Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Oh my goodness, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a
Speaker 2: podcast that is it'll be interested to see how the
Speaker 2: audience reacts to this one talking about some of the
Speaker 2: most obscure, frustrating Internet arcana that has ever occurred and
Speaker 2: recently led to the deaths of like six people. My
Speaker 2: guest today as in last episode, David Borie, David, Hey,
Speaker 2: you doing man, I'm doing great.
Speaker 3: I really can't wait to see where this goes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I feel.
Speaker 3: Like anything could happen at this point.
Speaker 2: It is going to It is going to a lot
Speaker 2: of frustrating things are going to happen. So we'd kind
Speaker 2: of left off by setting up the rationalists where they
Speaker 2: came from, some of the different strains of thought and
Speaker 2: beliefs that come out of their weird thought experiments. And
Speaker 2: now we are talking about a person who falls into
Speaker 2: this movement fairly early on and is going to be
Speaker 2: the leader of this quote unquote group, the Zizians, who
Speaker 2: were responsible for these murders that just happened. Ziz Lesota
Speaker 2: was born in nineteen ninety or nineteen ninety one. I
Speaker 2: don't have an exact birth date. She's known to be
Speaker 2: thirty four years old as of twenty twenty five, so
Speaker 2: somewhere in that field. She was born in Fairbanks, Alaska,
Speaker 2: and grew up there as her father worked for the
Speaker 2: University of Alaska as an AI researcher. We know very
Speaker 2: little of the specifics of her childhood or upbringing, but
Speaker 2: in more than one hundred thousand words of blog posts,
Speaker 2: she did make some references to her early years. She
Speaker 2: claims to have been talented in engineering and computer science
Speaker 2: from a young age, and there's no real reason to
Speaker 2: doubt this. The best single article on all of this
Speaker 2: is a piece and Wired by Evan Ratliffe. He found
Speaker 2: a two thousand and four teen blog post by Ziz
Speaker 2: where she wrote, my friends and family, even if they
Speaker 2: think I'm weird, don't really seem to be bothered by
Speaker 2: the fact that I'm weird. But one thing I can
Speaker 2: tell you is that I used to deemphasize my weirdness
Speaker 2: around them, and then I stopped and found that being
Speaker 2: unapologetically weird is a lot more fun.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: It's important you know. Ziz is not the name this
Speaker 2: person is born under. She's a trans woman, and so
Speaker 2: I'm like using the name that she adopts later but
Speaker 2: she is not transitioned at this point like this, This
Speaker 2: is when she's a kid, right, and she's not going
Speaker 2: to transition until fairly late in the story after coming
Speaker 2: to San Francisco. So you just keep that in mind
Speaker 2: as this is going on here. Hey, everyone, Robert here,
Speaker 2: just a little additional context, as best as I think
Speaker 2: anyone can tell. If you're curious about where the name
Speaker 2: Ziz came from, there's another piece of serial released online
Speaker 2: fiction that's not like a rationalist story, but it's very
Speaker 2: popular with rationalists. It's called Worm. Ziz is a character
Speaker 2: in that that's effectively like an angel like being who
Speaker 2: can like manipulate the future, usually in order to do
Speaker 2: very bad things. Anyway, that's where the name comes from.
Speaker 2: So smart kid, really good with computers, kind of weird
Speaker 2: and embraces being unapologetically weird at a certain point in
Speaker 2: her childhood. Hey, everybody, Robert here. Did not have this
Speaker 2: piece of information when I first put the episode together,
Speaker 2: but I came across a quote in an article from
Speaker 2: the Boston Globe that provides additional context on Zizz's childhood quote.
Speaker 2: In middle school, the teen was among a group of
Speaker 2: students who managed to infiltrate the school district's payroll system
Speaker 2: and award huge paychecks to teachers they admired while slashing
Speaker 2: the salaries of those they despised. According to one teacher, Zizz,
Speaker 2: the teacher said, struggled to regulate strong emotions, often erupting
Speaker 2: in tantrums. I wish I'd had this when Dave it
Speaker 2: was on, but definitely sets up some of the things
Speaker 2: that are coming. She goes to the U of Alaska
Speaker 2: for her undergraduate degree in computer engineering in February of
Speaker 2: two thousand and nine, which is when Elisia Jedkowski started
Speaker 2: Less Wrong. Ziz starts kind of getting drawn into some
Speaker 2: of the people who are around this growing subculture, right,
Speaker 2: and she's drawn in initially by veganism. So Ziz becomes
Speaker 2: a vegan at a fairly young age. Her family are
Speaker 2: not vegans, and she's obsessed with the concept of animal sentience,
Speaker 2: right of the fact that like animals are thinking and
Speaker 2: feeling beings just like human beings. And a lot of
Speaker 2: this is based in her interest in kind of foundational rationalist.
Speaker 2: A lot of this is based in her interest of
Speaker 2: a foundational rationalist and EA figure a guy named Brian
Speaker 2: Thomasik Brian is a writer and a software engineer as
Speaker 2: well as an animal rights activists and as a thinker.
Speaker 2: He's what you'd call a long termist, right, which is,
Speaker 2: you know, pretty tied to the EA guys. These are
Speaker 2: all the same people using kind of different words to
Speaker 2: describe the aspects of what they believe. His organization is
Speaker 2: the Center on Long Term Risk, which is a think
Speaker 2: tank he establishes that's at the ground floor of these
Speaker 2: effective altruism discussions, and the goal for the Center of
Speaker 2: Long Term Risk is to find ways to reduce suffering
Speaker 2: on a long timeline. Thomasik is obsessed with the concept
Speaker 2: of suffering and specifically obsessed with conceps. Suffering is a
Speaker 2: mathematical concept. So when I say to you, I want
Speaker 2: to end suffering, you probably think, like, oh, you want
Speaker 2: to like, you know, go help people who don't have
Speaker 2: access to clean water, or like who have like worms
Speaker 2: and stuff that they're dealing with, have access to medicine.
Speaker 2: That's what normal people think of, right, you know, maybe
Speaker 2: try to improve access to medical care that sort of stuff.
Speaker 2: Thomas Saith thinks of suffering as like a mass, like
Speaker 2: an aggregate mass that he wants to reduce in the
Speaker 2: long term through actions right. It's a numbers game to him,
Speaker 2: in other words, and his idea of ultimate good is
Speaker 2: to reduce and end the suffering of sentient life. Critical
Speaker 2: to his belief system and the one that Ziz starts
Speaker 2: to develop, is the growing understanding that sentience is much
Speaker 2: more common than many people had previously assumed. Part of
Speaker 2: this comes from long standing debates with their origins in
Speaker 2: Christian doctrine as to whether or not animals have souls
Speaker 2: or basically machines with meat right that don't feel anything right.
Speaker 2: There's still a lot of Christian evangelicals who feel that
Speaker 2: way today about like at least the animals we eat,
Speaker 2: you know, like, well they don't really think it's fine.
Speaker 2: God gave them to us. We can do whatever we
Speaker 2: want to them.
Speaker 3: Here we eat and.
Speaker 2: To be fair, this is an extremely common way for
Speaker 2: that people in Japan feel about like fish, even whales
Speaker 2: and dolphins, like the much more intelligent they're not fish,
Speaker 2: but like the much more intelligent ocean going creatures is
Speaker 2: like they're fish. They don't think you do whatever to them,
Speaker 2: you know. This is a reason for a lot of
Speaker 2: like the really fucked up stuff with like whaling fleets
Speaker 2: in that part of the world. So this is a
Speaker 2: thing all over the planet. People are very good at
Speaker 2: deciding certain things we want to eat. Are our machines
Speaker 2: that don't feel anything, you know, it's just much more
Speaker 2: comfortable that way. Now, this is obviously like you go
Speaker 2: into like pagan The Pagans would have been like, what
Speaker 2: do you mean animals don't think or have souls? Animals
Speaker 2: like animals think, you know, like they're they're they're like,
Speaker 2: you're telling me, like my horse that I love it
Speaker 2: doesn't think, you know, that's nonsense. But it's this thing
Speaker 2: that in like early modernity especially gets more common. But
Speaker 2: they're also this is when we start to have debates
Speaker 2: about like what is sentience and what is thinking? And
Speaker 2: a lot of them are centered around trying to answer,
Speaker 2: like our animals sentient And the initial definition of sentience
Speaker 2: that most of these people are using is can it reason?
Speaker 2: Can it speak? If we can't prove that like a
Speaker 2: dog or a cow can reason, and if it can't
Speaker 2: speak to us, right, then it's not sentient. That's how
Speaker 2: a lot of people feel. It's an English philosopher named
Speaker 2: Jeremy Bentham, who first argues, I think that what matters
Speaker 2: isn't can it reason or can it speak? But can
Speaker 2: it suffer? Because a machine can't suffer. If these are
Speaker 2: machines with meat, they can't suffer. If these can suffer,
Speaker 2: they're not machine with meat, right, And this is the
Speaker 2: kind of thing how we define sentience is a moving thing.
Speaker 2: Like you can find different definitions of it. But the
Speaker 2: last couple of decades, in particular of actually very good
Speaker 2: data has made it clear. I think inarguably that basically
Speaker 2: every living thing on this planet has a degree of
Speaker 2: what you would call sentience if you are described being
Speaker 2: sentienced the way it generally is now, which is a
Speaker 2: creature has the capacity for subjective experience with a positive
Speaker 2: or negative negative valence i e. Can feel pain or pleasure,
Speaker 2: and also is it can feel it as an individual right,
Speaker 2: it doesn't mean, you know, sometimes people use the term
Speaker 2: effective sentience to refer to this, to differentiate it from
Speaker 2: like being able to reason and make moral decisions. You know,
Speaker 2: for example, ants I don't think can make moral decisions,
Speaker 2: you know, in any way that we would recognize that
Speaker 2: they certainly don't think about stuff that way. But twenty
Speaker 2: twenty five, research published by doctor Vulker Nehring found evidence
Speaker 2: that ants are capable of remembering for long periods of
Speaker 2: time violent encounters they have with other individual ants and
Speaker 2: holding grudges against those ants. Right, just like us. They're
Speaker 2: just like us. And there's strong evidence that ants do
Speaker 2: feel pain. Right, We're We're not pretty sure of that.
