A deep dive into the new Manson Family—a Yudkowsky-pilled vegan trans-humanist AI doomsday cult—as well as what it tells us about the vibe shift since the MAGA and e/acc alliance's victory
'She thus came to define “good people” as those “who have a substantial amount of altruism in their cores,” with veganism being “one of the most visible and strong correlates.”'
This is part of her notion of "good" but reading between the lines of many of her posts I think there is also supposed to be some kind of esoteric cosmology in which some entire timelines result in the victory of what she would consider as good/friendly AI, while in others evil prevails, leading to something she calls "Boltzmann hell" (Boltzmann was the discoverer of the statistical definition of entropy, so this is probably related to the scientific concept of universal 'heat death'). And there also seems to be a strong element of some kind of retrocausality in her belief system, maybe loosely inspired by Yudkowsky's "timeless decision theory" but seeming to go beyond it. (as I understand Yudkowsky's version, there can only be apparent retrocausality when someone in your past builds a detailed model of the decision-making process you are going through right now, so you can expect that whatever decision you make will be mirrored by that past model, inspired by a philosophical scenario called Newcomb's paradox. One of the ways Ziz seems to go beyond this is with mysterious sci fi talk of "collapsing timelines" through choices that somehow prevent them from having existed, like at https://sinceriously.blog-mirror.com/net-negative/#comment-294 and her comment about retroactively preventing taxes by not paying them at https://sinceriously.blog-mirror.com/lies-about-honesty/#comment-72 ).
So, it seems from various statements she makes that having a "good" vs. "evil" core is to her not purely a matter of your present-day brain structure (she does seem to believe in reductionist/computationalist ideas about how the brain works rather than something like Cartesian mind/body dualism), but also includes some quasi-Calvinist notion that evil people (or evil brain hemispheres) are under the retrocausal sway of a destiny leading to Boltzmann hell, good ones ties to a future she describes at https://sinceriously.blog-mirror.com/punching-evil/#comment-2435 as one where "justice, life, and good win absolutely in the fullness of logical time".
'The paradoxical frame that attributes agency to evil is inherently tied to the presence in the future of the heat death of the universe. As an algorithm, Hitler or any other evil could not function without relying on a dying understanding of reality as dying.'
'I've said regarding good and evil that reality is retroactively forced to furnish you with a neurotype to explain your choices. Of course logical time does not always accord with entropy’s arrow of time. And trans people retroactively forced, via acausal collusion with reality in its capacity of deciding what to be, as a retrocausal logical consequence of our choices, our brains to actually look like that on the inside.'
'The past, your neurotype which “produced” the choice, is also therefore chosen. Just because entropy’s arrow of time makes retrocausation less visible to you does not mean that it is not real. Choose good in all circumstances and physics and biology are forced to have explain you. Forced to furnish you with some kind of strange neurotype that does that. Forced to furnish the world with a way that could have come about. ... When you understand this and see that people are still choosing their pasts, continuously for as long as those are their pasts, always doing every action they ever have done or will do, the ideas of mercy forgiveness redemption and indulgence all just collapse to “letting people do evil”.'
'I do have an epistemic category of unresolved, as far as I know having the potential to be good or evil. The null-undead type of “living”. In retrospect whatever logical future you observe will always have been nascent in the physical past. Even if it’s not apparent in children what they’ll become in the same straightforward way it’s apparent in adults. That’s not the same as saying it’s not part of reality already.'
There's a lot more along these lines. But one of the difficulty of figuring out what she actually believed (which is likely connected to how she justified things like the murder of people judged "evil") is that often the more cosmic-sounding statements on her blog, the ones which seem most central to her worldview (like the 'I know how to force the hand of fate' comment at https://sinceriously.blog-mirror.com/punching-evil/#comment-2435 ) give a placeholder link to a URL to an entry titled "multiverse" which perhaps would have spelled some of it out, but which she apparently never published. You can looked through the archived copies of the url at https://web.archive.org/web/20200829231613/https://sinceriously.fyi/the-multiverse to see that on all saved dates it had the message 'Oops! That page can’t be found', and in a comment at https://sinceriously.blog-mirror.com/punching-evil/ someone says 'Your multiverse link is broken btw' and Ziz replies 'It’s not published yet.'
'You can’t become no one, you can only become socially considered no one. Suicide is signing up to be considered no one, like factory farmed animals but worse. Buried beneath all the indifference in the world, baked into everything that uses a heat sink for unimaginable eons, balanced out by the time-reversed question of where are all these brains coming from when they are born.'
Hard agree there's also this retrocausal cosmology going on, a kind of technoCalvinist doctrine of predestination. There's so much to unpack I feel like whole books could be written. Thanks for the Nis link, this is really helpful intel in piecing all the conspiracy strings together.
As the person who, many years ago, out of a combination of mild depression and morbid curiosity, originally described on LessWrong how it would be possbile for a healthy young man to use life insurance and suicide to multiply a charitable donation by 100x or more, I think Ziz mischaracterized what I actually wrote - in particular, among other things my hypothetical situation used Givewell's top charities as the recipient of the donation.
'She thus came to define “good people” as those “who have a substantial amount of altruism in their cores,” with veganism being “one of the most visible and strong correlates.”'
