Previous: An Oasis of Truth-Telling
Like we said: this article by J.— this section we’re about to look at specifically— was a big influence on our originally-hostile stance towards Mz. Ziz.
Inspired partially by J., we’d originally intended to write one (1) post on this whole affair, & title it: “Why Ziz LaSota Is Not a Credit to the Left or to the Queer Community” 🙃
Reflecting on this now fills us w/ self-doubt: will we, after reading J.’s critique, agree w/ our original analysis— that The Guardian has laid out a thoughtful, reasonable, & comprehensive case for why les pensées de Ziz are both batty & dangerous? Will we be forced to harden our stance towards the Zizster? Will we be forced to pause our scrutiny of the media— & apply heaping dollops of scrutiny 🫣 to ourselves?
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This is hard to determine, bc J.’s uncharitable read of the Zizster is based on her “writing”, and on “people who know her”. Which writing? Which people? 🤷🏻♀️ J. isn’t saying. But based on either or both of these sources, he charges Ziz w/ 13 foibles— some of which, luckily, we’ve already responded to.
Unluckily, we’ve responded to 2 of them bc they are charges from The Unnamed Site:
• Is her writing “contemptuous of the idea that actions should be judged right or wrong merely because laws or social norms say so”? See here.
• Does decision theory become, “in her hands, justification for confrontation, escalation and retaliation”? See here— and here for, potentially, the origin of this rumor.
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Two more we responded to bc they sound ~dramatic~, but w/ closer scrutiny, aren’t too pearl-clutchable:
• Does she feel “that naturally altruistic people [are] easily victimized by others because of their goodness”? See here.
• Does she wonder “if good people should learn to act evil – that perhaps the only way the world could be saved was by a cadre of intelligent people who adopted the methods of sociopaths”? See here.
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A 5th foible is framed as belonging to Ziz, but is properly a foible of the Rationalists writ large:
Her personal philosophy… draws heavily on a branch of thought called 'decision theory', which forms the intellectual spine of Miri’s research on AI risk.
There’s nothing inherently sinister abt decision theory; here are some alternate branches we may wish Mz. Ziz had explored.
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Foible #6– ”She describes her veganism in misanthropic terms – Zizians call meat-eating ‘carnism’, and non-vegans ‘flesh-eating monsters’”— is a tricky one.
J. puts his opinion at the start of this sentence; then, to back it up, makes a statement that, to our knowledge, is only partially true.
At least once on her blog, Ziz does call meat eaters “flesh eating monsters”. She does sometimes call meat-eaters “carnists”— which, btw, light googling has revealed is a term used p. commonly in vegan discourse— it, like decision theory, is not a Ziz-ism.
In our reading, we’ve seen no evidence that the “Zizians”— meaning, Ziz’s friends— use these terms; they may, but it’s not a “Zizian thing” that we’ve come across.
There’s sadly not a term for the rhetorical swoop-de-whoop that J. has pulled here— but we might choose to call it “The Loaded Leap”: using subjective, emotionally-loaded framing as a springboard for an unproven generalization.
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Foible #7 is that "she [seems] preoccupied with moral purity, to a point verging on obsessive scrupulosity.”
If this is true, it indeed sounds unpleasant for Ziz— but the only example J. gives of this is a blog post where Ziz “recounts her anxiety at discovering ants in a shower. She weighs the costs of being late to work, thereby risking her job, against the moral cost of killing the insects.”
This blog post is, incidentally, popular among journalists to “prove” that Mz. Ziz is unhinged— but the post itself is not alarming.
Ziz does not describe extreme distress, in our reading of it; she merely asks herself if she can justify killing the ants, or if she should show up to work unshowered.
This rhetorical framing again doesn’t have a name, but we might call it “Moral Gaslighting”: making a mundane instance of ethical deliberation sound worryingly irrational.
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Foibles #8 & 9 have no clear sources— are they from the writing? The people? Who knows— they are:
• “She began to believe that it was not only probable but virtually certain that a future AI would subject her, personally, to some kind of damnation.”
• “Once she comes to a particular conclusion, she applies it literally, maximally, and with confidence impervious to restraint.”
#7 was, for a time, mostly true. Ziz, ca. 2015, did go thru a period of turmoil where she was certain demonic AI would emerge w/in her lifetime, & subject her- w/ the rest of humanity (so, not personally)- to torments beyond imagining. Indeed, it was with this grim future in mind that she made her big move to Rationalist HQ in the Bay Area- & sought out the help of CFAR. All this sounds unpleasant for poor Ziz— but isn’t inherently a sign that she might be a dangerous person, or that she, in future, might be prone to criminality.
More importantly, tho— it, like #5, is not properly Ziz’s foible: it is Eliezer’s foible— it is Eliezer who has threatened the Rationalists w/ precisely these visions of what demonic AI will do if— when!— it gets its hands on them.
#8. makes us laugh & wonder whether it might not be applied to J.’s own handling of this story: once J. came to the conclusion that this was a juicy “murder cult” narrative, did he— faced w/ contrary evidence— apply that assumption literally, maximally & w/ confidence impervious to restraint? 🤔
Alas, we have not had the pleasure of meeting Mz. Ziz in person; we have no idea if this describes her or not— & neither, we think, does J.
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Foibles #9 & 10 are— at last!— said to be found in her writing:
• Her writing [treats] abstract ideas with increasing, and alarming, literality.