Speaker 2: And in fact, again this is an argument that a
Speaker 2: number of researchers in this space will make. Sentience is
Speaker 2: probably some kind of something like this. Kind of sentience,
Speaker 2: the ability to have subjective positive and negative experiences is
Speaker 2: universal to living things, or very close to it.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: It's an interesting body of research, but there's as it's
Speaker 2: fairly solid at this point. And again I say this
Speaker 2: as somebody who like hunts and raises livestock. I don't
Speaker 2: think there's any any solid reason to disagree with this.
Speaker 2: So you can see there's a basis to a lot
Speaker 2: of what Thomisik is saying, right, which is that you
Speaker 2: should if you're what matters is reducing the overall amount
Speaker 2: of suffering in the world, and if you're looking at
Speaker 2: suffering as a mass, if you're just adding up all
Speaker 2: of the bad things experienced by all of the living things.
Speaker 2: Animal suffering is a lot of the suffering. So if
Speaker 2: our goal is to reduce suffering, animal welfare is hugely
Speaker 2: importantly right.
Speaker 3: It's a great place to start.
Speaker 2: Great, fine enough, you know, not a little bit of
Speaker 2: a weird way to phrase it, but fine.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: H So here's the way. Problem though, Thomisik, like all
Speaker 2: these guys, spends too much time. None of them can
Speaker 2: be like, hey, had a good thought, We're done, setting
Speaker 2: that thought down, moving on. So he keeps thinking about
Speaker 2: shit like this, and it leads him to some very
Speaker 2: irrational takes. For example, in twenty fourteen, Thomas six starts
Speaker 2: arguing that it might be a moral to kill characters
Speaker 2: in video games, and I'm going to quote from an
Speaker 2: article in Volves. He argues that while NPCs do not
Speaker 2: have anywhere near the mental complexity of animals, the difference
Speaker 2: is one of degree rather than kind, and we should
Speaker 2: care at least a tiny amount about their suffering, especially
Speaker 2: if they grow more complex. And his argument is that like, yeah,
Speaker 2: most it doesn't matter like individually killing a goomba or
Speaker 2: a bet or a guy in GTA five, but like,
Speaker 2: because they're getting more complicated and able to try to
Speaker 2: avoid injury and stuff. There's evidence that there's some sort
Speaker 2: of suffer ring there, and thus the sheer mass of
Speaker 2: NPCs being killed that might be like enough that it's
Speaker 2: ethically relevant to consider. And I think that's silly. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I think that's ridiculous. I'm sorry, man, No, I'm sorry.
Speaker 3: But that's a lot of the fun of the game.
Speaker 3: Kill you.
Speaker 2: If you're telling me, like we need to be deeply
Speaker 2: concerned about the welfare of like cows that we lock
Speaker 2: into factory farms, you got me, absolutely for sure. If
Speaker 2: you're telling me I should feel bad about running down
Speaker 2: a bunch of cops and grand theft auto.
Speaker 3: It's also one of those things where it's like you
Speaker 3: got to think locally. Man.
Speaker 2: There's yeah, there's there's like there's like this is this
Speaker 2: is the I mean? And he does say like, I
Speaker 2: don't consider this a main problem, but like the fact
Speaker 2: that you think this is a problem is it means
Speaker 2: that you believe silly things about consciousness. Yeah, anyway, so
Speaker 2: this is I think the fact that he gets he
Speaker 2: leads himself here is kind of evidence of the sort
Speaker 2: of logical fractures that are very common in this community.
Speaker 2: But this is the guy that young Ziz is drawn to.
Speaker 2: She loves this dude, right, He is kind of her
Speaker 2: first intellectual heart throb, and she writes, quote, MY primary
Speaker 2: concern upon learning about the singularity was how do I
Speaker 2: make this benefit all sentient life, not just humans? So
Speaker 2: she gets interested in this idea of the singularity. It's
Speaker 2: inevitable that an AI god is going to arise, and
Speaker 2: she gets into the, you know, the rationalist thing of
Speaker 2: we have to make sure that this is a nice
Speaker 2: AI rather than a mean one. But she has this
Speaker 2: other thing to it, which is this AI has to
Speaker 2: care as much as I do about animal life, right,
Speaker 2: otherwise we're not really making the world better, you know.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: Thamisik advises her to check out Less Wrong, which is
Speaker 2: how Ziz starts reading elizer Yetkowski's work. From there, in
Speaker 2: twenty twelve, she starts reading up effective altruism and existential risk,
Speaker 2: which is a term that means the risk that a
Speaker 2: super intelligent AI will kill us all. She starts believing
Speaker 2: in all of this kind of stuff, and her a
Speaker 2: particular belief is that like the Singularity, when it happens,
Speaker 2: is going to occur in a flash kind of like
Speaker 2: the rapture and almost immediately lead to the creation of
Speaker 2: either a hell or a heaven. Right, and this will
Speaker 2: be done by the term they use for this inevitable
Speaker 2: AI is the Singleton, right'. That's what they call the
Speaker 2: AI god that's going to come about, right, And so
Speaker 2: her obsession is that she has to find a way
Speaker 2: to make this Singleton a nice AI that cares about
Speaker 2: animals as much as it cares about people. Right, that's
Speaker 2: our initial big motivation. So she starts emailing Thomasick with
Speaker 2: her concerns because she's worried that the other rationalists aren't vegans, right,
Speaker 2: and they don't feel like animal welfare is like the
Speaker 2: top priority for making sure this AI is good, and
Speaker 2: she really wants to convert this whole community to veganism
Speaker 2: in order to ensure that the Singleton is as focused
Speaker 2: on insect and animal welfare as human welfare. And Thomas
Speaker 2: Sick does care about animal rights, but he disagrees with
Speaker 2: her because he's like, now, what matters is maximizing the
Speaker 2: reduction of suffering, and like, a good Singleton will solve
Speaker 2: climate change and shit, which will be better for the animals.
Speaker 2: And if we focus on trying to convert everybody in
Speaker 2: this the rationalist space to veganism. It's going to stop
Speaker 2: us from accomplishing these bigger goals, right, this is shattering
Speaker 2: to Ziz. Right, she decides that he doesn't Thomas Sick
Speaker 2: doesn't care about good things, and she decides that she's
Speaker 2: basically alone in her values. And so her first move.
Speaker 3: The time to start a smaller subcol shit that.
Speaker 2: Sounds like we're on our way. She first considers embracing
Speaker 2: what she calls negative utilitarianism. And this is an example
Speaker 2: of the fact that from the jump, this is a
Speaker 2: young woman who's not well, right because once her hero
Speaker 2: is like, I don't know if veganism is necessarily are
Speaker 2: the priority we have to embrace right now, her immediate
Speaker 2: goals to jump to, well, maybe what I should do
Speaker 2: is optimize myself to cause as much harm to humanity
Speaker 2: and quote destroy the world, to prevent it from becoming
Speaker 2: hell for mostly everyone. So that's a jump.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: That's not somebody who's doing well you think is healthy.
Speaker 3: No, she's uh, she's having a tough time out. Uh huh.
Speaker 2: So Ziz does ultimately decide she should still work to
Speaker 2: bring about a nice AI, even though that necessitates working
Speaker 2: with people she describes as flesh eating monsters who had
Speaker 2: created hell on Earth for far more people than those
Speaker 2: they had helped. That's everybody who eats meat, Okay, yes, yes,
Speaker 2: And it's ironic, large group. It's ironic because like if
Speaker 2: you if you're she really wants to be in the
Speaker 2: tech industry. She's trying to get an all all these
Speaker 2: people are in the tech industry. That's a pretty good
Speaker 2: description of a lot of the tech industry. They're in
Speaker 2: fact monsters who have created hell on Earth for more
Speaker 2: people than they've felt. But she means that for like,
Speaker 2: I don't know, you're you're onto has a Hamburger once
Speaker 2: a week and look again, factory farming evil. I just
Speaker 2: don't think that's how morality works. I think you're going
Speaker 2: a little far.
Speaker 3: No, she's making big jumps.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're making bold thinkers, bold thinker. Yeah. Now, what
Speaker 2: you see here with this logic is that Ziz has
Speaker 2: taken this. She has a massive case of main character syndrome.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: All of this is based in her attitude that I
Speaker 2: have to save the universe by creating, by helping to
Speaker 2: or figuring out how to create an AI that can
Speaker 2: end the eternal holocaust of all animal life and also
Speaker 2: save humanity.
Speaker 3: Right to do?
Speaker 2: That's me and this is this is a thing.
Speaker 3: Again.
Speaker 2: All of this comes out of both subcultural aspects and
Speaker 2: aspects of American culture. One major problem that we have
Speaker 2: in the society is Hollywood has trained us all on
Speaker 2: a diet of movies with main characters that are the
Speaker 2: special boy or the special girl with the special powers
Speaker 2: who save the day, right, and real life doesn't work
Speaker 2: that way very often. Right, the Nazis, there was no
Speaker 2: special boy who stopped the Nazis. There were a lot
Speaker 2: of farm boys who were just like, I guess I'll
Speaker 2: go run in a machine gun nest until this is
Speaker 2: done exactly. There were a lot of sixteen year old
Speaker 2: Russians who were like, guess I'm gonna walk in a bullet,
Speaker 2: you know, like that's that's how evil gets fought. Usually, unfortunately,
Speaker 2: all were reluctant like that, yeah yeah, or a shitloaded
Speaker 2: guys in a lab figuring out how to make corn
Speaker 2: that has higher yields so people don't starve. Right, These
Speaker 2: are these are really like how world clatt Like huge
Speaker 2: world problems get solved.
Speaker 3: People who have been touched, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not people who have been touched, and it's
Speaker 2: certainly not people who have entirely based their understanding on
Speaker 2: the world from quotes from Star Wars and Harry Potter.
Speaker 2: So some of this comes from just like, this is
Speaker 2: a normal, deranged way of thinking that happens to a
Speaker 2: lot of people in just Western I think a lot
Speaker 2: of this leads to, uh, why you get very comfortable
Speaker 2: middle class people joining these very aggressive fascist movements in
Speaker 2: the West, Like in Germany, it's like middle class mostly
Speaker 2: like middle class and upper middle class people in the US,
Speaker 2: especially among like these street fighting, you know, proud boy types.
