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.
lies
What lies are you talking about?
I received a few blackmail attempts
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.
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.
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?
(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.
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?
The community (if such a thing were considered as a cohesive unit, which it isn’t) violently shut down the attempt to course-correct
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
You said that your protest was “nonviolent” and the rationalist community did something “violent”.
I am treating death threats as violent. The rest of it was unhinged and horrible, but not violent, that I remember.
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.
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.
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”.
“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.
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.
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.
“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. ”
The one I took seriously, was later revealed to have been sent by Jamie Zajko
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?
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?
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”.
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)