[Link] A community alert about Ziz

I think there's a thing where people with a lot of mental problems tend to get very enthusiastic about various therapy-type techniques and genuinely get a lot of benefit out of them. But then they still have massive problems because their original problems were so humongous to begin with, even if they improve a lot they're still worse on mental health than the median person. (This has historically also described me, even though I have also been getting better over the long term.)

Even if they are genuinely making steady progress, that progress might not be fast enough to ensure that an unexpected shock or a set of adverse consequences won't bring them down.

Local Validity as a Key to Sanity and Civilization [LW · GW] is related.

When you take this idea seriously and commit to stopping this with all your heart, you get Ziz.

No, you don't, because Ziz-style violence is completely ineffective at improving animal welfare. It's dramatic and self-destructive and might express soundly their factional leanings, but that doesn't make it accomplish the thing in question.

Further, none of the murders & attempted murders the gang has committed so far seem to be against factory farm workers, so I don't understand this idea that Ziz is motivated by ambitions of political terrorism at all. Reading their posts it sounds more like Ziz misunderstood decision theory as saying "retaliate aggressively all the time" and started a cult around that.

Not necessarily because you might also commit to stopping it in a non-escalatory way. For instance you could work to make economically viable lab-grown meat to replace animal products.

Hence the other key ingredient in Zizianism is commitment to escalating all the way, which allows things to blow up dramatically like this. (And escalating all the way has the potential to go wrong in most conflicts, not just veganism (though veganism seems like the big one here), e.g. I doubt the landlord conflict was about veganism.)

As an analogy, if you were dealing with the Holocaust, you could try to directly destroy all Nazis, or you could try to mitigate against the Holocaust in less escalatory ways (e.g. trying to have Jews emigrate from Nazi territories, which I imagine could be done either with the cooperation of Jews as in the Danish case, or with the cooperation of Nazis as in the Madagascar plan).

I eat meat and wear leather and wool. I do think that animals, the larger ones at least, can suffer. But I don’t much care. I don’t care about animal farming, nor the (non-human) animal suffering resulting from carnivores and parasites. I’d rather people not torture their pets, and I’d rather preserve the beauty and variety of nature, but that is the limit of my caring. If I found myself on the surface of a planet on which the evolution of life was just beginning, I would let it go ahead even though it mean all the suffering that the last billion years of this planet have seen.

Bring on the death threats.

Btw, I think that Zizzism was — I should say “is” now that she has been reported as still alive — about a lot more than animal welfare, although that was a part of it. But I will have to peer once again into the cesspit to confirm that.

I do agree that it's not an easy subject to speak about. 

There are two separate issues at hand: 

1. What happens if you have multiple personalities
2. Suppressed anger and its effects 

Sometimes abused children develop multiple-personality disorders where they develop new personalities to deal with situations where the characteristics.

I have one friend who has the multiple-personality disorder and is able to switch between them. According to him, he often faced situations where a person was used to dealing with one of his personalities and really surprised when he switched to another personality that has different personality characteristics. 

The technique that Ziz advocates seems to intentionally created something that's similar to multiple personality disorder and I would expect that the same pattern hold where at least one of the personalities is able to do things that are far outside of what the old unified self would do. 

I think good evidence that someone is unlikely to cause harm is about observing that they have functional strategies for taking care of boundary violations. If someone's reaction is instead to ignore their own needs, repress any anger that comes up and go out of his way to avoid causing someone else harm, that strategy is not stable. 

Many people would have thought that Mother Thresa is the "least likely person to doubt in God", but that's what she did. Her outward presentation of extreme belief in God was not something stable. 

It's a mistake to take the fact that someone is extreme along an axis as evidence of stability. 

That's fair from a mental POV, but Daniel Blank physically has poor hand-eye coordination and bad reflexes, meaning that if he tried to shoot somebody he'd be extremely likely to miss at all but the shortest of ranges. (the murder in question was definitely gunshot based)

 

While he could be a part of the conspiracy his ability to have physically committed the actual act is questionable. 

Is this an empirical question? Like, could you gather 1000 people, measure how violent they are, then somehow summon their shadows, and measure again?

My guess would be that the shadow is on average more violent than the original person, but it is not true that less violent person = more violent shadow. (I would probably expect something like: each shadow gets a bonus +5 on violence compared to the original person; including people who already started very violent.)

I have multiple references that corroborate that.

Can you share? I would like to have a clearer sense of what happened to them. If there's info that I don't know, I'd like to see it.

Do you have any indication that Pasek was trans before they spoke with Ziz?

Pasek couch-surfed at my place for a few days around a LessWrong Community weekend he attended and we had deep conversations then. I think that was 1-2 years before he got into contact with Ziz.

At that time he was using heavy optimization pressure on himself. In my memory, he had some logging where he wrote something every hour to measure his productivity. He was also heavily into timeless decision theory-based utilitarian consequentialism at that time. 