Speaker 2: It's because it's not because they're like suffering and desperate.
Speaker 2: They're not starving in the streets. It's because they're bored
Speaker 2: and they want to feel like they're fighting an epic
Speaker 2: war against evil.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, you want to fill your time with importance,
Speaker 3: right right, regardless of what you do, you want to
Speaker 3: and you want to feel like you have a cause
Speaker 3: worthy of fighting for. So in that, I guess I
Speaker 3: see how you got here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So there's a piece I mean, I think there's
Speaker 2: a piece of this that originally it's just from this
Speaker 2: is something in our culture. But there's also a major,
Speaker 2: a major chunk of this gets supercharged by the kind
Speaker 2: of thinking that's common in EA and rationalist spaces, because
Speaker 2: so rationalists and effective altruists are not ever thinking like, hey,
Speaker 2: how do we as a species fix these major problems?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: They're thinking, how do I make myself better, optimize myself
Speaker 2: to be incredible, and how do I like fix the
Speaker 2: major problems of the world alongside my mentally superpowered friends.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: These are very individual focused philosophies and attitudes, right, And
Speaker 2: so they do lend themselves to people who think that, like,
Speaker 2: we are heroes who are uniquely empowered to save the
Speaker 2: world ziz rights. I did not trust most humans indifference
Speaker 2: to build a net positive cosmos, even in the absence
Speaker 2: of a technological convenience to prey on animals, So like,
Speaker 2: I'm the only one who has the mental capability to
Speaker 2: actually create the net positive cosmos that needs to come
Speaker 2: into being. All of her discussion is talking in like
Speaker 2: terms of I'm saving the universe, right, And a lot
Speaker 2: of that does come out of the way many of
Speaker 2: these people talk on the Internet about the stakes of AI,
Speaker 2: and just like the importance of rationality. Again, this is
Speaker 2: something scientology does. El Ron Hubbard always couched getting people
Speaker 2: on dianetics in terms of we are going to save
Speaker 2: the world and end war, right, like this is you know,
Speaker 2: it's very normal for cold stuff. She starts reading around
Speaker 2: this time when she's in college, Harry Potter and the
Speaker 2: Methods of Rationality. This helps to solidify her feelings of
Speaker 2: her own centrality as a hero figure. In a blog
Speaker 2: post where she lays out her intellectual journey, she quotes
Speaker 2: a line from that fan thick of yed Kowski's that is,
Speaker 2: it's essentially about what Yudkowski calls the hero contract, right
Speaker 2: or sorry, It's essentially about this concept called the hero contract. Right,
Speaker 2: And there's this, there's this, This is a psychological concept
Speaker 2: among academics right where. And it's about like, it's about
Speaker 2: about analyzing how we as a how we should look
Speaker 2: at the people who societies declare heroes and the communities
Speaker 2: that declare them heroes and see them as in a dialogue,
Speaker 2: right as in when when when you're in a country
Speaker 2: decides this guy is a hero. He is through his
Speaker 2: actions kind of conversing to them, and they are kind
Speaker 2: of telling him what they expect from him.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: But Yedkowski wrestles with this concept, right, and he comes
Speaker 2: to some very weird conclusions about it. In one of
Speaker 2: the worst articles that I've ever read, he frames it
Speaker 2: as hero licensing. I refer to the fact that people
Speaker 2: get angry at you if they don't think you have
Speaker 2: if you're trying to do something and they don't think
Speaker 2: you have a hero license to do it. In other words,
Speaker 2: if you're trying to do something like that they don't
Speaker 2: think you're qualified to do. He'll describe that as them
Speaker 2: not thinking of like a hero license. And he like
Speaker 2: writes this annoying article that's like a conversation between him
Speaker 2: and a person who's supposed to embody the community of
Speaker 2: people who don't think he should write Harry Potter fan fiction.
Speaker 2: It's all very silly, and again always is ridiculous. But
Speaker 2: Ziz is very interested in the idea of the hero contract, right,
Speaker 2: but she comes up with her own spin on it,
Speaker 2: which she calls the true hero contract, right and instead
Speaker 2: of again, the academic term is the hero contract means
Speaker 2: societies and communities pick heroes, and those heroes in the
Speaker 2: community that they're in are in a constant dialogue with
Speaker 2: each other about what is heroic and what is expected, right,
Speaker 2: what the hero needs from the commune unity, and vice versa.
Speaker 2: You know, that's all that that's saying, Ziz says, No, no, nah,
Speaker 2: that's bullshit. The real hero contract is quote poor free
Speaker 2: energy at my direction, and it will go into the
Speaker 2: optimization for good.
Speaker 3: In other words, classic.
Speaker 2: SiZ, it's not a dialogue. If you're the hero, the
Speaker 2: community has to give you their energy and time and power,
Speaker 2: and you will use it to optimize them for good
Speaker 2: because they don't know how to do it themselves, because
Speaker 2: they're not really able to think.
Speaker 3: You know, they're not the.
Speaker 2: Hero, because they're not the hero. Right you are? You are?
Speaker 3: You are the all powerful hero.
Speaker 2: Now this is a fancy way of describing how cult
Speaker 2: leaders think. Right, Yeah, everyone exists to poor energy into me,
Speaker 2: and I'll use it to do what's right. You know.
Speaker 2: So this is where her mind is in twenty twelve,
Speaker 2: but again she's just a student posting on the Internet
Speaker 2: and chatting with other members of the subculture. Point that year,
Speaker 2: she starts donating money to MIRY, the Machine Intelligence Research
Speaker 2: Research Institute, which is a nonprofit devoted to studying how
Speaker 2: to create friendly Ai y had Kowski founded Miri in
Speaker 2: two thousand, right, so this is his like nonprofit think tank.
Speaker 2: In twenty thirteen, she finished an internship at NASA. So
Speaker 2: again she is a very smart young woman.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: She gets an internship at NASA and she builds a
Speaker 2: tool for space weather analysis, so as the person with
Speaker 2: a lot of potential, very very as. All of the
Speaker 2: stuff she's writing is like dumbest shit. But again, intelligence
Speaker 2: isn't an absolute. People can be brilliant at coding and
Speaker 2: have terrible ideas about everything else.
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly. Yeah, I wonder if she's telling you think
Speaker 3: she's telling people at work.
Speaker 2: I don't. I don't think at this point she is,
Speaker 2: because she's super insular. Right, She's very uncomfortable talking to people. Right,
Speaker 2: She's going to kind of break out of her shell
Speaker 2: once she gets to San Francisco. I don't know. She
Speaker 2: may have talked to some of them about this stuff,
Speaker 2: but I really don't think she is at this point.
Speaker 2: I don't think she's comfortable enough doing that. Yeah. So
Speaker 2: she also does an internship at the Software Giant Oracle.
Speaker 2: So at this point you've got this young lady who's
Speaker 2: got a lot of potential, you.
Speaker 3: Know, a real career as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the start of a very real career. That's a
Speaker 2: great starting resume for like a twenty two year old.
Speaker 2: Now at this point, she's torn should she go get
Speaker 2: a graduate degree, right, or should she jump right into
Speaker 2: the tech industry, you know, and she worries that like,
Speaker 2: if she waits to get a graduate degree, this will
Speaker 2: delay her making a positive impact on the existential risk
Speaker 2: caused by AI, and it'll be too late. The singularity
Speaker 2: will happen already, you know. At this point, she's still
Speaker 2: a big fawning fan of Eliza Yedkowski and the highest
Speaker 2: ranking woman at Gydkowski's organization, Mary is a lady named
Speaker 2: Susan Salomon. Susan gives a public invitation to the online
Speaker 2: community to pitch ideas for the best way to improve
Speaker 2: the ultimate quality of the singleton that these people believe
Speaker 2: is inevitable. In other words, hey, give us your ideas
Speaker 2: for how to make the inevitable AI god nice right.
Speaker 2: Here's what Ziz writes about her response to that. I
Speaker 2: asked her whether I should try an alter course and
Speaker 2: do research or continue a fork of my pre existing
Speaker 2: life plan earned to give as a computer engineer, but
Speaker 2: retrain and try to do research directly instead. At the time,
Speaker 2: I was planning to go to grad school and I
Speaker 2: had an irrational attachment to the idea. She sort of
Speaker 2: compromised and said, I should go to grad school, fight
Speaker 2: a startup co founder, drop out, and earn to give
Speaker 2: via startups instead. First off, bad advices and bad advice
Speaker 2: being stobs, being Steve Jobs, worked for Steve Jobs well,
Speaker 2: and Bill Gates. I guess, to an extent, it doesn't
Speaker 2: work for most people.
Speaker 3: No, no, no, it seems like the general tech disruptor idea,
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and most people these people aren't very original thinkers,
Speaker 2: like yeah, she's just saying, like, yeah, go to a
Speaker 2: Steve Jobs. So Ziz does go to grad school, and
Speaker 2: somewhere around that time in twenty fourteen, she attends a
Speaker 2: lecture by Elisia Jedkowski on the subject of Inadequate Equilibria,
Speaker 2: which is the title of a book that Jodkowski had
Speaker 2: wrote about the time, and the book is about where
Speaker 2: and how civilizations get stuck. One reviewer, Brian Kaplan, who
Speaker 2: despite being a professor of economics, must have a brain
Speaker 2: as smooth as a Pearl wrote this about it. Every
Speaker 2: society is screwed up. Elisia Yidkowski is one of the
Speaker 2: few thinkers on earth who are trying, at the most
Speaker 2: general level to understand why. And this is like, wow,
Speaker 2: that's it you, Pete. Please study the humanities a little bit,
Speaker 2: A little bit, a little bit, I.
Speaker 3: Mean, fuck man.
Speaker 2: The first and most like one of the first influential
Speaker 2: works of his modern historic scholarship is The Decline and
Speaker 2: Fall of the Roman Empire. It's a whole book about
Speaker 2: why a society fell apart, and like motherfucker. More recently,
Speaker 2: Mike Davis existed, like like Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3: I believe this guy continues to get traction.
Speaker 2: Nobody else is thinking about why society screwed up, but
Speaker 2: a Leezer yed Kowski, this.