• She mentions [Roko’s Basilisk] often in her writing, in a way that suggests intrusive thoughts.
#9, ofc, gives no examples, & so is easy to respond to: this is J.’s opinion.
Based on our reading of the Zizster, we do not share his opinion; we, reading chronologically, have not seen a trend of increasing literality, or of alarming literality.
We also are too lazy at present to find citations— of banal or non-increasing literality, or even of excitingly figurative interpretations of abstract ideas 🥱
Here is a link to Ziz’s blog; you can form your own opinions.
#10 mentions Roko’s Basilisk, which we’d previously called “Rationalist claptrap we don’t have time for”. We still have no time for it. Here is the Basilisk, if you are interested.
We have not found Ziz “often” citing this dread claptrap (TDC) in her writing. It mainly comes up in one post, where she is describing the inner turmoil she experienced in '15 (described above).
At this time, Ziz struggled valiently to free herself from thoughts of TDC & the existential spirals that it caused. She seems mostly to have been successful: she was left feeling battle-worn, w/ her nerves frayed, but found some peace in taking a more detached approach to, y'know, Eliezer-inflected visions of AI doom. Most importantly: she does not perseverate on that brutish Basilisk in her writings overall.
Again, this all sounds unpleasant for poor Ziz. But the symptoms of Basiliskitis- existential dread; feelings of entrapment; demoralization; depersonalization; & self-loathing- do not indicate someone has violent potential. We’re rather appalled that J. would suggest otherwise; that is not, como se dice, mad positive.
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#12 is… aggravating:
Ziz became increasingly convinced that the AI-risk community had lost its way: Miri, in its early years, had started as a project to accelerate AI, before pivoting to focus on AI safety; she believed it wasn’t doing enough to prevent a hostile AI – that its leaders were self-interested people who would sacrifice others to an AI hell to save themselves, and that their considerations of the future did not account for the wellbeing of other sentient animals.
See here and here for what J. is trying to pull. He, like Wired, has declined to include transphobia or the alleged crimes of MIRI in his story— & so must reach for new reasons why Ziz would take issue w/ the Rationalists.
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#13, we are ashamed to say, originally struck us as the most poetic & prescient part of this piece. It reads:
Some rationalists were surprised, and a bit put off, when Ziz announced that she would now be known as Ziz. The name comes from Worm, a roughly 7,000-page serial fantasy story that many rationalists have read. Ziz is an alias used by a monster called the Simurgh, part of a group of villains called the Endbringers.
The Simurgh has an unsettling power, a reader of Worm told me. She’s an infohazard: anyone “who has encountered the Simurgh for too long, listened to the Simurgh for too long, becomes a liability. Because at some point in the future they will go crazy and cause a bunch of destruction.”
Reading this over w/ a more jaundiced eye, we rather fear the Rationalists were “a bit put-off” not by Ziz’s name’s purported* allusion, but by Ziz’s decision to change her name period.
*Ziz, on her blog, does not reference this book when describing how she chose her name. She says only, “I did not want an our-civilization-female name.”
We fear, in other words, this belies a pack of transphobes’ reaction to a girl’s tentative first steps of social transition— which, recall, Rationalist luminaries like Michael Vassar rage against!
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W/ all that said: we STILL feel that we must apply heaping spoonfuls of skepticism to ourselves!!
Why, so recently, had J.’s 13 charges left us shaking in our boots? What were we so afraid of?
We, just one month ago, were blissfully ignorant of Rationalism. Mz. Ziz & her notorious blog were nowhere on our radar. Luckily, here was J. to do the heavy lifting for us. He let us know that Ziz was contemptuous, misanthropic, impervious to restraint— & much more besides.
We, like J., had dived into this story ready to find an exposé of “dangerous ideology” & of the dangerous mind behind it (DIATDMBI).
J., in this section, has pulled a sort of stage trick that relies on this assumption: he has spun a series of ordinary or unobjectionable factoids into a pretty neat illusion of the thing— DIATDMBI— which he’s promised readers he will deliver.
Now looking back on his 13 critiques, we rather see him throwing everything at the wall, & hoping some things stick. But in our original reading, we’d been cowed by his comprehensive attention to detail.
The stacking of this, and that, and another, and another left us fully convinced we were dealing w/ a crazed criminal mastermind.
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Yesterday, blushing at our own so-recent innocence, we turned to our gf and said: “You know those videos of cats watching magic tricks? We were the cat to J.’s amateur magician”.
If we had to describe the routine that J. has performed for us, we might call its main illusions:
1. The Stacked Deck– A classic setup where every “card” (claim) is prearranged to ensure that we, the audience, see exactly what the “magician” (journalist) wants us to see. An illusion of objectivity masks the fact that the conclusions we draw were rigged from the start.
2. The Vanishing Context– One of our fav tricks: where key details and counterarguments disappear before we even notice they existed, leaving only the illusion of damning evidence.
As for this routine’s prestige— as for the payoff to all J.’s shenanigans— we might call it “The Exposé Mirage”– an illusion of a well-researched take-down, created by stacking loaded language, selective evidence, & interpretive leaps to make us believe that he’s uncovered something shocking— when, in reality, we’re just seeing a chimera he’s cleverly arranged for our viewing pleasure.
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Time, we think, for an intermission.
Buy your popcorn, buy your wine, please don’t buy those overpriced commemorative shirts— but please do join us for Act 3 of J.’s performance: what stunts will he shock & amaze us with next? 🪄
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