be capable of preventing all such misinterpretation and mistakes, but as humans who are not logically omniscient, any theory we present is a work in progress at best.
All theories are by-necessity living theory, and I can’t imagine Ziz messing up / misapplying up her own theory that badly. But I can imagine her being around people who mess up her theory that badly.
My understanding of Ziz’s beliefs, even though I disagree with them, contradict with the deaths that actually happened.
If I zoom out and blur my eyes, what happened feels like Emma thinking not Ziz thinking, the Ziz I knew is too careful and cautious to full send an idea, even one she nominally supports, if there remains an unresolved note of confusion/wrongness to it. Full sending is trashfire behavior that doesn’t match her personality even in a state like what I could imagine she’d be like under severe degradation. It is, moreover, accelerationist behavior. (And Emma was an accelerationist.)
So, I don’t hold Ziz responsible for the horrifying actions of the people nominally interested in her philosophy, just like I don’t hold Eliezer responsible for the actions of Anna Salamon or Davis Tower Kingsley or Elon Musk.
And what I would like to see, even if I’m the only person in the world left who would advocate for this, is for Ziz to pivot, leave the pile of fools behind her, and heal, like I did. Perhaps nobody else knows her potential and kind heart, but I do. Others want to paint a simple story, with a simple villain, but I know that to be not true.
A couple more clarifications
Nothing was a cult during the time I was present, and I have no reason to speculate that it became one. That accusation came originally from people speaking in bad faith, particularly GabrilovichRatio (aka J.D. Pressman), and was magnified through repetition. A group that discusses philosophy and strange ideas together, has in-group jargon and references, and is helping each other build RVs to live in, is not dissimilar from other rationalist friend groups, or really any intellectual friend group, and that is the environment I knew.
The slander of my dual agency theory (hemi theory), which still has not been published, among other things, aggravates me. Hopefully that will be clear when I publish it (which I plan to do soon). The core of it is simple, and the people I’ve directly explained it to in recent years have found it reasonable and compelling, unlike the distorted presentations I’ve seen online.
There are at least two additional factors behind the scenes that nobody seems to know about. Following the alumni reunion, Zajko began a harassment and infiltration campaign under a variety of anonymous guises. Most of the anonymous comments on Ziz’s blog around that time, Zajko later admitted to having written, as well as some emails. Zajko also admitted to egging GabrilovichRatio on to be hostile towards Ziz and to fear Ziz. I also learned in late 2020 that there was an anonymous account that had been messaging, I believe it was Regex, which was claiming to be me, and claiming to be suicidal, when I very much wasn’t. I got a phone call from Regex (who I had never spoken with before or given my phone number) when I was out hiking telling me “don’t do it, you have so much to live for” when I had literally never been suicidal in my life, and Regex refused to believe me when I told her that. I found this alarming and threatening, given the context, where Hive had been talking publicly about practicing with a gun. I don’t know what else that account said, whether that account made threats in my name or misstated my own theories/philosophy, and I don’t know if Zajko was the one responsible. But I saw GabrilovichRatio posting very paranoid things.
GabrilovichRatio, with Hive, admitted to being the author of the smear/slander site that has been uncritically picked up like fact by most of the press nowadays. Regex was in the same friend group IIUC.
Furthermore, I think a lot of her readers missed some important context. During 2020 and 2021 we were becoming more aware of the philosophy of people explicitly trying to destroy the world, and/or explicitly counter-altruistic. There was one person who self-described as the ‘Goddess of Rape and Death’ who was sending Ziz rambling emails (to which IIUC Ziz was not responding).
This was the class of people that was Ziz’s primary identified enemy, and her hardest-line stances were directed at this rare and extreme category of person.
(To clarify, I disagree with her philosophy even on this matter. Which is not to say I believe the inverse philosophy—I have precise, careful, nuanced strategies on this subject which I will slowly publish as part of my other writings alongside other things.)
My Case Study CFAR post
My Case Study CFAR post was imperfect, but it was the best I could do in my more-traumatized-than-I-had-ever-been state. I regret the part I wrote about Ratheka and Sebastian, that was a wrong action. I now disagree with some of the things I said about MIRI. I also now realize that what alarmed me wasn’t just a rationalist phenomenon but a broader societal current. I largely still agree with the rest. The actions of a number of people in the community were deplorable, many of them were employed by CFAR, and this has negative impacts on AI outcomes. If I could have waited a few years, I could have presented it all more clearly.
On my philosophical divergence
I’ve made a hard break with Ziz’s philosophy on a few key, consequential points. Though, her philosophy is obviously a part of my history, and my current philosophy is built largely in response to Ziz’s.
Kind of the core point of divergence is that I think most of her mistakes are rooted in a kind of vegan/Vassarian cynicism about human nature (of nonvegans), whereas my current beliefs are a fusion of that cynicism with mystic-optimism about human nature—something she outright rejected after 2019.
(Within Ziz’s own model, this makes me a phoenix as opposed to a revenant.)
This has influenced me to develop a divergent model of justice and of post-singleton trajectories, as well as to take a much greater interest in psychological healing as means and ends.
How this came about
In the initial set of ideas Ziz had when I first met her, I can identify two slight mistakes—the adoption of a dark aesthetic indicating an expectation of being seen negatively probably rooted in childhood trauma, and her adoption of the ideas in the Gervais Principle sequence. Neither of these is a particularly big issue.
But seeing the corruption of the rationalist community, including many people she had deeply and naively trusted. And then the almost indescribable gaslighting and smearing that happened after the alumni reunion. And then getting death threats, after being tortured by the police and unjustly charged (while the torturers and false reporter were never charged) and losing faith/trust in that foundational institution of society. And then receiving the insane ramblings of a self-proclaimed ‘Goddess of Rape and Death’. While also having to grapple with the horror of the ongoing holocaust of nonhuman animals called factory farming and most people’s acceptance of it (to those who don’t understand, imagine seeing the spark of a soul worth protecting in every animal—vegans can see their infinite potential in their Turing completeness and goal-seeking behavior despite their mostly simpler-than-symbolic thought, and love every one of them—how would you cope when people you love are massacring other people you love in unthinkable quantities). At the same time as she came into the acquaintance of Emma—an accelerationist, and the most intelligent person I’ve ever met.
In this environment, Ziz made the mistake of mostly believing a bit of accelerationist (i.e. Emma’s) propaganda: the idea that any moral flaw was a sign of an event horizon signalling eventual total commitment to fractal defection. In the extreme social trauma, that affected us both in different ways, a subset of vegans was the only people she could imagine trusting at all.
My model is that Ziz adopted this while retaining moral caution because she never believed it completely, it just seemed like a hypothesis more likely true than not given the evidence about human behavior she was regularly facing; but Emma adopted it as a way to channel a complicated malice in a seemingly justifiable way. Emma accelerated themself.
The phenomena demanded explaining, since Ziz’s earlier models of human behavior had not expected what happened.
Even under the best of circumstances, being a vegan moralist puts a tremendous demand on the precision and nuance of a person’s models of justice and of human nature. It’s not at all an easy bar to meet, and requires quite a bit of intellectual work. The effect of any mistake is magnified by the extremity of the context.
My vision
So what is the world that I wish to see and how do I intend for us to get there?
My intention to gain a draconic form through transhumanist technology is, in a way, emblematic of my vision, and I hope for my draconity to inspire others, to cause people to see that more is possible than they believe.
I want the future to be a place of wonders, of story and creation, of magic and the fantastic, of meaning and self-actualization for everyone, and I mean everyone. I dream of non-Euclidean geometries, of countless worlds visible and accessible in the daytime sky, of competent infrastructure, of soul forges continually working to bring back the dead, of mage academies and of exploration of beautiful wilds and the wondrous creations of ten thousand artists, each communicating something otherwise incommunicable. I dream of the stories to be told of growth and interaction, of meeting alien species and piercing the veil of understanding between us and establishing our commonality in love itself. I dream of reaching through warps in the spacetime fabric to save the dying across time, and of welcoming them to a brighter world, of healing their wounds, physical, mental, and spiritual. I dream of forests with trees so tall they take days to climb, of villages in glittering caverns, of craft-markets cluttering up space stations. I dream of morphological freedom. I dream of teaching language to nonhuman animals through advanced pedagogy and welcoming them to the collective knowledge and endeavor of our civilization, and making possibilities available to them in line with their inclinations, whatever those may be. I dream of a world where things are not done for us by a machine, but where each person has, if they want it, a pillar of the world to uphold matched to what they love—in the space of all definable people, there is enough diversity for such matching to exist and be fluid. I dream of the work of expanding the aegis of this civilization, to protect and support ever more people. I dream of learning to understand people I would maybe never have been able to imagine on my own, and building stories together with them.
