The border patrol shooter was a zizian rationalist. Let's read ziz.

I love edgy philosophy. My general hunch is that the forbidden stuff contains truths that the nomos longhouse doesn't want you to know. Those truths give you important leverage against the established control structures, so it's a key move in the martial art of ideology to study them. Furthermore, the kind of people who come up with such radicalizations often have unique virtues, or an excess of a certain kind of virtue that turns them into these tyrants of the will, so they are important to study as a human type which we ourselves may wish to become and improve upon. (Read Dr. Alamariu's "Birth of Philosophy" thesis)

The normoids want to warn you against this kind of curiosity. "oh no anon don't read that you might be radicalized and go crazy". There is probably a certain danger in this specifically the first time. I got radicalized hard by the rationalists. It blew up my life (in retrospect for the better but it hurt at the time). But then I got radicalized by many other cults and each time was less life-disrupting than the last, but just as insightful. My thesis is that you get good at philosophy, or the martial art of ideology, not by dissecting these things with clinical cynicism but in serial radicalization. So this is another way that studying these things is a good move in the Art; it builds you up to a state of enlightened post-radicalization. After this you know a lot of secrets, can reliably think across and outside of systems, are no longer so pwned by words, and are capable of actually breaking out of the matrix and thinking independent thoughts. Therefore you should read edgy philosophy *with intent to be radicalized by its truth*.

So enough preamble, the latest edgy philosophy drama is that the zizians are killing people again. Details not that interesting. The reason they kill people is they have a rather exacting ethics derived from a radicalization of AI singleton doomerism, rationalist decision theory ideas around blackmail and counterfactual punishment, utilitarianism taken actually seriously, some kind of leftist hysteria against nazis, veganism, and trans-adjacent depersonalization. Their target selection sucks though (mostly petty fights with personal associates like parents and landlords). Let's dig in and get ziz-pilled. What's in here that we might actually want to believe?

Almost all of their premises are wrong, but one thing I can't help but admire is the dangerous levels of will-to-consistency that correctly derives insane actions from their insane premises. Many people "believe" what the zizians believe, but mostly sit around optimizing for normalcy instead of taking consistency seriously. I share the strong intuition that you should actually take your beliefs seriously. I can't really give them more than 2/10 here though because again the actual result is underwhelming even by their own goals. This isn't coordinated effective action to steer the world, just insane flailing. Likely just high-IQ rationalization of catastrophic lack of social judgement.

The other piece that jumps out at me is the decision theory stuff around blackmail, moral strategy, counterfactual punishment, etc. I haven't figured out their core set of insights here, but actually taking the subject seriously, thinking up a lot of concepts, and taking them as absolute is interesting at least.

So far in all I haven't found anything really good here and I'm disappointed. I'm not really in the target audience (I don't take the premises seriously nor do they come to any compelling conclusions). But I can see how leftist vegan rationalist types might go for it. Here's some of the links people sent me when I asked for the good stuff:

https://voidgoddess.org/ziz/punching-evil/
https://sinceriously.blog-mirror.com/net-negative
https://sinceriously.blog-mirror.com/false-faces/
https://zizians.info/
https://sinceriously.blog-mirror.com/aliveness/
https://sinceriously.blog-mirror.com/social-reality/

The thing that stands out about 'Punching Evil' is that it's a form of liberal extremism. The justification for violence is the standard 'intolerance of intolerance'. Pretty much the whole of liberalism is present. The state seems be neural but can fall into the hands of Nazis/vampires. We're under a social contract but not when it comes to anti-liberals. Etc. Liberalism has always been able to justify arbitrary amounts of repression and violence for the purpose of defending liberalism.

Even liberal terrorism isn't new, but conservatives, being liberals themselves, usually attribute it to leftism, socialism, communism, etc, so it doesn't hurt the brand. Most environmentalist and animal rights violence conforms more strongly to liberal ideology than, e.g., revolutionary communism. The same is true of much anarchist violence. They're not part of a revolution but rather take themselves to be justified in using violence against those 'beyond the pale' within the context of liberal society.

The decision theory, etc, just seems to be lowering the threshold for violence.

