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due to Taking Seriously things like radical veganism
I take seriously radical animal-suffering-is-bad-ism[1], but we would only save a small portion of animals by trading ourselves off 1-for-1 against animal eaters, and just convincing one of them to go vegan would prevent at least as many torturous animal lives in expectation, while being legal. I think there must be additional causes, like the weird decision theory people have mentioned, although I think even that is insufficiently explanatory, as I explain near the end.
That said, taking animal suffering seriously does change the moral status of killing an average knowing animal-eater to something which is deontologically understandable, even if it's still strategically very bad.
So while I don't endorse the actions, I mostly feel empathy for Ophelia and the others and hope that they'll be okay. Maybe it's like how I'd feel empathy for an altruist who couldn't handle living in this world and committed suicide, cause that's also strategically bad and reckless.. but very understandable to me, as one who knows how alienating it can be.
I haven't seen others on LW with this sentiment, maybe they've felt afraid to express it (as I do). In which they were alienated altruists who couldn't handle this world and seemingly went a little insane (given the incorrect beliefs about decision theory). Most people struggle to stay dispassionately rational when faced with something which they regard as very morally bad. It is hard to live in a world one believes to contain atrocities.
It was once harder for me to live in this world too, but I adapted myself into a better consequentialist. That is a grueling and non-default thing to do; "There will soon be horror in front of you, young altruist, but you are not allowed to directly intervene, because if you do you will be arrested, and you won't be able to stop others from doing the same horror. That's right, there are many, many others doing the same horror, and you will often have to not voice objection to it while you plan how to make it stop in a lasting way." That is not the kind of situation a standard human is capable of handling well.
Now combine this with the default human bias of ignoring things outside one's own story (a standard example being suffering in another country); a decision theory that always says 'escalate conflict' cannot itself support escalating conflicts only with the ones around them in particular (a friend's abusive parents, a cop stopping your car, a landlord), instead of e.g. animal farming CEOs. Indeed, this kind of scope-sensitivity, when taken sufficiently seriously, generalizes to "do the altruistically best action, whatever it is, whether or not it looks like fighting back."
I doubt that this is the full explanation. For example, I imagine they were aware of the concept of scope sensitivity and agreed with it. Maybe it plays a part, though, since being aware of biases doesn't make you fully immune to them. I see no other explanation for this.
Given the purpose of this thread as sense-making, and that courage is listed as a virtue which it did take to post this, I hope this will be welcomed and help with sense-making.
- ^
For a valid analogue between how bad this is in my morality and something that would be equally bad in a human-focused morality, you can imagine being born into a world with widespread human factory farms. Or the slaughter and slavery of human-like orcs, in case of this EY fiction.
If we are going to be destroyed by Zizianism
I don't understand why rationalism would be destroyed by Zizianism. The murders have not been against rationalists. Do you mean, "If rationalism's reputation is damaged as a result of association"?