I’m working to establish the preconditions to ensure that any positive vision for the future comes about that has full potential to grow/mature/blossom, which isn’t quite the same thing as building it directly.
My own particular vision of beauty should have some part in it, but a truly good world is not something that could come in every particular out of any single individual’s mind. So I concern myself far more with the organizing/foundational principles, and ask myself how those principles can be made inevitable milestones of many different paths into the future, and how those principles remain cornerstones of every successive development that follows.
my own art, colored pencil, 2025
Lately my focus has returned to alignment theory / agent foundations and container theory; and I’ve been writing a series of posts about game theory and trajectories in a multipolar post-singleton world. I’m quite excited about this series, and I think it will provide some unexpected hope and improved clarity to the community.
Signed,
the dragon of creation
Creatrei (cree-AH-trey)
also known as Gwen Danielson
or as Char and Astria (when referring to my hemis as distinct individuals)
Moderator comment: I think this post is valuable in that it is sharing information about what happened about some stuff that has pretty obviously deeply affected the community (and the broader world). I also think this post is framing things in a bunch of ways that seems off and misleading to me, and not super congruent with the evidence I’ve seen.
Usually that wouldn’t be much of an issue, because LessWrong is a marketplace of ideas and people can just argue it out, and people can form their own impressions of what happened. But the big elephant in the room for this conversation in particular is that various things around you, Ziz, Zajko and various others have escalated far beyond what could be described as a “marketplace of ideas”. We have seen multiple murders, major federal police investigations, multiple high-profile documentaries, and a whole pile of death threats and crazy people. People will be afraid to discuss this stuff for fear of getting dragged into all of this, and people will very justifiably have a strong instinct to put a big barrier between them and whatever the hell happened here.
And, all things considered, I agree with them. This post is not actually doing a good job of making me trust you and think this conversation is safe to have[1], and I notice that as I am saying this that I am afraid that this will now somehow result in someone trying to murder me in my sleep, which I would really really rather not have to think about.
So I will leave up this post. But I don’t think anyone reading the discussion below this post should expect that they will get any remotely representative sample of what people on LessWrong or the broader rationality community think about this, and my best guess is any discussion will be a shit-show in like 15 different ways, and I don’t really see any way of making it go well. I expect the best sense-making on this issue will come from readers of this post talking to others in private chats, Discords, Slack channels or wherever else they can talk to people in a higher-trust context about what is going on.
Beyond that: I won’t be allowing you to post more on LessWrong in the future, with the potential exception of sharing concrete and specific details about what happened with the whole Ziz situation. The implicit threat of violence and chaos and madness would distort much around you and I do not have any solutions for dealing with that. I am truly and actually sorry in as much as you got wrapped up in some really shitty things that blew up far beyond proportion, possibly of no fault of your own, but you at the moment seem entangled in a bunch of stuff that seems truly batshit crazy and scary to me. Dealing with that is beyond even my high thresholds for conflict tolerance, and as such certainly beyond almost everyone else’s as well.
I will not ban you since I do want you to be able to say things on this post, but won’t be approving future top-level content by default. I don’t expect this situation to change until at least after the Ziz and Zajko trials have resolved, and my best guess is will last indefinitely.
I don’t think any individual post has much of a chance of actually making this conversation feel safe, as even if you were to display extraordinary levels of clarity and understanding, there would still be the issue of people being worried about crazy people reading and acting on whatever is said here.
IDK what this would look like, and I don’t think I’d view it as your / LW’s responsibility to figure it out, but I’d just want to state a vague desire for the possibility of a faster process—or rather, a process that allows for the possibility of faster unbanning given various preconditions (such as explaining much more what happened, and the community understanding + deciding whether what happened indicates that de-ostracization could work / be good). A murder trial could take years and years to fully resolve IIUC. I mean, it wouldn’t be that bad IMO for the LW ban to just be permanent, but like, de-ostracization is one important skill among others that a community could want to develop. I think that Gwen is, or at least was 8 years ago, a creative thinker, with potential value to offer. (I agree it should be quite a high bar; just saying that in theory it would be better to be a large finite bar.)
Ziz and Zajko aren’t charged with murder.
If I recall correctly, they are charged with having LSD, having a gun while on the run (but not using it), and trespassing in Maryland; refusing to cooperate with police investigation in Pennsylvania; and Ziz still has the same protest charges I had in California.
They obviously have ties to the people charged with murder, but as far as I know aren’t involved in those cases, but I wouldn’t know if they had been subpoena’d as witnesses.
Oh huh. I assumed / misremembered that at least Zajko was charged with the murder of her parents.
I assume prosecutors are waiting for less circumstantial evidence to emerge?
If we learn more things substantially earlier I am not opposed to reconsidering this policy earlier. I just wanted to set expectations that I think the bar for reconsidering here should be quite high, and very likely is at least few years in the future, and some major new information releases away (and that I am not promising to engage with non-verified information dumps that are substantially less robust than what we would get in a court discovery process, though someone doing some kind of big analysis and investigation here could also qualify).
I have valuable things worth talking about today, so this seems insufficient. And I still have played zero part in the events people are worried about, have taken zero violent acts, have not been in communication with any of the people who this community is concerned about.
And we are talking about the standard for me to be able to post some writings online, about subjects that excite me. Not in person meetings. Not immunity from moderation. My posts would be subject to the same terms of service as every other poster.
To quote my old favorite book, Mother of Learning, ch. 17:
I think that the default standard should be ‘let me post things, and if I cross any lines, take moderator action’. I don’t plan to cross any lines. I have no need or desire to discuss Ziz, except possibly in a post discussing how she went wrong in greater detail.
If it’s taken for granted that this would be a crux, surely you can see that we (vaguely) shouldn’t be at all confident of that, given the public information, and instead have plenty of information kinda suggesting various flavors of the opposite, right? Like, yeah, if you have in the past been quite closely associated with people who, to public legible appearance, plausibly committed one or more murders and/or caused one or more suicides and/or were closely associated with people who plausibly did that and/or other crazy associated stuff, then people who aren’t you would not be able to very strongly rule out dangerous behavior from you or from people kinda associated with you. I think to be de-ostracized you’d have to do a lot more work about that (I’m not sure exactly what), and in particular would probably require you to conceptually separate how we view and treat you from how you are (since these are legitimately separate things).
The burden of proof should be on the “stop Creatrei from posting” side, to show that allowing Creatrei to post is dangerous, right? The default for this site is to let people post on it, no?
This isn’t super relevant since it’s not like the standards are super high but ever since the enormous onslaught of LLM psychosis posters, the default of people who try to post to LW is to get rejected from posting here.
As always you can check out the content we reject on the /moderation page.
LW is a pretty curated garden. It would not survive the median person posting here.
I mean, morally speaking it’s partly the prerogative of the mods / maintainers of the site, plus some sort of idealized version of the community whose site-maintainer-somewhat-exclusive-niche the maintainers are occupying. But like, in practice the mods do and should act on info that they have without necessarily having to do a bunch of work to explicitize and defend or change their reasoning. There’s plenty of ways for someone to cross the burden of proof over the default, within the mods’s reasoning for the mods to ban them, e.g. posting useless LLM slop as their first post, or being known to the mods as likely to be somehow very toxic.
Have you considered writing a Substack? I feel fairly confident that many people would engage if you published there, and I imagine anything particularly interesting could be linkposted to LessWrong by someone else if the mod team allows that.
I appreciate the idea but I don’t know much about Substack. Why do you think Substack would get a lot of engagement? I’m also open to other ideas of this sort.
(x)
Largely due to network effects; a lot of bloggers I follow (including many rationalists) are there, and there are some discoverability features.
I think what should probably happen is that you should post elsewhere, but put a link to your blog at the end (or top?) of this post.
Then people who want to hear what you have to say know where to follow you, but LessWrong can maintain it’s boundaries.
I don’t know the details of this whole nightmare, but I’d hesitantly suggest that free speech helps people find the truth. If someone is wrong about something, talking to her might help her figure out she’s wrong. If she’s egregiously wrong about something with enormous stakes, then that only increases the importance of talking to her.
i think you should let them post.
IDK. The concerns in the footnote of attracting crazy people (even against
hertheir wishes), you are aware that I am concerned about as well due to events last year. But I definitely do not want anyone to feel inhibited from writing and socializing if they are well-meaning and it is good for them. Maybe lettingherthem post personal blogposts but not frontpage posts would be a good compromise? But maybe as mentioned find another adjacent space.@Vaniver do you still hold that “Less Wrong the website should accept letters from murderers in asylums”?
