Previous: Spot the CAUCs
Welcome, welcome, welcome back to News on News. Today we are joined by ☺️ none other than The Cut, whose true crime longreads we are always along to read. Cutting thru the leaves & creepers of Zizianism w/ us is Mr. Ezra Marcus— who made us wave our arms in alarm during our last segment, but w/ whom we’ve made up, & whose Milo & Audere revelations we are v. excited to see.
We are… less excited to see that M & A’s “friends-with-benefits” relationship had “quickly taken on ‘power dynamic-y’ overtones”. We are less excited to hear Milo saying that xie & Audere “talk[ed] about [Audere] reshaping [xier] brain”.
Are we being a fuddy-duddy? Have we drifted from being a cool aunt to being a censorious aunt? We do not want to yuck their yum, we are merely reminded that Audere, in ~2024 (~2 years after these “brain reshaping” convos w/ Milo) will confess on Twitter that they, when they were 21, had emotionally abused & erotic-roleplayed w/ a 17-y.o.
They will say that, at this time, they “thought that a lot of people were really into manipulation and abuse, and that for them it was the best way to become close friends”. They will originally beg their victim to keep this under wraps; but, once they confess the above, their victim will respond on Twitter: “My relationship with Audere was significantly harmful to me psychologically.”
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😞 We do not want Milo’s relationship w/ Audere to be significantly, psychologically harmful. We hope they had a much different dynamic. We hope that, as Audere tells Milo to call them “master”, “owner”, & “sir”, & as Audere slaps Milo “multiple times”, this is done w/ Milo’s enthusiastic consent— & not w/ Milo’s “starstruck” consent, which, to be fair, is Ezra’s word; we have no way of knowing if this is accurate to how Milo felt.
We are enthused to see Milo freeing xirself from the cobwebs of xier Christian upbringing via 😮💨 Rationalism, & we are less enthused to see Milo calling xirself “outsmart[ed]” by Audere, & “much more easily manipulated”. We are actually heartened to see Milo musing over whether to make “an anti brainwashing” Google Doc— “with my values and important things to me and stuff.” This is not a bad idea! This is a great idea when in the presence of a *forceful* other!
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Speaking of forceful others: Ezra, what are you up to w/ this line on MIRI:
Peter Thiel was an early donor.
🥱 How does the press manage to bore us so thoroughly w/ its talk of the oh-so-colorful Peter Thiel? Why does it drain the reactionary, anti-democratic, transphobic, & petty color right out Peter— why would it do so, when it could parade those colors in front of the world as just one means of characterizing the types of ppl we find hanging around Rationalism? We have no answers. We are moving on.
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We are moving on to a small but toothsome bite of Eliezer Yudkowsky New News: that on his OkCupid, Eliezer wrote:
I have been seriously and not in a joking way accused of trying to take over the world.
Who writes that in their OkCupid?! It’s just weird. This, Ezra, would have been a perfect opportunity for you to redistribute some of the “cult” weight off of “the Zizians’” shoulders, & onto the shoulders of Rationalism. Your Eliezer description is not bad— it is amusing & vivid:
a swaggering, fedora-clad ultrageek whose intimidating intellect was matched only by his self-regard.
—But it does not, in our opinion, go far enough. When you, in your next paragraph, vaguely mention Eliezer’s “convictions about AI risk”, why not drill down on those convictions? Are you worried you will lose your audience? That is understandable— “AI risk” by itself does sound like a snoozer (SLAS)… but it only SLAS bc you are not telling your readers abt the creepy, kooky, mysterious, & spooky (CKMAS) things that Eliezer is rlly talking abt. You are not even going so far as to say:
They were convinced that some day soon, AI would surpass human intelligence and take over the world.
— Which is just the tip of those CKMAS convictions.
We’ve ofc borrowed that tip-of-the-iceberg from your characterization of “the Zizians”, for which we have already given you more than enough grief. But you see, this is the problem! When you collude in offloading Rationalism’s CKMAS aspects to “the Zizians”, you cannot adequately describe the Rationalists & thus you kneecap your ability to tell a good, rich, honest story.
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Next, Ezra, you quote NBC quoting Anna Salamon; we’d seen this NBC quote many weeks ago, but lacked the emotional strength to respond to it (TESTRTI). We still lack TESTRTI. Anna has said that, “In hindsight”:
we were creating conditions for a cult.
Anna, what are you talking abt? YOUR org has been called cult-y. YOUR ideology has been called cult-y. Now that we look over your quote again, we actually find… nothing wrong w/ it: it would be a great description of *your own* backyard, were you not so determined— after all these years— to keep dumping your cult trash in “the Zizians’” backyard.
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Op, but Ezra has broken us out of our funk. We are rubbing our hands together, bc here he is finally getting into the Rationalists’ “Ironic” “magical thinking”.
