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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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:
Your insistence on viewing me as an uncompromising threat despite no hostile moves on my part is honestly getting rather tiresome...I came here to talk, not fight.
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.
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.
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.
Substack is designed for news, not for posts people will be reading in five years. Reading a Substack’s archive is a pain, and most Substacks are poorly indexed by Google. Therefore, if you take the intermittent-posting approach, I recommend posting to both a Substack and a separate stand-alone website (for inspiration, considerAndy Masley ordynomight’s pages). Your Substack allows people who are interested in your thoughts to subscribe and be automatically notified when you have something new to say, while the stand-alone website serves as a canonical reference.
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.
IDK. The concerns in the footnote of attracting crazy people (even against her their 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 letting her them post personal blogposts but not frontpage posts would be a good compromise? But maybe as mentioned find another adjacent space.
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 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.
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 her them from making classical LW posts, or also banning her them from having a personal blog (i.e. treating her them 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!]
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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 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.