All of Viliam's Comments + Replies

Viliam20

Eh, I asked ChatGPT to generate a caricature of Donald Trump as a Protoss (from the StarCraft game) saying "not enough minerals", but of course it refused.

It was actually funny, as ChatGPT kept saying that it cannot do what I want, but it could try something similar... I said "sure, do it", but it also failed to that, too, and offered to do something similar... until it finally produced something completely dissimilar.

I guess there are two separate AIs, one for talking and one for making pictures, and the one that does the talking is actually not sure about what commands the other one will accept.

4Kaj_Sotala
That's probably intentional. If it was purely up to the first AI, you'd only need to jailbreak it to get it to produce disallowed pictures. And if it could tell you the exact criteria the second AI was responding to, you might have an easier time finding a prompt that was technically allowed but violated the spirit of the rules. There have been some "see if you can get an LLM to produce a disallowed output" games online, where the higher difficulties involve stacking separate censor LLMs on top of the first one.
Viliam40

Steelmanning is not the same as passing the ideological Turing test.

ITT is successful when your opponent agrees with you, or when your opponent cannot distinguish you from their actual allies.

Steelman is successful if you, or your allies, find something useful in the ideas of your opponent. Whether your opponent approved of the result, or not.

In ITT, your opponent is the judge (of how much it passes). With a steelman, you are the judge (of whether you have extracted something useful). When steelmanning, you cherry-pick the good parts, and discard the rest.... (read more)

Viliam20

I don't care about discrimination of former criminals per se, but making them visibly different might lead to all kinds of secondary crime.

For example, if someone is visibly marked as a known thief, it would be tempting for another person to steal something in a situation where only the two of them had access to the stolen thing, and then exclaim "hey, the other guy is a known thief, so going by the priors, it is obvious that he did it".

This could be further leveraged into blackmail; if you know that you can use this trick to put the former thief in prison... (read more)

1ProgramCrafter
The follow-up post has a very relevant comment: Well of course this is illegal under current US laws, however this would help against being unjustly accused as in your example of secondary crime. It would also be helpful against repeat offences for a whole range of other crimes.
Viliam4420

While I don't necessary approve of the conclusion, there are many important points that people seem to underestimate. (Briefly, before discussing them, I suspect that what currently makes death penalty so expensive is all the legal processes around it, so if we replaced all death penalty with life sentence in prison, we would spend more money on the prisoners, but less money on the lawyers, potentially saving money on the net.)

The key part is: While the truly horrible people are few, they cause vastly disproportional damage, plus all kinds of secondary dam... (read more)

8Yair Halberstadt
I think for similar reasons trade in ivory from dead anyways elephants is severely restricted.
Viliam30

When we look at experience itself, there is no fixed “I” to be found. Boundaries between self and other aren’t innate to reality but drawn after the fact. We carve up this vast space of experience into “mine” and “yours,” but these divisions are somewhat arbitrary.

The boundaries are somewhat arbitrary, but it seems to me that if we keep going in this direction far enough, at the end of the road is equanimity with the universe being converted to paperclips. (Which would be a wrong thing in my current unenlightened opinion.) After all, there is no sharp boundary between "me" and a paperclip.

1Noahh
I see where you’re coming from, but my point about boundaries applies specifically within the domain of conscious experience. There’s no clear boundary between ‘you’ and ‘me’ in that space because consciousness doesn’t seem to have non-arbitrary borders. But paperclips aren’t conscious, so they don’t even exist within that domain of experience to begin with. So while self/other distinctions might be constructed, that doesn’t mean we should erase distinctions that actually matter—like the difference between something that has subjective experience and something that doesn’t. That’s why I wouldn’t extend the same boundary-dissolving logic to a paperclip (or a rock, or a chair) in the same way I would to other conscious beings.
Viliam20

So, one problem seems to be that humans are slow, and evaluating all options would require too much time, so you need to prune the option tree a lot. I am not sure what is the optimal strategy here; seems like all the lottery winners have focused on analyzing the happy path, but we don't know how much luck was involved at actually staying on the happy path, and what was the average outcome when they deviated from it.

Another problem is that human prediction and motivation are linked in a bad way, where having a better model of the world sometimes makes you ... (read more)

Viliam20

More generally, what is stopping people from making RL forum posters on eg Reddit that will improve themselves?