I do. But I think that people who are still committing crimes, and their network of suspected accomplices, are meaningfully different, in that their violence and retaliation is not (yet) contained. This situation seems to me substantially in that direction (e.g. see how someone who had never lived at Lind’s RV property travelled cross-country to kill him) even while it has some meaningful differences.
I predict that LessWrong would moderate an imprisoned Ziz’s writing in accord with Vaniver’s comment, rather than yours.
(Wait, considering Vaniver has commented here too, what comment do you mean, and in what direction do you think the difference is?)
I mean his comment on this thread. I originally read Ben as saying that if all the associated parties had been cleared or imprisoned, LessWrong would allow posts from the imprisoned parties in general. I think that, in fact, writing on psychology etc would likely be moderated.
On rereading Ben, I think there’s less of a difference than I imagined. Ben points to new people taking action apparently downstream of this thinking & writing. That would suggest continuing to moderate imprisoned folks. So seems like Ben’s comment agrees about the writings of imprisoned parties.
I do not think it is true that the Ziz crew “are still committing crimes” or that “their violence and retaliation is not contained”. I am also not quite sure what you are suggesting with the mention of Snyder. I would point to @AprilSR’s comment here (and subsequent subthread). Slimepriestess isn’t banned, Chase isn’t banned.
Nobody has even been prosecuted for the Zajko double-homicide. If the killers are some combo of LaSota/Zajko/Blank, then one of them is free and we’re waiting to see how long the gun-possession charges play out. If it’s someone else, then they’re free.
[Update: Zajko charged for the double-homicide.]
I’m not sure if I think “substantially in that direction” is in fact an unreasonable position? Like, I really don’t expect any additional Ziz-related violence except insofar as you count anti-AI violence by people who happen to have read Sinceriously at some point or something, but—I don’t think the situation is understood sufficiently clearly that it makes sense to expect everyone to be totally certain of that, and regardless it’s still appreciably distinct from “there was one guy without any accomplices who is in jail” or whatever.
(...I guess I’m not sure exactly what Ziz/Zajko would get up to if released from prison.)
Yes, but I think it matters what the letters were about and what the murders were about. Minor (the man from my example) was paranoid about the Irish but reliable about quotations and the meanings of words. I don’t think it would have made sense to publish his writings about the Irish.
Yeah I see. Cretarei say they don’t want to talk about Ziz again after that, but I see how you could have a broader definition of what “writings about the Irish” mean in the analogy (e.g. discussion of psychology).
To clarify: are you just banning
herthem from making classical LW posts, or also banningherthem from having a personal blog (i.e. treatingherthem similarly as the automatically sorted out LLM slop)?[Edit: btw Gwen I’m she/her-ing out of habit but please feel free to clarify your preferred pronouns!]Oh, I suppose I should have included that in the post! I prefer they/them pronouns.
This includes making “personal blogposts” on LessWrong (automatically sorted out LLM slop also basically just gets deleted and never publicly displayed, so it would be treated the same way).
The things around Ziz and Zajko have escalated far beyond reasonable, I agree. The things around me have been me quietly healing myself in a small town and discussing a lot of philosophical and futurist ideas I find exciting, and privately working on alignment research.
I do not plan to post about this subject again, as I have no need to, and frankly I don’t like discussing [all the worst things that have happened to me]. I’m not sure if that was part of your expectation.
I would like very much to contribute my ideas about secondary alignment, mental health, and the container problem; and to contribute my ideas in comments to other people’s posts. It was also my plan to publish my dual agency theory, which has not been an active area of development for a very long time, not because I have a special interest in promoting it, but because I think there has just been too much confusion about it and I can clarify it.
I think I have valuable things to contribute, and I care deeply about alignment, and I don’t think silencing me in advance is an appropriate strategy. You haven’t seen the cool things I want to talk about.
(I have been living peacefully for a while and am well-regarded by the community in which I found home. I have never been accused of violence in any legal context, and I don’t think I’ve ever been accused anywhere else. I’ve never taken a violent act in my adult life. I have remaining social trauma, but harbor no ill will and want to heal things and move on/forward. The purpose of this post was to do exactly that, because I have things that excite me and which I think the community will appreciate.)
I think this reply is valuable. I have some quibbles with some of the points but I want to make sure I am safe to share them, first.
I’m going to research the last two attempts to someone’s life that were related to the topic of ai risk. If it turns out the aspiring assassins were mainly influenced by the writings of Ziz, as opposed some other prominent rationalist, then I’ll get back to you.
Seems extremely implausible to me FTR. Looking at incidents of domestic terrorism against AGI companies, Sam Kirchner (if we’re counting him) was a StopAI guy, so left-wing human-centric anti-transhumanist and close to Torres (admittedly Zajko did praise Torres and quoted such anti-transhumanist stuff too though). Daniel Moreno-Gama was a right-wing (NRxish?) human-centric anti-transhumanist (and racist eugenicist). Amanda Tom and Muhamad Tarik Hussein appear to be generic progressives presumably motivated by near-term ethics concerns, not existential risk (unlike the previous two).
Ironically (with a little amount of bad faith) the one ~criminal activity that I can trace to someone influenced by Ziz is that one of the DOGE guys had an account here where he talked about veganism being necessary prefigurative praxis for a sentience-friendly singularity and praised Ziz when pointed to her in the comments.
Not sure about Tom/Hussein, but Daniel Moreno-Gama is self-admittedly influenced by LessWrong AI safety people.
The primary source is The Last Invention podcast.
Lumpenspace has written a Substack post which includes quotes from the podcast. Just as one quote:
I’m aware. I was just describing their philosophical worldview to contrast with Ziz’s ‘vegan anarcho-transhumanism’. But the whole point of Holly leaving rationalism and EA to start PauseAI was because she wanted AI x-risk concerns to reach people with all kind of worldviews (beyond the ~left-libertarian utilitarian transhumanism of rationalism and EA), and this has been a successful strategy hence everyone from Bernie Sanders to Ben Bernanke to Steve Bannon being into AI x-risk now.
I think you’re missing the sarcasm? Lumpenspace meant to imply that actually, recent attempted assassins were influenced by AI safety people rather than Ziz & co.
Maybe? Sorry for assuming people weren’t disingenuous trolls trying to derail a very serious topic involving several actual completed murders and suicides for their personal political vendettas.
I am literally in the same room as Lumpenspace and he confirms he meant that Daniel was AI safety influenced, not Zizian influenced.
It’s good that you have come back to interface with law-enforcement and the charges against you. That doesn’t mean things are remotely okay or that you’re now a safe person to interact with, but I want to acknowledge that this behavior is evidence strongly on the positive side of the ledger.
As for the rest of this timeline and account of people’s characters, I am still left with far more questions than this post addresses, and am not particularly inclined to trust your account of many of them. For instance: How can LaSota be a “moderate”, when she write sincere sentences like “Don’t trust anyone over 30 with a kill count of 0″ and endorses a reverse genocide on Germans? How can you write that you “parted ways with them in March 2022” when local police reported seeing you in November 2022 at Curtis Lind’s property on the day of his stabbing? How can you write “I now disagree with some of the things I said about MIRI” without also saying “I deeply apologize for running a protest where we falsely accused MIRI of covering up statutory rape by their staff”, or whichever accusations it is that you’ve changed your mind on?
I guess it’s an initial step, for you to monologue your own narratives about what a small subset of what has happened, but nothing like a sufficient interrogation of your role within a group of people who have endorsed and likely committed many heinous acts of violence. Nobody who just reads this should think of you as remotely close to ‘in good standing’ nor ‘physically safe to associate with’ without far more investigation, information, and evidence.
I heard about that, and was baffled because I very much was on the opposite side of the country, and have pretty extensive logs to verify it. I picked up a Walmart order 11:38am the day before and was in a car ride with the person hosting me living on their property the day of the report.
Your description is incorrect though, the Vallejo police have confirmed that I was not there the day of the stabbing. There is an arrest record for ‘Gwen Danielson’ a couple days later that did not lead to a booking. Which is baffling, but I am guessing that Ziz or someone else gave my name. Ziz had only a few days prior given the name ‘Julia Dawson’, according to the Vallejo police.
You responded to Ben’s comment about when you parted ways, but I’d be curious to know how you’d respond to the other point he brought up about various extreme-sounding statements Ziz has made that don’t seem to have been jokes, like “Don’t trust anyone over 30 with a kill count of 0” (about the anarchist transhumanist William Gillis, whose writing she had previously cited in a positive way) or various other examples of violent rhetoric in “A community warning about Ziz” (in the subsection titled ‘Statements by Ziz’).
