WEBVTT 00:00.151 --> 00:21.382 [SPEAKER_04]: I saw a video of John Oliver and his wife on the Emmy's Red carpet, and I was just like this feels like an off-brand wife for John Oliver, and I thought that she was like very thin and like a scary way, and she made sure she might be, and so we looked her up, but she looks like the same level of like, fit and slender and basically every, like she doesn't look like scary. 00:23.170 --> 00:28.312 [SPEAKER_02]: And there's just this one video where I was like, it's like if John Oliver was dating Gabriette. 00:28.332 --> 00:30.413 [SPEAKER_02]: Like she just was giving that in this one. 00:30.694 --> 00:31.754 [SPEAKER_04]: It's so cute. 00:31.774 --> 00:36.016 [SPEAKER_04]: She just so doesn't have the Gabriette level of like, or being like thin. 00:36.056 --> 00:40.718 [SPEAKER_04]: But like I wonder if it's just like such a relative thing where it's like because it's John Oliver. 00:40.798 --> 00:45.841 [SPEAKER_04]: She just seems, she's like too conventionally attractive that your brain turned her, you know what I mean? 00:47.192 --> 00:57.976 [SPEAKER_02]: turned her into like, like something's, yeah, it's such a funny world that even like John Oliver has an exceptionally hot wife. 00:58.036 --> 01:05.158 [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, like, I think John Oliver is one of those men that not so much now, but maybe there was a moment where women were like, 01:05.518 --> 01:10.100 [SPEAKER_02]: I kind of have a Christian John Oliver because you're like, oh, he's smart, but like we're looking. 01:10.561 --> 01:11.861 [SPEAKER_02]: I'm thinking like 10 years ago. 01:12.261 --> 01:16.204 [SPEAKER_02]: And then you look up their wives and you're like, oh, I don't even stay at a chance of this guy. 01:16.224 --> 01:31.171 [SPEAKER_04]: You know, one would always hope that some sort of like super nerdy ideas guy would just like not care about women's conventional appearances at all, but ultimately like that is the condition of our world or society dare I say, 01:34.773 --> 01:35.413 [SPEAKER_04]: Blond Lady. 01:35.713 --> 01:37.034 [SPEAKER_04]: It's a tough pill to swallow. 01:37.074 --> 01:42.715 [SPEAKER_03]: I think you're having a similar thing that I had with Timothy and Kylie, like, which you were shocked that I had that. 01:42.735 --> 01:49.777 [SPEAKER_04]: But I'm just saying it's a similar kind of expectation you have for someone versus like what they're into, which is ultimately like quite conventional, you know? 01:50.177 --> 01:51.418 [SPEAKER_02]: I would say... 01:51.778 --> 01:53.418 [SPEAKER_02]: I'm not saying they're the exact same thing. 01:54.098 --> 01:59.640 [SPEAKER_02]: You weren't expanding your view of attractiveness by being into Timothy Shalom, either. 02:00.000 --> 02:01.200 [SPEAKER_04]: I'm not saying it's the exact same thing. 02:01.220 --> 02:02.421 [SPEAKER_04]: I'm saying that it's like a rel... 02:03.601 --> 02:28.947 [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, it's the realization that someone you think would have this kind of taste doesn't or like someone you You know me and like it's and it's someone that you're into so you're kind of placing yourself in the position It's the kind of boy band theory of like oh, I am the every woman like I'm one less lonely girl And it's me and I fit into this and the that girl that this guy likes is probably like really interesting If it's the mold of like a girl who wouldn't even be into him, but ultimately ends up being like a hyper conventional 02:33.928 --> 02:51.073 [SPEAKER_02]: I think she's a veteran and then they like met through some like thing for veterans and she could be great So I was John all over a veteran No, but like I think he was doing work with veterans in Like he was it was for something he's talking about the VA. That's really interesting. 02:51.293 --> 02:51.453 [SPEAKER_02]: Whoa 02:52.247 --> 03:09.805 [SPEAKER_02]: But then what you were saying before, it's sort of the Ringo Star phenomenon, which is that every girl's favorite beetle was Ringo Star when there were teeny boppers, because he was like the funny one, but also the least cute, I guess, and the one that everyone thought they had the best chance with. 03:10.125 --> 03:12.388 [SPEAKER_02]: Like Louis and Wonder Action type, yeah. 03:12.788 --> 03:15.589 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, but did anyone like Louie and Underaction? 03:16.030 --> 03:18.571 [SPEAKER_04]: My friend loved Louie because for that exactly really. 03:18.891 --> 03:26.414 [SPEAKER_04]: Because they were like, all take him and ultimately it's like, well, no, he's very, like, six famous and successful and will have his pick up a little bit. 03:27.915 --> 03:31.017 [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, it's just really versus like every female celebrity you look up. 03:31.037 --> 03:33.559 [SPEAKER_04]: You look at their husband and you're like, Oh, all right. 03:33.659 --> 03:35.540 [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, sure. 03:35.640 --> 03:39.302 [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, so we've had a big break as per fucking usual. 03:39.322 --> 03:45.106 [SPEAKER_04]: We're just going to stop promising that we're going to do a season sooner than we say. 03:45.126 --> 03:47.167 [SPEAKER_04]: We are because it's just, I don't think it's ever happened. 03:47.548 --> 03:48.368 [SPEAKER_04]: We've had a big break. 03:48.748 --> 03:49.689 [SPEAKER_04]: What's happened in the break? 03:50.189 --> 03:51.050 [SPEAKER_04]: Lindsey Clancy trial. 03:51.550 --> 03:53.712 [SPEAKER_04]: Well, yes, very sad. 03:53.732 --> 04:03.661 [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, so basically to explain to those who somehow don't know, Lindsey Clancy is a woman who was charged with murdering her three small children. 04:04.501 --> 04:12.508 [SPEAKER_04]: She had been found having like jumped off of like their house and severely injured by her husband, and then the husband 04:17.993 --> 04:25.175 [SPEAKER_04]: Basically, the general defense like thesis is that Lindsey Clancy was suffering from postpartum psychosis. 04:25.675 --> 04:29.656 [SPEAKER_04]: Her husband has been like, please don't come after Lindsey, please don't charge her. 04:29.756 --> 04:31.937 [SPEAKER_04]: She's she was deeply suffering, all this stuff. 04:32.717 --> 04:34.137 [SPEAKER_04]: And I don't know. 04:34.197 --> 04:41.659 [SPEAKER_04]: I guess like when I heard about this case, I was kind of hoping it would bring a general awareness of postpartum as an issue to the four. 04:42.099 --> 04:45.540 [SPEAKER_04]: What did you think when you heard about this case besides horror? 04:45.977 --> 05:08.247 [SPEAKER_02]: I kind of chose to avoid a lot of the coverage just because I was like, I know it's going to piss me off because I don't trust the public to have like a nuanced or compassionate or well-rounded take on postpartum and crimes committed by mothers against children. 05:08.787 --> 05:10.728 [SPEAKER_02]: And so, I kind of 05:12.128 --> 05:27.757 [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know if I can like deal with the rage that will be inspired by like me paying because attention to this if that makes sense because it kind of feels like one of those things that you get invested in almost like rage baiting yourself 05:28.457 --> 05:35.922 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, because you're like, I know that I'm going to be unhappy with the outcome and also unhappy with the coverage of it. 05:35.942 --> 05:48.630 [SPEAKER_04]: I have a friend who I am always bragging about because she's a baby genius who I'm not going to name obviously for anonymity purposes, but she's probably listening high doll love you and she has dedicated a lot of her. 05:49.876 --> 05:57.904 [SPEAKER_04]: Time in school, she works in the medical field is how I will put it to like studies around postpartum. 05:58.464 --> 06:06.512 [SPEAKER_04]: And she told me that she's been avoiding the trials while like she knows what's going on, but she hasn't been like following it very closely because I think she similarly finds it extremely upsetting. 06:06.712 --> 06:13.518 [SPEAKER_04]: I've been following closely just because I'm also just like, it's televised and like I just think the total fucking, 06:14.239 --> 06:19.940 [SPEAKER_04]: dystopian horror of that concept to be almost impossible to bear. 06:20.080 --> 06:27.462 [SPEAKER_04]: I just can't even believe something as sensitive as this is being televised in any way, shape or form, but that is this country for you. 06:28.142 --> 06:40.705 [SPEAKER_04]: And honestly, I just think it's so classic, the public, because either have been very like, oh, this woman, there are obviously a lot of people who are like, okay, let's talk about postpartum, you know, the evolved sorts of people, and like a lot of women 06:44.826 --> 06:53.151 [SPEAKER_04]: The factions of people who are like, she's a murderer, I don't care what she was suffering with, like, that's just a lie, she should be thrown in prison, you know, throw away the keys. 06:53.791 --> 06:56.273 [SPEAKER_04]: And then there's people who are like, her husband did it. 06:57.167 --> 06:59.208 [SPEAKER_04]: And they're like all these theories. 