Could be a problem with not enough learning data -- you get banned for making the bad comments before you get enough feedback to learn how to write the good ones? Also, people don't necessarily upvote based on your comment alone; they may also take your history into account (if you were annoying in the past, they may get angry also about a mediocre comment, while if you were nice in the past, they may be more forgiving). Also, comments happen in a... (read more)

Viliam40

Ah, I meant something like people have 11 units of resources, but they need ~10 to survive, so 10 of them would have to invest all their savings... which is unlikely to happen, because coordination is hard.

You are right that companies with shares are the way to overcome it. I was thinking deeper in history, where e.g. science could only happen because someone had a rich sponsor. Without the rich sponsors, science probably would not have happened; Newton would be too busy picking the apples. Only a small fraction of rich people becomes sponsors of science, ... (read more)

Viliam39

Leave them up, other people may be curious too, but too shy to ask.

Viliam20

Also, sometimes inequality functions a bit like division of labor.

Imagine that everyone has 11 units of resources, and you need 20 to start a project. Compare to a situation where most people have 10 units of resources and one person has 30. There is no guarantee that the rich person will start the project, but the chances are probably higher than in the first scenario.

2Ben
I am not sure that example fully makes sense.  If trade is possible then two people with 11 units of resources can get together and do a cost 20 project. That is why companies have shares, they let people chip in so you can make a Suez Canal even if no single person on Earth is rich enough to afford a Suez Canal. I suppose in extreme cases where everyone is on or near the breadline some of that "Stag Hunt" vs "Rabbit Hunt" stuff could apply.
Viliam2713

This article feels like arguing against a statement that was probably never made on Less Wrong.

I even think I remember Yudkowsky saying that individual differences in IQ are unfair, and that in the glorious transhuman future of course everyone should get at least IQ 200, or something like that.

The implicit assumption that anyone could reason as we do if they simply tried harder.

Frustration or dismissal when others fail to grasp concepts we find intuitive.

For me, the frustrating thing is that many of those people who have the sufficiently high intelligence ... (read more)

Viliam20

In my experience, it’s scary how often such vibes prove correct in the end.

Yeah. I have the same experience. (Unless it is a selective memory, of course.)

But that alone does not prove that the experience is universal. Maybe we are just exceptionally well calibrated. If so, there is a potential self-improvement area: figure out how well calibrated you are about people, and maybe try to improve somehow. Not sure how, though. Make predictions about other people, and check them later? A prediction market for whether your neighbors will divorce, and which of yo... (read more)

Viliam28

From inside, almost everything I can do is "easy". Otherwise I wouldn't be able to do it, right? The trick is noticing that many things that are "easy" for me are actually quite difficult for other people. And even there, who do you compare yourself to? If you are constantly surrounded by experts, the things that are considered "easy" by your entire bubble can still be a mystery for 99.9% of population.

people with potential didn't have enough time to read LW to become rationalists? Or rationalists don't have time for LW?

Both of that. There are probably som... (read more)

1EniScien
(There was some errors, message hadn't sent before now) Becoming stronger feels like things became lighter. But a lot of things I trying to do are not "just easy"? Also I thought about it more like finding things which you found too hard and gave up. And I am not sure how to just pinpoint easy things, it's like finding details of how you are moving. (Though I probably should expect that for a lot of people it's actually hard to from the first try read/remember even single time new long words like "cefoperazone" and "ceftazidime" and that wasn't just a trope) 99.9%??? Are you serious? I thought I have a bad memory, but I don't think I will forget more than 70% of what I read THE NEXT DAY. Like, I can remember which tweets and shortforms I've read in the last few days, just trying to remember what I read, not because I found myself in relevant situation. And that is for random post which I didn't considered important to me like "what to do with AI for a layman?". I remember much better posts which I did considered important, like the one LW about effectively explaining things in the way of "it's like airbnb, but for boats". I think about it in the way of "which time I can spare if I will find something really important", it's not like now I am going and saying "oh, again I have no idea what to do with my time". It's just that I am not compelled to work, don't have kids etc. I don't think about it quite that way. Isn't the sense in sharing ideas? You have have ideas, some are more important, and share them is easier than invent and different people find different ideas. So you have a benefit from sharing with each other. So if it was like that I'd expected more like 30K of people showing with great ideas on lesswrong once a week each.
Viliam127

Death tax without a gift tax would simply be a tax on people who die unexpectedly. Because if you know that you are going to die tomorrow, you can donate all your belongings to your children today.