Speaker 3: Man, this man, this guy, this marry.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I was trying to find another. I read
Speaker 2: through that Martin Luther King junior speech. Everything's good, oh,
Speaker 2: oh my god, oh my god. Like motherfucker. So many
Speaker 2: people do nothing but try to write about why our
Speaker 2: society is sick.
Speaker 1: They did.
Speaker 3: On all levels, by the way, on.
Speaker 2: Everybody's thinking about this. This is such a common subject
Speaker 2: of scholarship and discussion.
Speaker 3: What everyone's talking always.
Speaker 2: It would be like if if I got really into
Speaker 2: like reading medical textbooks and was like, you know what,
Speaker 2: nobody's ever tried to figure out how to transplant a heart.
Speaker 2: I'm going to write a book about how that might work.
Speaker 2: I think I got you know, people, So yeah, speaking
Speaker 2: of these fucking people have sex with Uh Nope, well.
Speaker 3: That's not something.
Speaker 2: No, I don't know. I don't know. Uh, don't fuck
Speaker 2: listen to ads. We're back. So Zizz is at this
Speaker 2: speech where Yudkowski is shilling his book, and he most
Speaker 2: of what he seems to be talking about in this
Speaker 2: speech about this book about why societies fall apart is
Speaker 2: how to make a text startup. She says, quote he
Speaker 2: gave a recipe for finding startup ideas. He said, Paul
Speaker 2: Graham's idea only filter on people, ignore startup ideas was
Speaker 2: partial epistemic learned helplessness. That means Paul Graham is saying,
Speaker 2: focus on finding good people that you'd start a company with.
Speaker 2: Having an idea for a company doesn't matter. Yudkowski says,
Speaker 2: of course, startup ideas mattered. You needed a good startup idea,
Speaker 2: so look for a way in the world is broken,
Speaker 2: then compare against a checklist of things you couldn't fix,
Speaker 2: you know, right, Like, that's that's what this speech is
Speaker 2: largely about, as him being like, here's how to find
Speaker 2: startup ideas. So she starts thinking. She starts thinking as
Speaker 2: hard as she can, and you know, being a person
Speaker 2: who is very much of the tech brain industry rot
Speaker 2: at this point, she comes up with a brilliant idea.
Speaker 2: It's a genius idea. Oh you're gonna you're gonna love
Speaker 2: this idea. David Uber for prostitutes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, fucking with me?
Speaker 2: No, No, it's.
Speaker 3: That's where she landed.
Speaker 2: She lands on the idea of oh wow, sex work
Speaker 2: is illegal, but porn isn't. So if we start an
Speaker 2: uber whereby a team with a camera and a porn
Speaker 2: star come to your house and you fuck them and
Speaker 2: record it, that's a legal loophole. We just found that
Speaker 2: at Its not just bus. She makes the bank bus,
Speaker 2: the gig economy. It is really like dondreper a moment,
Speaker 2: what about uber but a pimp? It's so funny these people.
Speaker 3: You gotta love it, you got wow, it's wow. Wow,
Speaker 3: what a place to end up. I would love to
Speaker 3: see the other drafts.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, first because god, yeah, man, that's that's that
Speaker 2: is the good stuff, isn't it.
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Wow wow, we special minds at work here. Oh man.
Speaker 3: Ultimately it all I have to make smart.
Speaker 2: I have to make pimp uber.
Speaker 3: That's so wild.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, the uber of pimping. What an idea? Now,
Speaker 2: so Ziz devotes her brief time in grad school. She's
Speaker 2: working on pimping Uber to try and find a partner.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: She wants to have a startup partner, someone who will
Speaker 2: will embark on this journey with her.
Speaker 3: I don't know if that's an investor you need to.
Speaker 2: It doesn't work out, She drops out of grad school
Speaker 2: because quote, I did not find someone who felt like
Speaker 2: good startup co founder material. This may be because she's
Speaker 2: very bad at talking to people and all, so probably
Speaker 2: scares people off because the things that she talks about
Speaker 2: are deeply off putting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was gonna say. It's also a terrible idea.
Speaker 2: And at this point she hasn't done anything bad, so
Speaker 2: I feel bad for this is a person who's very lonely,
Speaker 2: who is very confused. She has by this point realized
Speaker 2: that she's trans but not transitioned. She's in like this
Speaker 2: is this is like a tough place to be, right,
Speaker 2: that's a hard times.
Speaker 3: That's that's hard.
Speaker 2: And nothing about her inherent personality makes it is going
Speaker 2: to make this easier for her. Right who she is
Speaker 2: makes all of this much harder because she also makes
Speaker 2: some comments about dropping out because her her thesis advisor
Speaker 2: was abusive. I don't fully know what this means. And
Speaker 2: here's why Ziz and encounter some behavior I will describe
Speaker 2: later that is abusive from other people, but also regularly
Speaker 2: defines abuse as people who disagree with her about the
Speaker 2: only thing that matters being creating an AI god to
Speaker 2: protect the animals. So I don't know if her thesis
Speaker 2: advisor was abusive or was just like, maybe drop the
Speaker 2: alien god idea for a second. Yeah, yeah, but maybe
Speaker 2: maybe focus on like finding a job, you know, making
Speaker 2: some friends, a couple of dates, go on a couple
Speaker 2: of dates, something like that. Maybe maybe like maybe make
Speaker 2: God on the back burner here for a second. Whatever
Speaker 2: happened here, She decides it's time to move to the Bay.
Speaker 2: This is like twenty sixteen. She's going to find a
Speaker 2: big tech job. She's going to make that big tech money.
Speaker 2: While she figures out a startup idea and finds a
Speaker 2: co founder who will let her make enough money to
Speaker 2: change and save the world, well, the whole universe. Her
Speaker 2: first plan is to give the money to Mary Yudkowski's
Speaker 2: organization so it can continue it's important, important work, imagining
Speaker 2: an ic AI. Her parents. She's got enough family money
Speaker 2: that her parents are able to pay for like I
Speaker 2: think like six months or more of rent in the bay,
Speaker 2: which is not nothing, not a cheap place to live.
Speaker 2: I don't know exactly how long her parents are paying,
Speaker 2: but like that that implies a degree of financial comfort. Right,
Speaker 2: So she gets hired by a startup very quickly, because
Speaker 2: again very gifted.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes it's some sort of gaming company. But at
Speaker 2: this point she's made another change in her ethics system
Speaker 2: based on the Leiser Yeddkowski's writings. One of Yukowski's writings
Speaker 2: argues that it is talking about the difference between consequentialists
Speaker 2: and virtue ethics. Right. Consequentialists are people who focus entirely
Speaker 2: on what will the outcome of my actions be? And
Speaker 2: it kind of doesn't matter what I'm doing or even
Speaker 2: if it's sometimes a little fucked up, if the end
Speaker 2: result is good virtue ethics. People folk have a code
Speaker 2: and stick to it, right And actually, and I kind
Speaker 2: of am surprised that he came to this. Yakowski's conclusion
Speaker 2: is that like, while logically you're more likely to succeed,
Speaker 2: like on paper, you're more likely to succeed as a consequentialist.
Speaker 2: His opinion is that virtue ethics has the best outcome.
Speaker 2: People tend to do well when they stick to a
Speaker 2: code and they try to rather than like anything goes
Speaker 2: as long as I succeed, right, And I think that's
Speaker 2: actually a pretty decent way to live your life.
Speaker 3: It's a pretty reasonable conclusion for him.
Speaker 2: It's a reasonable conclusion for him, So I don't blame
Speaker 2: him on this part. But here's the problem. Zizz is
Speaker 2: trying to break into and succeed in the tech industry,
Speaker 2: and you can't. You are very unlikely to succeed at
Speaker 2: a high level in the tech industry if you are
Speaker 2: unwilling to do things and have things done to you
Speaker 2: that are unethical and fucked up. I'm not saying this
Speaker 2: is good. This is the reality of the entertainment industry too, right.
Speaker 2: I experience when I started and I started with an
Speaker 2: unpaid internship. Unpaid internships are bad, right, It's bad that
Speaker 2: those exist. They inherently favor people who have money and
Speaker 2: people who have family connections. You know, I had like
Speaker 2: a small savings account for my job in special ed,
Speaker 2: but that was the standard. It is, like, there were
Speaker 2: a lot of unpaid internships. It got me my foot
Speaker 2: in the door. It worked for me. I also worked
Speaker 2: a lot of overtime that I didn't get paid for.
Speaker 2: I did a lot of shit that wasn't a part
Speaker 2: of my job to impress my bosses to make myself
Speaker 2: indispensable so that they would decide, like, we have to
Speaker 2: keep this guy on and pay him. And it worked
Speaker 2: for me. And I just wanted to add because this
Speaker 2: was not in the original thing. A big part of
Speaker 2: why it worked for me is that I'm talking about
Speaker 2: a few different companies here, but particularly at Cracked where
Speaker 2: I had the internship. Like my bosses, you know, made
Speaker 2: a choice tom intor me, and you know, to get me,
Speaker 2: you know, to work overtime on their own behalf to
Speaker 2: like make sure I got a paying job, which is
Speaker 2: a big part of like the luck that I encountered
Speaker 2: that a lot of people don't. So that's another major
Speaker 2: part of like why things worked out for me is
Speaker 2: that I just got incredible lucky with the people I
Speaker 2: was working for and with That's bad. It's not good
Speaker 2: that things work that way, right, It's not healthy.
Speaker 3: Set up for you either, Like you know, you kind
Speaker 3: of defied the odds. It's it's, like you said, the
Speaker 3: rich people who get the job where exactly it's not.
Speaker 2: Even yes, that said, if I am giving someone, if
Speaker 2: someone wants what is the most likely path to succeeding?
Speaker 2: You know, I've I've just got this job working, you know,
Speaker 2: on this production company or the music steer, I would
Speaker 2: I would say, well, your best odds are to like
Speaker 2: make yourself completely indispensable and become obsessively devoted to that task.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Uh, that's it. I don't tend to give that advice anymore.
Speaker 2: I have and I have had several other friends succeed
Speaker 2: as a result of it, and all of us also
Speaker 2: burnt ourselves out and did huge amounts of damage to ourselves.
Speaker 2: Like I am permanently broken as a result of of
Speaker 2: you know, the ten years that I did eighty hour
Speaker 2: weeks and shit, you.
