a place for it
Update! They are writing letters to Big Yud! https://archive.ph/2025.02.08-132157/https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/ziz-zizians-rationalism-group-20149075.php
Reached by the Chronicle, Yudkowsky said he would not read the letter for the same reason he refused to read the manuscript of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.
Not even the MST3k version?
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.tv.mst3k/search?q=MiSTing%3A+Unabomber+Manifesto
(Warning: contains some … Tarantino-like 1995 edginess at odds with its overall tone)
Well now I am screaming about this. I am trying very, very hard to do it in a way that you won’t immediately dismiss - Audere
I’m not gonna read that - EY
also lol the amount of rat sanewashing
They didn’t care much for marine life when they abandoned a tugboat, leavnig it to leak fuel and crap into the sea:
Ziz was originally radicalised by the sex abuse and abusers around CFAR
deleted comments from the thread https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/96N8BT9tJvybLbn5z/we-run-the-center-for-applied-rationality-ama
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?
How are you going to get them back to the farm a retail job once they’ve seen Paris tasted cult power?
pol pot was in paris and tasted cult power and all it took to get him back to farm and out of power was Vietnamese invasion. personally i think that Vietnamese invasion on all ea compounds would solve a lots of problems and disband a couple of startups
I’m so used to bad rat science being expressed in obscurantist math and quantum physics jargon that the kindergarten neuro woo like “each half-a-brain has a 1 in 20 chance of being ontologically Good” and “nonbinary people have one half of their brain be transgender” throws me off.
Where are the Planck units and the h-bars, category theory, maybe something about Turing machines or Gödel? Can’t you at least throw in a square root or something? Is this all it takes to stroke the a modern STEM dweeb’s ego? I guess all the talk about “debugging” and “jailbreaking” compensates for the infantile aesthetics of the crankery.
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!
fwiw, this /r/slatestarcodex poster says that Ziz of the Zizians did indeed take her name from Worm the web serial
“indirect personal communication”
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.
Explanatory spoiler for those who don’t want to read Worm, a million words of deconstruction/reconstruction of superhero comics:
spoiler
The source of superpowers is a pair of gigantic multidimensional alien creatures. Their eternal mission involves finding a planet with intelligent life, infesting them with powers via brain tumor neural links, and encouraging them to fight so as to generate new ideas – the aliens are profoundly uncreative, even stupid by human standards, but immensely powerful – and when the planet is no longer producing, they reincorporate all the changed and combined powers, then eat the local sun to power their next FTL hop.
When their experimental subjects aren’t moving fast enough, they open up their archive and resurrect the Endbringers – superpowered kaiju which provide a stimulus for cooperation by destroying cities on a schedule. Each Endbringer is unique. The Simurgh, or Ziz, takes the form of a giant statue of a woman covered in angel wings, and wings-on-wings, and so forth. Ziz has primarily psychic powers: telekinesis; a ‘scream’ or ‘song’ that drives people to violent insanity over the course of an hour or so; and mind-control that seems limited to slowly changing supers into creative serial killers and mad scientists and so forth. Ziz floats in orbit, preventing space travel, and periodically descends to the surface to terrorize a city.
Everything escalates. Every trope is explained.