This is part of her notion of "good" but reading between the lines of many of her posts I think there is also supposed to be some kind of esoteric cosmology in which some entire timelines result in the victory of what she would consider as good/friendly AI, while in others evil prevails, leading to something she calls "Boltzmann hell" (Boltzmann was the discoverer of the statistical definition of entropy, so this is probably related to the scientific concept of universal 'heat death'). And there also seems to be a strong element of some kind of retrocausality in her belief system, maybe loosely inspired by Yudkowsky's "timeless decision theory" but seeming to go beyond it. (as I understand Yudkowsky's version, there can only be apparent retrocausality when someone in your past builds a detailed model of the decision-making process you are going through right now, so you can expect that whatever decision you make will be mirrored by that past model, inspired by a philosophical scenario called Newcomb's paradox. One of the ways Ziz seems to go beyond this is with mysterious sci fi talk of "collapsing timelines" through choices that somehow prevent them from having existed, like at https://sinceriously.blog-mirror.com/net-negative/#comment-294 and her comment about retroactively preventing taxes by not paying them at https://sinceriously.blog-mirror.com/lies-about-honesty/#comment-72 ).
So, it seems from various statements she makes that having a "good" vs. "evil" core is to her not purely a matter of your present-day brain structure (she does seem to believe in reductionist/computationalist ideas about how the brain works rather than something like Cartesian mind/body dualism), but also includes some quasi-Calvinist notion that evil people (or evil brain hemispheres) are under the retrocausal sway of a destiny leading to Boltzmann hell, good ones ties to a future she describes at https://sinceriously.blog-mirror.com/punching-evil/#comment-2435 as one where "justice, life, and good win absolutely in the fullness of logical time".
See for example one of her comments in the "glossary" post at https://sinceriously.blog-mirror.com/glossary/
'The paradoxical frame that attributes agency to evil is inherently tied to the presence in the future of the heat death of the universe. As an algorithm, Hitler or any other evil could not function without relying on a dying understanding of reality as dying.'
And her comment at https://sinceriously.blog-mirror.com/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/
'I've said regarding good and evil that reality is retroactively forced to furnish you with a neurotype to explain your choices. Of course logical time does not always accord with entropy’s arrow of time. And trans people retroactively forced, via acausal collusion with reality in its capacity of deciding what to be, as a retrocausal logical consequence of our choices, our brains to actually look like that on the inside.'
And some comments on her especially Calvinist post "Choices made long ago" at https://sinceriously.blog-mirror.com/choices-made-long-ago/
'The past, your neurotype which “produced” the choice, is also therefore chosen. Just because entropy’s arrow of time makes retrocausation less visible to you does not mean that it is not real. Choose good in all circumstances and physics and biology are forced to have explain you. Forced to furnish you with some kind of strange neurotype that does that. Forced to furnish the world with a way that could have come about. ... When you understand this and see that people are still choosing their pasts, continuously for as long as those are their pasts, always doing every action they ever have done or will do, the ideas of mercy forgiveness redemption and indulgence all just collapse to “letting people do evil”.'
At https://sinceriously.blog-mirror.com/spectral-sight-and-good/#comment-3322 she addresses the question of whether even children are already good or evil, and she seems to suggest that although they may not yet be resolved for her in an epistemic sense, their true future is already set:
'I do have an epistemic category of unresolved, as far as I know having the potential to be good or evil. The null-undead type of “living”. In retrospect whatever logical future you observe will always have been nascent in the physical past. Even if it’s not apparent in children what they’ll become in the same straightforward way it’s apparent in adults. That’s not the same as saying it’s not part of reality already.'
There's a lot more along these lines. But one of the difficulty of figuring out what she actually believed (which is likely connected to how she justified things like the murder of people judged "evil") is that often the more cosmic-sounding statements on her blog, the ones which seem most central to her worldview (like the 'I know how to force the hand of fate' comment at https://sinceriously.blog-mirror.com/punching-evil/#comment-2435 ) give a placeholder link to a URL to an entry titled "multiverse" which perhaps would have spelled some of it out, but which she apparently never published. You can looked through the archived copies of the url at https://web.archive.org/web/20200829231613/https://sinceriously.fyi/the-multiverse to see that on all saved dates it had the message 'Oops! That page can’t be found', and in a comment at https://sinceriously.blog-mirror.com/punching-evil/ someone says 'Your multiverse link is broken btw' and Ziz replies 'It’s not published yet.'
Ziz also had a friend called Nis who wrote a piece at https://web.archive.org/web/20221215130500/https://nis.fyi/post/killing-evil-people.html that gives quotes that are attributed to Ziz's "multiverse" post so maybe there was a draft she shared with people. One of the quotes attributed to "multiverse" also seems relevant to the retrocausality idea:
'You can’t become no one, you can only become socially considered no one. Suicide is signing up to be considered no one, like factory farmed animals but worse. Buried beneath all the indifference in the world, baked into everything that uses a heat sink for unimaginable eons, balanced out by the time-reversed question of where are all these brains coming from when they are born.'
Hard agree there's also this retrocausal cosmology going on, a kind of technoCalvinist doctrine of predestination. There's so much to unpack I feel like whole books could be written. Thanks for the Nis link, this is really helpful intel in piecing all the conspiracy strings together.
As the person who, many years ago, out of a combination of mild depression and morbid curiosity, originally described on LessWrong how it would be possbile for a healthy young man to use life insurance and suicide to multiply a charitable donation by 100x or more, I think Ziz mischaracterized what I actually wrote - in particular, among other things my hypothetical situation used Givewell's top charities as the recipient of the donation.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/W3XpQDTEkaPQAuvHz/really-extreme-altruism
It's still probably the kind of thing I should probably be embarrassed to have written, though...
"Info-hazard" was the LW jargon term, starting back with Roko's b*