I'd buy it that there was an internal conflict at the time. I believe that process that Ziz proposed took that internal conflict and create the Shine and Maia personalities out of them. 

If a person is putting an extraordinary amount of effort into being nice (which is what Gordon Seidoh Worley observed) there's likely an internal conflict. What Ziz is doing allows transforming that internal conflict into two parts, one that's very nice and one that's opposed to being nice.  

This is a very common EA brainworm to have and I know lots of EAs who have folded themselves into pretzels around this sort of internal friction. 

Usually, people who do that have a lot of akrasia. Pasek is different in that they managed not to have that. Most people would be blocked by internal friction from doing the kind of productivity optimization that Pasek did. 

I think that Pasek was smart enough to know that it's good to give the part of him that "i am a creature that exists in a body. I have needs and desires and want to be happy and feel safe"  things to satisfy it. That part wanted to be happy, so they did some body work intervention to feel happy (and wrote on the blog that someone that didn't solve the issue and that people aren't really seeking happiness). That part wanted that they identified themselves publically as Maia, so they did that. That part wanted to transition, so they took hormones. 

The only "exit" that could get them out of their sense of horrifying heroic responsibility was by dying so Shine found a "decision theoretic justification" to kill them and did. 

Shine did find a justification. The way they committed suicide however was not done in a way that sounds like TDT was involved. They could have written an actual suicide note to the people that cared about them and send it the day they died but they didn't. 

People can do bad things if they think something much larger is at stake. Some but not all religions suggest that. Some non religious philosophies do as well, notably utilitarianism. Many, but not all, utilitarians solve the problem by not fully believing in it. Zizians adopt extreme utilitarianism about animal welfare.

It is-for a certain type of unstable person. Ziz would likely have come up with different crazy ideas without Less Wrong. Compare Deepak Chopra on quantum mechanics: he pushes all manner of “quantum” bullshit, yet you can hardly blame physics for this, and if physics weren’t known, Chopra would almost certainly just be pushing a different flavor of insanity.

Daniel was definitely strange in many socially awkward ways

Ok, not Williams Syndrome. There's more going on in his face than the strabismus, though, and I am unsurprised by the further comments on his physical and mental character from Edmund Nelson.

One of the bigger issues is that when we make moral judgements on others, we probably don't realize that we are imposing our own values, and that this is all we can do.

This cashes out in 2 pessimistic claims:

1. Fundamentally unbridgeable divides between values exist, as well as their intensity, and this is poor from the perspective of compromise.

2. Rationality increases don't have anything to do with terminal goals changes.

Adding Up to Normality [? · GW]?

Common sense?

Ignoring base rates? -- in the sense that if you just invented a clever theory why good is actually bad, and bad is actually good, consider that the prior probability of this being true (and you being the first person who noticed that) is smaller than the probability of you making a mistake in the clever argument.

Maybe even tails coming apart [LW · GW] -- in the sense that arguments that seem rational are in general more likely to be true, however the correlation may disappear at the extremes, and the marginal value of taking one more idea in an already too long unlikely chain seriously may be negative.

Well said! Though it raises a question: how can we tell when such defenses are serving truth vs defending an error?

As for an easier word for “memetic immune system”, Lewis might well have called it Convention, as convention is when we disregard memes outside our normal mileu. Can’t say for Chesterton or Aquinas; I’m fairly familiar with Lewis, but much less so with the others apart from some of their memes like Chesterton’s Fence.

Re reason: The real issue is that whenever we make moral judgements, we probably don't realize that we are imposing our values on it.

That's why from the perspective of a fanatic like Ziz doesn't believe they're irrational, primarily because the Zizians and LW have fundamentally unbridgeably opposed values.

Would it be evil from the perspective of someone with priors who believes animal lives are equal in value or greater than humans lives?

Presumably Zizians don't believe they are evil.

For example, many abusive partners reinvent half of the cult techniques on their own. If you are the right kind of personality, it is probably enough to carefully observe your victim, and gradually remove everything that empowers them. (Their parents disapprove of you? No more contact with the parents. An article about abusive relations that actually explains a lot? No more reading that specific website or a book. Ideas encountered in free time that you don't like? Invent lots of busywork, no more free time. Thinking too much? Create emotional drama, so that the victim thinks about made up problems instead.)

Cults are simply groups that stumbled upon the right combination of techniques, efficient enough to either keep their members trapped reliably, or to recruit new members faster than the old ones leave. It helps if you can copy some techniques from your previous cult, but it is not necessary. You can also copy from abusive parents, or if you are an abusive person yourself (and Ziz seems to be) simply learn from your previous experience.

It sure sounds like you think outsiders would typically have the "common sense" to avoid Ziz. What do you think such an outsider would make of this comment [LW(p) · GW(p)]?