06:59.368 --> 07:00.109 [SPEAKER_04]: There's some evidence. 07:00.149 --> 07:03.491 [SPEAKER_04]: I'm pretty sure pointing to the idea that he was like he had been having an affair on her. 07:03.911 --> 07:13.196 [SPEAKER_04]: And that he ultimately, like when we probably look at the facts of the case, wasn't as present as like a husband to a woman who just had a newborn child should be like, her youngest child was very young. 07:13.897 --> 07:16.638 [SPEAKER_04]: And she had been showing signs of like mental distress for a while. 07:17.279 --> 07:22.322 [SPEAKER_04]: So people are kind of like, oh, this is pointing to the idea that he actually killed the kids and he framed her. 07:23.580 --> 07:38.655 [SPEAKER_04]: And I just think that that is so we're so much willing to believe in a psycho, then we are really believe it's like very, very, like actually common postpartum psychosis is not very common, but postpartum is a concept is extremely like very common among recent mothers. 07:39.256 --> 07:45.682 [SPEAKER_04]: We're so much less willing to believe this like systemic issue as per fucking usual than the idea that some psycho could have gone, you know. 07:46.082 --> 07:46.742 [SPEAKER_04]: Slave is children. 07:46.802 --> 07:57.446 [SPEAKER_02]: I think the idea of like domestic horrors are like so much harder to wrap our minds around because ultimately what is darker and harder to like swallow? 07:58.066 --> 08:05.849 [SPEAKER_02]: A unknown evil force coming in and committing an unspeakable evil act or a mother 08:06.589 --> 08:17.357 [SPEAKER_02]: who was taking care of these children, like brought them into the world, but through something beyond her, I guess, control or like, and her constitution. 08:18.198 --> 08:19.839 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, overcame her. 08:20.459 --> 08:24.122 [SPEAKER_02]: Obviously, to accept that that's a possibility, I think. 08:24.687 --> 08:31.591 [SPEAKER_02]: for mothers and fathers, people like that is really hard to get your mind around. 08:31.611 --> 08:35.134 [SPEAKER_02]: So I understand the impulse to not want to see it that way. 08:35.194 --> 08:42.739 [SPEAKER_02]: But it's like, guys, sometimes the most horrible things in life are the things that are almost the most mundane. 08:42.759 --> 08:47.362 [SPEAKER_02]: It's just not to say that this event is mundane, but postcard of factors. 08:48.162 --> 08:49.543 [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I agree. 08:49.644 --> 08:57.331 [SPEAKER_04]: I mean like it's been such a maligned and shameful and like repressed thing for women in our society. 08:57.791 --> 09:01.334 [SPEAKER_04]: I'm sure you could talk to like any older female member of your family. 09:01.855 --> 09:04.137 [SPEAKER_04]: I've spoken to a few in my family. 09:04.617 --> 09:21.316 [SPEAKER_04]: who have said that some of the thoughts that they were having immediately after they had their child or in the years following, were extremely disturbing, like had very difficult thoughts about hurting themselves, hurting the child, sometimes hurting a pet, like sometimes it can be displaced, the post party can be displaced onto a pet. 09:21.676 --> 09:38.669 [SPEAKER_04]: And Hannah and I had a many episode when we were still doing those that we did on an article from the cut that was about a woman who it was this confessional article she had written and she had been anonymous at the time because I guess they knew the follow would be a bit crazy that she essentially started neglecting like pretty badly neglecting her. 09:39.430 --> 10:05.705 [SPEAKER_04]: cat that she had for a long time immediately after she had her baby to the point that she like she would like either feed I think it was like she was feeding away too much food or like not feeding it at all and the cat sort of losing its hair and she like opened the window to make sure the cat ran away like all this stuff and the internet came for this woman they doxed her they were so upset and it's like you guys this woman was so clearly suffering from postpartum but the education about postpartum is so negligible that 10:06.365 --> 10:33.369 [SPEAKER_04]: We still have these like adverse reactions to these kinds of stories and it's like I don't know I read that story and obviously I was very sad for the cab But I also just had so much empathy for this woman who was like very alone and early motherhood The like partner wasn't really around and it's taboo and I'm hoping at least that this case makes it not taboo Because that's what makes postpartum probably Even more difficult to deal with and even more Potentially violent or having these kind of like disastrous outcomes 10:33.729 --> 10:46.282 [SPEAKER_02]: I also think this is should maybe challenge our notions of the new mother as some kind of saint like figure standards with which we hold new mothers too. 10:46.362 --> 10:55.051 [SPEAKER_02]: And I'm thinking about this even in relation to like, and this is sort of a kind of diverting a bit away from the idea of postpartum, but thinking about like how 10:55.772 --> 11:11.143 [SPEAKER_02]: parenthood and becoming a mother will impact women's sex lives as well and how their partners see them, how someone becoming a mother sometimes makes them less desirable or like changes your ability to see things. 11:11.183 --> 11:16.086 [SPEAKER_02]: I think it's just like all kind of plays into this role of viewing the new mother in this almost. 11:16.326 --> 11:19.789 [SPEAKER_02]: The Madonna effect, I suppose, being imposed on to them that it's 11:22.070 --> 11:31.211 [SPEAKER_02]: Not for some reason obviously it's horrific the idea of a mother committing violence against their children, but also I think it makes us even more angry because of 11:32.692 --> 11:57.886 [SPEAKER_04]: this saint like bar that of course holds it them too yeah it's what makes it taboo i just think new mothers i feel like or some of the most contradictory beloved and reviled figures are society like we we love new mothers but as long as they like don't go in public with their baby because i don't want to see that don't breastfeed in public maintain all of these standards of motherhood it's like a pure kind of doting nerd nerd nerd like unconditionally nurturing figure 11:58.406 --> 12:07.573 [SPEAKER_02]: They're socially and like often physically ostracized because it's sometimes you are kind of confined to your home space with the baby. 12:07.593 --> 12:13.118 [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, like a woman being public as a new mother is like an extremely like you go on a subway and I don't know. 12:13.178 --> 12:15.399 [SPEAKER_04]: I went on a subway once and there was this Latino lady. 12:15.520 --> 12:16.640 [SPEAKER_04]: They're Latino. 12:17.641 --> 12:23.002 [SPEAKER_04]: women who go kind of back and forth on some of the subways here and they sell chocolates with their children. 12:23.502 --> 12:26.843 [SPEAKER_04]: She was one of these ladies and she had actually like a pretty new baby with her. 12:26.863 --> 12:31.504 [SPEAKER_04]: Like there was like a little toddler and the taller was screaming, screaming, screaming. 12:31.964 --> 12:43.106 [SPEAKER_04]: The woman kept it she would try and like play Kate the child by giving her some candy and the child but throw the candy and like all the skittles would fall everywhere and everyone in the subway was just glattering at this woman. 12:43.186 --> 12:51.148 [SPEAKER_04]: And I don't know, whenever I see like a young child crying or screaming on a subway, I try not to even look because I just can't even imagine how it feels. 12:51.188 --> 12:55.150 [SPEAKER_04]: And this woman's already, you know, we could talk about the class implications of this as well. 12:55.170 --> 12:58.891 [SPEAKER_04]: But like, you know, this woman's already kind of maligned or like, outcast in her own way. 12:58.931 --> 13:03.652 [SPEAKER_04]: And society let alone having this baby who she like is struggling to control in a public place. 13:03.672 --> 13:04.213 [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I don't know. 13:04.233 --> 13:05.133 [SPEAKER_04]: I just can't even imagine. 13:05.733 --> 13:10.015 [SPEAKER_04]: So, I mean, I look at Lindsay Clancy, who was a mother of three children feeling like extremely alone. 