Even if you don't know the exact day, if you trust your children, you can simply donate them everything now, and then continue living in a house they legally own, etc. (Though then you are screwed if your children die before you. But this just means that the system introduces a lot of randomness.)

Oh, and if you have a 100% gift tax, you also need to make all kind... (read more)

Viliam40

Minimizing friction is surprisingly difficult. I keep plain-text notes in a hierarchical editor (cherrytree), but even that feels too complicated sometimes. This is not just about the tool... what you actually need is a combination of the tool and the right way to use it.

(Every tool can be used in different ways. For example, suppose you write a diary in MS Word. There are still options such as "one document per day" or "one very long document for all", and things in between like "one document per month", which all give different kinds of friction. The one... (read more)

Viliam20

May be, I was just wrong that I am not unusual.

Unusual is not a binary, it is a "more or less" thing, but yes, you may be much more unusual in some regards than you expected.

Actually, looking at your bio, it may be a cultural taboo for you to admit that you are exceptional. I grew up in communist Czechoslovakia, and the thought "I may be different from most other people, in a good way" went completely against all my conditioning. That's not what you are supposed to ever say, unless you want to get in deep trouble.

It's not just about intelligence, although ... (read more)

1EniScien
I think I written my bio in some biased way. But yeah, even in modern Russia it's not a very popular frame that you are so unique and exceptional. And our teacher said us "not to run faster than a whole train". And modesty is a virtue, but admitting how very excellent are is not at all. And in part it were things like my parents were trying to make me less perfectionist about grades by saying that "grades doesn't really matter", then I continued be a perfectionist, but now just thought that grades are not at all a measure of intelligence. Or that I was programming at 9y because it was interesting and then saying to myself that it's not a reason to be proud by my interests, if they were interested they obviously could too. Or that I've seen that prideful people in fiction were just doing some stupid short termed or evil things, like beating people because someone said something wrong, and next I concluded that whole emotion of pride is something awful. And also it young me's failure of putting myself into others shoes. Like, obviously most of kids were not invited to the stage at every end of year, but for me it was just something that happened from the beginning of the time. And I was very distrusting to people who were saying things like "oh, you know, you are not like the other kids, you are smarter than your age" etc, of course they were just trying to flatter you. A lot of such things. I actually ended up almost full blown Modest Epistemology by my own.   And that an interesting observation. I somehow missed THAT as a part of my rationalist leanings, but yeah, I can remember reading about Pollyanna (it was before HPMoR) and being outraged about her attitude "how glad I am about crutches as a gift, I don't need them" because... Doesn't she see how bad everything around her is? She can't see reality. Blind. Lobotomisedly happy not being able to internally react on environment. For me it felt like something worse than death. And not surprisingly, I was al
Viliam30

Probably there are just not enough people for all of that?

Social media will make you overestimate a lot. When I share a LW post on Facebook, it gets 10 likes. When I invite those people to a local LW meetup, no one comes. Clicks are cheap; even people who don't like rationality are happy to click if the article seems interesting.

1EniScien
(I will consider it as getting some evidence, so, thanks) I mean, I just thought in the way of "yeah, not all of people on twitter will come to LW", but I was on LW even though I wasn't on twitter. And there are also Facebook, Reddit, SSC and other PBlogs, and people who prefer to meetup instead of using online, and people in other countries. And also so much people read HPMoR. And I personally, if look back on my life story, don't see any division moments where I was prone even a little to change my direction in which I was going after reading HPMoR, way could be different, but direction is the same. May be, I was just wrong that I am not unusual. Like, I was probably the best pupil in my class, but that just gives sort of lower bound. What is after that? May be I should take IQ or SAT. But it's long, hard and has side effects. The most close thing that I've done was to take Vocabulary tests. And I actually found just one (1) site that wasn't terrible. https://www.myvocab.info/ In difference with all the other, it uses adaptive testing, so it takes just like 20 questions and 2 minutes, and author says "Bayes" in description, which are, in the surface, good signs. And I've got 99.9% for my age. (which is just knowing twice as many words as average, not so much). And I can't remember specifically doing something that could optimise over vocab test. I don't know, may be almost everyone on LW will get 99.9% for their age or something? (Though, of course I took the test in my native Russian, and for English it's different).
Viliam20

This is the kind of thing I don't trust LLMs about, too much hallucinating.