It seems to me that your belief in her non-involvement in violence relies heavily on your assessment of her character, but I don’t think character is sufficient to predict violence or nonviolence, even “nice” people may be driven to violence if they adopt belief systems that justify it (especially among Rationalists who are known for taking ideas seriously). In particular you allude to the idea that she came to accept “the idea that any moral flaw was a sign of an event horizon signalling eventual total commitment to fractal defection”, but from what I gather this was more of a metaphysical belief than just a statement about psychology (not just something along the lines of bad choices leading to vicious cycles that make further bad choices more likely), one which could lead to a kind of dehumanizing attitude about those deemed metaphysically evil.
I read through her blog a while ago and took some notes—she often talked about every left/right brain hemisphere having a “core” which was something like a soul, and expressed a belief that every core was fundamentally aligned to either good or a binary alternative which she initially called “nongood” (to cover both ‘neutral’ and ‘evil’ according to her ‘Glossary’ post), but later she decided the alternative to “good” was what she called “cancer”, saying in a comment on “Spectral Sight and Good”:
She also had various comments suggesting this orientation was chosen at some initial point in “logical time” prior to a determinate spacetime history in which these cores were embedded. For example in her post “Choices Made Long Ago” she wrote some comments clarifying what she meant by “long ago”:
And in “Intersex Brains and Conceptual Warfare” she wrote:
You may be right that her notion of a sharp good/nongood binary just started as a sort of empirical hypothesis as she never really attempts to give a theory of why this would be true and in a comment on “Spectral Sight and Good” she said that she came to believe goodness was a “permanent attribute” based on “self-experimentation and examining a few other people”. But it seems like at some point this became more of a foundational belief for her, judging by her blog comments.
She also seemed to think that refusing to back down in any confrontation with evil was a way of “collapsing the timeline”, from what I gather there was some notion different possible timelines existing at different points in logical time, so that by refusing to back down she could create a timeline later in logical time in which the evil wouldn’t challenge her that way in the first place (sort of like a weird version of Newcomb’s paradox or Parfit’s hitchhiker that tests your resolve, but unlike in those examples it seems she thinks the answer is exactly the same even when the agent you’re dealing with is not any kind of ideal predictor). For example see this comment from “Net Negative”:
And this comment from “Punching Evil”:
The cosmology or reasoning behind these ideas never seems to have been really elaborated and I can’t make any sense of it, but if Ziz really believed it, it seems like a pretty dangerous combination of ideas: the notion of certain individuals as irredeemably evil combined with the need to refuse to back down from any confrontation as part of some cosmic universe-saving drama. Another one of Ziz’s sometime discussion partners Nis had a post called Killing Evil “People” which is also hard to comprehend but seems to hint at idea that the double-evils are not even real people (with consistent scare quotes around ‘people’, and ‘their’ choices), more like manifestations of the universal “cancer” Ziz had talked about, and defends “lethally opposing them”. In one of the comments Ziz says “I am so fucking glad to finally have an equal.”
Given Ziz’s later close association with people who committed actual murders, from the outside it looks very plausible she was involved in putting this sort of philosophy into practice (she was not accused of physically participating in the attack on Curtis Lind but the prosecutor on the case said that Ziz had been “on the scene, alive and well”, so she may well have been privy to the planning). Do you think I am getting her beliefs badly wrong here, or do you just not think she would have seen those beliefs as ever justifying killing ordinary people deemed “evil” for reasons other than immediate self-defense?
Well, the later blog comments on sinceriously.fyi are peppered with links to an unpublished post titled “the multiverse”. She said that she was leaving those as pointers for when she did eventually publish it.
The protest was made in good faith on my part. My Case Study CFAR post was made in good faith, excluding the part about Ratheka and Sebastian, under a tremendous degree of trauma.
I did express that I regret the way we did the protest. It was in good faith, but it involved bad decisions. Many of them were made because neither Ziz nor I had prior experience with protests—we were trying to do things by the book and I still believe we didn’t break the law but it was still a predictable mess.
It still seems factually correct that MIRI paid out to blackmail to cover up accusations of statutory rape. No strong opinion on whether the statutory rape actually happened. But that was Ziz’s pet issue, mine was the inefficiency and stagnation and logistical/community problems with the Bay area rationalist community. Arguments that I’m seeing partially expressed by others in articles on LW’s present-day main page, with slightly different cause attribution. If I had been able to give the talks I had prepared, the community might have started thinking about these things and pivoting a few years earlier.
Specifically, I now think MIRI’s work on how to utilize an unaligned AI in a box to perform a stabilizing move was less than ideal, but not a useless or counter-productive line of research. Calling MIRI an accelerationist organization was incorrect, even though they had some well-meaning predictable in hindsight negative effects. I also regained some of my respect for MIRI when they pivoted to policy advocacy. Better late than never. And I have realized that MIRI’s role in establishing the preconditions for making AI safety almost a household issue is very positive, and may save us yet.
I haven’t seen that quote by Ziz, and you’re mischaracterizing her opinion about Nakam—in her own analysis last I knew, it would be a bad idea for someone with greater capability for precision/discernment or procedure—a better outcome in my present models would have been Nuremberg trials—fair and understanding—for the civilian population of Nazi Germany, court-ordered restitution as appropriate, etc—although the logistics might have made that infeasible—and I don’t model Ziz as actually disagreeing with present-me about that ideal scenario. But the core way in which I think Ziz was a moderate was caution in her models. Certainly relative to Emma. She definitely was influenced by Emma’s ideas, and endorsed some of them online, I remember that much. I don’t claim she was objectively a moderate, just relatively, and still not as much as I was then or am now.
No. They paid a relatively small sum of money for a lunatic who had been harassing them and fraudulently pretending to be them and calling the police on their houses at random hours of the night to finally shut up and go away (after 6+ months of it).
One of the many things that happened in this campaign was to falsely accuse them of being a ‘pedophile ring’, but you are being some amount of naive and/or deceptive to frame that as the central thing that happened.
A minor but relevant note: this post is not on the frontpage. This is on the user’s personal blog. As a result it gets much less traffic (because it is not shown to users who are logged out, which is most of our visitors to that page).
This is wrong. She writes “I think the world would be better if Nakam had succeeded”, yet indeed we had the Nuremberg trials in this world, so by logical implication she cannot prefer a world with Nuremberg trials to a world with Nakam.
(Her website is down, but if you go to this page and search “Nakam” you can find the relevant quote.)
That’s still giving into blackmail. Much like a settlement that allows an aggressor to not admit wrongdoing is giving into blackmail. Sometimes you, as a practical matter, have to give in to blackmail, if you’re acting with people too irrational to be deterred by predictably not giving in. Sometimes you have not had the opportunity to demonstrate it and do not believe you will have cause to have publicly demonstrated it in the future, and so the pragmatic case says ‘Sure, give in, the cross-time coalition of my selves agrees that it’s not worth it to refuse.’
But I think it does say something negative. They were, then, an organization which was paying a great deal of attention to optimal timeless decision theory that prescribe being shaped across time to be the sort of thing that cannot be usefully blackmailed because it predictably does not give in to it. And when it came to the practical case where they could implement that policy… they gave in. It’s not great to fail to take your beliefs seriously, and this chain of events suggests that they did not. But that’s a venial sin. The extenuating circumstances were significant, and the blackmailer plausibly undeterrable even if they had been predictably unexploitable.
In other words, the substance of the accusation was correct; it was the volume and vehemence of it which was disproportionate and unjustified. (And I still wouldn’t call it morally wrong; that came later.)
But they were predictably unexploitable. The blackmailer didn’t turn a profit! He was someone who had worked at a startup in the SF Bay Area and likely could get another tech job, going up to 100s of $k of salary per year! The important thing about your payout policy is that people should expect that it is not worth their time to try to extort you. And that’s what happened here.[1]
If someone manages to pay a lunatic $1 to go away after 6-9 months of harassment, we would not say “what a terrible incentive you’ve set up for yourself, now everyone is going to try to come for your money”. We’d say “what a fool that guy was to do all that work for $1″.
It was not a profitable extortion, in the way that means someone is predictably exploitable. It was an expensive way for the lunatic to waste his own time.
Note that we don’t know the exact figure, but I recall looking up their public tax filings that year and there being very little money that could have been spent on this, and concluding it was somewhere in the $20k to $60k range.
There’s a few different questions here:
what is the technical definition of blackmail? Boring, taboo the term.
What is the right policy to have in regards to paying off aggressors? Maybe it’s fine as long as it’s not net-positive for the aggressor.
What principle did MIRI articulate and commit to before the Louis Helm lawsuit? Did they act in accordance with those principles?