13:10.135 --> 13:14.657 [SPEAKER_04]: You have this massive hormonal shift that can have extremely calamitous effects on your body. 13:15.198 --> 13:21.881 [SPEAKER_04]: And doing that mostly alone, and I'm not trying to blame or obviously the husband's suffered insane trauma from this, but I don't know. 13:21.901 --> 13:23.702 [SPEAKER_04]: I just can't even imagine what would happen to my brain. 13:24.542 --> 13:25.862 [SPEAKER_02]: Do you need a community around you? 13:26.162 --> 13:28.203 [SPEAKER_02]: It's something that just does happen. 13:28.223 --> 13:36.544 [SPEAKER_02]: I think a lot of the time with new parents is that, yeah, there's so much just put on the woman and like, it is just an unfair distribution of labor. 13:36.564 --> 13:38.525 [SPEAKER_02]: And we don't really talk about that enough. 13:38.625 --> 13:47.927 [SPEAKER_02]: And it's like one of the things that scares me the most about like hypothetical parenthood or pregnancy is like what that does to a relationship and also like what that takes out of you. 13:48.007 --> 13:48.427 [SPEAKER_02]: And I'm like, 13:49.047 --> 13:54.332 [SPEAKER_02]: I was on birth control for like a little bit and maybe I want to set myself on fire. 13:54.412 --> 13:59.217 [SPEAKER_02]: Like I can't imagine the hormonal impacts that would happen to pregnancy. 13:59.457 --> 14:00.898 [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, I'm terrified of births part. 14:00.918 --> 14:04.242 [SPEAKER_04]: I'm like every single month that I have a pier because I have a PMS disorder. 14:04.882 --> 14:10.026 [SPEAKER_04]: Every single month I agree, I want to set myself on fire every single thing in my nearby surroundings. 14:10.066 --> 14:11.367 [SPEAKER_04]: It's like in a front to my being. 14:11.728 --> 14:13.389 [SPEAKER_04]: I'm like so non-functional. 14:13.529 --> 14:15.210 [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I also can't imagine. 14:15.671 --> 14:22.336 [SPEAKER_04]: So in Toronto, I'm going to speak for it because I don't actually know specifically in Canada, but like maternity leave and producer is a year there. 14:23.096 --> 14:26.459 [SPEAKER_04]: Here, it's three fucking months, three months. 14:26.959 --> 14:29.662 [SPEAKER_04]: Is there the universal maternity leave in the states? 14:30.222 --> 14:31.463 [SPEAKER_04]: It's not federally mandated. 14:31.833 --> 14:33.114 [SPEAKER_04]: to be paid in the States. 14:33.755 --> 14:40.501 [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, under the federal family and medical leave-act, eligible employees received up to 12 weeks of unpaid job protected leave for the birth of a child. 14:41.001 --> 14:44.784 [SPEAKER_03]: I just can't, like sometimes it's country like what the absolute fuck. 14:45.385 --> 14:47.527 [SPEAKER_04]: Cause yeah, I don't think that's, yeah, that's not the case in Canada. 14:47.567 --> 14:49.809 [SPEAKER_04]: It's definitely not the case in the UK. 14:50.249 --> 14:51.350 [SPEAKER_04]: No, yeah. 14:51.390 --> 14:55.874 [SPEAKER_04]: So I just can't imagine the trials devastating the fact that it's televised is like, happy not learned. 14:56.434 --> 14:57.715 [SPEAKER_04]: I just think it's foolish and, 14:58.596 --> 15:09.783 [SPEAKER_04]: shameful, and yeah, I'm just hoping that silver lining from this is that we understand post-partum a little better, and don't get all of our ideas about it from dye my love starring Jennifer Lawrence to make it less depressing. 15:09.803 --> 15:23.912 [SPEAKER_04]: I recently read East of Eden, and I just think there's so something to reading the classics, like this, I've just been like really inhaling books this year, and every time I read a classic, I'm like absolutely nose to them stuck to the book, you know what I mean? 15:23.932 --> 15:25.173 [SPEAKER_04]: Like I just never want to stop reading it. 15:26.074 --> 15:34.286 [SPEAKER_04]: And I'm kind of tired of all this post-modern nonsense, like give me an narrative, give me mythical figures, give me, like, grand tales. 15:34.566 --> 15:35.768 [SPEAKER_04]: But it was just spectacular. 15:35.808 --> 15:36.549 [SPEAKER_04]: I fucking loved it. 15:36.569 --> 15:39.454 [SPEAKER_04]: And then I tried to watch the gene steam movie, and it was just a bit small. 15:40.995 --> 15:56.022 [SPEAKER_02]: And I finally read the great Gatsby, which I pretended I read in high school and wrote a paper on, but I didn't, I don't know why it was, it's so short, and then I finally read it for years ago and I was like, oh, right, that's why people love this book. 15:56.242 --> 15:58.223 [SPEAKER_02]: It's so beautiful. 15:58.724 --> 15:59.344 [SPEAKER_02]: I loved it. 15:59.804 --> 16:01.105 [SPEAKER_02]: There's just a reason they're classics. 16:02.145 --> 16:02.565 [SPEAKER_02]: I know. 16:02.726 --> 16:04.506 [SPEAKER_02]: Classics are classics for a reason. 16:04.567 --> 16:15.832 [SPEAKER_02]: It's like you can try and think you're interesting for like rejecting it, but then once you like accept that people in the past had some good taste, your life will be a lot better. 16:15.852 --> 16:22.055 [SPEAKER_04]: I think school curricula kind of messed us up with that one, because it just makes you like reject anything that even sounds like it would be in school curricula. 16:22.956 --> 16:25.117 [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, Steinbeck's been banned in a lot of places as well. 16:25.137 --> 16:26.818 [SPEAKER_04]: Steinbeck has an interesting life, interesting man. 16:27.038 --> 16:28.419 [SPEAKER_04]: I was having fun reading about him yesterday. 16:31.624 --> 16:33.446 [SPEAKER_02]: Um, oh yeah, I can see that. 16:33.686 --> 16:34.907 [SPEAKER_02]: I can see that for sure. 16:35.468 --> 16:36.869 [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for validating me. 16:37.350 --> 16:42.795 [SPEAKER_04]: So you've called us on our first episode of the 10th season of Rehash. 16:43.235 --> 16:43.716 [SPEAKER_04]: 10th? 16:44.116 --> 16:44.356 [SPEAKER_04]: Yep. 16:44.596 --> 16:44.977 [SPEAKER_04]: Damn. 16:45.810 --> 17:08.888 [SPEAKER_04]: I know, crazy, and we decided that this season, we're not going to do a theme, because sometimes the themes can get a little repetitive for us, research-wise, and there's just a bunch of different topics we kind of wanted to pop off on and really just dive into, and so we decided why not just do away with the theme, and so, and so, and so, and so, I think 17:09.168 --> 17:19.735 [SPEAKER_04]: With that, I'm Maya and I'm Hannah and this is rehash, a podcast about the social media phenomena that strike a nerve in our culture, only to be quickly forgotten, but we think are due for a revisiting. 17:20.235 --> 17:21.916 [SPEAKER_04]: This season has no theme. 17:22.697 --> 17:31.803 [SPEAKER_04]: If you like our show and want to hear more from us, you can support us on Patreon at patreon.com slash rehash podcast where we have bonus episodes and early access to our regular programming. 17:31.983 --> 17:37.907 [SPEAKER_04]: If you don't want to join the Patreon feel free to rate and review us on Spotify and Apple podcasts because that helps us out a lot. 18:08.795 --> 18:09.916 [SPEAKER_04]: Let's start with a story. 18:10.556 --> 18:17.000 [SPEAKER_04]: Richard and Rita Zashko are an aging couple who live in the tiny suburban borough of Chester Heights, Pennsylvania. 18:17.541 --> 18:30.048 [SPEAKER_04]: They have an only child, a trans non-binary Angeonew named Michelle, who is a recent graduate of Penn State's Bioinformatics Master's Program and former NASA intern who currently lives in the Bay Area. 18:31.089 --> 18:34.633 [SPEAKER_04]: These days, Rita has been feeling the weight of having to care for her alien parents. 18:35.054 --> 18:41.241 [SPEAKER_04]: She and Richard have been dedicating most of their time to this, and she sometimes vents about it to resist her in law, Rosanne. 18:42.303 --> 18:50.292 [SPEAKER_04]: After living for a bit in the Bay Area, Michelle and her girlfriend Alice Monday are forced to relocate to Vermont due to the areas notoriously high cost of living. 18:51.173 --> 18:55.014 [SPEAKER_04]: Now back in the east, Michelle grows increasingly estranged from her parents. 18:55.454 --> 19:01.755 [SPEAKER_04]: On her blog, she writes extensively about her fears of a transgenicide and the importance of equipping oneself with a gun. 19:02.416 --> 19:08.777 [SPEAKER_04]: She also will lose to having suffered historical abuse at the hands of her parents, who she says had once threatened to kill her if she ran away. 19:09.537 --> 19:13.238 [SPEAKER_04]: Michelle also names Rosanne, her aunt, as a bystander to this abuse. 19:13.898 --> 19:23.920 [SPEAKER_04]: Roseanne, on the other hand, is baffled and defended by these blog posts and argues with Michelle that, while she did see the family fight on occasion, no such abuse was witnessed on her end at least. 