As an example, once an LLM insisted that "infinity plus one" is a finite number... because the sequence (infinity, infinity plus one) has a length two, and of course a finite sequence cannot have an infinite limit. I guess it's because it read many statements like this, but missed the detail that those were finite sequences of finite numbers, not finite sequences already starting at infinity.

So, in my opinions, the current LLMs are unable to do math, because math requires precision,... (read more)

Viliam24

The rich people may keep a few human slaves as a status thing, or maybe because they enjoy having power over humans. I agree that economically human slaves won't be valuable.

1teradimich
Keeping people as a commodity for acasual trade or pets seems like a more likely option.
Viliam20

Top performers in fields like chess, music and athletics almost universally receive coaching.

I wonder how much of that is actually based on science, and how much is just superstition / scams.

Do you know whether these coaches are somehow trained / certified themselves? Like, are there some scientific studies that a wannabe coach needs to learn and take an exam? Or is it more like some random person decides "I feel smart, I am going to be a coach", and the rest depends only on their charisma and marketing?

If I somehow happen to be a top athlete, is there som... (read more)

2Adam Zerner
In basketball there isn't any certification. Coaches/trainers usually are former players themselves who have had some amount of success, so that points towards them being competent to some extent. There's also the fact that if you don't feel like you're making progress with a coach you can fire them and hire a new one. But I think there is also a reasonably sized risk of the coach lacking competence and certain players sticking with them anyway, for a variety of reasons. I'm sure that similar things are true in other fields, including athletics but also in fields like chess where there isn't a degree you could get. In fields with certifications and degrees it probably happens less often, but I know I've dealt with my fair share of incompetent MDs and PhDs. So ultimately, I agree with the sentiment that finding competent coaches might involve some friction, but despite that, it still feels to me like a very tractable problem. Relatedly, I'm seeing now that there has been some activity on the topic of coaching in the EA community. I don't expect that the needs of alignment researchers are too unique when compared to the needs of other intellectuals. I mention alignment researchers because I think they're a prototypical example of people having large, positive impacts on the world, as opposed to intellectuals who study string theory or something.
Viliam20

This perspective challenges common assumptions about meaning, morality, and subjective experience.

I don't think those assumptions are common on LessWrong.

Viliam63

Specific things -- especially people -- feel more real than abstract threats?

Also, maybe instead of actual damage the intuitions reflect the perceived intention / integrity of the actor? Like, it is more plausible that there is a honest misunderstanding / difference of opinions on AI safety, than about protecting a corrupt mayor. Such intuition may make sense in general (even if not specifically in the case of AI safety), because misunderstandings can possibly be addressed by a dialog, but it doesn't make much sense to talk to people participating in corruption -- they are perfectly aware of what they are doing.

Viliam20

To clarify, I don't see evangelism as a problem per se, but I see it as a problem when the community needs evangelism to survive -- e.g. because the existing members get burned out and are discarded.

A difference between a symbiont and a predator, kind of.

JenniferRM*130

That makes sense as a "reasonable take", but having thought about this for a long time from an "evolutionary systems" perspective, I think that any memeplex-or-geneplex which is evangelical (not based on parent-to-child transmission) is intrinsically suspicious in the same way that we call genetic material that goes parent-to-child "the genome" and we call genetic material that goes peer-to-peer "a virus".

Among the subtype of "virus that preys on bacteria" (called "bacteriophage" or just "phages") there is a thing called a "prophage" which integrates into ... (read more)

Viliam2-4

Probably an evolutionary adaptation that (usually) prevents them from killing their 3 years old children.

4lc
It helps, but this could be solved with increased affection for your children specifically, so I don't think it's the actual motivation for the trait. The core is probably several things, but note that this bias is also part of a larger package of traits that makes someone less disagreeable. I'm guessing that the same selection effects that made men more disagreeable than women are also probably partly responsible for this gender difference.
Viliam40

We wanted computers to be more like humans; didn't realize it would make them suck at math.

Viliam80

If the problem is that nice people are generalizing from their internal experiences, then why is it that even self-declared psychopaths I meet seem ~basically correctly calibrated about how likely others are to mess with them?

I suspect that the psychopath's theory of mind is not "other people are generally nicer than me", but "other people are generally stupid, or too weak to risk fighting with me".

