Thread for Sense-Making on Recent Murders and How to Sanely Respond

post by Ben Pace (Benito) · 2025-01-31T03:45:48.201Z · LW · GW · 2 comments

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In case you have not heard, there have been some recent and not-so-recent killings allegedly by people who have participated in aspiring rationalist spaces.

I've put some links in a footnote for those who want the basic info.^[1]

I believe many people are thinking about this and how to orient. People have questions like:

1. What has happened?
2. What is likely to happen?
3. What can be done to prevent more killings?
4. How to relate to all of the widespread interest (e.g. from journalists)?

I hereby demarcate this thread as a place for people to ask and answer questions about this topic. 

Three virtues for this thread are (1) Taking care of yourself, (2) Courage, and (3) Informing.

Airlines have standard advice to put your own oxygen mask on first, before helping others. The reasoning being that if you don't help yourself, you won't then be able to help others. In a similar spirit, please take responsibility for keeping yourself safe first, and then help others. There are violent people about who, it seems to me, have thought carefully about how to hurt others and not be caught by law enforcement. Take the time to think through that before volunteering yourself to help out with something, or before sharing information you know about what people involved did, that might lead the foolish murderers to be aggressive.

I think courage is what lets people do difficult things together, and is helpful here. A society of brave and courageous people sees problems solved that are unpleasant and unrewarding and require taking personal risk, and gets better outcomes than other society. I also want to quote a friend of mine on this subject:

If we are going to be destroyed by Zizianism, let that Zizianism, when it comes, find us doing sensible and rationalist things – making prediction markets, posting, memeing, reading, encouraging the open exchange of information, building OSINT pipelines, reducing x-risk, arguing with our friends over some stimulants and a warm slack channel – not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about Zizianism

Finally, informing: People and institutions all around the world are trying to figure out what is going on, how to update their priors around general threat models, and how to help respond. These include aspiring-rationalist group organizers, family and friends of people involved, news organizations, local law enforcement institutions, people understanding how safe their town is, and so many more. Talking about it clearly, sharing accurate information about active threats is the sort of thing that improves people's maps of reality and helps them to better protect themselves and others. So I implore you to share what you know, questions you have, and considerations that haven't been articulated yet.

Pseudonymity notes

And remember: you can make pseudonymous accounts to talk on this thread. I do not expect to leave many comments with my own username. My one request is that you don't pick ugly names like "anon031234" but something pretty like "Morning Grass" or "Curious George".

Also, if you want to make sure your writing is unrecognizable, you can have your comments re-written by a language model. Example prompt: "Here is a comment I'd like to write. Please can you re-phrase it in your own words."

P.S. If this thread gets over 200 comments, I will make a 2nd one.

1. ^{^}

   List of resources / articles with the basic info.

   1. Open Vallejo's News Article on the Subject (the best one so far IMO).
   2. Timeline of Events (1k words)
   3. Detailed timeline of events (10k words)
   4. Google Drive of Relevant Documents
   5. A medium article from Feb 2023 (plus LW discussion [LW · GW])

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