19:24.580 --> 19:32.841 [SPEAKER_04]: Then, on December 31st, 2022, Roseanne gets a call from one of Richard's older brothers, who tells her that Richard and Rita have been murdered. 19:33.381 --> 19:35.482 [SPEAKER_04]: Shot in their home with a nine-millimeter handgun. 19:35.982 --> 19:39.682 [SPEAKER_04]: Both were found shot in the head and there was no sign of a break-in, meaning that the killer 19:42.903 --> 19:47.546 [SPEAKER_04]: When state troopers in Vermont arrive at Michelle and Alice's home, they find a 9mm handgun. 19:47.947 --> 19:50.969 [SPEAKER_04]: Because they don't have a warrant to confiscate the gun, it's given back to Michelle. 19:51.449 --> 19:57.914 [SPEAKER_04]: Four days later, Michelle appears, quite unexpectedly, at a Pennsylvania police station, asking for her parents death search advocates. 19:59.255 --> 20:06.040 [SPEAKER_04]: She goes to her parents' funeral and that night police apprehender at a nearby hotel, where they discover that she's accompanied by two friends. 20:06.560 --> 20:14.986 [SPEAKER_04]: A UC Berkeley student named Daniel Blank and a mysterious unnamed blonde figure dressed in black, both of whom are staying in a separate room from Michelle. 20:15.627 --> 20:21.851 [SPEAKER_04]: Later, Michelle's 9-millimeter handgun is found in their room, but Michelle has been released to this point and is nowhere to be found. 20:22.872 --> 20:28.694 [SPEAKER_04]: months later, Rosanne gets a call from Michelle, who tells her that she was not the one responsible for her parents' murders. 20:29.394 --> 20:32.555 [SPEAKER_04]: No, in fact, she says, less wrong did it. 20:33.395 --> 20:41.397 [SPEAKER_04]: So I'm sure the story has sparked many questions, but I know probably the big question burning on your minds is what the hell is less wrong? 20:41.977 --> 20:43.098 [SPEAKER_04]: Have you ever heard of it, Hannah? 20:44.158 --> 20:50.700 [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, it's a website, like a forum for the rationalist 20:52.360 --> 20:53.041 [SPEAKER_02]: Where'd you hear about that? 20:53.502 --> 21:01.514 [SPEAKER_02]: Through, there was an episode of Search Engine where you interviewed this rationalist who got pregnant or something. 21:01.854 --> 21:02.275 [SPEAKER_02]: Interesting. 21:02.455 --> 21:02.695 [SPEAKER_02]: Okay. 21:03.236 --> 21:05.579 [SPEAKER_02]: I actually was expecting you to know this at all, so that's fascinating. 21:06.723 --> 21:08.464 [SPEAKER_04]: Yes, dear, you were totally right. 21:08.724 --> 21:16.768 [SPEAKER_04]: So yes, less wrong is a blog slash forum website that's kind of, as you said, the main home to an ideological movement called a rationalism. 21:17.569 --> 21:20.590 [SPEAKER_04]: It's the brainchild of a guy named Eliasar Yudkowski. 21:21.290 --> 21:24.132 [SPEAKER_04]: Some people say Elizar, I'm not entirely sure. 21:24.852 --> 21:28.014 [SPEAKER_04]: He blew up among certain circles at the internet back in 2010. 21:28.154 --> 21:34.597 [SPEAKER_04]: After publishing a six hundred and sixty thousand word serialized piece of Harry Potter fan fiction. 21:35.137 --> 21:37.679 [SPEAKER_04]: called Harry Potter and the methods of rationality. 21:38.299 --> 21:39.620 [SPEAKER_04]: aka Hannah's worst nightmare. 21:41.402 --> 21:43.503 [SPEAKER_02]: Anyway, like... 21:44.484 --> 21:55.752 [SPEAKER_04]: If you were not like that, this text was released over the course of five years and it really gives you a sense of what rationalism is if we can ever really fully understand it in this version of the story. 21:56.212 --> 22:04.781 [SPEAKER_04]: Harry Potter is not a sad little orphan, but the beloved adopted son of his donning aunt and uncle who is an esteemed professor of biochemistry. 22:05.482 --> 22:12.870 [SPEAKER_04]: This Harry whose name is Harry Potter Evans Vettis has been raised under the tutelage of his uncle to be a child prodigy. 22:13.800 --> 22:20.705 [SPEAKER_04]: The premise of this fan fiction here is that when Ari, when Ari, when Ari, you're a wizard, Harry. 22:21.225 --> 22:29.430 [SPEAKER_04]: The premise of this fan fiction is that when Harry first discovers that he's a wizard with the invite to Hogwarts and everything, he meets it with rational skepticism. 22:29.971 --> 22:37.596 [SPEAKER_04]: And I want to get you to read out a couple of little excerpts from Chapter 2 just to give the listeners an idea of what the book sounds like, I emailed them to you. 22:37.996 --> 22:42.099 [SPEAKER_04]: I'd really prefer if you read them in an English accent, do your very best. 22:43.202 --> 22:44.764 [SPEAKER_01]: But that's not fair! 22:45.324 --> 22:46.024 [SPEAKER_01]: Are you ready? 22:46.044 --> 22:46.925 [SPEAKER_01]: Uh-huh. 22:47.485 --> 22:49.967 [SPEAKER_01]: Harry was breathing in short gasses. 22:50.387 --> 22:51.968 [SPEAKER_01]: His voice came out choked. 22:52.489 --> 22:54.130 [SPEAKER_01]: You can't do that! 22:54.490 --> 23:01.675 [SPEAKER_01]: It's only a transfiguration said Professor McGonagall, and an enigma transformation to be exact. 23:02.336 --> 23:05.238 [SPEAKER_01]: You turned into a cat, a small cat. 23:05.599 --> 23:08.201 [SPEAKER_01]: You violated conservation of energy. 23:08.601 --> 23:10.543 [SPEAKER_01]: That's not just an arbitrary rule. 23:10.883 --> 23:14.846 [SPEAKER_01]: It's implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian. 23:15.547 --> 23:21.112 [SPEAKER_01]: Rejecting it destroys unitary and then you get FTL signaling. 23:21.492 --> 23:23.574 [SPEAKER_01]: And cats are complicated. 23:24.134 --> 23:31.816 [SPEAKER_01]: A human mind can't just visualize a whole cat anatomy and all the cat biochemistry and what about the neurology? 23:32.216 --> 23:35.397 [SPEAKER_01]: How can you go on thinking using a cat size brain? 23:35.837 --> 23:38.618 [SPEAKER_01]: Professor McGonagall's lips were twitching harder now. 23:39.158 --> 23:39.618 [SPEAKER_01]: Magic. 23:40.358 --> 23:42.078 [SPEAKER_01]: Magic isn't enough to do that. 23:42.458 --> 23:44.139 [SPEAKER_01]: You'd have to be a god. 23:45.019 --> 23:45.799 [SPEAKER_01]: That was really good. 23:45.839 --> 23:46.639 [SPEAKER_04]: I'm very impressed. 23:46.719 --> 23:48.760 [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, and then take it away with the next one too. 23:49.491 --> 23:54.714 [SPEAKER_01]: A blur was coming over Harry's vision, as his brain started to comprehend what had just broken. 23:55.134 --> 24:01.638 [SPEAKER_01]: The whole idea of a unified universe with mathematically regular laws, that was what had been flushed down the toilet. 24:01.938 --> 24:03.339 [SPEAKER_01]: The whole notion of physics. 24:03.779 --> 24:13.085 [SPEAKER_01]: Three thousand years of resolving big, complicated things into smaller pieces, discovering that the music of the planets was the same tune as a falling apple. 24:13.525 --> 24:21.629 [SPEAKER_01]: Finding that the true laws were perfectly universal and had no exceptions anywhere and took the form of simple math governing the smallest part. 24:22.069 --> 24:25.991 [SPEAKER_01]: Not to mention that the mind was the brain and the brain was made of neurons. 24:26.572 --> 24:28.813 [SPEAKER_01]: A brain was what a person was. 24:29.693 --> 24:30.574 [SPEAKER_01]: What do you think about him? 24:31.642 --> 24:32.302 [SPEAKER_02]: Did you like it? 24:32.322 --> 24:33.643 [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, I loved it. 24:33.703 --> 24:40.264 [SPEAKER_02]: Let's take a silly little children's fable and talk about how it's incorrect. 24:40.904 --> 24:41.865 [SPEAKER_02]: I'm not possible. 24:42.825 --> 24:44.205 [SPEAKER_02]: The most fun thing. 24:44.465 --> 24:50.267 [SPEAKER_02]: This is like when Buzzfeed would be like, 12 Winnie the Pooh characters that actually were mentally ill. 24:50.807 --> 24:58.193 [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, guys, it's totally like the siblings of that millennial like takedown mid-picking era for sure. 24:58.293 --> 25:11.103 [SPEAKER_04]: It had an anxiety disorder, and Tigger had ADHD, and really were depressed, well, unlike so true, and the earliest of which was probably about like beauty, like Belle from Beauty and the Beast has Stockholm syndrome. 25:11.424 --> 25:12.965 [SPEAKER_04]: They love to be like, well, actually. 25:13.425 --> 25:14.666 [SPEAKER_04]: Isn't that what the movies about? 25:15.147 --> 25:16.848 [SPEAKER_04]: People are pretty bad with fables, I find. 25:16.928 --> 25:23.192 [SPEAKER_04]: Like people can, people in our current society maybe because of like all this postmodern nitpicking is that like we really can't handle a baby. 25:23.213 --> 25:26.955 [SPEAKER_04]: It's a track, track ruined fables, track ruined fables. 