Speaker 3: Know, now you're sounding like somebody who works in the
Speaker 3: entertainment and.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, and it worked for me, right, I got
Speaker 2: a I succeeded, I got a great job, I got money.
Speaker 2: Most people it doesn't. And it's bad that it works
Speaker 2: this way. Ziz, unlike me, is not willing to do that, right.
Speaker 2: She thinks it's wrong to be asked to work overtime
Speaker 2: and not get paid for it, and so on her
Speaker 2: first day at the job, she leaves after eight hours
Speaker 2: and her boss is like, what the fuck are you doing?
Speaker 2: And she's like, I'm I'm here to supposed to be
Speaker 2: here eight hours. Eight hours is up, I'm going home.
Speaker 2: And he calls her half an hour later and fires her. Right,
Speaker 2: and this is because the tech industry is evil, you know,
Speaker 2: like this is bad. She's not bad here she is.
Speaker 2: It is like a thing where it's she's not doing
Speaker 2: by her standards. What I would say is the rational thing,
Speaker 2: which would be if all that matters is optimizing your
Speaker 2: earning power, right, right, well, then you do this, then
Speaker 2: you do do whatever it takes. Right. So it's kind
Speaker 2: of interesting to me like that she is so devoted
Speaker 2: to this like virtue ethics thing at this point that
Speaker 2: she fucks over her career in the tech industry because
Speaker 2: she's not willing to do the things that you kind
Speaker 2: of need to do to succeed, you know, in the
Speaker 2: place that she is. But it's interesting, I don't like
Speaker 2: give her any shit for that. So she asked your
Speaker 2: parents more for more runway to extend your time in
Speaker 2: the bay. And then she finds work at another startup,
Speaker 2: but the same problems persist. Quote, they kept demanding that
Speaker 2: I work unpaid overtime, talking about how other employees just
Speaker 2: put always put forty hours on their timesheet no matter what.
Speaker 2: And this exemplary employee over there worked twelve hours a
Speaker 2: day and he really went the extra mile and got
Speaker 2: the job done. And they needed me to really go
Speaker 2: the extra mile and get the job done. She's not
Speaker 2: willing to do that. And again I hate that this
Speaker 2: is part of what drives her to the madness that
Speaker 2: leads to the cult to the killings, because it's like, oh, honey,
Speaker 2: you're in the right. It's an eavil industry.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you a flash of where it could have gone.
Speaker 3: Well it really there were chances for this to work out.
Speaker 2: No, you were one hundred percent right, Like this is
Speaker 2: stuck to it. Yeah, you know what I mean, And
Speaker 2: that's super hard. I really respect that part of you.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm so sad that this is
Speaker 2: part of what shatters your brain. Like that really bums
Speaker 2: me out. So first off, she's kind of starts spiraling
Speaker 2: and she concludes that she hates virtue ethics. This is
Speaker 2: where she starts hating Yidkowski, right, This is she doesn't
Speaker 2: come break entirely on him yet, but she gets really
Speaker 2: angry at this point because she's like, well, obviously virtue
Speaker 2: ethics don't work.
Speaker 3: And she's been following this man at this point for.
Speaker 2: Years exactly exactly, so this is a very like damaging
Speaker 2: thing to her that this happens. And you know, and
Speaker 2: again as much as I'm blamed Yadkowski, the culture of
Speaker 2: the Bay Bay area tech industry. That's a big part
Speaker 2: of what drives this person and you know, to where
Speaker 2: she ends up.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: So that said, some of her issues are also rooted
Speaker 2: in a kind of rigid and unforgiving internal rule set.
Speaker 2: At one point, she negotiates work with a professor and
Speaker 2: their undergraduate helper. She doesn't want to take an hourly job,
Speaker 2: and she tries to negotiate a flat rate of seven k.
Speaker 2: And they're like, yeah, okay, that sounds fair, but the
Speaker 2: school doesn't do stuff like that, so you will have
Speaker 2: to fake some paperwork with me for me to be
Speaker 2: able to get them to pay you seven thousand dollars.
Speaker 2: And she isn't willing to do that. And that's the
Speaker 2: thing where it's like, ah, no, I've had some shit
Speaker 2: where this was the like there was a stupid rule
Speaker 2: and like in order for the pep meat or other
Speaker 2: people to get paid, we had to like tell something
Speaker 2: else to the company. Like that's just that's just no
Speaker 2: knowing how to get by. Yeah, that's that's living.
Speaker 3: In the world. You got Yeah, you did the hard part. Yeah,
Speaker 3: they said that we were going to do it.
Speaker 2: You said they did it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's like they already said we don't do this.
Speaker 3: That's where are you just?
Speaker 2: You can't get by in America If you're not, why
Speaker 2: will rely on certain kinds of paperwork? Right, That's that's
Speaker 2: the game our president does all the time. He's the
Speaker 2: king of that shit. So at this point, Ziz is
Speaker 2: stuck in what they consider a calamitous situation. The prophecy
Speaker 2: of doom, as they call it, is ticking ever closer,
Speaker 2: which means the bad AI that's going to create hell
Speaker 2: for everybody. Her panic over this is elevated by the
Speaker 2: fact that she she starts to get obsessed with Roco's
Speaker 2: basilisk at this time. No I know, I know, worst
Speaker 2: thing for her to read, come on and info hazards
Speaker 2: right the warnings yep, and a lot of the smarter
Speaker 2: rationalists are just annoyed by it.
Speaker 3: Again.
Speaker 2: Yadkowski immediately is like this is very quickly decides it's
Speaker 2: bullshit and bans discussion of it. He argues there's no
Speaker 2: incentive for a future agent to follow through with that
Speaker 2: threat because it by doing so, it just expends resources
Speaker 2: no gain to itself, which is like, yeah, man, a
Speaker 2: hyperlogical AI would not immediately jump to I must make
Speaker 2: hell for everybody who didn't code me Like, yeah, that's
Speaker 2: just crazy.
Speaker 3: There's step skew.
Speaker 2: Yeah, only humans are like ill in that way.
Speaker 3: That's the funny thing about it is it's such a
Speaker 3: human response to it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right right now. When she encounters the concept of
Speaker 2: Roco's basilisk at first, Ziz thinks that it's silly, right.
Speaker 2: She kind of rejects it and moves on, But once
Speaker 2: she gets to the Bay, she starts going to in
Speaker 2: person rationalist meetups and having long conversations with other believers
Speaker 2: who are still talking about Roco's basilisk. She writes, I
Speaker 2: started encountering people who were freaked out by it, freaked
Speaker 2: out that they had discovered an improvement to the info
Speaker 2: hazard that made it function got around a Leezer's objection.
Speaker 2: Her ultimate conclusion is this, if I persisted in trying
Speaker 2: to save the world, I would be tortured until the
Speaker 2: end of top the universe by a coalition of all
Speaker 2: unfriendly ais in order to increase the amount of measure
Speaker 2: they got by demoralizing me. Even if my system too
Speaker 2: had good decision theory, my system one did not, and
Speaker 2: that would damage my effectiveness. And like, I can't explain
Speaker 2: all of the terms in that without taking more time
Speaker 2: than we need to. But like you can hear like
Speaker 2: that is not the writing of a person who is
Speaker 2: thinking in logical terms.
Speaker 3: No, it's it's a uh it's so scary.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, it is very scary stuff.
Speaker 3: It's so scary to be like, Oh, that's where she
Speaker 3: was operating those mistakes.
Speaker 2: This is where you're she's dealing with.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's that's it is. You know.
Speaker 2: I talked to my friends who grow are raised in
Speaker 2: like very toxic evangelical subculture, chunks of the evangelgelical sub
Speaker 2: culture and growth and spend their whole childhood terrified of
Speaker 2: hell that like everything. You know, I got angry at
Speaker 2: my mom and I didn't say anything, but God knows
Speaker 2: I'm angry at her, and he's going to send me
Speaker 2: to hell because I didn't respect my mother.
Speaker 3: Mother.
Speaker 2: Like, that's what she's doing right.
Speaker 3: Exactly, like exactly, she can't win. There's no winning here.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, and again I say this a lot. We
Speaker 2: need to put lithium back in the drinking water. We
Speaker 2: we gotta put lithium back in the water. Maybe xanax too, she.
Speaker 3: Needed she could have tooken a combo. Yeah, before it
Speaker 3: gets to where it gets at this point, you really
Speaker 3: you really feel for and like just living in this
Speaker 3: living like that every day. She's so scared and that
Speaker 3: that this is what she's doing. It's it's this, this
Speaker 3: is she is.
Speaker 2: The therapy needingest woman I have ever heard. At this point,
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: She just needs to talk to she needs to talk again.
Speaker 2: You know, the cult the thing that happens to cult
Speaker 2: members has happened to her. Where she her. The whole
Speaker 2: language she uses is incomprehensible to people. I had to
Speaker 2: talk to you for an hour and fifteen minutes, so
Speaker 2: you want to understand parts of what this lady says, right, Exactly,
Speaker 2: she has to because it's all nonsense if you don't
Speaker 2: do that work exactly.
Speaker 3: She so spun out at this point, it's like, how
Speaker 3: do you even get back? Yeah, how do you even
Speaker 3: get back?
Speaker 2: Yeah? So she she ultimately decides, even though she thinks
Speaker 2: she's doomed to be tortured by unfriendly ais evil gods,
Speaker 2: must be fought. If this damns me, then so be it.
Speaker 2: She's very heroic, she had and she sees herself that way, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And even like just with her convictions and that
Speaker 3: she she does, she does, she does, she does, she
Speaker 3: does it.
Speaker 2: She's a woman of conviction. You really can't take that
Speaker 2: away from hers. Are nonsense, No, that's the but they're there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're based on elaborate Harry Potter fan fiction.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like David Ike, the guy who believes in
Speaker 2: like literal lizard people, and everyone thinks he's like talking
Speaker 2: about the Jews, but like no, no, no, no, he
Speaker 2: don't just lizards.
Speaker 3: It's exactly that where it's just like you want to draw, yeah,
Speaker 3: you want to draw something, so it's not nonsense, and
Speaker 3: then you realize.
