In case you have not heard, there have been some recent and not-so-recent killings allegedly by people who have participated in aspiring rationalist spaces.
I've put some links in a footnote for those who want the basic info.[1]
I believe many people are thinking about this and how to orient. People have questions like:
- What has happened?
- What is likely to happen?
- What can be done to prevent more killings?
- How to relate to all of the widespread interest (e.g. from journalists)?
I hereby demarcate this thread as a place for people to ask and answer questions about this topic.
Three virtues for this thread are (1) Taking care of yourself, (2) Courage, and (3) Informing.
Airlines have standard advice to put your own oxygen mask on first, before helping others. The reasoning being that if you don't help yourself, you won't then be able to help others. In a similar spirit, please take responsibility for keeping yourself safe first, and then help others. There are violent people about who, it seems to me, have thought carefully about how to hurt others and not be caught by law enforcement. Take the time to think through that before volunteering yourself to help out with something, or before sharing information you know about what people involved did, that might lead the foolish murderers to be aggressive.
I think courage is what lets people do difficult things together, and is helpful here. A society of brave and courageous people sees problems solved that are unpleasant and unrewarding and require taking personal risk, and gets better outcomes than other society. I also want to quote a friend of mine on this subject:
If we are going to be destroyed by Zizianism, let that Zizianism, when it comes, find us doing sensible and rationalist things – making prediction markets, posting, memeing, reading, encouraging the open exchange of information, building OSINT pipelines, reducing x-risk, arguing with our friends over some stimulants and a warm slack channel – not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about Zizianism
Finally, informing: People and institutions all around the world are trying to figure out what is going on, how to update their priors around general threat models, and how to help respond. These include aspiring-rationalist group organizers, family and friends of people involved, news organizations, local law enforcement institutions, people understanding how safe their town is, and so many more. Talking about it clearly, sharing accurate information about active threats is the sort of thing that improves people's maps of reality and helps them to better protect themselves and others. So I implore you to share what you know, questions you have, and considerations that haven't been articulated yet.
Pseudonymity notes
And remember: you can make pseudonymous accounts to talk on this thread. I do not expect to leave many comments with my own username. My one request is that you don't pick ugly names like "anon031234" but something pretty like "Morning Grass" or "Curious George".
Also, if you want to make sure your writing is unrecognizable, you can have your comments re-written by a language model. Example prompt: "Here is a comment I'd like to write. Please can you re-phrase it in your own words."
P.S. If this thread gets over 200 comments, I will make a 2nd one.
- ^
List of resources / articles with the basic info.
1. Open Vallejo's News Article on the Subject (the best one so far IMO).
2. Timeline of Events (1k words)
3. Detailed timeline of events (10k words)
4. Google Drive of Relevant Documents
5. A medium article from Feb 2023 (plus LW discussion)
I take seriously radical animal-suffering-is-bad-ism[1], but we would only save a small portion of animals by trading ourselves off 1-for-1 against animal eaters, and just convincing one of them to go vegan would prevent at least as many torturous animal lives in expectation, while being legal. I think there must be additional causes, like the weird decision theory people have mentioned, although I think even that is insufficiently explanatory, as I explain near the end.
That said, taking animal suffering seriously does change the moral status of killing an average knowing animal-eater to something which is deontologically understandable, even if it's still strategically very bad.
So while I don't endorse the actions, I mostly feel empathy for Ophelia and the others and hope that they'll be okay. Maybe it's like how I'd feel empathy for an altruist who couldn't handle living in this world and committed suicide, cause that's also strategically bad and reckless.. but very understandable to me, as one who knows how alienating it can be.
I haven't seen others on LW with this sentiment, maybe they've felt afraid to express it (as I do). In which they were alienated altruists who couldn't handle this world and seemingly went a little insane (given the incorrect beliefs about decision theory). Most people struggle to stay dispassionately rational when faced with something which they regard as very morally bad. It is hard to live in a world one believes to contain atrocities.
It was once harder for me to live in this world too, but I adapted myself into a better consequentialist. That is a grueling and non-default thing to do; "There will soon be horror in front of you, young altruist, but you are not allowed to directly intervene, because if you do you will be arrested, and you won't be able to stop others from doing the same horror. That's right, there are many, many others doing the same horror, and you will often have to not voice objection to it while you plan how to make it stop in a lasting way." That is not the kind of situation a standard human is capable of handling well.
Now combine this with the default human bias of ignoring things outside one's own story (a standard example being suffering in another country); a decision theory that always says 'escalate conflict'[2] cannot itself support escalating conflicts only with the ones around them in particular (a friend's abusive parents, a cop stopping your car, a landlord[3]), instead of e.g. animal farming CEOs. Indeed, this kind of scope-sensitivity, when taken sufficiently seriously, generalizes to "do the altruistically best action, whatever it is, whether or not it looks like fighting back."
I doubt that this is the full explanation. For example, I imagine they were aware of the concept of scope sensitivity and agreed with it. Maybe it plays a part, though, since being aware of biases doesn't make you fully immune to them. I see no other explanation for this.
Given the purpose of this thread as sense-making, and that courage is listed as a virtue which it did take to post this, I hope this will be welcomed and help with sense-making.
(Disclaimer: I am not associated with the social cluster in question)
For a valid analogy between how bad this is in my morality and something that would be equally bad in a human-focused morality, you can imagine being born into a world with widespread human factory farms. Or the slaughter and slavery of human-like orcs, in case of this EY fiction.
Edit: SlimePriestess in the podcast says Ziz didn't believe this, although she then says something about rebels being supposed to not surrender, I didn't catch if it was a reductio or not (decision theory does not care what you value; if rebels don't surrender, they either have plot armor, have chosen their battles smartly, or, alas, are acting recklessly)
Edit: This tumblr thread linked in a more recent comment says the original attack on the landlord was done in self-defense against a (successful) murder attempt