Previous: An Alternate Story Emerges
After banning Ziz & Gwen from CFAR’s reunion conference, Anna calls the police to “get their take on things” should Z & G show up regardless. She also informs staff at the venue that Z & G may yet appear.
Appear they do, in black Sith robes & Guy Fawkes masks. With them are Somni & Emma. They use their trucks to block off the building's entrance & exit. The girls are carrying 1 can of pepper spray, & a stack of leaflets which state their grievances as follows:
1. MIRI has payed hush-money to cover up Eliezer’s (alleged) statutory rape.
2. MIRI is not developing adequately “friendly” AI.
3. MIRI has “missed the rapidly oncoming global catastrophic threat of fascism”.
4. MIRI mostly hires rich ppl, &, by basing itself in the Bay Area, spends an inordinate amount of the $ which Rationalists donate to it on rent.
5. Anna uses her clout among Rationalists to “exclude/psychologically attack” would-be whistleblowers.
6. Anna is a TERF. She clings to her dumb “gender” test, does not hire trans women, & excludes trans women from CFAR workshops/events (even though, as the girls plaintively add, “trans women [are] naturally inclined/gifted in mental tech development”.)
7. CFAR, in defiance of their own stated mission, does not develop innovative mental tech.
8. CFAR’s founding premise— “that people [are] blocked on having the tools to think”— is wrong.
9. CFAR, in short, does nothing but drain the “life/time/effort of… donors”.
The girl’s flier enjoins readers to “Take the time to process what” has happened— both to these noble orgs, & to Rationalism writ large: “It is not what it once seemed like it would become.”
They end by affirming: “New things can be built”— and, towards these ends, provide a “General recipe for escaping containment by society”: in no particular order—
1. logistical autonomy
2. mental autonomy (self-knowledge, spectral sight, DRM stripping)
3. scope awareness
4. heal/process damage/trauma
5. awareness of institutional betrayal
6. interhemispheric game theory*
*This recipe is, you may have noticed, rather hampered by Zizisms. “DRM stripping” has been explained in pt. 15. Gwen’s “interhemispheric game theory” has been touched upon in pt. 4. “Spectral sight” & “scope awareness” are not vital to our story at present, but may be read abt in Ziz’s glossary.
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For the record:
The team at Wired Mag, having (as noted in pt. 19) declined to detail the Rationalists’ rap-sheet of misbehaviors, must— at this point in their zretelling (Ziz retelling)— search for an alternate reason why the girls would want to protest such esteemèd institutions as MIRI & CFAR.
Re: MIRI, Wired posits that the girls were not motivated by *genuine concern for the alleged underaged victim of Eliezer*, but were motivated instead by kooky concern for sthng called timeless decision theory (TDT).
TDT is a fav concept chez our Rationalists. Under TDT, a decision you make *now* isn't only abt this one case— it's abt all cases like it. Thus, if you give into blackmail, you are effectively precommitting to *always* yielding to blackmail: to being a perpetual sucker.
This, according to Wired, is what got the girls riled up. And Wired goes on to point out that an internal investigation by MIRI of MIRI found the alleged victim’s claims to be “straightforwardly false". The claims were eventually retracted, under circumstances which remain confidential.
Case closed, as far as Wired is concerned.
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As far as we are concerned, we would like to leave this case open due to the following needling details:
1. We do not love the sound of an org investigating itself, & finding it has done nothing wrong;
2. We also dislike the secrecy which shrouds the retraction of these quite serious allegations.
Moreover: we object to Wired’s dismissal of the girls’ concerns as ~kooky~. We find— on Ziz’s blog, & on Gwen’s blog— no mention of being disgruntled by bad TDT praxis. Instead, we find a pair of me-too*-minded girls whose motives appear to be quite genuine. (We may add: Wired also fails to mention that the alleged victim was transfem.)
*We may also add: at around this time, MIRI accepted tens of thousands of dollars from Jeffrey Epstein— after Jeffrey’s range of crimes had already been exposed to the public. This is neither here nor there; it is simply a fun fact.
We know that Wired has read the blogs of Gwen & Ziz, bc they quote from both— insofar as it suits their version of the zstory (Ziz story).
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Re: CFAR— Wired disputes the girls’ claims that CFAR— indeed, that the Rationalists writ large— are transphobic. This blows, as previously mentioned, our minds.
Not only does light googling reveal a tizzy of transphobic tropes which the Rationalists— most importantly, Eliezer— appear to cherish; both Ziz & Gwen have taken pains to document their *own* unhappy experiences— as, btw, has Somni.
Wired omits all this info, & instead quotes one (1) unnamed trans Rationalist, who says: “That's preposterous. Rationalists have the most trans people of any group I've seen that isn't explicitly about being trans. You'd just show up at a math event or house party, and it would be 20 percent trans.”
We’ll admit: prior to our light googling, & prior to finding the girls’ blogs, this seemed convincing to us. We’d taken this source at their word: we are not ourselves a trans Rationalist, & have never even heard of a math party; so how would we know?
Indeed, Gwen herself confirms that many Rationalists are trans. This has, unfortunately, failed to prevent the overall culture of transphobia chez the Rationalists— esp. among the leadership ranks of the Rationalists, to which trans ppl (as mentioned) are very rarely promoted, due to the fear that they will introduce “irrational policies”.
Wired’s deft sidestepping of this issue— of whether the Rationalists have a group culture of transphobia— in fact shows a number of cognitive biases & logical fallacies (CBALF).