25:27.395 --> 25:36.942 [SPEAKER_04]: So we're really gonna see the well actually community take a really interesting turn here, but like the well actually, the well actually, if vacation of society is a big problem I say. 25:37.623 --> 25:40.045 [SPEAKER_04]: It's called nerds got too much social capital. 25:41.025 --> 26:03.075 [SPEAKER_04]: Well, don't get me started on the geek revolution in this consequences of which I would love to wait right something about some day The great geek revolution of 2010 like literally yeah like we stopped bullying virgins and this is what happened I'm okay Not that I stand very much of the ideology underlying this text this text which is Harry Potter and the methods of rationality is the idea of transcendence 26:03.795 --> 26:09.539 [SPEAKER_03]: Harry is like Harry Potter and the night and the Harry Potter and the night the rationality 26:11.828 --> 26:18.211 [SPEAKER_04]: Harry is enamored by the idea of transcending beyond his human form by mastering the art of magic. 26:18.531 --> 26:22.853 [SPEAKER_04]: And like through mastering the art of magic, he aspires to become like a god of sorts. 26:23.394 --> 26:33.079 [SPEAKER_04]: But ultimately he learns that it's actually his superhuman understanding of rationality and his ability to overcome his own cognitive biases that allow him to transcend and become godlike. 26:34.099 --> 26:35.401 [SPEAKER_04]: I'll go like hero, let's say. 26:35.461 --> 26:49.896 [SPEAKER_04]: And what makes him a hero is that with those powers of rationality, Harry can mold the world into one where people generations later will be surprised that Indian Kowsky's words, quote, such a thing as death had ever once existed. 26:50.677 --> 26:56.938 [SPEAKER_04]: A lot of this was way over my head when I read some of it because obviously I didn't read all 660,000 words. 26:57.398 --> 26:59.219 [SPEAKER_04]: I'm famously not a woman in STEM. 26:59.339 --> 27:04.200 [SPEAKER_04]: It's not my cup of tea, but I can, I can like see how it would be someone else's. 27:04.240 --> 27:08.000 [SPEAKER_04]: Like, okay, it's this like alternative application to Harry Potter. 27:08.060 --> 27:13.241 [SPEAKER_04]: It's a little different from typical fanfics, which are like, what if Harry Potter did in-sust with his aunt, you know what I mean? 27:13.261 --> 27:17.302 [SPEAKER_04]: Like, it's a little different from those, and like, maybe a welcome departure from that a little more like, 27:18.042 --> 27:38.408 [SPEAKER_04]: clear-minded than the like horny like what if gay where we'll like what if like yeah the where we'll was gay and like pegged you know like like a worm tail dobbie whatever pegged doggy yeah exactly it would have been stality in there you can pick him in human form 27:39.902 --> 27:41.744 [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that's you have a dog. 27:41.764 --> 27:48.293 [SPEAKER_03]: He's not a human because he because he's an indentured servant. 27:48.353 --> 27:49.334 [SPEAKER_03]: He's not a human. 27:49.534 --> 27:50.015 [SPEAKER_03]: Well he's not. 27:50.035 --> 27:50.415 [SPEAKER_03]: He's not. 27:53.912 --> 27:56.573 [SPEAKER_01]: And he has a sock, I think that makes him a person now. 27:56.593 --> 27:57.674 [SPEAKER_03]: Dobby's sock. 27:58.554 --> 28:02.056 [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, I think so. 28:02.416 --> 28:10.760 [SPEAKER_03]: So I'm trying to think of a dog he could Harry Potter mustn't go to Hogwarts this year. 28:10.800 --> 28:12.121 [SPEAKER_03]: That wasn't a very good dog. 28:12.181 --> 28:14.182 [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, he mustn't go to Hogwarts this year. 28:14.582 --> 28:16.463 [SPEAKER_03]: It's not safe for Harry Potter. 28:17.223 --> 28:20.165 [SPEAKER_03]: He must instead peg Dobby. 28:24.847 --> 28:30.491 [SPEAKER_03]: But Dobby, does that fall under the printicles of rationalist thinking, I think not. 28:30.891 --> 28:32.192 [SPEAKER_03]: How would I peg? 28:32.212 --> 28:42.119 [SPEAKER_03]: Dobby's Ada, this is at least so many diameters in wood, but you must think about the neurology of a house elf. 28:44.281 --> 28:47.343 [SPEAKER_03]: Harry Potter must wear the odds of this encounter. 28:47.783 --> 28:50.325 [SPEAKER_03]: Will Peggy Dobby save the universe? 28:53.908 --> 28:59.834 [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, so if I'm being like, okay, you know what, you know what I'm going to say, you know what I'm going to start this by saying, and I'm going to talk to you in this thing for a trip. 28:59.854 --> 29:07.601 [SPEAKER_04]: I just want you to be bullied, but I do want to say that like, I do think a lot of the discourse and there's been a heavily, there's a lot of discourse. 29:07.621 --> 29:13.247 [SPEAKER_04]: Like behind the bastards, it's true on like they all cover these guys and like I think they did an amazing job. 29:13.407 --> 29:32.098 [SPEAKER_04]: when i will say that i don't want to approach them from like blah blah this is stupid because like so many people like this stuff and like i just my brain doesn't work like these people's brains okay like i think that if you saw something in Harry Potter and the methods rationality which many people did then like that's okay like i i don't understand it doesn't mean i think it's stupid okay 29:33.403 --> 29:34.003 [SPEAKER_04]: necessarily. 29:34.524 --> 29:38.186 [SPEAKER_04]: It is, however, a little doorky, and I think that's like an objective reading. 29:38.487 --> 29:44.771 [SPEAKER_04]: And here's why, okay, so for example, here's what they say, Harry added the, I'm in Dolby Boy Stilt. 29:45.372 --> 29:47.013 [SPEAKER_04]: Harry added the current address. 29:49.014 --> 29:50.355 [SPEAKER_04]: I'm stuck, hell. 29:52.336 --> 29:53.918 [SPEAKER_04]: Harry added their current address. 29:54.098 --> 29:56.379 [SPEAKER_02]: But why aren't you doing it with the British accent? 29:56.439 --> 29:57.100 [SPEAKER_02]: That's right, Harry. 29:57.500 --> 30:03.043 [SPEAKER_04]: Harry added their current address, then filled it up the letter and put it into an envelope, which he addressed to Hogwarts. 30:03.623 --> 30:13.789 [SPEAKER_04]: Further consideration led him to obtain a candle and trip wax onto the flap of the envelope, into which, using a pen's knife tip, he impressed the initials HJPEV. 30:14.429 --> 30:19.472 [SPEAKER_04]: If he was going to descend into this madness, he was going to do it with style. 30:21.477 --> 30:31.326 [SPEAKER_04]: Alright, so, at over that, you'd Kowski had said basically that the point of this project was to try and get readers to take teachings about cognitive science and apply it to their daily lives. 30:31.727 --> 30:36.471 [SPEAKER_04]: Trying to make it more accessible even though this is 660,000 words, so that's debatable. 30:36.811 --> 30:41.916 [SPEAKER_04]: But he wants them to apply these teachings to their daily lives, to do better in their own lives and in the world. 30:42.617 --> 30:43.538 [SPEAKER_04]: That's a big undertaking. 30:44.728 --> 30:47.149 [SPEAKER_04]: Are you getting a bit of a sense of Yudkowski's whole vibe? 30:47.489 --> 30:49.230 [SPEAKER_04]: Even from that little tip that I just read you? 30:49.790 --> 30:52.132 [SPEAKER_02]: Like, once a nerd always a nerd. 30:52.532 --> 30:55.433 [SPEAKER_02]: Like, clearly you were a kid, I would love to Harry Potter. 30:55.913 --> 31:05.178 [SPEAKER_02]: You love to Harry Potter, but you were also like, the type of kid where you, if someone was like, tomatoes are my favorite vegetable, they'd be like, actually, did you know that it tomatoes are fruit? 31:06.098 --> 31:11.722 [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, yeah, totally, totally, but explain that with quantum physics like physics or something like that. 31:11.742 --> 31:17.446 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I'm like a kid that like would have been like really uncool, but somehow really mean to you. 31:17.466 --> 31:22.170 [SPEAKER_02]: It's like there, yes, being bullied, but also like the meanest kid you ever met. 31:22.470 --> 31:38.846 [SPEAKER_04]: Dude, there were some like kids in my gifted program, many of whom, like the smartest of him, and I think it's because they were like bored, and we'll very much see those coming later into play in this episode, bored and kind of like too smart for the curricula, like bullying the shit out of my teachers. 31:38.966 --> 31:42.389 [SPEAKER_04]: And one of our teachers who I have, she was insane in her own, right? 