Creatrei

Karma: 93

Creatrei 27 Apr 2026 6:09 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: dawnlightmelody’s comment on: (Re)introduction of a rationalist dragon, and clarifications on Ziz’s character
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.

Creatrei 24 Apr 2026 4:19 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: (Re)introduction of a rationalist dragon, and clarifications on Ziz’s character
What lies are you talking about?
See my Case Study CFAR post.
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.

Creatrei 23 Apr 2026 20:53 UTC
4 points
−19
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: (Re)introduction of a rationalist dragon, and clarifications on Ziz’s character
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.

Creatrei 23 Apr 2026 17:50 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: (Re)introduction of a rationalist dragon, and clarifications on Ziz’s character
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.

Creatrei 23 Apr 2026 17:28 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Matrice Jacobine’s comment on: (Re)introduction of a rationalist dragon, and clarifications on Ziz’s character
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.

Creatrei 23 Apr 2026 17:10 UTC
9 points
4
in reply to: Benjy_Forstadt’s comment on: (Re)introduction of a rationalist dragon, and clarifications on Ziz’s character
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.

Creatrei 23 Apr 2026 16:48 UTC
9 points
0
on: (Re)introduction of a rationalist dragon, and clarifications on Ziz’s character
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.

Creatrei 23 Apr 2026 16:32 UTC
9 points
0
in reply to: Regex’s comment on: (Re)introduction of a rationalist dragon, and clarifications on Ziz’s character
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.

Creatrei 23 Apr 2026 5:26 UTC
6 points
1
in reply to: Benjy_Forstadt’s comment on: (Re)introduction of a rationalist dragon, and clarifications on Ziz’s character
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.

Creatrei 23 Apr 2026 5:18 UTC
10 points
0
in reply to: Muga Sofer’s comment on: (Re)introduction of a rationalist dragon, and clarifications on Ziz’s character
a California state trooper reported seeing Gwen alive at the Vallejo crime scene the day after the event.
(I answered this in another comment, reposting here:)
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.
Can you elaborate a bit on your relationship with Curt
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.

Creatrei 23 Apr 2026 5:08 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: jessicata’s comment on: (Re)introduction of a rationalist dragon, and clarifications on Ziz’s character
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.

Creatrei 23 Apr 2026 4:43 UTC
2 points
−24
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: (Re)introduction of a rationalist dragon, and clarifications on Ziz’s character
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.

Creatrei 23 Apr 2026 4:31 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: (Re)introduction of a rationalist dragon, and clarifications on Ziz’s character
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.
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.

Creatrei 23 Apr 2026 4:22 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Matrice Jacobine’s comment on: (Re)introduction of a rationalist dragon, and clarifications on Ziz’s character
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.

Creatrei 23 Apr 2026 4:11 UTC
9 points
1
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: (Re)introduction of a rationalist dragon, and clarifications on Ziz’s character
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.

Creatrei 23 Apr 2026 3:36 UTC
23 points
0
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: (Re)introduction of a rationalist dragon, and clarifications on Ziz’s character
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?
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.

Creatrei 23 Apr 2026 2:45 UTC
1 point
1
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: (Re)introduction of a rationalist dragon, and clarifications on Ziz’s character
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.)

Creatrei 23 Apr 2026 2:17 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Matrice Jacobine’s comment on: (Re)introduction of a rationalist dragon, and clarifications on Ziz’s character
Oh, I suppose I should have included that in the post! I prefer they/them pronouns.