I’m tentatively fine with MIRI or anyone else holding the principle “we’ll pay costs to make lawsuits go away but not enough to make it worth your while”. But AFAIK what they said was more in line with “We’ll never pay off aggressors”. This is a crux for me when judging if they held to their commitments and will hold to their commitments in the future, and that’s true even if “only small pay-offs” is the better policy, because that’s evidence they made a strong commitment without thinking through the edge cases.
What, where would MIRI have said anything like this? What kind of weird commitments are people imagining?
I don’t know, I assume LessWrong or their website? I wasn’t there at the time but neither sides’ statements over the last 10 years make sense unless it was common knowledge at the time that MIRI pledged to never pay off blackmail.
It was definitely not common knowledge! I think some people just read Eliezer’s writing on TDT, made some extremely confident conclusions about what that means how you should behave, and decided to go around policing those norms. This seems to still happen with random other things Eliezer writes (c.f. Mikhail trying to enforce a norm of “you have to be the kind of agent that other people never regret telling something to based on a fictional story with gods that are perfectly capable of compartmentalizing information”).
Then I think “MIRI never committed to not paying off blackmail” is a perfectly reasonable argument (as is “it was a returned donation”), but “it’s not paying off blackmail, it’s just giving money to a person who’s threatening me so they won’t follow through” is still bizarre.
No? From an incentive and game theory perspective there are huge differences between a world where people can get rich exploiting others and a world where they can’t. The exact lines are blurry but there are obviously some ethical principles here that seem reasonable to try to hold people accountable by.
The right level of accountability is unclear and how to set the right incentives to not create terrorists is a tricky question, but trying to argue that there isn’t a very important difference here seems absurd.
The distinctions between crows and ostriches are important for many situations but that doesn’t make either one not a bird.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard it claimed that MIRI said this outright. The usual argument AIUI is: MIRI staff endorse/believe-in TDT (not that MIRI has stated it as organizational policy or anything), TDT endorses not paying off blackmail (and this is obvious/well-known), therefore MIRI staff violated their endorsed (and also, importantly, correct) principles.
Why do you think so? Is there a particular sequences post or something that says this or something like this? Did they make a comment on this particular situation?
See the ensuing conversation with Habryka. I assumed this because people claimed it, and MIRI’s defenders responded with “this does not meet the technical definition of paying off aggressors”, and not the straightforward “MIRI never said they wouldn’t pay off aggressors”. Sounds like I was wrong, but to this day that response only makes sense to me if the writer is conceding that MIRI committed to never paying blackmail.
If your numbers are right, the blackmailer came out with a reasonable rate of return on his effort. $20k for harassing someone you don’t like (I forget the details, but I understood him to have hostile personal history with several people involved) for half a year, well less than full time, is not a trivial reward. $60k is a pretty solid hourly rate, especially if he was not really in shape to work at the same salary as before, which on priors for someone who does something like this is very very likely.
If your when-healthy market salary is $200k, but you’re not healthy, so you can only get $120k/year from a job you can get and keep? And you get EV $30k from 15 hours a week of harassment for 6-9 months? That’s about your market rate! You’d do better than that working freelance but not that much better, and under many theories of being angry and unwell this is an easier ‘job’ to keep.
Someone told me that there was some dispute about whether he was suing MIRI for a payout, or suing to have a donation he gave returned. If it’s the latter that does feel somewhat different to me, and maybe outside the definition of blackmail.
My understanding of events (heard secondhand, both years ago and some years after the fact—please take as “what Eli remembers of what someone told him in 2016 or so” not “definitive account of what happened.”).
“Albert” had a job at the Singularity Institue.
Albert left to pursue another oportunity.
That opportunity didn’t work out, and Albert asked for his job back.
SI said “nah, we’re good now, and don’t want to rehire you.”
Albert was pissed of and demanded all his historical donations to SI be refunded. (Reading between the lines, I wonder if he was financially desperate?)
SI said “uh, no. That’s not really how non-profit donations work.”
Albert said “If you don’t give me my money back, I will really make a hard time for you.”
[various harassment ensues, causing a lot of very annoying and costly trouble for the people involved]
The parties eventually reach a legal settlement, which (apparently, according to this thread) does involve refund the donations? [I haven’t verified that part]. Also, it involves some kind of NDA or non-disparagement, such that most of the people involved in the incident are legally bared from commenting on the incident or talking about the other party?
Yeah in the latter case I would say this is maybe complicatedly blackmail, but definitely not straightforwardly blackmail (and maybe not blackmail at all). The strong nondisparagement clauses that must have been involved make that somewhat implausible to me, but I would need to know more details than I ever bothered to learn to determine how implausible and it doesn’t seem worth the effort.
There is zero chance that this whole extortion rigamarole turned out net-positive for Louie Helm. He lost much more in opportunity cost, and legal costs and reputation than he remotely gained from the maybe $30k or so he squeezed out of MIRI.
Of those, I’m inclined to place the value of losses for everything but legal costs as zero or near-zero. Someone who cares about their reputation in this respect is not going to go into this in the first place. Someone with a high opportunity cost, likewise. The fact that Helm tried this at all means either he was wildly irrational and undeterrable, or his value on his reputation was nil and his opportunity costs low.
Posit: He was unwell in a way that, durably, prevented him from working at anywhere near his former capacity. This is not particularly unlikely on priors. Severely depressed, something like that. Then, as first-order consequences:
His professional reputation is not worth very much to him. All portions of it that came from skill, he cannot maintain, and they will soon be gone regardless. His social reputation with startup people will soon follow it.
His opportunity cost is much lower than you’d otherwise expect.
Second-order consequence: If legal fees didn’t devour all his payout, this probably came out positive for him, and in expectation (heavy-tailed distribution) better than that.
And the fact that he bothered with it should be a large update in favor of this assumption. It might not push it fully to ‘more likely than not’ but I think it probably does.
I… have no idea why you would do that. Of course the primary deterrent you have in almost any circumstance like this is loss of time and effort and reputation. You can’t be immune to anyone squeezing out pennies on the dollar from you. Practically every business out there is “exploitable” if you are willing to put in effort at this level of criminality and cost to yourself.
This doesn’t make any sense. Him getting a payout below his break-even point is the topic at discussion. MIRI was not pursuing a stochastic policy that could have somehow caused him to get 10x the payout.
Literally one of your counter-arguments is “he was unwell in a way that prevented him from working at anywhere near his former capacity” and “severely depressed, something like that”. I don’t see any reason to assume that Louie Helm was pursuing a rational strategy, indeed, I see enormous reasons to assume the opposite.
(Revisiting when my thoughts percolated into more coherent words:) You don’t get to live in the convenient world where most potential blackmailers are people with good alternative options. It’s always going to be an adversarial sample; the people who are most likely to attempt blackmail are those with the worst alternatives and the lowest costs; the ones who have little or no reputation to lose, and poor returns on their effort if it’s directed in other directions. If you can’t deter someone with minimal reputation and low value of their time from blackmailing you, your only defense against blackmail is to prevent anyone meeting that description from having information they could use to blackmail you.
Do you not see how that would also reinforce my point? I don’t even know how to explain that, it’s too obvious to me. (EDIT: I thought of how to explain it and placed it in this new sibling comment.)
Reality was. He didn’t know how much money was available to be extorted, and if it was a lot, it could be quite a lot; heavy-tailed distribution.
This honestly feels like it’s getting silly. I am bowing out.
Here’s a link.
There is no logical contradiction. I think she would prefer hypothetical far, far more extensive Nuremberg trials; I don’t claim she would prefer the Nuremberg trials that actually happened.
And I do not consider wanting a genocide to happen rather than the Nuremberg trials to be the sign of someone who would be a moderating force on active vengeance and violence (e.g. around the Zajko parents’ double-homicide). Though perhaps the other people around her were more violent still.
Added: I see that I read your comment too quickly (for I am very tired today), and it was not logically inconsistent with her statement. However the point still stands that if she (and you, for that matter) would prefer if the 1900s involved an extra vigilante genocide, then this is a straightforward sign that you will support future unlawful murder, mass murder, and other horrors, and aren’t safe people to be around.
I’m not sure this argument holds at all. I think this is biased because we already know some people in the group have the ability to turn consideration into violence… generally speaking if somebody endorses torture in torture vs dust specks, or pulling the lever in the trolley problem, I would still not worry at all about them torturing me or arranging for me to be killed so that my organs can save two other people. Most moral consideration on big-picture problems occurs in a different universe from everyday behavior, or many rationalists—maybe the median rationalist! - would be considered deeply unsafe people rather than the highly safe people they are in reality.
As far as CFAR described the situation. You blockaded a building in which children were at the time and scared people in it that were not part of the rationalist community and who called the police as you scared them.
