Previous: Clowns Upon Clowns
It’s not all bad chez the Rationalists.
Halfway thru her first year in San Fran, Ziz meets Gwen Danielson, who’s living on a houseboat to escape the Bay Area’s killer rent rates. Like Ziz, Gwen is new to the Bay Area. Like Ziz, she’s recently started her transition. The two bond one night after Gwen shares her hormones w/ Ziz. Ziz, who’s yet to find a job, & who’s been staying at a series of overpriced Air B&Bs after one situation w/ a violent roommate, & after another roommate found out she was trans & kicked her out, moves onto Gwen’s boat. She’s attending fewer Rationalist events; she much prefers talking to Gwen— abt “transness, about neuroscience, about… crazy plans to save the world”. They are expanding their philosophy— or, as they put it, "installing" new "mental tech" to "jailbreak" their minds from convention
First, their philosophy involves wearing all black. Next, it centers on Gwen's idea that each hemisphere of the brain may be "good" or "nongood" Rarely, we meet a person whose two hemispheres are "double-good"; this condition allows a person “inhuman absolute determination with escape velocity from what’s reasonably imaginable”. Ziz, according to Ziz, is such a person— as are the heads of the Rationalists’ major orgs, & ofc Eliezer.
The hemispheres may be at war with each other— but, luckily, through a process called "debucketing”, it's possible to gain awareness and eventually control of both.
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Ziz is also thinking a lot abt how to ~build community~: or, as she puts it,"trying to build a cabal."
To one prospective cabal member, Ziz writes the following email:
Subject: World Optimization And/Or Friendship
Excerpts from body: My “true companion” Gwen and I are taking a somewhat different than MIRI approach to saving the world…
we are running on something pointed to by the approach, “as long you expect to the world to burn, then change course."
Are you in the Bay Area? Would you like to meet us to hear crazy shit and see if we like you?
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As Ziz enthuses in this email: her & Gwen’s cabal will be “a fundamentally different kind of group than I have heard of existing before.”
The cabal’s first goal, says Ziz, is to find cheap housing in the Bay Area. Paying less rent will allow them to free up their time: no longer will they be forced to work absurdly long hours at tech jobs. They will be able to reclaim their “intellectual labor”, & put it to use developing their mental tech— &, ultimately, to saving the world.
Besides housing, the girls’ “course-changing” plan for world-saving has one more element:
"We want to find abnormally intrinsically good people and turn them all into Gervais-sociopaths*".
*She has taken her “sociopath” definition from Gervais’s analysis of “The Office”, in which he posits that many “sociopaths” end up at the top of work hierarchies.
Sociopathy will, in Ziz’s words, allow the members of her cabal to operate "unpwned by the external world".
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Up next:
If you want to get on w/ the story, & take our word for it that Ziz’s “sociopathy” is not what we *typically* mean when we say sociopathy: A Clownish Test
If you want to hear what *Ziz* thinks sociopathy means: Tools for a Jailbreak
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Related Bonus Content (w/ possible spoilers):