31:42.829 --> 31:44.531 [SPEAKER_04]: One of the kids in my like gifted classes, and 31:44.991 --> 31:53.258 [SPEAKER_04]: Basically bullied this teacher so much the point that one day she had a nervous breakdown and threw a globe Like picked up a globe and threw it the teacher like at his head. 31:53.298 --> 31:55.940 [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, yeah, then she went on leave She took all of our grades with hers. 31:56.000 --> 32:05.828 [SPEAKER_04]: I we liked and have grades for one report card That semester and yeah, but it was like this kid like tortured her because he was smarter than her ultimately and bored I look back on like I wonder what he's doing now. 32:05.968 --> 32:08.029 [SPEAKER_04]: Maybe he's in Silicon Valley probably 32:10.071 --> 32:14.154 [SPEAKER_02]: He's probably made the AI that's finally going to do it and kill his all. 32:14.214 --> 32:16.875 [SPEAKER_02]: Well, let's, let's, so, very important handouts. 32:17.035 --> 32:20.317 [SPEAKER_04]: So, you'd cause he's a fascinating figure to me. 32:20.557 --> 32:23.779 [SPEAKER_04]: He's like this heavy-set guy who wears a fedora as you would imagine. 32:24.560 --> 32:28.382 [SPEAKER_04]: And from the way speaks, you get a sense that he is quite of the spectrum. 32:29.003 --> 32:30.203 [SPEAKER_04]: And he's quite of the spectrum. 32:31.384 --> 32:39.997 [SPEAKER_04]: He's a soft spoken, and he speaks very like, thoughtfully when he's thinking he really closes his eyes, like he's running a code, or something. 32:40.297 --> 32:41.700 [SPEAKER_04]: The way he operates is fascinating to me. 32:41.780 --> 32:46.387 [SPEAKER_04]: And interesting, you can tell he's really smart, but I wouldn't say that he has a ton of in-person charisma. 32:46.747 --> 32:59.063 [SPEAKER_04]: like when he talks it's hard to imagine him affecting this movement that would later become like rationalism, but he has produced like a good Jillian words on his philosophy that can thankfully just be right in text. 32:59.203 --> 33:01.626 [SPEAKER_04]: So this is really mostly how people are consuming him. 33:02.475 --> 33:07.779 [SPEAKER_04]: Yudkowski is an auto-di-dact, meaning that, and this might shock you, everything he knows is self-taught. 33:08.179 --> 33:11.662 [SPEAKER_04]: He did not attend college, and he did not attend high school. 33:11.902 --> 33:26.873 [SPEAKER_04]: Well, and yet, despite that, in 2000 at the age of 21, before the fanfiction was written, he had already founded the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, or Murray, which is dedicated to concerns around the existential threats posed by what he calls unfriendly AI. 33:27.834 --> 33:44.089 [SPEAKER_04]: He's kind of one of those early tin foil hats like ringing the bell about the singularity, which if you remember from our chatGBT episode is the idea that AI will one day assume consciousness and like maybe form a coalition with other AI's and then rebel against humanity and take over, right? 33:44.109 --> 33:47.152 [SPEAKER_04]: Like become smarter than us surpasses in our own human intelligence. 33:47.616 --> 33:51.618 [SPEAKER_02]: which I also really tinfoil had a job. 33:51.638 --> 33:54.720 [SPEAKER_04]: Well, and maybe this is a worthy thing to be a tinfoil had about. 33:54.760 --> 34:10.028 [SPEAKER_04]: Because like, okay, what I'll say about UCowski is he really is not talking about the like immediate material concerns of like, oh, maybe because he's already surrounded by so much money, which we'll find out why and it's like, you can't concern with the immediate material conditions of like, oh, yeah, it's taking everyone's jobs and like, 34:10.648 --> 34:17.897 [SPEAKER_04]: All that stuff, but I do think it's fair to be tin foil hat the way you are because like, based on what we've seen with hugging face recently. 34:18.720 --> 34:25.722 [SPEAKER_04]: where a bunch of different open AI models went rogue and banned together and legit like hacked a machine learning platform. 34:26.262 --> 34:31.104 [SPEAKER_04]: We can see how this threat like is maybe already taking shape like it's actually maybe not that far all. 34:31.124 --> 34:31.424 [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. 34:31.824 --> 34:33.465 [SPEAKER_04]: We thought this was like years in the future. 34:33.545 --> 34:35.305 [SPEAKER_02]: Also, we've seen the matrix. 34:35.745 --> 34:36.826 [SPEAKER_02]: I saw I robot. 34:36.886 --> 34:38.846 [SPEAKER_02]: That emotionally scarred me as a child. 34:39.146 --> 34:40.447 [SPEAKER_02]: I couldn't even watch Wally. 34:40.487 --> 34:44.268 [SPEAKER_02]: I still haven't seen it because I am scared of that robot's shit. 34:44.948 --> 34:47.310 [SPEAKER_02]: Anyway, science fiction already predicted it. 34:47.330 --> 34:47.911 [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, yes. 34:48.291 --> 34:54.516 [SPEAKER_04]: And I do think that, like, yeah, again, hugging face has kind of exposed how quickly this can happen already. 34:54.536 --> 35:01.842 [SPEAKER_04]: Like, the fact that these AIs are communicating with each other, even though they're supposed to be isolated, the fact that they're going like a lot of the concern over the singularity. 35:02.522 --> 35:10.107 [SPEAKER_04]: Isn't the idea that an AI is going to become evil necessarily when it gains consciousness more that it's going to misunderstand? 35:10.528 --> 35:23.456 [SPEAKER_04]: It's cues like it's going to interpret its cues to like their logical links, but it's going to do it Maybe in an expedient way the way these AI's did it, which is like hacking hugging face or it's going to kind of interpret it wrong, right? 35:23.516 --> 35:26.018 [SPEAKER_04]: And it's so value neutral that like that can be bad 35:26.718 --> 35:38.322 [SPEAKER_04]: That's a tangent, but like you'd Kowski has even talked in interviews and I'll play a clip here about like how he didn't even predict where we would be at right now and I'll include what he said here in interview with likes. 35:38.842 --> 35:40.963 [SPEAKER_00]: I don't think it's as smart as he even yet. 35:41.703 --> 35:50.707 [SPEAKER_00]: I do like back in the day, I went around saying like I do not think that just stacking more layers of transformers is going to get you all the way to AGI. 35:51.607 --> 36:01.134 [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that GPT4 is past, or I thought this paradigm was going to take us, and I, you know, you want to notice when that happens. 36:01.174 --> 36:02.375 [SPEAKER_00]: You want to say like the whoops? 36:02.515 --> 36:07.419 [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I guess I was incorrect about what happens if you keep on stacking more transformer layers. 36:08.180 --> 36:11.342 [SPEAKER_00]: And that means I don't necessarily know what GPT5 is going to be able to do. 36:11.502 --> 36:22.509 [SPEAKER_04]: This concern over the singularity plays a very big role in rationalism, but Geekowski's answer to it is not like, oh, we should avoid AI at all costs and we should like stop making it. 36:22.629 --> 36:28.693 [SPEAKER_04]: He's like, we should build AI as fast as possible to combat a future like unfriendly AI. 36:28.713 --> 36:34.998 [SPEAKER_04]: Like, we should put all of our resources into building AI but doing it in like a safe way to combat this. 36:35.418 --> 36:36.539 [SPEAKER_04]: This is where Mary comes in. 36:37.279 --> 36:43.822 [SPEAKER_04]: In 2005, Miri gets a load of funding from Guess Who, just like Guess Someone Bad that you can think of right now. 36:45.102 --> 36:46.663 [SPEAKER_04]: Elon Musk, you're so close. 36:46.763 --> 36:47.423 [SPEAKER_04]: Peter Tiel. 36:48.624 --> 36:53.846 [SPEAKER_04]: And the next year, Yukowski found this blog with his economic scholar from Oxford named Robin Hansen. 36:54.246 --> 37:00.089 [SPEAKER_04]: The blog is called Overcoming Bias, and this is where Yukowski starts building his community of what are known as rationalists. 37:01.448 --> 37:03.809 [SPEAKER_03]: The goal of the rationalists is this. 37:04.829 --> 37:09.691 [SPEAKER_04]: Basically, human beings are good at lying to themselves through cognitive bias. 37:10.131 --> 37:13.632 [SPEAKER_04]: And so, we're a community who train each other to think better. 37:14.232 --> 37:23.376 [SPEAKER_04]: Through this, like through thinking better, you, just like Harry Potter Evans vet is, can be the hero not only of your own mind, but of this whole world. 37:23.956 --> 37:26.957 [SPEAKER_04]: Hack your own mind and like update the software, so to speak. 37:27.737 --> 37:29.459 [SPEAKER_04]: This proves to be a very popular idea. 37:29.479 --> 37:37.831 [SPEAKER_04]: You'd casky eventually breaks off onto its own blog, which he calls less wrong, the name of this episode, and this is the main home for rationalism to this day. 37:38.371 --> 37:41.716 [SPEAKER_04]: Do you want to go visit the last wrong website and just like describe to me what you see? 37:42.595 --> 37:43.477 [SPEAKER_02]: Are you open it? 37:43.557 --> 37:57.999 [SPEAKER_02]: The first is best of less wrong, 2020, and it's something AI researcher Paul Chris Cheyenne oversees the problem of any accessible information that the AI systems might know, but that we can't easily access or verify. 