Speaker 2: No, that's no, no, no no. And like David he
Speaker 2: went out, he's made like a big rant against how
Speaker 2: Elon Musk is like evil for what all these people
Speaker 2: he's hurt by firing the whole federal government and people
Speaker 2: were shocked. It's like no, no, no, David Ike believes
Speaker 2: in a thing. It's just crazy. Those people do exist.
Speaker 2: Here we are talking about and here we are talking
Speaker 2: about them. Some of them run the country. But actually
Speaker 2: I don't know how much all of those people believe
Speaker 2: in anything. But yeah, yeah, speaking of people who believe
Speaker 2: in something, our sponsors believe in getting your money. We're back.
Speaker 2: So uh. She is at this point suffering from delusions
Speaker 2: of granteur, and those are going to rapidly lead her
Speaker 2: to danger, but she concludes that since the fate of
Speaker 2: the universe is at stake in her actions, she would
Speaker 2: make a timeless choice to not believe in the bast
Speaker 2: right and that that will protect her in the future
Speaker 2: because that's how these people talk about stuff like that.
Speaker 2: So she gets over her fear of the basilisk for
Speaker 2: a little while, but even it, like when she claims
Speaker 2: to have rejected the theory, whenever she references it in
Speaker 2: her blog, she like locks it away under a spoiler
Speaker 2: with like an info hazard warning Roco's Basilisk family skippable,
Speaker 2: so you don't like have to see it and have
Speaker 2: it destroy your psyche.
Speaker 3: That's the power of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah yeah. The concept does, however, keep coming back
Speaker 2: to her like and continuing to drive her mad. Thoughts
Speaker 2: of the basilisk return, and eventually she comes to an
Speaker 2: extreme conclusion. If what I cared about was sentient life,
Speaker 2: and I was willing to go to hell to save
Speaker 2: everyone else, why not just send everyone else to hell?
Speaker 2: If I didn't submit, Can I tell you I really
Speaker 2: it felt like this is what was This is where
Speaker 2: it had to go, right yeah yeah yes. So what
Speaker 2: she means here is that she is now making the
Speaker 2: timeless decision that when she is in a position of
Speaker 2: ultimate influence and helps bring this all powerful vegan Ai
Speaker 2: into existence, she's promising now ahead of time, to create
Speaker 2: a perfect hell, a digital hell to like punish all
Speaker 2: of the people who don't stop like eat meat. Ever,
Speaker 2: she wants to make a hell for people who eat meat.
Speaker 2: And that's the yeah, that's the conclusion that she makes. Right,
Speaker 2: So this becomes an intrusive thought in her head, primarily
Speaker 2: the idea that like everyone isn't going along with her, right, Like,
Speaker 2: she doesn't want to create this hell. She just thinks
Speaker 2: that she has to. So she's like very focused on
Speaker 2: like trying to convince these other people in the rationalist
Speaker 2: culture to become vegan. Anyway, she writes this quote, I
Speaker 2: thought it had to be subconsciously influencing me, damaging me
Speaker 2: at my effectiveness, that I had done more harm than
Speaker 2: I can imagine by thinking these things, because I had
Speaker 2: the hubris to think info hazards didn't exist, worse to
Speaker 2: feel resigned a grim sort of pride in my previous
Speaker 2: choice to fight for sentient life, although it damned me
Speaker 2: and the gaps between. Do not think about that, you moron.
Speaker 2: Do not think about that, you moron pride, which may
Speaker 2: have led to intrusive thoughts to resurface, and progress and
Speaker 2: progress to resume. In other words, my ego had perhaps
Speaker 2: damned the universe. So Man, I don't fully get all
Speaker 2: of what she's saying here. But it's also because she's
Speaker 2: like just spun out into madness at this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she lives in it now. It's so yeah, it's
Speaker 3: so far for we've been talking about it, however long
Speaker 3: she's she's so far away from us even.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it is it is deeply I've read a
Speaker 2: lot of her writing. It is deeply hard to understand
Speaker 2: pieces of it here, man.
Speaker 3: But she is at war with herself.
Speaker 2: She is for sure at war with herself.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: This is at this point attending rationalist events by the Bay,
Speaker 2: and a lot of the people at those events are older,
Speaker 2: more influential men, some of whom are influential in the
Speaker 2: tech industry, all of whom have a lot more money
Speaker 2: than her. And some of these people are members of
Speaker 2: an organization called see FAR, the Center for Applied Rationality,
Speaker 2: which is a nonprofit founded to help people get better
Speaker 2: at a pursuing their goals. It's a self help company, right,
Speaker 2: and what runs self help seminars. This is the same
Speaker 2: as like a Tony Robbins thing. Right, We're all just
Speaker 2: trying to get you to sign up and then get
Speaker 2: you to sign up for the next workshop and the
Speaker 2: next workshop and the next workshop, like all self help
Speaker 2: people do. Yeah, there's no difference between this and Tony Robbins.
Speaker 2: So Ziz goes to this event and she has a
Speaker 2: long conversation with several members of SEEFAR, who I think
Speaker 2: are clearly kind of My interpretation of this is that
Speaker 2: they're trying to groom her to get a new because
Speaker 2: they think chick's clearly brilliant, she'll find her way in
Speaker 2: the industry, and we want her money, right, you know,
Speaker 2: maybe we wanted to do some free work for us too,
Speaker 2: but like, let's you know, uh, we got to reel
Speaker 2: this fish in, right. So this is described as an
Speaker 2: academic conference by people who are in the AI risk
Speaker 2: field and rationalism, you know, thinking of ways to save
Speaker 2: the universe, because only the true, the super geniuses can
Speaker 2: do that. The actual why I'm really glad that I
Speaker 2: read Ziz's account here is I've been reading about these
Speaker 2: people for a long time. I've been reading about their beliefs.
Speaker 2: I felt there's some cult stuff here. When Ziz laid
Speaker 2: out what happened at this seminar, this self help him
Speaker 2: seminar put on by these people, very close to Yedkowski.
Speaker 2: This is it's almost exactly the same as a Synonon meeting,
Speaker 2: Like it's the same stuff, It's exact and it's the
Speaker 2: same shit. It's the same as accounts of like big
Speaker 2: like self help movement, things from like the seventies and
Speaker 2: stuff that I've read that that that's when it really
Speaker 2: clicked to me.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Quote, here's a description of one of the because they
Speaker 2: have you know, speeches in they break out into groups
Speaker 2: to do different exercises. Right there were hamming circles per
Speaker 2: person take turns, having everyone else spend twenty minutes trying
Speaker 2: to solve the most important problem about your life. To you,
Speaker 2: I didn't pick the most important problem in my life
Speaker 2: because secrets. I think I used my turn on a
Speaker 2: problem I thought they might actually be able to help
Speaker 2: with the fact that it did, although it didn't seem
Speaker 2: to affect my productivity or willpower at all, I e
Speaker 2: I was in humanly determined. Basically all the time, I
Speaker 2: still felt terrible all the time that I was hurting
Speaker 2: from to some degree relinquishing my humanity. I was sort
Speaker 2: of vaguing about the pain of being trans and having
Speaker 2: decided not to transition and so like, this is a
Speaker 2: part of the thing. You build a connection between other
Speaker 2: people in this group by getting people to like spill
Speaker 2: their secrets to each other. It's a thing scientology does.
Speaker 2: It's a thing they did. It's send it on, tell
Speaker 2: me your dark is secret.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: And she's not fully willing to because she doesn't want
Speaker 2: to come out to this group of people yet. And
Speaker 2: you know part of what I forget.
Speaker 3: That she's also dealing with that entire yes.
Speaker 2: Wow, yeah, and that the hamming circle doesn't sound so
Speaker 2: bad if you'll recall any And as you mentioned this,
Speaker 2: I was really in part one. Sin and On would
Speaker 2: have people break into circles where they would insult and
Speaker 2: attack each other in order to create a traumatic experience
Speaker 2: that would bond them together and with the cult. These
Speaker 2: hamming circles are weird, but they're not that. But there's
Speaker 2: another exercise they did next called doom circles. Quote. There
Speaker 2: were doom circles where each person, including themselves, took turns
Speaker 2: having everyone else bluntly but compassionately say why they were
Speaker 2: doomed using blindsight. Someone decided and set a precedent of
Speaker 2: starting these off with a sort of ritual incantation we
Speaker 2: now invoke and bow to the doom gods and waving
Speaker 2: their hands saying doom. I said I'd never bow to
Speaker 2: the doom gods. And while everyone else said that, I
Speaker 2: flipped the double bird to the heavens and said fuck
Speaker 2: you instead. Person a that's this member of Seafar that
Speaker 2: she is. Admires found this and joined in. Some people
Speaker 2: brought up that they felt like they were only as
Speaker 2: morally valuable as half a person. This irked me. I
Speaker 2: said they were whole persons and don't be stupid like that,
Speaker 2: Like if they wanted to sacrifice themselves, they could weigh
Speaker 2: one versus seven billion. They didn't have to falsely detegrate
Speaker 2: themselves is less than one person. They didn't listen. When
Speaker 2: it was my turn concerning myself, I said my doom
Speaker 2: was that I could succeed at the things I tried,
Speaker 2: succeed exceptionally well, Like I bet I could in ten
Speaker 2: years have earned a give like ten million dollars through startups,
Speaker 2: and it would still be too little, too late, like
Speaker 2: I came into this game too late. The world would
Speaker 2: still burn. And first off, like this is you know,
Speaker 2: it's a variant of the synonym thing you're going on.
Speaker 2: You're telling people why they're doomed, right, like why they
Speaker 2: won't succeed in life, you know. But it's also one
Speaker 2: of the things here these people are saying they feel
Speaker 2: like less than a person. A major topic of discussion
Speaker 2: in the community at the time is if you don't
Speaker 2: think you can succeed in business and make money, is
Speaker 2: the best thing with the highest net value you can
Speaker 2: do taking out an insurance policy on yourself and committing suicide,
Speaker 2: oh my god, and then having the money donated to
Speaker 2: a rationalist organization. That's a major topic of discussion that
Speaker 2: like Ziz grapples with, a lot of these people grapple
Speaker 2: with right because they're obsessed with the idea of like,
Speaker 2: oh my god, I might be net negative value. Right,
Speaker 2: if I can't do this or can't do this, I
Speaker 2: could be a net negative value individual. And that means
Speaker 2: like I'm not contributing to the solution. And there's nothing
Speaker 2: worse than not contributing to the solution.