Do you call that claim gaslighting? If so, what evidence do you have for it being false?
We parked trucks at the entrances of the property, but people could and did walk past them.
We had no knowledge that a previous event with children would be there, I never saw any children while I was there, and I don’t know where on the property they were. The judge in my case in Sonoma issued a ruling last August 12 affirming that I had no knowledge of the children who were there until I arrived and didn’t take wrong actions under the circumstances with regards to that issue, and she dropped the child endangerment and false imprisonment charges as not having a basis in fact worth going to trial over.
We were not standing outside any building, except in the sense that being 300 feet away across a bridge/creek is technically “outside”.
When we got there, it was camp staff, not CFAR staff that we were speaking to. But a call falsely reporting a firearm, resulting in a SWAT operation, is more than youthful high spirits.
The fact that you cause collateral damage out of ignorance does not imply that other people are to blame for you having to face the consequences of the damage you cause.
It’s not clear to me why that would “shake your faith in humanity, especially the rationalist community”.
You made a power play, overplayed your hand, lost and needed to pay the costs of losing. It should have made you lose faith in the heuristics that caused you to make the bad power play not lose faith in the rationalist community or humanity more broadly.
I observed unhinged hypocrisy and lies, standard antitrans bigoted narratives being repeated by many of the people in positions of power, I received several death threats, I received a few blackmail attempts, I was shut out from communicating a lot of legitimate issues even in retrospect which are now pretty widely talked about in the community and should have been in the Overton window years earlier. The stuff I was saying at that time is now as far as I can tell entirely in the Overton window. I was sexually assaulted, and tortured, and Ziz and Somni were tortured worse. (That jail has a history of torture, you can find video evidence on Youtube.) And the torturers and the false reporter were never investigated or charged.
The community (if such a thing were considered as a cohesive unit, which it isn’t) violently shut down the attempt to course-correct, even at the same time as senior rationalists were pointing out that things looked pretty doomed.
This is more of a shock to one’s system that I doubt most people have ever even needed to conceptualize much less face all at once.
‘Power play’ and ‘collateral damage’ is disingenuous language. It was a nonviolent protest and a planned series of talks at an event I had given talks at before. I had no reason to expect a false report of a gun. The judge in my case confirmed on August 12 in that official capacity, I had no reason to expect that report or the police overresponse that followed from it, and it’s not reasonable to hold me responsible for it.
You use a lot of terms that are about your judgements instead of sharing facts. Given the position you are in, this is not helping build trust.
What lies are you talking about?
What exactly are you claiming here? What were the threats and what were the asks? If you would be specific about the facts, it would be easier for readers to judge about how they believe those facts should be classified.
What do you mean with being “shut out”? That you weren’t invited to events after the CFAR protest episode? Did you try to write things up on LessWrong and anyone tried to censor you?
US jails do seem pretty bad and engage in a lot of mistreatment. I don’t know anything about this particular jail and it’s plausible that it’s even worse than average. From what I read about the situation from CFAR sources it seemed to me that instead of cooperating with the police, you tried not to cooperate and that probably got you harsher treatment.
While it would be good if the US police would not mistreat people for not cooperating, this seems to me not surprising. This is why it’s common sense to cooperate at least a bit when interacting with police.
I got the impression that some form of Timeless Decision Theory got you to chose to defect instead of letting the police take you in with minimum effort. Do you believe that impression is wrong?
You said that your protest was “nonviolent” and the rationalist community did something “violent”. Even if you would classify the call that suggest they might have seen a weapon as violent, that call didn’t seem to come from the rationality community but someone of the staff at the location, so it’s unclear to me what you are talking about here.
See my Case Study CFAR post.
Not the biggest part of the ordeal, but yeah my account on LW was banned/deleted, and I was banned from CFAR/LW and SSC meetups, and was kicked out of a Facebook discussion group about the event and a Discord server.
But part of it also was that I was afraid to talk about most things because I had criminal charges against me and I have never had that before and didn’t know what was safe to say.
No actually. Ziz and I at least were following the advice of Youtube pot lawyers that she had shared with me amounting to “shut the fuck up” and “don’t sign anything”, limiting what we said to a few phrases like “am I being detained or free to go?” “why are you doing this?” and “I want a/my lawyer”.
Neither of us had ever been arrested before or really had more than a few minor cop interactions.
I am treating death threats as violent. The rest of it was unhinged and horrible, but not violent, that I remember.
I published the one blackmail attempt by Jade Nameless on my blog, the ask was regular hush money. There was an earlier one, the ask was for us to play nice with the court IIRC. It was with good enough intent that I won’t drag her name into this. The threat in both cases was to write up dirt about us and send it to the Sonoma prosecutor.
I received three death threats that I remember, but the details of two are fuzzy in my memory, and I took them less seriously. The one I took seriously, was later revealed to have been sent by Jamie Zajko. Ziz posted a screenshot of it on her blog but I am having trouble finding it.
It seems to me that a lot of that is about CFAR problems that were also there before the episode of the camp. I do think that it’s reasonable to say that CFAR had some issues where knowing about those issues reduces faith in CFAR and the rationality community around it.
The article in the sfchronicle said:
“Many aspects of the strange incident on Friday in Occidental remain a mystery, a sheriff’s spokeswoman, Misti Wood, told The Chronicle. The suspects were allegedly uncooperative and spoke incoherently, and Wood said investigators had to rely on fingerprints to identify them.”
This suggest that you did not share your legal names with the police, and I think based legal advise does include sharing your legal names with the police when being arrested.
Did you follow requests like putting down the masks? What was the reasoning for the mask in particular? If I go to an invent with the hope of convincing people through conversation I would expect that wearing mask is counterproductive to my goal.
The banned list for SSC meetups as of April 2020 was: Giego C, Brent D, Michael V, Robert L, Alice M, Z*, Alison S
I think Z* is probably Ziz, but I don’t think that any of those names refers to you. Also most meetup organizers were not aware of the existence of that list which lead to the episode of Michael being invited as the main speaker of the online SSC event.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/96N8BT9tJvybLbn5z/we-run-the-center-for-applied-rationality-ama?commentId=5W86zzFy48WiLcSg6 seems to be the moderator note for the temporary banning of you on LessWrong where habryka wrote:
“Moderator note: I’ve deleted six comments on this thread by users Ziz and Gwen_, who appear to be the primary people responsible for barricading off last month’s CFAR alumni reunion, and who were subsequently arrested on multiple charges, including false imprisonment.
I explicitly don’t want to judge the content of their allegations against CFAR, but both Ziz and Gwen_ have a sufficient track record of being aggressive offline (and Ziz also online) that I don’t really want them around on LessWrong or to provide a platform to them. So I’ve banned them for the next 3 months (until March 19th), during which I and the other moderators will come to a more long-term decision about what to do about all of this. ”
This is interesting in that the most serious violence against you came from Zajko. What was Zajko’s motivation here? Did he wanted to protect CFAR/MIRI? How did he came up living with Ziz, when he was that antagonistic against you?
Zajko is a cis woman FTR.
That claim seems to be contrary to mainstream media reporting that suggest they identify as nonbinary.
If you want to correct that record, based on what do you base your claim?
I believe, from memory, that Zajko identified herself as a woman in court, but I cannot access to the relevant Maryland local media rn bc it blocks European countries and the Internet Archive is down rn. For second-hand evidence e.g. here refers to Zajko as “a cis woman involved in the affair”.
Rather, Zajko is biologically female, as reflected in other reporting.
So she’s assigned female at birth but probably identified as nonbinary at least at some point.
(nonbinary might be the common phrasing, it’s compatible with the bigender label that Ziz herself uses)
Well, I know that the CFAR staff who were on the grounds at the time (which did not include myself, I was driving up later in the day), were sheltering in place in a cabin, for some hours, until the police arrived, and escorted them out. I assume that the children were similarly hidden away, out of fear of an active shooter.
I don’t know how the camp staff came to think there was an active shooter threat. I know that Ziz and co had bought tickets to the alumni reunion a few days earlier, and CFAR had disinvited them and refunded their tickets. Some people affiliated with CFAR received some quite scary-sounding, threatening-sounding emails from Ziz that week. I assume (though don’t have first hand knowledge) that someone at CFAR gave some advance warning to the camp staff that there were some seemingly-unstable individuals, ambiguously threatening violence, that we had disinvited from our event, but who might try to come anyway.
My best guess is that when camp staff saw people in black robes and Guy Fawkes masks get out of a van, they freaked out, and assumed the worst, and adopted active shooter precautions: everyone on site was directed to shelter in place, and someone called the cops, saying (I guess) something to the effect of “there are deranged masked people outside, they threatened to kill people already, they probably have a gun.”