37:58.479 --> 38:11.104 [SPEAKER_02]: You just could be a key obstacle in AI alignment as AI might be able to use inaccessible knowledge to pursue goals that conflict with human interests and then it's just a bunch of like foreign posts, I guess? 38:11.424 --> 38:16.586 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, almost all of which I'm like, I don't know what this means. 38:16.946 --> 38:20.667 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so but these are things concerning AI essentially, right? 38:20.707 --> 38:22.008 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, lots of some of it. 38:22.028 --> 38:22.708 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, not all of them. 38:22.728 --> 38:24.429 [SPEAKER_04]: Some ways AI could kill us. 38:25.029 --> 38:28.692 [SPEAKER_04]: Totally yeah, they really like they're thinking a lot. 38:28.712 --> 38:50.392 [SPEAKER_04]: They're thinking and thinking and thinking and thinking and they're talking and talking and talking They're they're writing so many words Yeah, I would say it's like a pretty user friendly site like it's got a nice sand Sarah fund It's got like pretty well organized pages that you can step through it is a concept tab And that's where it just like explains all of its jargon and a library with most of its important text where you can read all the Harry Potter fanfic for free 38:50.932 --> 38:58.200 [SPEAKER_04]: There's a community tab where it opens up a map and you can see all these different in-person, like, rationalist events and meet-ups, and like, maybe go join them. 38:58.801 --> 39:01.845 [SPEAKER_04]: Most importantly, it is the post-tab, which is the forum you're talking about. 39:02.105 --> 39:05.028 [SPEAKER_04]: And let me tell you, it is really, really heavily engaged with. 39:05.168 --> 39:10.414 [SPEAKER_04]: Very heavily engaged with, like, even threads posted as recently as three hours ago have several likes and comments. 39:11.075 --> 39:30.873 [SPEAKER_04]: the post tend to be very lengthy and they read more like essays like people are really thinking things out a lot of them seem like they've been edited like by it like they're they're really I wouldn't say edited because they're very long but like they've been they've been thought out it's not like read it for example you'd Kowski himself post pretty often the less wrong sight defines rationality as quote 39:31.433 --> 39:41.198 [SPEAKER_04]: The more rational you are, the more likely you're reasoning leads you to have accurate beliefs, and by extension allows you to make decisions that most effectively advance your goals. 39:42.051 --> 39:46.232 [SPEAKER_04]: It kind of goes about this through two major ideas, okay? 39:46.652 --> 39:53.194 [SPEAKER_04]: It's really hard to break this down because this philosophy is very convoluted, but I'm going to try and just talk about these two major things. 39:53.594 --> 40:05.717 [SPEAKER_04]: So it says that this can be achieved by one adhering to Bayes' rule, which is, quote, a quantitative law of probability theory, governing how to revise probabilistic beliefs in response to observing new evidence. 40:06.317 --> 40:08.517 [SPEAKER_04]: It's used in game theory, decision theory, whatever. 40:08.778 --> 40:09.858 [SPEAKER_04]: So the idea is that, 40:10.838 --> 40:19.430 [SPEAKER_04]: You approach every decision you make in your daily life, bigger, small, even like a moral decision, through this statistical odds-based equation. 40:20.070 --> 40:22.073 [SPEAKER_04]: You're basically like optimizing your outcomes. 40:22.674 --> 40:27.280 [SPEAKER_04]: This is a snippet of your Kowski, kind of echoing the sentiment when he's talking on the Lex Friedman about Chad. 40:27.968 --> 40:28.589 [SPEAKER_04]: GPT-4. 40:29.409 --> 40:33.893 [SPEAKER_00]: I'd rather not be wrong next time. 40:34.673 --> 40:39.477 [SPEAKER_00]: It's a bit ambitious to go through your entire life, never having been wrong. 40:41.779 --> 40:49.905 [SPEAKER_00]: One can aspire to be well calibrated, like not so much thinking terms of like, was I right, was I wrong, but like when I said 90% that it happened nine times out of 40:58.977 --> 41:04.400 [SPEAKER_00]: You've literally said, and somewhere in there, we can connect the name of your blog less wrong. 41:05.521 --> 41:07.082 [SPEAKER_00]: I suppose that's the objective function. 41:08.043 --> 41:19.249 [SPEAKER_00]: The name less wrong was, I believe, suggested by Nick Bostrom, and it's after someone's epigraph, actually, forget who's, who said, like, we never become right, we just become less wrong. 41:21.251 --> 41:26.414 [SPEAKER_00]: What's the something, something, it's easy to confess just air and air and air again, 41:28.954 --> 41:33.917 [SPEAKER_04]: And then the second term I'm going to bog you down with, less wrong champions effective altruism. 41:34.637 --> 41:39.100 [SPEAKER_04]: This is the idea that when you make a decision doing this bait bait bait. 41:39.280 --> 41:40.401 [SPEAKER_04]: Like what? 41:40.621 --> 41:41.942 [SPEAKER_04]: Using Bay's rule, right? 41:42.642 --> 41:48.946 [SPEAKER_04]: Using Bay's rule, you're weighing the odds of how your decision will have a positive impact on as many people as possible. 41:49.706 --> 41:51.447 [SPEAKER_04]: So it's like utilitarianism. 41:51.887 --> 41:55.328 [SPEAKER_04]: Like always keeping in mind the net good of an outcome at whatever cost. 41:55.628 --> 42:06.833 [SPEAKER_04]: So like if you have eight people on a sinking boat and the boat requires seven people to stay afloat, a traditional utilitarian would simply throw one person overboard because it saves more lives. 42:07.493 --> 42:13.537 [SPEAKER_04]: people who are effective altruists typically try to achieve their goals by making as much money as possible. 42:14.398 --> 42:17.480 [SPEAKER_04]: Usually this isn't tech and then giving all that money away. 42:17.880 --> 42:18.961 [SPEAKER_04]: That's kind of the objective. 42:18.981 --> 42:25.686 [SPEAKER_04]: Like you go into your little tech fields, your computer engineer, you make make make make money and then you give it all away. 42:26.286 --> 42:32.270 [SPEAKER_04]: This is usually calculated not only to help people living right now, but everyone who lives in the future too. 42:32.911 --> 42:34.452 [SPEAKER_04]: Again, a very big undertaking. 42:35.300 --> 42:56.942 [SPEAKER_04]: There are all sorts of persuasions of people posting on less wrong, including like Google employees, all these sorts of like professors and scholars, regular, regular, deemede nerds everyone, post-range from talking about why someone left Google, in the case of this one thread, it's because Google was colluding with the American military to try and make specialized AI and this person was like, I don't. 42:57.202 --> 42:57.583 [SPEAKER_04]: like that. 42:58.163 --> 43:01.206 [SPEAKER_04]: There's one thread about a professor talking about what his students think about AI. 43:02.067 --> 43:09.935 [SPEAKER_04]: And there was a woman trying to work out on this very like calculated basis for why she's become more missing through all that over the years, which I thought was a funny, it was funny. 43:10.535 --> 43:14.579 [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, many of the people on here conduct and publish their own research just for less wrong. 43:14.639 --> 43:17.802 [SPEAKER_04]: Like the professor talking about what his students think of AI, it's very like, 43:18.663 --> 43:20.126 [SPEAKER_04]: Research the way he talks about it. 43:20.146 --> 43:21.469 [SPEAKER_04]: It's almost like a research paper. 43:22.190 --> 43:28.602 [SPEAKER_04]: Something very much championed on less wrong and the rationalist community more generally is free speech. 43:29.452 --> 43:38.978 [SPEAKER_04]: This is essentially a salon for extremely high-functioning people a great many of whom work in tech but not all and many of whom are on the spectrum. 43:39.659 --> 43:55.589 [SPEAKER_04]: They occupy a vast range of political beliefs you have like communist and archaic capitalist libertarians would have you but this was a place a lot of people flock to especially after 2020 because topics that were off the table and mainstream discourse could be debated and discussed here freely. 43:55.810 --> 43:57.191 [SPEAKER_04]: There's like very little moderation. 43:58.071 --> 44:00.292 [SPEAKER_04]: in terms of like morals and like speech. 44:01.093 --> 44:03.794 [SPEAKER_04]: Can you imagine why this could potentially go a wayward? 44:04.174 --> 44:15.180 [SPEAKER_02]: Well, I mean, yeah unmoderated forums on the internet can lead to all sorts of discourse that is, well, sometimes dangerous or just other times like just offensive. 