We hear of demonic AI. We hear of silly Basilisks. We hear of torturous hypothetical scenarios driving Rationalists “to psychosis”. We read the wonderful line:
Amid the fervor, some of the sharpest… minds in the country ended up lost in thickets of acute irrationality.
👏👏👏 Chapeau, chapeau, Ezra! You are the first journalist we have seen being honest on this point. & yet, we have to nudge you: why didn’t you go even further?
Why didn’t you make it clear which fedora-clad ultrageek has sown & tended these thickets? Eliezer has spent almost 25 years digging & watering & pruning the delightful landscape you see before you. Why are you not giving this man his due?
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Instead, Ezra, you dive into Ziz— we assume it’s Ziz, you have intro’d her only as “a forbidden source of knowledge”. It’s either her or the apple of Eve! You give us a run-thru of Audere’s extreme-sounding ideas— is this run-thru accurate? Four months ago, we would have trusted you implicitly. Alas, you meet us at a war-torn & wary juncture.
Anyway, the extreme ideas you describe do not sound much like Ziz’s blog— or, as Milo coyly puts it, do not sound much like “a lot of infohazard stuff by this one person”.
One of these ~infohazards~, as described by Audere, we agree w/ & think is a fairly banal, non-radical statement:
Bad people THRIVE on ambiguity, greyness, DARVOing, muddying the waters, and ‘second chances' (AGDMTWASC).
This— altho we don’t like to flatly call anyone “good” or “bad”— is so! Much abuse takes place thanks to AGDMTWASC. This is why we enjoy un-muddying the waters when we perceive attempts at skullduggery. Yet Audere uses this to launch into a claim which we personally don’t agree w/. They use this to claim that the world is “more black and white than most people think.”
Here, we worry that Audere is conflating the complexity which is a natural— central— characteristic of our world w/ the kind of faux-complexity that comes from bad actors covering their tracks, & from onlookers’ refusal to take a forthright stance on harms being done.
This natural complexity, we’d argue, is not an obstacle to clarity: it is the terrain of clarity. It is a terrain w/ many bumps & swerves that cannot be flattened or straightened out— either by disingenuous moral relativism, or by moral absolutism. Most importantly: it, unlike faux-complexity, does not favor bad-faith actors. We live in an ambiguous world, but thankfully, this does not conflict w/ our ability to see harm & to name harm.
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It does not, for ex., conflict w/ our ability to nudge Ezra again on this next line:
Ziz LaSota… quickly became a curiosity in the rationalist scene
Ezra, we love to picture Ziz under a dusty bell jar in the Rationalists’ cabinet of curiosities. We love to picture Ziz as a strange plant or unusual stone. We love to picture her as an exotic fossil, taxidermied animal, or antique oddity.
We love, Ezra, that you have given us this imaginal experience. What we don’t love is that you have glossed over the Rationalists’ raging, flaming transphobia (TRRFT).
It was TRRFT which led them to see Ziz as a “strange”, “unusual” “oddity”. It led them to react to her not in a spirit of playful intrigue— which would have been insufferable in its own way— but in a spirit of outraged rejection.
They did not stage her on a pedestal, give her a little placard, & keep her out of direct sunlight. Instead they barred her from pedestals, flooded her w/ the harshest lights they could find, & gave her a placard that said “CULT”!
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Audere, here is an object lesson in what kinds of gobbledygook can come from too much black-&-white-ifying of complex terrain.
Mz. Ziz, as we have said numerous times, has yet to be exonerated by us or by anyone else. Does this mean she deserves to be flooded & cultified? No! She deserves to be perceived for who she is, whatever that may be— it certainly won’t be an angel; we are none of us so blessed 🙏
If she were a cult leader, she would deserve to be seen as a cult leader— but we have yet to find compelling cult leader evidence. We have rather found a lot of cult placards that are supported by (among other things) a desire for unrealistic moral clarity: a vain desire for a world where Mz. Ziz is a demon, & where the Rationalists have done no wrong.
This world is a pipe-dream. This world is Never-Never Land. Thru enthusiastically reporting on Never-Never Land, we run risks: we risk overlooking harm, & obscuring it from our readers’ view (OIFORV). We risk overlooking humanity, & OIFORV. These are the risks being run by Ezra in just that small little word: “curiosity”.
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Audere, we suspect— we hope— that your desire for moral clarity was driven by a desire to see “bad people” held accountable, & a desire to see “good people” get their due. We share this desire 😮💨
But we have been scalded & burned too many times by the misdirected “moral clarity” (“MC”) of others to believe, at this point, that “MC” is an effective— or even necessary— tool in the fight for accountability & due-getting. It is too easily turned to the wrong ends. We would rather see it turned to face the backboards of a dusty cabinet— we would rather see it retired as simply one more antique curiosity.
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