Also the short email they sent that day, to like 100+ ppl going to the CFAR reunion (I assume everyone whose emails they could find), included the phrase “If you do not want to die” twice, followed by metaphors and links to many long and hard to read blogposts, which is definitely enough reason to take seriously the hypothesis that they would bring weapons.
(Also also, LaSota has written outright that it’s important to do some murders by the time you’re 30 and many other things implying that they are totally on board with killing people. If anybody was picking up a violent streak from her, they were accurately picking up the signals. To be clear, I believe that the shooter concern came from the camp staff, as they were the ones who called the police, but anyone arguing that people were entirely unfair to think the protestors would consider violence are totally wrong, as at least some of the protestors turned out to be extremely pro unlawful violence.)
The full text of that email:
Subject: Fall of MIRI and CFAR
The reader can judge for themselves how threatening this email is (noting that there are some additional emails sent privately, which in my judgement are notably more threatening, though still somewhat ambiguous) than this one.
True, but let’s not get the chronology confused or mix up which events could be evidence for which inferences. They only wrote that comment in 2022, several years after the failed reunion protest.
But this is a fair point.
I’m glad to hear all this, but I, uh, have some questions.
Ziz’s blog contains some stuff that seems at odds with the rosy picture you’ve painted of her and her relationship with you all. Here she describes threatening (she says sincerely) to kill you over an argument about money issues during Rationalist Fleet when the two of you were alone together out on the water. (Ziz might disagree that this was a “threat”, but in the colloquial sense.) Then in the comments below that post, she goes off on a spiel about killing any “single good” friends/followers who ever step out of line. Maybe you didn’t/don’t think these were serious, but they seem pretty serious.
A timeline question—as far as I can tell, the public first became aware you were alive after
What were you doing there, given you were—and I have no other reason to doubt this—homeless/recovering/in hiding and living on the other side of the country at this point? Or was this report somehow false, even though you really are alive?
Can you elaborate a bit on your relationship with Curt, and your impression of what he was like? Some other people involved have posted some pretty strong stuff about Curt, calling him violent & threatening, transphobic, a “shady slumlord”, etc. (Actually, I don’t know who exactly wrote that post.)
(I answered this in another comment, reposting here:)
Curt was pretty kind, was an old (but still quite active) man who had lived a life of a series of adventures. He was not transphobic. He might have threatened people after I left, but that was not a general personality trait of his. I met him late 2017, we became friends, and I lived on his boat (the Robert Gray) for most of 2018, having conversations with him maybe every other day about his adventures / his lessons and about rationality and my own ideas about psychology and my own series of adventures. He had deep dieselpunk expertise from managing a few boats and a boatyard, and those lessons are still useful to me.
Hi, I’m the Regex mentioned in the post. I haven’t read anything in the post other than the section that mentioned me. (Also skimmed a tiny tiny bit)
I’m adding the tiny sliver of relevant context I possess, which should hopefully clear up some things. I was in social circles around the start of the pandemic where the whole Ziz cult thing was fermenting, so I got to see tiny bits of it going down in real time before it became public. (Although I haven’t ever even been to the Bay Area so my interactions are purely online.)
“Zajko”—I have never seen this name before. I do not know anything about them. I suppose it’s possible I might know them by another name, but as far as I am aware I do not know them. I can see their name appears on the wikipedia article as someone the cult murdered though. I had stopped paying attention before all that happened.
I can confirm I made said phone call, however I don’t remember why I felt so confident that Gwen considering suicide was what was going on at the time. I think I may have mixed Gwen up with someone else I had talked to over Discord? (Edit: I believe I thought Gwen and Fluttershy were the same person. And I am now learning Fluttershy killed herself, I actually thought Gwen was dead. So that might have been where the confusion came from? Conflating the two at some point. I actually primarily knew Fluttershy from the fact she was the one who welcomed me to Lesswrong when I joined and posted in the welcome thread, forget how much we actually talked.) So I thought I had some amount of like… grounds to do so at all? It was a long time ago. Nor do I remember how I got Gwen’s phone number. I probably asked around on discord until I found someone that had it? There was a lot of overlapping social circle at the time I think. I distinctly remember it being a ‘this person is actively suicidal and at risk’ emergency-thing. But yes, I had called Gwen to try and help her not be suicidal without having talked to her over the phone ever before. And then immediately ran into the wall of her denying being suicidal. Which I wasn’t sure what to do about and so ended the phone call awkwardly. I admit this to being an extremely strange and socially-weird thing to do, but I am a bit of an odd person willing to do things if I think they will help people if I don’t expect a meaningful downside. I had expected the worst probable case would be Gwen feeling like… some sense of communal security in knowing people cared about random others. Or maybe just ‘that was weird’. The idea it would feel threatening did not even cross my mind. In this case I failed to consider my information might be false or properly attend to the social landscape so it landed very badly, apparently.
“I found this alarming and threatening, given the context, where Hive had been talking publicly about practicing with a gun.”—I did not intend to threaten you. I was quite earnestly trying to save your life! Apparently unnecessarily? And ineffectively at any rate. I’m sad that my attempt at helping there had a negative impact on you. I was concerned that the murder-suicide cult that seemed to be rapidly expanding in my social circles was trying to induce suicide in another one of its members. Since I knew that at least one person (squirrelinhell) already had committed suicide as a direct result of said cult. And that other insane nonsense was going on (most of the public events hadn’t happened yet—it was after Ziz cult getting arrested while trying to intimidate cfar at some park, but before the border patrol agent, if I recall. This was 2020-2021ish). And so I was trying to be helpful and prevent that from the limited information I had. The bit about Hive is news to me. I didn’t know that. Around that time I had largely stopped talking to Hive entirely, and am unaware of her exact relation to you. (Again, I only read the section of this post mentioning my name since I am so done with all the Ziz cult nonsense.)
“anonymous account that had been messaging, I believe it was Regex, which was claiming to be me, and claiming to be suicidal”—I do remember explicitly talking to ‘Char’ at some point? So I am PRETTY sure I had been talking to Gwen directly at some point. However in retrospect I can’t actually remember where the idea of ‘Gwen is suicidal you have to go help her right this instant’ came from. And it doesn’t actually make sense that I would call Gwen instead of just talking to her over discord if I had her discord handle. So I am now very confused about what was going on there. The only reason I did that was because I didn’t have any other way to contact her...?? Very confusing in retrospect. I remember it made sense at the time. But I was also in a panic so it is hard to say. I could go examine chat logs, but they’re pretty buried and full of pain around that time so I’d rather not deal with that.
I believe at the time I was extremely stressed from the pandemic, and was experiencing hypomania from being on a too high dose of buproprion. I was regularly getting 4 hours of sleep at the time. So I was making both leaps of logic and operating out of a state of constant burnout. Not giving myself enough time to recover and think. Just one massive major stressor after another. Driven purely by ‘here is the next fire to put out’. And unable to not act given information and the capacity to do something. So I was making a lot of mistakes constantly.
“Nothing was a cult during the time I was present, and I have no reason to speculate that it became one.”—All I can really say in response to this is that even before it became publicly known for killings (e.g. the border patrol agent), it already had the labels ‘violent’, ‘murder/suicide’, and ‘cult’. The expected evidence from the labels (from my 2020-2021 vantage point) was people dying. It was labeled such and after that… the cult murdered enough people to end up on the news and is labeled as a cult on wikipedia. And is considered in fact to be the most extreme case of being a cult in the entire rationalist social sphere. And to many people became the face of rationality itself. This cult has caused an extreme amount of anxiety for many people important to me. This cult is such a cult that I cold called you as a stranger out of fear for your safety. So please fuck off with that position.
I do not want anything to do with the Ziz drama vortex however. Please do not suck me back into it. In the future please avoid mentioning my name in relation to Ziz and anyone related to Ziz. I just. Do not want to be part of any of this. I have provided you this information such that you have a sense of closure about ‘why did that random person call me’, and to provide the community with more information. Please use this information in ways that reduce the amount of drama and reduce the number of times I am mentioned. I am just so sick of hearing about all this.
Oh, thank you for the care you showed and which I misunderstood.
The phone call was in August or September or October 2020.
The [account claiming to be me], I remember was called Background Pony, and I think I heard of this through JD. So maybe it wasn’t messaging you.
If you spoke with a Discord account ‘Char’ in 2019-2021 that was likely me.
If you’re trying to come across as sane, safe, reasonable and trustworthy in the future, my advice would be to try to write a little more normally. It’s fine if you want to become a dragon in the future, really. I just don’t see why it’s relevant to the topics at hand. Another example, and this is a little mean to say, but I don’t see why it’s necessary to go on for multiple paragraphs of purple prose describing your hopes and aspirations for humanity.