Motivation is invisible, skills are visible. So it is easy to be in denial about differences in motivation, and attribute behavior to the differences in skills.... (read more)

4lc
That is true, and it is indeed a bias, but it doesn't change the fact that their assessment of whether others are going to hurt them seems basically well calibrated. The anecdata that needs to be explained is why nice people do not seem to be able to tell when others are going to take advantage of them, but mean people do. The posts' offered reason is that generous impressions of others are advantageous for trust-building. This was the explanation he offered, yeah.
Viliam51

At the same time, empowering only the user and making the assistant play along with almost every kind of legal NSFW roleplaying content (if that’s what OpenAI ends up shipping) seems very undesirable in the long term.

Why? Do dildos sometimes refuse consent? Would it be better for humanity if they did? Should erotic e-books refuse to be read on certain days? Should pornography be disabled on screens if the user is not sufficiently respectful? What about pornography generated by AIs? When is it proper to worry about objectifying objects?

Viliam20

'Poor' people no longer starve in winter when their farm's food storage runs out.

Homeless people sometimes starve, and also freeze in winter.

(But I agree that the fraction of the starving poor was much larger in the past.)

Viliam20

When you start a new chat, you reset the memory, if I understand it correctly. Maybe you should do that once in a while. Then you may need to explain stuff again, but maybe it gives you a new perspective? Or you could write the background story in a text file, and copy-paste it to each new chat.

Could the LLM accidentally reinforce negative thought patterns or make unhelpful suggestions?

I am not an expert, but I think that LLMs are prone to agreeing with the user, so if you keep posting negative thought patterns, there is a risk that LLM will reflect them b... (read more)

Viliam72

One possible line to draw between "religions" and "cults" is how much they depend on recruiting new people / how much they burn out the existing ones. Whether they can live with a stable population -- of course, many religions would be happy to take more converts, but what happens when they can't, and they need to spend a few decades with the existing ones (and their children) only -- or whether people are so damaged by being in the group that recruiting new ones and discarding the old ones is necessary for the group to function.

For example, you can have s... (read more)

4JenniferRM
I've followed this line of thinking a bit. As near as I can tell, the logic of "evolutionary memetics" suggests that parent-to-child belief transmission should face the same selective pressures as parent-to-child gene transmission. Indeed, if you go hunting around, it turns out that there are a lot of old religions whose doctrines simply include the claim that it is impossible for outsiders to join the religion, and pointless to spread it, since the theology itself suggests that you can only be born into it. This is, plausibly, a way for the memes to make the hosts not waste energy on anything except transmission to progeny. Quite a few "Hinduisms" work this way, if you squint, although there have often been religious entrepreneurs who were willing to pretend that foreigner/outsiders LARPing as new members of their old religion might perhaps at least get those foreigners the ability to be reincarnated as proper real Hindus. Once communication and resources are flowing, further evangelism and memetic innovation can get pretty weird pretty fast. Still, for myself, as someone with no coherent familial religious inputs (all four grandparents had wildly different beliefs, as did both parents) I generally up-weight the likelihood that particular doctrines are healthy based on the degree to which their source community rejects evangelism. If two or three non-evangelical religions have convergently evolved the same pragmatic ideas (norms or educational processes or visualization techniques or whatever), then the ideas are plausibly worthy of a second look and some practical experiments <3
4lsusr
My understanding is that Mormons banned polygamy because the US government was cracking down on polygamy around that time. Their choice was to change their doctrine or be destroyed by the State, and they chose to change their doctrine.
Viliam20

If there are 10 sellers selling the same thing for the same price, I wouldn't be in any trouble if one of them stopped existing.

2tailcalled
And they wouldn't be getting any profit. (In the updated comment, I noted it's only the profit that measures your trouble.)
Viliam60

we can tell from the externally observed effect - the crazy stuff they got up to - that the technique had a bad effect.

This is probably only convincing from outside. From inside, there is probably a perfectly good explanation, and what seems to us as craziness would seem to them as advanced rationality.

I think Ziz believes in some form of quantum suicide, so from that perspective, even getting killed is not necessarily a bad outcome, because if you apply your timeless algorithm across all Everett branches, of course you are going to win some and lose some,... (read more)

Viliam*50

I wonder if the greatest benefit of LDS missionary service isn't recruiting new members, but instead dirtying their children with outside memespace to prevent an autoimmune reaction when they mature.

From what age do the Mormons do this?

It sounds plausible that a small child would not be able to evaluate new arguments correctly, so it will just ask an elder and receive some bullshit excuse which sounds okay. And at later age, it will not even listen to the arguments, because "I have heard it all before many times".