These CBALF are *not uncommonly encountered* by journalists who perhaps want to absolve a group of systemic issues, & who perhaps want to avoid the difficult work of investigating the full range of group members’ experiences.
Chief among these CBALF are:
1. Anecdotal Evidence Fallacy/Availability Heuristic
• Wired has dismissed widespread claims of transphobia based on a single individual’s experience, rather than engage with broader data or patterns.
• One person’s experience (even if valid) does not negate the experiences of many others.
2. Survivorship Bias
• Wired may have focused on *visible* trans Rationalists, while ignoring those who have left due to transphobia or who feel unsafe speaking out.
• Just because some trans people remain Rationalists does not mean the Rationalists *love trans ppl*; those affected by the vile & virulent strains of transphobia which we have covered extensively may already have self-selected out.
3. False Consensus Effect
• Wired has claimed that, because one (1) trans person says there’s no transphobia, their perspective must be representative of most trans people in the group.
• In reality, marginalized people within a group can have widely varying experiences depending on factors like social status, background, or willingness to challenge norms.
4. Base Rate Neglect
• Wired has failed to consider the base rate of transphobia in similar spaces or in society at large.
• The presence of trans people does not automatically indicate an absence of transphobia, just as the presence of women in a workplace doesn’t mean sexism is absent.
5. Tokenism
• Wired has used a single trans person’s perspective as a stand-in for all trans perspectives, treating their testimony as sufficient proof that the Rationalists’ overall culture is a-ok.
• This again overlooks the fact that different trans people may have different levels of comfort, privilege, or willingness to call out problems.
6. Confirmation Bias
• If Wired was already inclined to believe the Rationalists are not transphobic, they may have sought out and emphasized perspectives that align with that belief, while ignoring contradictory accounts.
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…Alas: at the end of the day, Wired’s logic seems to be that it doesn’t trust Ziz & the girls, & therefore doesn’t trust anything they have to say.
While this, superficially, may appear to be a reasonably cautious approach, we have already noted that Wired fails to apply this same skepticism to the Rationalists’ side of the story (RSOTS). They instead echo the RSOTS, while assuming that Ziz & the girls are acting w/ malice, w/ craziness, or w/ histrionic exaggeration.
They do not, in their article, engage w/ the girls’ actual claims; they instead cover them up, & rewrite the story around “veganism” & “timeless decision theory”.
FTR: Wired’s dismissal of the girls’ documented experiences belies a few *more* cognitive biases which its esteemèd journalists may have, inadvertently, stumbled into:
1. Poisoning the Well – This is when you dismiss anything someone says based on a preconceived negative judgment about them, rather than evaluating their statements on their own merits.
2. Halo/Horns Effect – This is when a perceived negative trait (or association) of a person leads to the assumption that everything they say or do is untrustworthy or wrong.
3. Belief Perseverance – This is our v. human tendency to cling to a belief even when faced with contradictory evidence, which often leads us to reject valid claims from someone we have already decided against.
4. Moral Inversion – This is when you unconsciously reverse the moral landscape, siding with the nogoodnik over the nogoodnik’s victim(s), due to prior biases or manipulation.
W/ all of that said: back to The Story. Back to the CFAR conference, & back to our girls’ efforts at a protest.
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W/in 10 minutes, police descend w/ their guns drawn, accompanied by at least one SWAT unit (numbers vary), an armored car, a bomb squad, dogs, & a helicopter. It will emerge that they have been called by venue staff, who have reported (falsely) that the girls have guns; that they are entering the building; & that there is an “active shooter” w/ a sinister-looking duffel bag.
To make things worse: what the girls don’t know is that in the in the convention hall w/ the Rationalists is a group of children doing a ropes course.
The kids are sheltering in place w/ their teacher as the cops pounce on Ziz, Gwen, Somni, & Emma in "a high-risk-type takedown.”
Ziz & co. refuse to give their names, so the cops take their fingerprints... which lead to their deadnames, by which they will now be referred in all the coming legal battles.
They are carted off to jail, where they are sexually assaulted. Gwen reports:
"in my case, i was groped and had my pants pulled down and then [was] sat on by an officer in a mounting position"
"two of us were gawked at by a group of about a dozen police looking at our naked bodies after pinning us down and cutting off our clothes ("Ha! I told you it was a man.") and one had pictures taken of them front and back naked and pinned down".
Somni additionally describes being “chained and dragged around a police station with a bag over [her] head.” She is put in solitary confinement, under suicide watch, for refusing to answer the cops’ questions.
The girls spend the next 4 days in jail, during which time they’re denied clothes food, hormones*, & medical care, & kept in freezing-cold cells.
*Indeed, CA inmates do have a hypothetical right to HRT.
They are not allowed to speak to a lawyer; and, for daring to request such a thing, their recently-granted clothes are once more cut off of them.
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Several years later, a Rationalist who is compiling a “community alert” abt Ziz— & who, to this end, has included Gwen’s account of the protest & assault— will pause here to say: “I don't get the impression that Gwen is the sort of person who generally lies about things like this”.
They will continue:
Some aspects of this account sound like other accounts of police misconduct I've heard in the US... these cruelties seem entirely possible to me.. their allegations... deserve to be treated seriously.
& they will finish by saying:
Hopefully people reading this can help gather and share information about bad behavior directed at Ziz, Gwen, etc, and not just bad behavior done by them.
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Related Bonus Content (w/ possible spoilers):