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The Zizians as we probably know are a rationalist murder-cult, followers of Jack "Ziz" Lasota, a non-passing preop MtF transsexual, which is an identity shared by many of Jack's followers. Yudkowsky commented on it on X, and I noticed he used "she/her" pronouns for Jack.
This seems to be the dominant social norm in rationalist spaces. In my experience I have seen rationalist spaces completely capitulate to trans language norms, even using altered pronouns to refer to people who don't pass and exhibit male-coded bad faith behavior, like murder sprees.
I'm rationalist adjacent myself. I don't go out of my way to refuse to use someone's altered pronouns. I certainly have used chosen pronouns for people that pass and seem to engage the community in good faith. But I have a hard time adopting chosen pronouns as a rule. It seems to me that a social norm of always using altered pronouns weakens the defense against bad-faith actors. I've gotten comments deleted on rationalist message boards for correctly gendering various people in the news who seemed to me to be bad actors.
The fact that Jack Lasota is a man and not a woman seems like an important fact about the world for us to know. It seems important for the justice system. It helps explain his behavior. And it seems important for communities that are pattern-matching to filter future bad actors.
While I've spent a lot of time in rationalist spaces, I've also absorbed a bit of Gender Critical ideology. I used to have strong AGP urges, describing myself as a "lesbian in a man's body". But in my mid 30s I figured out that having an auto-erotic fantasy at the center of my sex life was isolating and would keep me from having the kind of family life that I desired. I began to detox from TG pornography and erotica, treating it much as one would treat an addiction. Gender critical forums were helpful for puncturing the balloons of my fantasy and helping me understand how some could see my TG roleplaying as anti-social behavior.
Coincidentally on X I recently ran into a GC account describing the behavior of another trans bad actor in a Facebook group for lactating mothers. This transwoman was pretending to have lived through a pregnancy and then lost the baby in a miscarriage. He sought sympathy, support, and validation from the group. This was obviously fulfilling some sort of fantasy for him, to which the women of the group were made non-consenting participants. This incident got some play on social media because some of the real women in the group did object to the presence of the transwoman and those women were kicked out. This group chat was governed by suburban nice liberal norms, which like the rationalists have completely capitulated to trans beliefs.
I wonder if the rationalist default to fully embrace trans language norms reflects the fact that there aren't a lot of mothers and daughters in the rationalist space, while there are a lot of MtF transsexuals. Perhaps it is just easiest for a scene to adopt the norms which will cause the least social friction within the scene. There's not a lot of breast-feeding forums, girl's swim meets, or female dorms in the experience of people in the rationalist community where the presence of transwomen would create conflict.
But I wonder if there are any people here who are willing to explicitly defend trans language norms as a more universal principle. Do you perceive bad actors and slippery slopes to be a problem? If so, how do you defend against them?
I think it’s a consequence, in part because of the utilitarian approach most self described rationalists have. Utilitarian philosophy doesn’t have any inherent moral principles other than “minimize harm.” The problem comes when you have a group that’s defined “telling the truth” as “causing harm.” Theres no leverage to push back with. You can’t say “I refuse to tell lies” because that’s not really a base level moral principle of utilitarian moral thinking. The argument would take the form of “I don’t want to tell lies”, but unless you can show that you telling a lie leads to worse consequences than “trans woman committing suicide because you hurt their feelings,” it’s not something you can support under that moral code. It end up being “suicide vs my desire to tell the truth.” Truth loses.
Surely rationalists, who like doing things like calculating the effect of trillions of hypothetical future specks of dust in people's eyes and weighing them against immediate murder, would consider the advantages and disadvantages of respecting a trans person's chosen pronouns beyond the immediate effect of "I tell a lie" vs. "the person might go through with their threat of suicide". I think what is actually going on is a combination of (1) the real community of rationalists has a high fraction of people who are not quite the independent thinkers resilient to social pressure they make themselves out to be, and (2) the old guard at some point concluded that the danger of AI doom dominates their value function, and that building and maintaining a durable alliance with the US Left is their best shot at averting AI doom.
This might in part be reasonable political calculation (unaligned movements with any amount of influence, in the US climate, tend to be crushed as crypto-outgroupers and pillaged for remaining political capital by both sides; of the two, the Left is in principle more receptive to safetyism and EA/tikkun olam/global paternalism), and in part a certain measure of arrogance by the core personnel (Yudkowsky probably thinks of himself and the handful of people he respects as smart enough to not have their ability as the Wisest and Most Rational Human Beings be compromised by a well-contained set of signalling beliefs, and doesn't think that they stand to benefit that much from potential additional peers that get lost to brainrot in the pipeline).
… just figuring this out? I love the rationalist movement and read a lot of blogs/forums, but it totally falls apart once they start dealing with anything politically charged or that’s socially highly controversial.
A good example is Scott Alexander’s post after the election, where he basically said “I adamantly refuse to believe polymarket was correct by giving odds at 60-40 and the true odds were 50-50” really showed this to me. After the biggest right wing blow out election in recent history, you can’t accept one party had the odds going into it?
…anyways, many such examples, but it’s important to see this movement for what it is. Just so happened that the Rationalists, from Berkeley, rationally thought themselves into taking left wing stances on most all the controversial issues of ours time… right
I mean, how many of those stances are about facts, as opposed to values? Separate magisteria.
Part of the problem with Californian Utilitarianism is that while, when pressed, it will recognize that the choice of a utility function is ultimately an arbitrary decision, in practice it always seems to round down to "increase happiness", and therefore to the care/harm moral foundation, and therefore to left wing politics.
To wit, Zizians are functionally communists, Hegelian dialectic and all. They believe that there is a good future out there, they they can be its instruments, and that the goodness of the future washes away all sins they may commit in the service of that future, because the ends justify the means.
Scientific Utopianism is the disease of worshiping reason, and I'm afraid this isn't the last of its incarnations, because without any tempering force to the hubris of men who think they can predict the future, the temptation to make it one's own at all costs is always there. Babel's construction crew is never going to run out of volunteer laborers.
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