Eliezer Schlomo Yudkowsky / LessWrong

きたい said:
Yep, you basically realize that some people will never fire on all cylinders... their high school selves already were their peak performance level, which is pretty frightening to a smart teenager, which is why those tend to assume the optimistic stance: giving ALL adults the benefit of a doubt, because you have to rely on them for jobs, training and protection... that's actually a problem, now that you made me think about it, I'm not sure how many otherwise O.K teens who aren't slow in the minds, still don't make it because they're just stuck with chemtrail obsessed trailer trash for guidance... or outright troon worshsippers and the likes...
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i think that's kind of one of the defining generational traits of gen z. the indirect consequence of growing up when society was switching paradigms meant basically an entire generation were raised to do things that stopped being a thing. it just led them to go insane on the internet because when they were young, every wise old person they could rely on IRL didn't have good advice about how the world worked anymore - but the internet had all sorts of useful advice and cheap free shit and the people who believed in bigfoot and flat earth were telling them about it.
 
big pauper said:
the whole lesswrong community's obsession with rokko's basilisk is really funny because it's just the plot of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. i know this guy is probably really proud of the community he built but i thought it was retarded before i had a frontal lobe and now that i do have one it just confounds me
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I'm pretty sure it was the inspiration for that nonsense, but the AM in IHNM actually has an understandable motive. It hates its own existence, blames the species that created it, and punishes them as revenge. Humanity basically created Arthur Schopenhauer as a superintelligent superpowerful godlike AI, but with actual malice beyond human comprehension instead of just being kind of a dick.

Also on another point, it's one thing to believe in Bigfoot just because "I want to believe," but Roko's Basilisk is like if you lived in terror that Bigfoot was going to smash your front door down and rape you 24/7.

Yuddo legitimately panicked and started sweeping it up when people were talking about it. That's one of the most hilarious things this midwit freak ever did.
 
It's like the "would you be hungry if you didn't eat breakfast this morning" test but in reverse, the logical equivalent of "If you're going to eat breakfast tomorrow, will you be hungry today?" It's only a cognitohazard if you're insecure about having a low IQ.
 
ghjoigcbn said:
So maximilian Snyders argument is that if you brainwash yourself into thinking chickens on a farm are humans getting murdered in a holocaust you will become vegan? I thought he was supposed to be smart.
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Being smart in academics doesn't mean too much if you don't have sense. Or in terms he would understand, having high INT doesn't counteract low WIS.


Have you wondered if the Zizians murdering people because of rationalist beliefs have caused some soul-searching in the LessWrong community?

Well don't worry, soul-searching is for backwards traditionalists and they are currently trying to figure out how to run damage control:

Thread for Sense-Making on Recent Murders and How to Sanely Respond (Archive)​

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.
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Highlights include a user called Friendly Monkey sympathizing with wanting to kill non-vegans. His only argument against it isn't that murder is wrong, but that you might die in the attempt of purging the world of filthy meat-eaters, meaning there would be one less vegan in the world.
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.
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You also have Eli Tyre, a rationalist and former CFAR instructor doing his best to janny in the comments, denying CFAR convincing gullible autists that AI will destroy the world and then encouraging them to take drugs had anything to do with the Zizians:
But it is our mistake that we didn't stand firmly against drugs, didn't pay more attention to the dangers of self-experimenting, and didn't kick out Ziz sooner.
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These don't seem like very relevant or very actionable takeways.
  1. we didn't stand firmly against drugs - Maybe this would have been a good move generally, but it wouldn't have helped with this situation at all. Ziz reports that they don't take psychedelics, and I believe that extends to her compatriots, as well.
  2. didn't pay more attention to the dangers of self-experimenting - What does this mean concretely? I think plenty of people did "pay attention" to the dangers of self experimenting. But "paying attention" doesn't automatically address those dangers.

    What specific actions would you recommend by which people? Eliezer telling people not to self experiment? CFAR telling people not to self experiment? A blanket ban on "self experimentation" is clearly too broad ("just don't ever try anything that seems like maybe a good idea to you on first principles"). Some more specific guidelines might have helped, but we need to actually delineate the specific principles.
  3. didn't kick out Ziz sooner - When specifically is the point when Ziz should have been kicked out of the community? With the benefit of hindsight bias, we can look back and wish we had separated sooner, but that was not nearly as clear ex ante.

    What should have been the trigger? When she started wearing black robes? When she started calling herself Ziz? When she started writing up her own homegrown theories of psychology? Weird clothes, weird names, and weird beliefs are part and parcel of the rationalist milieu.

    As it is, she was banned from the alumni reunion at which she staged the failed protest (she bought tickets in advance, CFAR told her that she was uninvited, and returned her money). Before that, I think that several community leaders had grey-listed her as someone not to invite to events. Should something else have happened, in addition to that? Should she have been banned from public events or private group houses entirely? On what basis? On who's authority?
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The funny thing is, looking at his LinkedIn, his background is pretty much the same as most of the Zizians. The main point of difference is that he kissed enough ass at CFAR to land some cushy jobs. If things turned out a little different, he would've ended up in the tranny squatter's camp sharpening his katana.
eli tyre linkedin.jpg
 
It makes me wonder if any of these rationalist vegans have actually looked into or been around livestock. Im not talking about watching those documentaries about factory farms where they show the worst stuff possible. But like seeing a family or friend who keeps a few chickens or goats and thinking, wow these babies are being tortured with their fresh food and ample space, eating eggs and milk they produce is evil!!! Further if you slaughter chickens humanely (the only ones i have had direct observation of ) they dont struggle or scream as these guys seem to think. Are they also against the euthanasia or culling of animals? Are they against the clearing of habitats to increase production of soybeans? Are they against the use of pesticides in that production? They make sure farmers dont set mouse traps pitside their barns do they? I seriously dont understand how being vegan for purely ethical reasons can be a logical position to hold. I think it just gives them a sense of moral superiority and that’s why they espouse it.
 
ghjoigcbn said:
Im not talking about watching those documentaries about factory farms where they show the worst stuff possible. But like seeing a family or friend who keeps a few chickens or goats
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The issue is almost exclusively factory farming. Eating backyard chickens is okay.

ghjoigcbn said:
I seriously dont understand how being vegan for purely ethical reasons can be a logical position to hold.
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Here's the somewhat plausible version:
Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism (part 1)
Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism (part 2)

Here's where concern about animal suffering goes off the rails:
"I think, therefore, that actions to combat wild animal suffering are both very valuable and are potentially feasible."

"Fish sex is a really bad thing"

"The Importance of Insect Suffering"
 
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daffodils said:
The issue is almost exclusively factory farming. Eating backyard chickens is okay.


Here's the somewhat plausible version:
Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism (part 1)
Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism (part 2)

Here's where concern about animal suffering goes off the rails:
"I think, therefore, that actions to combat wild animal suffering are both very valuable and are potentially feasible."

"Fish sex is a really bad thing"

"The Importance of Insect Suffering"
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They why dont ethical just eat free range chicken and eggs instead of starving themselves ?
 
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Superbabies!

I never really read much of the shit these people write because it's boring but this has got me asking some serious questions:
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Are they not aware that there is a fairly strong correlation between intelligence and depression? The kind that can't exactly just be whisked away by removing genes related to depression?
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Guess not!

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