EDIT:

There is a traditional atheist way of ... (read more)

7lsusr
18-19 (formerly 18-21). When I wrote "children", I meant "next generation descendants". Missionaries are young adults.
Viliam30

Something about Beeminder always rubbed me the wrong way, especially those days when it was very popular on Less Wrong. But I didn't have a better alternative. Doing violence to myself felt wrong. Yet, the work needs to be done, and things that seem important in short term sometimes feel like a waste of time the next day.

I thought that a better inner harmony could be achieved by some kind of peaceful self-talk, generating an inner consensus. Like, if I know I should be doing X, but I feel an urge to do Y, instead I should just lie down on a couch, and do n... (read more)

2jessicata
I'm not sure what differentiates these in your mind. They both reduce the inconvenience of exercising, presumably? Also, in my post I'm pretty clear that it's not meant as a punishment type incentive: ... That's part of why I'm thinking an important step is checking whether one expects the action to happen if the initial steps are taken. If not then it's less likely to be a good idea. There is some positive function of the signaling / hyperstition, but it can lead people to be unnecessarily miscalibrated.
Viliam20

I wasn't there, so who knows how I would have reacted, it probably looks different in hindsight, but it seems like there were already red flags, some people noticed them, and others ignored them:

Salamon told Open Vallejo that LaSota attended three CFAR events between 2014 and 2018. Concerned by their “weird” behavior and interactions with other CFAR attendees, Salamon tried to convince a joint admissions committee between the Machine Intelligence Learning Institute and CFAR to not admit LaSota into their month-long summer fellowship in 2018. Salamon, howev

... (read more)
Viliam110

I don't see a reason why we should trust Altman's words on this topic more than his previous words on making OpenAI a non-profit.

Before Singularity, I think it just means that OpenAI would like to have everyone as a customer, not just the rich (although the rich will get higher quality), which makes perfect sense economically. Even if governments paid you billions, it would still make sense to also collect $20 from each person on the planet individually.

After Singularity... this just doesn't make much sense, for the reasons you wrote.

I was trying to steelm... (read more)

Viliam20

Also, what makes Ziz believe that there are always "two [cores] per organism" (source)?

Viliam2-1

What about using the name that is on the legal documents first, then all other important names, separated by slashes. "Maximilian Snyder / Audere", "Jack LaSota / Ziz", etc. (With only the legal name hyperlinked.) Not everywhere, but at least in the main list of criminals & suspects.

Also, it should be a list rather than a table. Now it seems like there is a distinction between the left and right columns of the names, which I believe wasn't the intention.

Viliam51

Just guessing, but maybe admitting the danger is strategically useful, because it may result in regulations that will hurt the potential competitors more. The regulations often impose fixed costs (such as paying a specialized team which produces paperwork on environmental impacts), which are okay when you are already making millions.

I imagine, someone might figure out a way to make the AI much cheaper, maybe by sacrificing the generality. For example, this probably doesn't make sense, but would it be possible to train an LLM only based on Python code (as o... (read more)

1sjadler
My sense of things is that OpenAI at least appears to be lobbying against regulation moreso than they are lobbying for it?
Viliam20

Upvoting for the footnote, btw.

Viliam20

Yes, but mere persistence does not imply reproduction. Also does not imply improvement, because the improvement in evolution is "make copies, make random changes, most will be worse but some may be better", and if you don't have reproduction, then a random change most likely makes things worse.

Using the government example, I think that the Swiss political system is amazing, but... because it does not reproduce, it will remain an isolated example. (And disappear at some random moment in history.)

1Davey Morse
persistence doesn't always imply improvement, but persistent growth does. persistent growth is more akin to reproduction but excluded from traditional evolutionary analysis. for example when a company, nation, person, or forest grows. when, for example, a system like a startup grows, random mutations to system parts can cause improvement if there are at least some positive mutations. even if there are tons of bad mutations, the system can remain alive and even improve. eg a bad change to one of the company's product causes the company's product to die but if the company's big/grown enough its other businesses will continue and maybe even improve by learning from one of its product's deaths. the swiss example i think is a good example of a system which persists without much growth. agreed that in this kind of case, mutations are bad.
Viliam20

Here is my collection of news article, although now it no longer feels like "more is better", because most of the information is repeated many times.

