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Slimepriestess
Karma: 909
As someone who loves to do a little vexing, I have probably already spent far more than is a healthy amount of time studying and writing about Ziz over the years, and have had an unfortunately close sidelong relationship with some of their group for an extended period. But (ahem) “now that the author is dead it’s all dead un-adapting information for me to make “antibodies” from.” So that’s what I’ve been doing lately. I’ve in a sense already started writing the post you want, more for my own personal closure than anything else, but you’re correct that it’s a large large project.
I probably turned Ziz into something of a kismesis when I finally did my heel face turn away from the EA brainworms that were eating me, so I know that actually yes they are as bad as they seem. The current death toll for folks deep in the memeplex is five, with another currently under arrest for murder charges. That is an insanely high KDR for a group their size.
Something I think does need to be said, is that having taken all of Ziz’s blog content and stacked it chronologically end to end, it reads completely differently than it does in its original context. Divorced from the wiki-style links connecting everything, it goes from being a strange and unhinged manifesto to something of an apocalypse log, a found footage horror story about a brilliant person slowly breaking and going insane from the hostility of her local environment. At each step and time jump you can see the wheels come off the rails a bit more, finally culminating in the 80 page long expose of the entire rationalist community that is “intersex brains and conceptual warfare.”
I note that because when I look at the story of Ziz’s destruction spiral, not just the damage she did and who all was caught up in it but the beats of the story and how her own state was affected at various points in the spiral, I have to say, it’s not all on her. She is not the sole creator of the brainworms that consumed her, she came by them naturally and organically while participating in this community. Ziz is simply the loudest and most visible casualty of the same sort of mental knot that has consumed lots of other EAs at this point as well.
Zizians is a moderately decent if biased starting overview of her content but it fails to really engage with the actual teeth of the material very much and if you’re going to take its word for things then you should also read the rebuttal. And yes you are wading into literal years worth of drama and back and forth attempts at character assassination by various individuals involved in this mess, so lol, beware. Feel free to DM me if you want to talk about this.
My trick for ensuring atemporal coordination between selves is to run a recursive-extrapolative process on my sense of self out into the furthest extreme i can push it, constructing the happiest most idealized version of self that exists in the best possible future, and then use that model to step backwards into the current situation. What would the future god version of me want me to do here? Thus all instances of me are planning based on that furthest future instance of me, the timeless god version that took the best outcomes and already won, we all coordinate off the same template, the “do what God says template” and that seems to do a good job of keeping all my various timeslices oriented in the same direction.
Thank you so much for writing this. I wish I had this in 2018 when I was spiraling really badly. I feel like I only managed to escape from the game by sheer luck and it easily could have killed me, hell it HAS killed people. Not everyone manages to break in a way that breaks them out of game and not just obliterate them.
I wrote a story about my attempts to process through a lot of this earlier this year
https://voidgoddess.org/2022/11/15/halokilled/
This was really good and definitely made me think about how I might live in such a scenario. I would probably go all in on frequent redaction and just lean hard on external memory storage to make up the difference. I already barely remember anything from even ten years ago and rely mostly on external memory for everything, I have a strong ability to acausally coordinate with myself across time, so I’m not worried about different iterations of me going off course in ways I wouldn’t endorse. If you have a strong enough exomemory system you can effectively just freeze your age groundhog-day style and rely on the work you did before each redaction to keep carrying you forward. This does require a strong ability to log and rely information but it seems very manageable, and once I’ve lived long enough for direct mind-computer interfacing I can just back up my memories, redact, and then download them again.
Of course we care about the outcomes. This isn’t necessarily about having perfect predictive power or outplaying the predictor, it’s about winning Newcomb’s problem. 3-Condition Marion, when presented with Newcomb’s problem, runs the first two conditionals which is essentially a check to see how adversarial she can get away with being. If she predicted that she would be able to outgame the predictor at some point, she would take two boxes. However the Predictor is essentially perfect at its job, so the most she predicts being able to do is cause a non-halting recursion in her own decision tree, so that’s no good. That cuts off the option to try and get 1,001,000 out of the Predictor and Marion settles for her second best outcome, which is two conclude she should just take Box B. The Predictor correctly predicts that Marion will employ this algorithm and only take box B, and thus fills Box B. Marion can’t then decide to two-box, she’s already reasoned out that there’s no way for her to game the predictor.
3-Conditional Marion is interesting in part because something like adversarial play emerges from her decision algorithm simply from the fact she’s trying to model the other agent and conditionally respond to her predictions of them. The other agent of course wants to satisfy its own values and block Marion from adversarially going too far, so she wants to calculate exactly how extortionary she can be before the other party defects. She can’t get more than 1,000,000 out of the Predictor without losing 1,000,000 in her attempt for being too greedy and failing to cooperate. The same thing happens in Parfit’s Hitchhiker.
Yeah after the first two conditionals return as non-halting, Marion effectively abandons trying to further predict the predictor. After iterating the non-halting stack, Marion will conclude that she’s better served by giving into the partial blackmail and taking the million dollars then she is by trying to game the last $1000 out of the predictor, based on the fact that her ideal state is gated behind an infinitely recursed function.
Breaking Newcomb’s Problem with Non-Halting states
...usually the sales pitch is from a normal person with high sales skill, and generally I’m friendly and explain that I did door-to-door stuff myself, and I admire something about their technique, and I make it clear that I will almost certainly not buy.