Speaker 3: Were there people who did that?
Speaker 2: I am not aware there are people who commit suicide
Speaker 2: in this community. I will say that, like, there are
Speaker 2: a number of suicides tied to this community I don't
Speaker 2: know if the actual insurance con thing happened, but it's
Speaker 2: like a seriously discussed thing. And it seriously discussed because
Speaker 2: all of these people to talk about the value of
Speaker 2: their own line vives in purely like mechanistic how much
Speaker 2: money or expected value can I produce? Like that is
Speaker 2: a person and that's why a person matters, right And
Speaker 2: the term they use is morally valuable, right like, that's
Speaker 2: that's what means. You're a worthwhile human being if you're
Speaker 2: morally if you're creating a net positive benefit to the
Speaker 2: world in the way they define it. And so a
Speaker 2: lot of these people are. Yes, there are people who
Speaker 2: are depressed, and there are people who kill themselves because
Speaker 2: they come to the conclusion that they're a net negative person,
Speaker 2: right like that that is a thing at the edge
Speaker 2: of all of this shit that's really fucked up. And
Speaker 2: that's that's what this doom circle is about. Is everybody
Speaker 2: like flipping out over I'm like and telling each other,
Speaker 2: I think you might know be as only be as
Speaker 2: morally valuable as half a person, right like, that's people
Speaker 2: are saying that, right like, that's what's going on here,
Speaker 2: you know, Like it's not the synonym thing of like
Speaker 2: screaming like you're a you know, using the f slur
Speaker 2: a million times or whatever. But it's very bad.
Speaker 3: No, this is this is this is awful for like.
Speaker 2: One thing I don't know. My feeling is you have
Speaker 2: an inherent value because you're a person.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a great place to start, you know, I'm
Speaker 3: so leading people to destroy themselves. Like it's yeah.
Speaker 2: It's it's so. It's such a bleak way of looking
Speaker 2: at things.
Speaker 3: It's so crazy too. Where were these meals? I just
Speaker 3: in my head, I'm like, this is just happening in
Speaker 3: like a ballroom at a raticon.
Speaker 2: I think it is, or a convention center, you know,
Speaker 2: the different kind of public spaces. I don't know, Like honestly,
Speaker 2: if you've been to like an anime convention or a
Speaker 2: Magic the Gathering convention somewhere in the Bay, you may
Speaker 2: have been in one of the rooms they did these,
Speaker 2: And I don't know exactly where they hold this. So
Speaker 2: the person A mentioned above, this like person who's like
Speaker 2: affiliated with the organization that I think is a recruiter
Speaker 2: h looking for young people who can be cultivated to
Speaker 2: pay for classes. Right, this person, it's very clear to
Speaker 2: them that Zizz is at the height of her vulnerability,
Speaker 2: and so he tries to take advantage of that. So
Speaker 2: he and another person from the organization engage Ziz during
Speaker 2: a break. Ziz, who's extremely insecure, asks them point blank,
Speaker 2: what do you think my net value ultimately will be
Speaker 2: in life? Right? And again there's like an element of this.
Speaker 2: It's almost like rationalist calvinism, where it's like it's actually
Speaker 2: decided ahead of time by your inherent, immutable characteristics, you know,
Speaker 2: if you are a person who can do good. Quote.
Speaker 2: I asked person A if they expected me to be
Speaker 2: net negative. They said yes. After a moment, they asked
Speaker 2: me what I was feeling or something like that. I
Speaker 2: said something like dazed and sad. They asked why sad.
Speaker 2: I said I might leave the field as a consequence
Speaker 2: and maybe something else. I said I needed time to
Speaker 2: process or think. And so she goes home after this
Speaker 2: guy is saying like, yeah, I think your life's probably
Speaker 2: net negative value, and sleeps the rest of the day,
Speaker 2: and she wakes up the next morning and comes back
Speaker 2: to the second day of this thing, and yeah, Ziz
Speaker 2: goes back and she tells this person, Okay, here's what
Speaker 2: I'm gonna do. I'm going to pick a group of
Speaker 2: three people at the event I respect, including you, and
Speaker 2: if two of them vote that they think I have
Speaker 2: a net negative value quote, I'll leave EA and Existential
Speaker 2: risk and the rationalist community and so on forever. I'd
Speaker 2: transition and move, probably to Seattle. I heard it was
Speaker 2: relatively nice for trans people, and there do what I
Speaker 2: could to be a normy, retool my mind as much
Speaker 2: as possible, to be stable, unchanging an enormy gradually abandoned
Speaker 2: my Facebook account and email, use a name change as
Speaker 2: a story for that, and God, that would have been
Speaker 2: the best thing for That's what you see.
Speaker 3: But sliver of hope, like yeah, oh man.
Speaker 2: She sees this as a nightmare. Right, this is the
Speaker 2: worst case scenario for her, Right, because you're not part
Speaker 2: of right, you're not part of the you're not part
Speaker 2: of the cause. You know, you're you have no you
Speaker 2: have no involvement in the great quest to save humanity.
Speaker 2: That's worse than death, almost right, It's its own kind.
Speaker 3: Of hell, though, Right to think that you have this
Speaker 3: enlightenment and that you that you weren't good enough to.
Speaker 2: And that's a lot about how I'd probably just kill myself,
Speaker 2: you know, that's the logical thing to do. It's so
Speaker 2: fucked up, it's so fucked up. But also if she's
Speaker 2: trying to live a normal life as a normy, and
Speaker 2: she she refers to like being a normy as like
Speaker 2: just trying to be nice to people, because again that's useless.
Speaker 2: So her fe fear here is that she would be
Speaker 2: a causal negative if she does this right. And also
Speaker 2: the robot god that comes about might put her in hell, right.
Speaker 3: Because that's also looming. Yeah, after every for every decision right. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And the thing here, she she expressed, she tells these
Speaker 2: guys a story, and it really shows, both in this
Speaker 2: community and among her, how little value they actually have
Speaker 2: for like human life. I I told a story about
Speaker 2: a time I had killed four ants in a bathtub
Speaker 2: where I wanted to take a shower before growing to work.
Speaker 2: I'd considered, can I just not take a shower, and
Speaker 2: presumed me smelling bad at work would, because of big
Speaker 2: numbers in the fate of the world and stuff, make
Speaker 2: the world worse than the deaths of four basically causally
Speaker 2: isolated people. I considered getting paper in a cup and
Speaker 2: taking them elsewhere, and I figured there were decent odds
Speaker 2: if I did, I'd be late to work and it
Speaker 2: would probably make the world worse in the long run.
Speaker 2: So again she considers ants identical to human beings, and
Speaker 2: she is also saying it was worth killing four of
Speaker 2: them because they're causally isolated so that I could get
Speaker 2: to work in time, because I'm working for the cause.
Speaker 2: It's also in a bad place here. Yeah.
Speaker 3: The crazy thing about her is it like the amount
Speaker 3: of thinking just to like get in the shower to
Speaker 3: go to work, you know, you know what I mean
Speaker 3: like that that Oh, it just seems like it makes everything. Yeah,
Speaker 3: every the action is so loaded, yes, yes, must.
Speaker 2: It's it's so it's it's wild to me both this
Speaker 2: like mix of like fucking Jane Buddhist compassion of like
Speaker 2: an aunt is no less than I, or an aunt
Speaker 2: is no less than a human being, right we are
Speaker 2: all these are all lives. And then but also it's
Speaker 2: fine for me to kill a bunch from me to
Speaker 2: go to work on time because like they're causally isolated,
Speaker 2: so they're basically not people. Like it's it's so weird.
Speaker 2: Like and again it's getting a lot clearer here why
Speaker 2: this lady and her ideas end in a bunch of
Speaker 2: people getting shot.
Speaker 3: Yeah and stabbed.
Speaker 2: Okay, there's a samurai's sword later in the story, my friend, that's.
Speaker 3: The one thing this has been missing.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, So they continue, these guys to have a
Speaker 2: very abusive conversation with this young person, and she clearly
Speaker 2: she trust them enough.
Speaker 3: To a conversation where she asks for the two yeah, ok.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and she tells them she's trans, right, And this
Speaker 2: gives you an idea of like how kind of predatory
Speaker 2: some of the stuff going on in this community is.
Speaker 2: They asked what I'd do with a female body. They
Speaker 2: were trying to get me to admit what I actually
Speaker 2: wanted to do was the first thing in heaven, heaven
Speaker 2: being there's this idea, especially amongst like some trans members
Speaker 2: of the rationalist community that like all of them basically
Speaker 2: believe a robot's going to make heaven right. And obviously,
Speaker 2: like there's a number of the folks who are in
Speaker 2: this who are trans are like and in heaven like
Speaker 2: you just kind of get the body you want immediately, right,
Speaker 2: so these get they were trying to get me to
Speaker 2: admit that what I actually wanted to do as the
Speaker 2: first thing in heaven was masturbate in a female body,
Speaker 2: and they follow us up by sitting really close to her,
Speaker 2: close enough that she gets uncomfortable. And then a really
Speaker 2: really rationalist conversation follows. They asked if I felt trapped.
Speaker 2: I may have clarified physically they may have said sure. Afterward,
Speaker 2: I answered no to that question, under the likely justify.
Speaker 2: I believe that it was framed that way. They asked
Speaker 2: why not. I said I was pretty sure I could
Speaker 2: take them in a fight. They prodded for details why
Speaker 2: I thought so, and then how I thought a fight
Speaker 2: between us would go. I asked, what kind of fight,
Speaker 2: like a physical, unarmed fight to the death right now?
Speaker 2: And why? What were my payouts? This was over the
Speaker 2: fate of the multiverse. Triggering actions by other people, ie
Speaker 2: or imprisonment or murder was not relevant, So they decide
Speaker 2: they make this into again. These people are all addicted
Speaker 2: to dumb game theory stuff, right, Okay, so what is
Speaker 2: this fight? Is this fight over the fate of the multiverse?
Speaker 2: Are we in a you know, an alternate reality where
Speaker 2: like no one will come and intervene and there's no
Speaker 2: cops we're the only people in the world or whatever.