2019-11-18 Mystery in Sonoma County after arrests of protesters in Guy Fawkes masks and robes
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Mystery-in-Sonoma-County-after-kidnap-arrests-of-14844155.php

2021-11-16 Protesters arrested in 2019 suing Sonoma County, Westminster Woods
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/protesters-arrested-in-2019-suing-county-westminster-woods/

2022-09-07 Jack LaSota Obituary
https... (read more)

Viliam50

On one hand, thank you, I thought it might be a good idea to have a collaboratively edited document on Zizians. On the other hand, now that I look at the pages, it seems excessive. Do we really need a separate page on each Zizian? Also, are we supposed to just summarize what was in the news and legal documents, or provide our own explanations? But providing our own explanations about living people exposes us to potential libel charges. Etc.

So... I don't know. I wished we had something like this, but now that I see it, I am not so sure anymore.

Viliam1412

I am thankful that the glossary exists, because it makes it easier to decode various Zizian writings, and makes it more difficult to sanewash Ziz.

For example, now I have a convenient proof that Ziz literally believes that there are two persons in each human. Not as a vague metaphor for "people are complicated". Literally two. Literally in everyone. Literally persons, in a way that it makes sense to describe them individually as male or female, good or "nongood". Literally believing that you can talk with the individual persons, make them argue against each... (read more)

Viliam53

Sleep deprivation is a traditional mind-control technique in cults; makes it difficult to disbelieve.

Of course you can't just tell your recruits "I need you to be sleep-deprived so that you will find my teaching more credible". Instead, there is so little time and so much work to do. Also, waking up early is healthy (but somehow we forget that going to bed early is healthy, too).

Using sleep deprivation as a way to "know yourself" is an interesting new take. You don't even have to organize the work and the early meditations/prayers, your recruits will volun... (read more)

Viliam51

See the Zizian "Infohazardous Glossary":

Left-Female

Of a human, having a female left hemisphere. Abbreviated “lf”.

Right-Female

Of a human, having a female right hemisphere. Abbreviated “rf”.

Left-Male

Of a human, having a male left hemisphere. Abbreviated “lm”.

Right-Male

Of a human, having a male right hemisphere. Abbreviated “rm”.

lmrf

Left-male, right-female.

lfrm

Left-female, right-male.

Double-Female

Both hemispheres female. Cis women or binary trans women. Abbreviated “df”.

Double-Male

Both hemispheres male. Cis men or binary trans men. Abbreviated “dm”.

Seems quit... (read more)

3Milan W
The title "infohazardous glossary" sounds pretty insane. The contents of that webpage also strike me as pretty insane. The page is also structured as a glossary, and the concepts explained within it have very likely contributed to the insanity of the people who have heavily interacted with them. Therefore, the title "infohazardous glossary" seems pretty accurate after all. My policy with this kind of stuff is to consider it harmful but also to consider it harmful to be scared of it's harmfulness. Generally disregard, but also maybe play with it for a little bit if I'm feeling curious and sane. It is interesting yes, but also mostly wrong and can be harmful to those who are on an epistemically/emotionally shaky place right now.
Viliam76

I often try, but (1) it costs some time, and (2) sometimes it is quite difficult, especially to comment in a way that I think would be understood by the author. Sometimes the author is just so far away in the mental space that I don't believe that a short message could reach him... and I don't have a time to write a long one. (I could write a short message that would predictably fail, just to signal that I am a nice person, but that wouldn't help anyone.)

Viliam31

It's just this: the things that survive will have characteristics that are best for helping it survive.

With some assumptions, for example that the characteristics are permanent (-ish), and preferably heritable if the thing reproduces.

See "No Evolutions for Corporations or Nanodevices"

1Davey Morse
i agree with the essay that natural selection only comes into play for entities that meet certain conditions (self-replicate, characteristics have variation, etc) , though I think it defines replication a little too rigidly. i think replication can sometimes look more like persistence than like producing a fully new version of itself. (eg a government's survival from one decade to the next).
Viliam60

I don't know. (Which is a convenient way to end this thread.)

Some information is at https://zizians.info/ but it is far from complete, when it comes to the technical details of Zizianism.

Viliam120

My visual metaphor is the angel and the devil sitting on your shoulders, each whispering in one of your ears. Except, they live inside your respective brain hemispheres, because obviously literal angels and devils are unscientific, but left and right brain are the Science™.

That makes Ziz like Jesus, born without sin. Explained by having two angels, conveniently.

(Also, both the angels and the devils can be male or female, which provides a theological Rationalist foundation for explaining trans-sexuality. Makes it easier to recruit among trans-sexual rationa... (read more)

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