I’m sorry if the reason you brought these things up is that they are very important to your identity. But many people entertain transhumanist fantasies of body modification or have utopian hopes for the future of the world. The impression I am getting from this post is of someone who is lost in their own head, someone who has adopted a very insular frame and doesn’t feel comfortable stepping outside of it. Writing in a more ordinary fashion would go a little ways to put people like me at ease that you’re grounded in reality.
I would also try to avoid unnecessary jargon and references, especially to works of fanfiction. Yes, it’s true that intellectual communities often develop these ways of marking members of an ingroup. But if people are constantly mistaking you for a cultist, it’s probably best to lay off the esotericism.
I prefer authenticity over rhetoric.
And what I said is proof-of-work of an aspect of my mental health, and of a small part of my philosophical divergence from Ziz.
I am quite interested in a wide variety of classical mystic work, such as Buddhism, Hermeticism, neoplatonism, and Wiccan thought. One of the things I think is worth talking about is the existence of compatibility layers for projecting some of this work into a rationalist frame. While there’s a lot of low-quality work, there are also some useful things that I engage with in a similar way to how I engage with major philosophers. (I wouldn’t expect you to judge the quality of this contribution until I publish it.)
This interest happened after I parted ways with Ziz.
I am, and have always been, weird, and it would be a useless charade to pretend otherwise. Much of my strength as a thinker comes from my originality and ability to ground strange ideas in useful ways. If you aren’t up for work that is original and challenges existing frames, you’re not going to like my work, but I hope you can accept its existence and utility.
I’m not going to apologize for being different and pretend to be neurotypical. I further reject the implication that neurodivergence is a bad thing worth apologizing for.
And, uh, interest in the thousands of years of history of classical mystic philosophy does not imply the existence of or inclusion in a modern ‘murder cult’ which has philosophical commitments directly in contradiction to that classical work.
In my immediate physical vicinity right now, I have books by Bertrand Russell and Immanuel Kant next to the Corpus Hermeticum and a Tibetan Buddhist book. I know rationalists by default consider the latter two disreputable—but I’ve found them insightful and (with some work) compatible with a rationalist frame.
I don’t want to be known by the horrible events that I am responding to / commenting on. The post is meant to be an introduction first and foremost, since I was never very socially active before and most people know nothing about me as a person.
Vision is necessarily grounded in potentiality—any talk about vision will either be pretty distant from the present, or woefully underwhelming. You have formed an incorrect impression about me, but it isn’t especially important for me to correct it.
I have verified this to have been written by Ziz, in response to the top level post I am commenting on and the Rolling Stone interview: https://hopes-and-dreams.fyi/one-more-callout-post/
How was this written by her? And how did you verify that it was her?
I was under the impression that she was in jail awaiting trial. Does she have access to a computer? Did she write it freehand and you posted it?
(My guess is @Elua is more likely than not Daniel Blank.)
Gwen: “Ziz has been on the receiving end of possibly the worst press a person could realistically receive. I think Ziz is being maligned far more than she should be”
Ziz: “Gwen tried to stage an intervention to try to make me kill half of my brain as punishment, pursuant to a suddenly declared multiversal genocide crusade against sex.”
To me it seems that Ziz is the obvious reason why Ziz gets the bad press.
The press unfortunately has not been trying very hard to be accurate or fair to Ziz due to the extremely convoluted way she writes—she was definitely being maligned far more than she should be at the beginning to the point that I was interested in speaking up on what I had picked up on because it felt like a moral injury to do nothing about it. Unfortunately I did not have the emotional will or the time back then, and did not know anyone other than Ophelia and Daniel Blank personally (both of whom have been extremely kind to me and my friends). Even now it feels more like people are picking on Ziz’s writing style more than the content, since the “quotation marks” show that these may not be her words as much as Gwen’s (whom she clearly disagrees with here).
It is very rare for me to feel compelled to speak out (and apologies if this is not my place to say), but I do think it’s unfair to hold people to different standards of behavior when LessWrong is about judging ideas by their own merit rather than the person who made them.
Thanks for reading!
I’m curious if you know anything significant about the deaths of Pasek and/or Fluttershy. I’m also not sure what you mean when you say Emma is accelerationist, given the term has multiple meanings.
I don’t know much more than is public, I think. Pasek’s ‘Decision Theory and Suicide’ post on their blog (deleted shortly after posting) came as a surprise to both me and Ziz; we (mostly Ziz) tried to talk her out of it through a logical rebuttal. We both thought Pasek was mostly doing better afterwards, until they stopped reading our messages, and we found out after a couple(?) weeks they had committed suicide, IIRC at/near their parents’ house in Poland (Pasek had told us they were visiting their parents). Ziz was actively working for Google in Mountain View at the time. I miss them, and wish I had known to recognize the situation as serious and/or known how to navigate it. I told Curt, while crying, about what had happened when I found out.
I can’t remember who, but Fluttershy had an online/Discord friend, and I heard from Ziz who heard from them that Fluttershy had video called them saying they were going to commit suicide right then, and had a shotgun(?) on camera, and I presume they committed suicide right then. My memory is old enough that I don’t know what was going on at the lot in Vallejo at the time, but I have no memory of Ziz or her truck leaving the lot around then, and she rarely did.
i heard that the reason fluttershy committed suicide was because the police impounded the truck they were living in with all their possessions.
You said that the people you met in the small town were kind in ways you were unfamiliar with and were surprised to learn about, but didn’t go into depth on that (likely because that was not the point of the post). Other people have discussed most of the other questions I would have here but I want to hear more about this because I’m interested in kindness models / how to be better at being kind.
Update: here is a Rolling Stone article by someone who has been investigating the matters around Ziz for the last year, and who has previously published about the subject. I gave an interview for Rolling Stone earlier this month, and the article is mostly based on that interview.
Were you a source for the original Rolling Stone article?
The author reached out to me through my lawyer a few days before publication to fact-check what had already been written. The author expressed interest in talking more once my legal case resolved, and so we did.
thank you for writing this. feel free to reach out if you want.
Hey, Gwen—I wanted to applaud your courage, authenticity, and thoughtfulness in writing this post. Unfortunately I don’t have time to go into it now due to some urgent work-related matters that need my attention, but I want you to know that I’ve independently generated several of what you’ve said (minus the part where Ziz is the moderate of the group—this still surprises me, but I suppose the experiences she faced would radicalize many) when first researching what happened in an effort to help Daniel Blank. It became very clear at the end of my research that he joined of his own free will and that the “vegan siths” (?) were originally not a cult but defamed as such by bad actors (thanks to Octavia’s brave confession). I’ve been meaning to write you something more in depth, but unfortunately lack the time currently—all I can say is that I strongly feel that the moderators should let you post under the same rules as anyone else, otherwise it does come off as a sign of the hypocrisy that you mentioned in another comment. The rest of us can decide how we engage based on our risk levels, etc.
Thank you so much for telling the truth even when it’s hard, and if you’ve gained complex PTSD from these horrific experiences, somatic therapies have been extremely conducive for my own healing (such as the half-salamander exercise, EMDR, etc.) and I hope you safely continue your very inspiring acts of kindness far into the future.
Concepts from Mage are used heavily by Michael Vassar, Ziz, and yourself. It got me curious and I’ve tried to engage through franchise fiction, but what I’ve read has been not good, and just, I guess, generic compared to what I’ve seen in posts. (Compare Ziz’s posts about the Nephandi to the generic cackling evil wizards in the franchise fiction, for example).
It’s gotten me wondering how you all have engaged with the setting. Are you reading the franchise fiction? (If so, please give me recommendations.) Reading the rulebooks? Or running games?
I’m also wondering about Wraith, since Ziz uses Wraith concepts extensively, especially Oblivion (though I understand her use isn’t directly the Wraith concept, but just something for which Wraith provides a useful analogy or reference). The only Wraith fiction I’ve read so far that seemed to really use the Psyche vs Shadow premise are John H. Steele’s stories: “Glimpses of Before”, and its sequel, “Some There Be That Shadows Kiss”. Were you all reading the rulebooks, reading the fiction, or did you actually run Wraith games? Wraith is so strange that sometimes I wonder whether anyone played it. Although when reading a review of a World of Darkness anthology, the reviewer said:
This also seems to be an issue for authors, and it’s been disappointing reading a Wraith story where the Psyche vs Shadow conflict just gets some obligatory mentions rather than being the core of the drama. But anyway, a few times is not nothing, so someone played it. What about you and Ziz?