Speaker 2: So they tell her like, yeah, imagine, there's no consequences
Speaker 2: legally whatever to you do, and we're fighting over the
Speaker 2: fate of the multiverse. And so she proceeds to give
Speaker 2: an extremely elaborate discussion of how she'll gouge out their
Speaker 2: eyes and try to destroy their prefrontal lobes and then
Speaker 2: stomp on their skulls until they die. And it's both
Speaker 2: it's like, it's nonsense. It's like how ten year olds
Speaker 2: thinks fights work. It's also it's based on this game
Speaker 2: theory attitude of fighting that they have, which is like
Speaker 2: it's you have to make this kind of timeless decision
Speaker 2: that any fight is you're you're just going to write.
Speaker 3: The hardest confrontation, right, Yes, I suppose you have to
Speaker 3: be the most violent.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, because that will make other people not want
Speaker 2: to attack you, as opposed to like what normal people
Speaker 2: understand about like real fights, which is if you have
Speaker 2: to do one, if you have to, you like try
Speaker 2: to just like hit him in the hit him is
Speaker 2: somewhere that's going to shock them, and then run like
Speaker 2: a motherfucker, right you get them get out of Like
Speaker 2: if you have to, like ideally just run like a motherfucker.
Speaker 2: But if you have to strike somebody, you know, yeah,
Speaker 2: go for the eye and then run like a son
Speaker 2: of a bitch, you know. Like, but there's no run
Speaker 2: like a son of a bitch here, because the point
Speaker 2: in part is this like timeless decision to anyway, This
Speaker 2: gives tells you a lot about the rationalist community. So
Speaker 2: she tells these people, she explains in detail how she
Speaker 2: would murder them if they have to af They're like
Speaker 2: sitting next super close. Have you just asked her about masturbation?
Speaker 2: Here's their first question quote. They asked if I'd rape
Speaker 2: their corpse. Part of me insisted this was not going
Speaker 2: as it was supposed to, but I decided. I decided
Speaker 2: inflicting discomfort in order to get reliable information was a
Speaker 2: valid tactic. In other words, them trying to make her
Speaker 2: uncomfortable to get info from her, she decides, is fine. Also,
Speaker 2: the whole discussion about raping their corpses is like, well,
Speaker 2: if you rape, obviously, if you want to have the
Speaker 2: most extreme response possible, that would like make other people
Speaker 2: unlikely to fuck with you knowing that you'll violate their corpse.
Speaker 2: If you kill them as clearly the light and like that. Okay, sure,
Speaker 2: I love rational thought.
Speaker 3: Oh man, this is crazy. Sorry, this yes is so crazy,
Speaker 3: It's so nuts.
Speaker 2: So then they talk about psychopathy. One of these guys
Speaker 2: had earlier told Ziz that they thought she was a psychopath.
Speaker 3: But he told.
Speaker 2: Her that doesn't mean what it means bo to actual
Speaker 2: like clinicians, because psychopathy is a diagnostition or like what
Speaker 2: normal people mean. To rationalists, a lot of them think
Speaker 2: psychopathy is a state you can put yourself into in
Speaker 2: order to maximize your performance in certain situations. It's because
Speaker 2: they they've again there's some like popular books that are
Speaker 2: about like the psychopaths way, the Dark Triad, and like, well,
Speaker 2: you know, these are the people who lead societies in
Speaker 2: the toughest times, and so like you could you need
Speaker 2: to optimize and engage in some of those behaviors if
Speaker 2: you want to win in these situations. Based on all
Speaker 2: of this, Ziz brings up what rationalists call the Gervas principle. Now,
Speaker 2: this started as a tongue in cheek joke describing a
Speaker 2: rule of office dynamics based on the TV show The Office.
Speaker 2: Yes it's Ricky Space, Yes, and The idea is that
Speaker 2: in office environments, psycho's always rise to the top. This
Speaker 2: is supposed to be like a negative observation, Like the
Speaker 2: person who wrote this initially is like, yeah, this is
Speaker 2: how offices work, and it's like why they're bad.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: It's an extension of the Peter principle. And these psychopaths
Speaker 2: put bad like dumb and incompetent people in like when
Speaker 2: positions below them for a variety. It's trying to kind
Speaker 2: of work out why in which offices are often dysfunctional. Right,
Speaker 2: it's not like the original Jervas principle thing is like
Speaker 2: not a bad piece of writing or whatever, but Zis
Speaker 2: takes something insane out of it. I described how the
Speaker 2: Jervase principle said sociopaths give up empathy as in a
Speaker 2: certain chunk of social software, not literally all hardware awared
Speaker 2: accelerated modeling of people, not necessarily compassion, and with it
Speaker 2: happiness destroying meaning to create power, meaning too, I did
Speaker 2: not care about I wanted this world to live on.
Speaker 2: So she tells them she's come to the conclusion I
Speaker 2: need to make myself into a psychopath in order to
Speaker 2: have the kind of mental power necessary to do the
Speaker 2: things that I want to do. And she largely justifies
Speaker 2: this by describing the beliefs of the Syth from Star Wars,
Speaker 2: because she thinks she needs to remake herself as a
Speaker 2: psychopathic evil warrior monk in order to save all of creation. Yeah, no,
Speaker 2: of course, yep, So this is her hitting her final form.
Speaker 2: And true to fact, these guys are like, they don't
Speaker 2: say it's a good idea, but they're like, Okay, yeah,
Speaker 2: you know that's not That's not the worst thing you
Speaker 2: could do. Sure, you know, like I think the Sith
Speaker 2: stuff kind of weird, but making yourself a psychopath makes sense. Sure, yeah,
Speaker 2: of course I know a lot of guys who did that.
Speaker 2: That's literally what they say, right, And then they say
Speaker 2: that also, I don't even think that's what they really
Speaker 2: they say that, because the next thing they say, this
Speaker 2: guy person a is like, look the best that later
Speaker 2: turn yourself from a net negative to a net positive value.
Speaker 2: I really believe you could do it. But to do it,
Speaker 2: you need to come to ten more of these seminars
Speaker 2: and keep taking classes here right right right, here's a
Speaker 2: quote from them. Are from Ziz. She's conditional on me
Speaker 2: going to a long course of circling like these two
Speaker 2: organizations offered, particularly a ten weekend one, then I probably
Speaker 2: would not be net negative. So things are going good.
Speaker 2: This is this is you know, ah, yeah great.
Speaker 3: How much is ten weekends cost?
Speaker 2: I don't actually know. I don't I don't fully know
Speaker 2: with this. It's possible some of these are like some
Speaker 2: of the events are free, like but the classes cost money,
Speaker 2: or but it's also a lot of it's like there's
Speaker 2: donations expected, or by doing this and being a member,
Speaker 2: it's expected you're going to tithe basically like your income
Speaker 2: right more than at.
Speaker 1: Ult I don't know the format. Is she not going
Speaker 1: to be like super suspicious that people are like, you know,
Speaker 1: faking it or like going over the top.
Speaker 2: She okay, is she is? She gets actually really uncomfortable.
Speaker 2: They have an exercise where they're basically doing you know,
Speaker 2: they're playing with love bombing right where everyone's like hugging
Speaker 2: and telling each other they love each other, and she's like,
Speaker 2: I don't really believe it. I just met these people.
Speaker 2: So she has started to and she is going to
Speaker 2: break away from these organizations pretty quickly. But this conversation
Speaker 2: she have with these guys is a critical part of
Speaker 2: like why she finally has this fracture because number one,
Speaker 2: this dude keeps telling her you have a net negative
Speaker 2: value to the universe, right, and so she's obsessed with
Speaker 2: like how do I And it comes to the conclusion,
Speaker 2: my best way of being net positive is to make
Speaker 2: myself into as sociopath and the sith Lord to save
Speaker 2: the animals.
Speaker 3: Of course, it feels like the same thinking though, as
Speaker 3: like the Robot's gonna make It seems to always come
Speaker 3: back to this idea of like I think we just
Speaker 3: gotta be evil.
Speaker 1: It's like, yes, oh, yes, well I guess the only
Speaker 1: logical conllusion is doom yep.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: It's like it feels like it's a it's a theme here,
Speaker 4: m m yep. Anyway you want to plug anything. At
Speaker 4: the end here, I have.
Speaker 3: A comedy specially you can purchase on Patreon. It's called
Speaker 3: Birth of a Nation with a G. You can get
Speaker 3: that at Patreon, dot combat Slash.
Speaker 2: David Bori excellent, excellent, All right, folks, Well that is
Speaker 2: the end of the episode. David, thank you so much
Speaker 2: for coming on to our inaugural episode. By listening to
Speaker 2: some of the weirdest shit we've ever talked about on
Speaker 2: this show.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is uh, I don't really I'm going to
Speaker 3: be thinking about this for weeks.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, yeah, fair because your co host likes
Speaker 1: a curbent kbon for the Elders of Zion episodes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, okay, I wanted to. I was initially gonna
Speaker 2: kind of just focus on all this would have been
Speaker 2: like half a page or so, you know, just kind
Speaker 2: of summing up, here's the gist of what this believes,
Speaker 2: and then let's get to the actual cult stuff when,
Speaker 2: like you know, Ziz starts bringing in followers and the
Speaker 2: crimes start happening. But that Rolling or that Wired article
Speaker 2: really covers all that very well. And that's the best piece.
Speaker 2: Most of the journalism I've read on these guys is
Speaker 2: not very well written. It's not very good. It does
Speaker 2: not really explain why they what they are are, why
Speaker 2: they do it. So I decided, and I'm not The
Speaker 2: Wired piece is great. I know, the Wired guy knows
Speaker 2: all of the stuff that I brought up here. He
Speaker 2: just it's an article. You have editors. He left out
Speaker 2: what he thought he needed to leave out. I don't
Speaker 2: have that problem, and I wanted to really, really deeply
Speaker 2: trace exactly where this lady's how this lady's mind develops,
Speaker 2: and how that intersects with rationalism, because it's interesting and
Speaker 2: kind of important and bad.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Okay, he's so.
Speaker 2: Anyway, thanks for having a had fuck with me, all right.
Speaker 2: That's it, everybody, goodbye.
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