My Journey to the Dark Side

I think all these worldview enhancements and drugs are no longer a solution to your original problem (not fitting in) and have evolved to a scary problem in itself. You should probably start pushing back.

She also organized a rather poorly received protest of that group which has gained her some notoriety within the community.

This deserves some clarification. Here's what happened. Ziz and some friends went to the CFAR alumni reunion in 2019, before it started. They put on their Sith robes, and chained their vehicle across the entrance road to block it. The previous users of the venue, a class of fifth graders, were still there. Venue staff called the police. The police interpreted it as a school shooting situation, and decided they needed to search the venue for bombs. And so a hundred-ish people, including me, while we were in the middle of driving to the alumni reunion, got an email saying: Don't come. There is a police helicopter and they are searching the area for bombs.

That is the first impression we all got of Ziz's protest. I saw a copy of the pamphlet they had intended to hand out, some time later. It wasn't as bad as that, but it was still nonsense.

Even as I switched to a diet of mostly soylent to save money and attempted to adopt an extremely aggressive update schedule for this blog, I was slowly making myself more and more miserable and gaslighting myself about my own emotions.

Be warned: Soylent comes with a trap. It makes total calorie intake extremely legible, which can overshadow peoples' instinctive eating, causing them to undereat, which causes depression. In particular: for most people, 2000 calories per day is a shortfall. The standard answer to how much one should eat, if not attempting weight loss, is to use the Harris-Benedict formula. A mostly-Soylent diet is also a low-sodium diet, which I believe is also something to look at with skepticism. Whenever mental health issues appear close in time to questionable dietary changes, I believe the diet should be the first suspect, regardless of how compelling other narrative explanations might seem.

I had not realised that there is such a quantity of batshit insanity in the rationality community. Poe's law has applied to the collection of Insanity Wolf memes I recently made. (I won't link them again; you can look for the link if you really want to see it. It's twice as long as it was then.)

Ziz adheres to a moral principle which classifies all life which has even the potential to be sentient as people and believes that all beings with enough of a mind to possess some semblance of selfhood should have the same rights that are afforded to humans. To her, carnism is a literal holocaust, on ongoing and perpetual nightmare of torture, rape, and murder being conducted on a horrifyingly vast scale by a race of flesh eating monsters. If you’ve read Three Worlds Collide [? · GW], Ziz seems to view most of humanity the way the humans view the babyeaters.

... well.

... I mean, letting aside the holocaust comparison which is just asking to have the whole discourse get pulled astray, can you really make rational arguments that it's not at least as bad as a quantitatively reduced version of doing the same things to human beings?

Having said this, I'm just puzzled on why she seems to think that the "flesh-eating monster hell" would survive a positive singularity with a human-aligned AI. 

I can't really imagine a future with a positive singularity where there's just not a more convenient solution to have meat than actually growing and butchering a live animal. Humans, save perhaps a handful of sadistic psychopaths or a few people really wanting to cling about fringe stuff like "the moral value of the hunt" or barbaric recipes who would supposedly increase taste, would choose to have their meat sans-suffering if that was an option. You'd have to model people worse than Quirrelmort does, because they wouldn't even be able to role-play a good person act that simple as answering yes to that question.

Or should I interpret her utopia as making all life immortal as well, protecting animals from accidental deaths, each others and etc... ? I'd say it still seems like a trivial fix and not something to threaten or sabotage people working on singularity over.

I honestly felt a full cognitive assault reading the links with her writing and had to commit to never open links to her blog again, but I think this is mostly my own issues resonating hard. 

Two months ago I kicked open the lid of my gender dysphoria, after having repressed it for some 15 years. I quickly found out that rationality+a kind of distress that doesn't get better if you can think clearly about it (not to say that rationality can't help making that going away in other ways) can quickly degenerate in paranoia, since you can't seem to manage to push a stop button to whatever search process your mind is attempting to solve your pain. 

I had overthought what I was feeling a dozen different ways, and the way she seems to model other people's thoughts struck a lot of resonating chords with me about what people I talked to could actually be thinking about me.

While I'm extremely critical of the Ziz-cult, I have to admit that her theory of core self vs. narrative self is very close to my own thinking [LW · GW] (although I think hyperbolic discounting exists in addition to the core/narrative dynamics.) I also did some kind of "deconstructing the matrix" when thinking about this. However, I strongly depart from her theory of morals. While I care about other people, I do so very non-uniformly [LW(p) · GW(p)] so I'm nowhere near utilitarianism. For example, I'm against animal suffering but it probably wouldn't be worth it for me to be vegan if not for signalling value (while it probably would be worth it for me if I could make everyone vegan including myself.) I guess this might just mean that in her terminology I'm evil? However, I am very much in favor of engaging in mutually beneficial trade with other people, and in favor of creating social norms/matrices that are better for everyone.