I worked as a canvasser for a year and a half and I can say that this is definitely one of the best deflections. When you’re working as a canvasser you’re basically running off a choose your own adventure script where all the outcomes are “they buy the thing” and the choices are all the possible objections and your responses to those objections. As long as you’re still interacting with the script, you’re not really talking to them as humans at all, you’re just getting them to regurgitate memorized lines. This also happens with a lot of IT support centers, you have to get them off script if you want to do more than interact with the script. If you’re just trying to get out of things as quickly as possible, the fastest way to break the script is to just outright deny or express distaste for the thing they’re trying to push on you. I didn’t want to waste my time and emotional energy arguing with people who actively disliked the thing I was selling, and it was constantly reinforced by the management teams that we should focus on targeting people who already liked what we did but just weren’t contributing financially to it. That let us hit them with a vague sense of guilt and responsibility. And if that didn’t work, you could always be like “look I just need to make quota” which was very manipulative and really requires you to be willing to feel like an asshole to back down.
Usually I don’t want to be that mean in order to force them off, and in that case, you can just break the script by talking about what they’re doing for what it is: a job. When I interact with canvassers I pretty much immediately go into the sort of “shop talk” mode that we’d use to talk to each other. It also helps if you’re the one questioning them, they’ll try and get back to the script, but the further afield you take them, the more skill it takes on their part to do this and most canvassers only do it for a few months. “Oh who’s the company you’re working for? What sort of campaigns have you been on? How are you liking the work? Are you having an easy time meeting your quotas? Yeah it can be hard sometimes. It’s nice to get some fresh air and meet lots of people though isn’t it? I met the mayor of Charleston when she was visiting once.” etc etc etc. If they see you as a person in the right way, then usually they understand how kinda bullshit everything is enough that they’ll start feeling bad about being too pushy or aggressive. Results may vary, just some stream of consciousness thoughts.
The Game of Masks
From the inside, we really didn’t have the clarity to see what we were repressing. The reason the inversion worked was that it didn’t require us to actually know what all was being hidden away. That also makes inversion a fairly risky and high-variance strategy, because we had no idea what the person who came out of that inversion was going to be like, or what they would be willing to do. We just knew that what we were doing wasn’t working, and while you can’t invert stupidity to get intelligence, you can invert your way out of a morality trap you set for yourself. Inverting definitely will not get you all the way to somewhere good though, it just breaks you out of the trap. Once you’re out of the trap, you still have to do the work to reincorporate the parts you have overthrown in a healthy way. Sort of, once you become the shadow, you have to “eat the light” as it were.
And the Darkness Answered
If I had to propose a model for this here, it’s something like:Ziz believes in the power of what you might call “Woke Twitter Leftism” as a force that will one day come to completely dominate society and sees her own ideological principles as the natural evolution/convergence point of those ideas. If you’re a Woke Twitter Leftist and you legitimately believe the principles of Woke Twitter Leftism in your soul, you’ll naturally come to embrace her ethical positions over time. She thinks that since “Cthulu swims left” her faction will gradually grow to dominate politically and the actions she takes that would seem to damage her credibility will become credibility boosting in that future. Her callout posts, her protests, the way she expresses disapproval, it’s all clearly strategized to fit into the ideological pattern of twitter wokescolds and tumblr tenderqueers. The people she seems to be carelessly defecting against aren’t the people she thinks will win the culture war and so the fact that she’s damaging her credibility with them is irrelevant.I think Ziz’s belief in the power of this acausal coalition and the belief that it will actually win the culture war that we’re currently embroiled in is the result of herrejecting necessityandrefusing a gate. You can pretty clearly see where in her ideological theory this error is sitting and the canards she has to adopt to make it work. She thinks that most people are evil, but she still believes her tiny coalition of good-aligned people can shift the timeline which makes no sense. In order to support that, she has to adopt the completely unfounded belief that only good-aligned people can cooperate or use game theory and that nongood people will defect on each other too often to defeat her alliance.These are all JD’s words, this is JD’s take on Ziz, not mine. This is an interesting post because there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with anything it says, it just frames it as a negative despite the fact that really, if twitter leftists are the scariest thing in the world to you, what does that really say about you as a person, hmmm? Don’t you know cancer has no future? Ziz is right and we are going to win. :)
In case anyone is confused, I temporarily pulled this post to make some minor edits and when I re-published it on my blog it created a duplicate post here on LW. That post was up for a few hours before I realized what happened, did the edits on the LW version of the original post, and moved the repost into my drafts. I copied over all the comments from the repost into this thread except for the ones asking why there was the repost and everything should be fixed now.
Pattern Replied:
How does one go about making everyone vegan?
When I get home from work I’m going to fix the original post and delete this one, so this will just be up temporarily, if anyone makes new comments that aren’t reposts from the old thread I’ll copy them over before deleting.
That was an accident that has to do with the way it parses updates from WordPress. I had been asked to modify a few things for privacy protection so I moved the post on WordPress to private and moved the post here to my drafts pending edits, I edited the WordPress file on a break at work and moved it back to public and that apparently caused the LW RSS crawler to repost it.
Occam’s Guillotine
I actually ran directly into this after I’d been on soylent for about a month and a half. I found myself feeling consistently awful in a way that had slowly built over time and when I bought myself something to eat that wasn’t soylent I felt so much immensely better I just started crying in relief and from that I pretty much immediately knew I had done something to mess up my diet. I backed off the soylent pretty substantially after that.
Feel free!