A bit more context about this story via
https://x.com/DrTechlash/status/1883996064648421500

(Re Punching Evil) I don't get the point of these people acting like they're anodyne liberals who just don't like nazis. Why lie to yourself like that? He's acting like he's some Popperist but he clearly believes in something deeply revolutionary. Nothing about his reasoning is conceptually unavailable to nazis. Indeed nazis (I'm just rolling with the terminology here) often extoll the virtues of liberty and free speech within ordered white societies.

It's always a bit of a shame seeing smart people use basically campaign trail language — it's like they've truly "bought in" and aren't really dealing in substance. "The fundamental problem with Nazis is not that they conduct their politics in a way that crosses an abstract line. It’s that they fight for evil, however they can get away with it." This is self-deluding rhetoric befitting a peasant revolt. I can't trust the analysis of people who actually talk like this, but that's just me

I think the best model to analyze this is occult Reichian psychodynamics. These people are so devitalized that they must perform violent blood sacrifice of the Other to maintain their shadowy ghoulish existence.

>Almost all of their premises are wrong, but one thing I can't help but admire is the dangerous levels of will-to-consistency that correctly derives insane actions from their insane premises. Many people "believe" what the zizians believe, but mostly sit around optimizing for normalcy instead of taking consistency seriously. I share the strong intuition that you should actually take your beliefs seriously. I can't really give them more than 2/10 here though because again the actual result is underwhelming even by their own goals. This isn't coordinated effective action to steer the world, just insane flailing. Likely just high-IQ rationalization of catastrophic lack of social judgement.

This is one example of the core irrationality of Rationalism as an ideology. There are many currents of Rationalist thought that basically go something like "Intelligence is so powerful that you can make anyone less intelligent than you do anything, merely by talking to them." One example is the "AI in a box" thought experiment, where the contention is that merely by talking to you, a super intelligent AI will be able to convince you to let it out of the box no matter how much you know letting it out of the box would doom humanity or otherwise be very bad.

I think Rationalists like to believe this about intelligence because they consider themselves very intelligent and also harbor secret fantasies of omnipotence. But you don't see a lot of proof of this persuasive power of intelligence in real life: everywhere you see smart people who are frustrated by people who are not as smart but posses some other, more important virtue, like bravery or the ability to compromise. Rationalists therefore need to prove to themselves that intelligence is omnipotent, so they prove it by being easily conned by people who are smarter than them. In the same way a woman will stay with an abusive boyfriend, because that abuse proves to her that she is helpless, and therefore not responsible for her bad choices, Rationalists prove their intelligence is valuable by letting smarter people convince them of bad ideas. By this sort of subconscious self-judo, doing idiotic things like killing your landlord is suddenly not proof of your poor decision-making, but is actually proof you have a super secret genius decision theory.

These sorts of irrational mental gymnastics undergird much of the Rationalist movement's weird behavior. In most circumstances, it's best not to be super consistent with your beliefs, because the intuitions that guide your actions (the sense of motivation being foremost) are much better attuned to reality than your stated beliefs, which are often adopted not through reason, but because they act as psychological crutches for your personal failures or frustrations.

>>2895
interesting theory. You're right that rationalists have self-serving motivation to believe intelligence is and ought to be the one true virtue, and have fantasies of omnipotence. I'm less convinced of the particular psychologization of abuse-seeking or rat cults as self-justification through feats of vulnerability to intelligence.

In particular, the "super genius" decision theory extremism was the basis of the cult. Dysfunctional people join cults because it creates a place and a narrative where they can get more social support and self esteem than they could get normally, for the small price of believing something that sounded plausible really really hard. Or something like that. I've seen my fair share of cults up close and a lot of it is just bonding over special knowledge and then accidentally creating an environment powered by social pressure for belief-escalation. Then someone gets into a fight with the landlord and they are too far down their extreme path to not kill him. But I don't think it's about any actual psychological constraint to prove that such-and-such is true.

Good points on working from your actual felt motivations and not abstract bullshit stated beliefs. But I disagree that you shouldn't try to be consistent about this. That's just some kind of traumatized helplessness response where you see other people reasoning from insane social bullshit premises and conclude you should never reason from any premises at all. You have missed the healthy alternative, which is to take your felt intuitions seriously as high-powered beliefs, and have your reason dialog between those, and not just the polite bullshit that comes out of Oxford.