I wonder about that. 

I'd expect we'd first see a huge number of newspaper articles and internet websites trying to make health scares about "lab meat" and an ungodly about of memes about "real men eating real meat", or "only real meat has real taste", and then governments would ramp up subsidies to traditional farms because "cultural activities" and whatever. Oh, and a lot of jokes about the synthetic meat that many sci-fi dystopias have as an element.

Old, powerful lobbies don't like the free market regulating itself, at all, and making harmful/obsolete stuff a cultural/identity/political tribes battle is the first strategy to hinder it.

I'd agree it eventually will become the solution, but I expect it to go slightly worse than the energetic transition.

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. 

I appreciate you writing this! Describing how exactly a set of ideas fucked with you, how the ideas interlock, and what you think their structure is, is something I'm always glad to see.

Very interesting post. I found Sinceriously to be a really good blog, full of ideas that resonated with my own experiences. I didn't find her to be a very skilled manipulator though; her attempts to sway me were transparently obvious and I had no problem stripping out the unwanted stuff and keeping the useful ideas.

Perhaps it helps to have already embraced one's dark side? Until now it hadn't occurred to me that doing so might trigger such a catastrophic response as you talked about. Mine was painful but not dangerous, so I at least know it can be done safely.

You've mentioned Pasek's Doom a few times before, but I'm still not quite sure what it means. Something about taking your own headspace drama too seriously in self-destructive ways?

So first off, thanks for sharing -- its really interesting to hear other ppls experience with scrupulosity and Ziz's work. That being said... I have a fair amount of criticism wrt your discussion of Ziz

And look, I don’t have a stake in any of that at this point and I’m not in a position to judge, but I don’t think she’s lying. I don’t think she ever lies, I just think she’s speaking from within her own worldview, the same way that she always does, the same way that everyone always does

Ziz has made a number of specific claims about the rationality community that seem extremely bad to me including (off the top of my head): endemic transphobia in CFAR, sexual misconduct, an attempted cover-up of sexual misconduct endemic (at least at a point) in MIRI. If these occured, they are real concrete events independent of worldview. 

That stuff matters. It mattered enough to me that I've been off this website and un-associated with the rationality community for upwards of a year because I heard about it.

The final Big Idea on Sinceriously is the one which is widely considered to be the most intensely radioactive and results in most of the hostility aimed at her and her followers. This is Ziz’s moral theory, which is, to put it lightly, very extreme.... To her, carnism is a literal holocaust, on ongoing and perpetual nightmare of torture, rape, and murder being conducted on a horrifyingly vast scale by a race of flesh eating monsters.

Just showing up here to preemptively lightly push back on the textual association here between "very extreme moral theory" and "carnism is a literal holocaust." There is a very broad spectrum of moral beliefs that notice that carnism is a literal holocaust and Ziz's philosophy just happens to also be rigorous enough to notice this.

Hm maybe this set me off on defensiveness but, as I continued reading, I couldn't help reinterpret parts of it as a hit piece on Ziz. Here are specific quotes I view as designed to be unjustifiably adversarial (in bold) and my response (in italics) explaining why I perceive them as such:

• "...is willing to go as far as holding protests at CFAR meetups and trying to create her own vegan torture basilisk to timelessly blackmail carnists into not eating meat."
  (If you buy the game-theory being right and buy that AGI would have correct game-theory, everyone working on AGI is trying to create a torture basilisk of some kind and Ziz's just happens to also be vegan. Seems like summarizing what Ziz is trying to do as "vegan torture basilisk" is just punishing her for explicitly thinking about doing the thing everyone's already doing.)
• "What’s a few humans killing themselves when the stakes are literally all of sentient life and the future of all sentient life in the universe?"
  (The equivocation between "two people committed suicide because they read sinceriously" and "Ziz killed people" seems rhetorically adversarial here)
• "This is not to say that you should go out and start using the specific formulation of utilitarianism and timeless decision theory which she does unless you’re also a radical vegan extremist"
  (Ouch lol. I'm a non-radical vegan and see below)
• "Even being willing to write “my morals just happen to correspond with the most objectively correct version of morality” is a pretty gutsy move to make that seems to imply some degree of grandiosity and disconnection from reality"
  (Arbitrary demand for moral rigor. Note that Ziz's morality doesn't have to be the most objectively correct version for her to act as she does, it just has to beat out the competition -- which isn't hard to do since most ppl like factory farming)