came here to post this!

I loved this comment:

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[Former member of that world, roommates with one of Ziz's friends for a while, so I feel reasonably qualified to speak on this.]

The problem with rationalists/EA as a group has never been the rationality, but the people practicing it and the cultural norms they endorse as a community.

As relevant here:

1. While following logical threads to their conclusions is a useful exercise, each logical step often involves some degree of rounding or unknown-unknowns. A -> B and B -> C means A -> C in a formal sense, but A -almostcertainly-> B and B -almostcertainly-> C does not mean A -almostcertainly-> C. Rationalists, by tending to overly formalist approaches, tend to lose the thread of the messiness of the real world and follow these lossy implications as though they are lossless. That leads to...

2. Precision errors in utility calculations that are numerically-unstable. Any small chance of harm times infinity equals infinity. This framing shows up a lot in the context of AI risk, but it works in other settings too: infinity times a speck of dust in your eye >>> 1 times murder, so murder is "justified" to prevent a speck of dust in the eye of eternity. When the thing you're trying to create is infinitely good or the thing you're trying to prevent is infinitely bad, anything is justified to bring it about/prevent it respectively.

3. Its leadership - or some of it, anyway - is extremely egotistical and borderline cult-like to begin with. I think even people who like e.g. Eliezer would agree that he is not a humble man by any stretch of the imagination (the guy makes Neil deGrasse Tyson look like a monk). They have, in the past, responded to criticism with statements to the effect of "anyone who would criticize us for any reason is a bad person who is lying to cause us harm". That kind of framing can't help but get culty.

4. The nature of being a "freethinker" is that you're at the mercy of your own neural circuitry. If there is a feedback loop in your brain, you'll get stuck in it, because there's no external "drag" or forcing functions to pull you back to reality. That can lead you to be a genius who sees what others cannot. It can also lead you into schizophrenia really easily. So you've got a culty environment that is particularly susceptible to internally-consistent madness, and finally:

5. It's a bunch of very weird people who have nowhere else they feel at home. I totally get this. I'd never felt like I was in a room with people so like me, and ripping myself away from that world was not easy. (There's some folks down the thread wondering why trans people are overrepresented in this particular group: well, take your standard weird nerd, and then make two-thirds of the world hate your guts more than anything else, you might be pretty vulnerable to whoever will give you the time of day, too.)

TLDR: isolation, very strong in-group defenses, logical "doctrine" that is formally valid and leaks in hard-to-notice ways, apocalyptic utility-scale, and being a very appealing environment for the kind of person who goes super nuts -> pretty much perfect conditions for a cult. Or multiple cults, really. Ziz's group is only one of several.

To be fair, I also dont believe any stories about a blackmail pedo ring ran by Yudkowsky. And with all the bad stuff going round, why make up a blackmail ring, like he is the Epstein of Rationality. (Note this is a diff thing than: people did statutory rape and it was covered up, which considering the Dill thing is a bit more believable).

Stop stop I can only update my priors so fast!

Dozens as you can see.

College Hill is very good and on top of this shit

extremely normal thing and definitely not cult shit (ziz):

Something I don’t think I ended up writing, was a random conversation on what it meant to be good and a Sith. In which I said, something like, well, I’m doing whatever I want, no matter what, which in my case is good things.

also seems weird that vassar went from failed let-me-google-scholar-that-for-you fake medical startup to a niche rat cult leader. can't any single one of these people get a normal job?

@dgerard I can't help but imagine what a Zizian would do if one endarkened them with the knowledge that lettuce in salad was not allowed to grow to maturity (flowering) before being harvested and consumed

Footnote 1: As a consequence of this approach to thinking and life, rationalists are, as a rule, unbelievably prolix, wall-eyed, and tedious writers, and also polyamorous.

"Wall-eyed" hit me as odd, so I go to look it up: https://www.wordnik.com/words/walleyed

The first entry:

adjective Often Offensive Affected with exotropia.

Well-played, Max!

I'm glad the non sanitized details are making it out.

Adding zizians to the list of things that sneerclub gets blamed for. After covid.

Guess they have not noticed we also have sneered at ziz, and that a lot of us are not living in america, nor the east coast of it.

Demonstrating once again that Twitter is the damp locker-room floor of ideas.

lol. link?

Worm finally enters the mainstream. Yaaaaaaaaay.

You know I was wondering about where the name came from and it's sufficiently plausible that I believe it. Notably in the story her threat - the reason just being around her is so dangerous - is because she has some kind of perfect predictive ability on top of all the giant psychic kaiju nonsense. So she attacks a city and finds the one woman who needs to die in order for her super-thinker husband to go mad and build an army of evil robots or whatever.

It very much rhymes with the Rationalist image of a malevolent superintelligence and I can definitely understand it being popular in those circles, especially the "I'm too edgy to recognize that Taylor is wrong, actually" parts of the readership.