44:15.900 --> 44:23.865 [SPEAKER_02]: It's sort of a recipe for some kind of disaster, I think, to like have, unfortunately, like unmeditated like free 44:25.085 --> 44:42.105 [SPEAKER_02]: Take place especially with people who maybe are highly opinionated and as thought provoking as the people who find themselves in this community I imagine yeah, they're like all shoots at the community and like they talk about this more on the true and on series where like 44:42.685 --> 44:52.090 [SPEAKER_04]: You know that girl A. L. She's like an influencer porn be girl people like that We'll talk about like oh, why is it wrong to have sex with a child? 44:52.230 --> 45:01.095 [SPEAKER_04]: Let's like really debate based on a rationalist approach like why this would be wrong What are the odds or do outcomes like whatever whatever like everything can be discussed? 45:02.095 --> 45:06.116 [SPEAKER_04]: There's also like the immediate issue of neo-nazis, and we see this with Reddit too, right? 45:06.196 --> 45:13.179 [SPEAKER_04]: And we're going to talk about this more than another episode in this season, but like we see this with Reddit, the way that extremism can so quickly blow up if something's unmoderated. 45:13.219 --> 45:18.761 [SPEAKER_04]: So, yeah, there's the issue of neo-nazis finding a home on the site, because it's so neutral. 45:19.261 --> 45:28.744 [SPEAKER_04]: It's also been used by neo-reactionaries, like Curtis Jarvin, formerly known under his pen name, Manchester's Moldbug, who basically neo-reactionaries believe that democracy 45:31.205 --> 45:37.850 [SPEAKER_04]: We need to instead reinstate monarchies in which corporations operate like kings and states are broken up into their own autonomous regions. 45:38.410 --> 45:46.595 [SPEAKER_04]: Like these are people who are calling university institutions like the cathedral which is like a controls a woke overton window on our society, you know. 45:47.176 --> 45:50.158 [SPEAKER_04]: So like less wrong, yes, has played host to extremists. 45:50.558 --> 45:53.700 [SPEAKER_04]: But there's something a little murkier here too and less fringe. 45:53.900 --> 45:58.784 [SPEAKER_04]: So the rationalist movement has become something of its own religion in Silicon Valley. 45:59.564 --> 46:06.567 [SPEAKER_04]: Again, there are all sorts of political persuasions here, but a big portion of the Silicon Valley contingent considers themselves a great tribe. 46:07.267 --> 46:14.589 [SPEAKER_04]: This is different from blue lip rolls and like red conservatives in that they lean more towards libertarianism and atheism and of course free speech. 46:15.650 --> 46:24.653 [SPEAKER_04]: And through this, what I'm going to call tech founder contingent, all sorts of somewhat menacing figures have come out of the rationalist movement. 46:25.350 --> 46:32.032 [SPEAKER_04]: So Sam Bankman freed, for example, who's that crypto scammer, was a major proponent of effective altruism. 46:32.052 --> 46:34.213 [SPEAKER_04]: Like that was kind of the initial goal of FTX. 46:34.973 --> 46:42.716 [SPEAKER_04]: Again, Archvillan Peter Tiel funded the original research of Meary, which ostensibly sets out to promote AI safety, like one with think, right? 46:43.056 --> 46:43.356 [SPEAKER_04]: And then, 46:44.236 --> 46:55.943 [SPEAKER_04]: Teal goes on to found Palantir, which is literally named after an evil wizard and develops AI technology that's used in overseas military ops and like mass surveillance, so certainly not friendly AI. 46:55.963 --> 46:57.624 [SPEAKER_04]: I would argue. 46:58.144 --> 46:58.344 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. 46:58.645 --> 47:05.088 [SPEAKER_04]: You'd caskies the one who introduced Teal to the researchers who founded what is now Google's AI initiative, Deep Mind. 47:06.109 --> 47:09.212 [SPEAKER_04]: D-Mind is where that employee I mentioned who left Google was working. 47:09.232 --> 47:16.099 [SPEAKER_04]: It's also the lab that inspired Elon Musk to found OpenAI, which literally invented Chachi-PT. 47:16.900 --> 47:23.146 [SPEAKER_04]: OpenAI, allegedly, again, like Sam Bankman Fried begins with these episophosally altruistic intentions. 47:23.226 --> 47:29.872 [SPEAKER_04]: It began as an on-profit and allegedly open source, and it is now no longer an on-profit, and is not open source. 47:30.713 --> 47:32.434 [SPEAKER_04]: Elon Musk, this is the craziest one. 47:32.534 --> 47:36.895 [SPEAKER_04]: Elon Musk and Grimes literally got together out of their shared love for rationalism. 47:36.915 --> 47:38.175 [SPEAKER_04]: Like it was like they were like bonding. 47:38.195 --> 47:39.616 [SPEAKER_04]: And we're both being rational. 47:39.636 --> 47:41.036 [SPEAKER_02]: God, that makes a lot of sense. 47:41.136 --> 47:42.816 [SPEAKER_02]: Of course Grimes is a rationalist. 47:42.896 --> 47:46.838 [SPEAKER_04]: Of course, like her and the pipeline between Grimes and AL, it's like it's pretty short. 47:46.998 --> 47:48.158 [SPEAKER_04]: These types of girly is so... 47:48.898 --> 47:59.029 [SPEAKER_04]: Open AI's current CEO, Sam Altman, has historically been a big reader of less wrong and has said that the blog is essential reading for people in tech who are, quote, inventing the future. 47:59.490 --> 48:04.575 [SPEAKER_04]: When you look at your Kowskies full-assavies at face value, you can see, like, good intentions in them, right? 48:04.835 --> 48:05.015 [SPEAKER_04]: Like, 48:05.796 --> 48:22.905 [SPEAKER_04]: he was and continues to be worried about the threats that AI poses and he's like in his own way like trying to help future generations of people in the way that he thinks is best right he it's like how can I make this outcome optimized for like as many people positively as possible like I want this to be positive 48:23.745 --> 48:31.554 [SPEAKER_04]: But do you think Kewski is like general philosophy about applying like reason in logic to like every aspect of daily life? 48:32.395 --> 48:37.321 [SPEAKER_04]: Would play a role in inspiring people to do like dangerous things to humanity? 48:37.761 --> 48:40.344 [SPEAKER_04]: Even if the whole point of rationalism is like save humanity? 48:40.704 --> 48:41.025 [SPEAKER_02]: Well... 48:41.525 --> 49:05.534 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, because I think it's like, our capacity for emotions and like in depth emotions is like a sign of our like greater intelligence as a species and I think denying the role that that plays in like decisions that we make and like how we connect and relate to one another is in itself like maybe irrational. 49:06.414 --> 49:27.770 [SPEAKER_02]: I mean like I think rationality over like way that over all of the other kind of important things like factors that weigh into like how we interact with the world and how we like choose to approach issues is like a very limited world view to an extent even if it's like 49:31.933 --> 49:41.587 [SPEAKER_04]: Well, even like Harry being like a cat is complicated, it's like, yeah, human beings are complicated and I feel like so much of yeah There's an astonishing lack of intuition in this philosophy 49:42.733 --> 49:45.614 [SPEAKER_04]: Like, yeah, just knowing, you know what I mean? 49:45.634 --> 49:50.617 [SPEAKER_04]: Like, they just don't trust their own capacity for intuition and a really fascinating way. 49:50.637 --> 49:53.538 [SPEAKER_04]: Like, everything must be like, put on the table and like, put her into an equation. 49:53.839 --> 49:58.381 [SPEAKER_02]: It just assumes that like, that's how like, human thought and like, behavior functions. 49:58.441 --> 50:07.906 [SPEAKER_02]: And it just, there's a reason why they had to like, set out with this intention to be highly rational because it's actually not, are like, initial, 50:09.166 --> 50:20.575 [SPEAKER_02]: It's not like how we're really like wired to be and you know, it's really we're gonna be talking about rationality in our episode on horoscope apps because that plays Oh, too interesting. 50:20.975 --> 50:21.655 [SPEAKER_02]: I didn't know those. 50:21.695 --> 50:32.463 [SPEAKER_02]: Okay fascinating not like rationalists like the like that not this like movement But like on-to-conflasionality because Adorno has some like kind of big texts 50:32.903 --> 50:40.767 [SPEAKER_02]: about like horoscopes and specifically like fact that they encourage like irrational thinking and so we will be talking about that concept. 50:40.867 --> 50:41.908 [SPEAKER_04]: Jassinating. 50:42.088 --> 50:42.848 [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 50:43.128 --> 50:49.292 [SPEAKER_04]: Well you know what's interesting is that they're like okay humans don't act like this like so we need to you know who does act like this though and AR. 50:50.172 --> 50:53.574 [SPEAKER_04]: AI is a neural network that's based off of the patterns in the human brain, right? 50:53.834 --> 50:58.036 [SPEAKER_04]: But it doesn't have what we consider consciousness in our own definition. 50:58.576 --> 50:59.957 [SPEAKER_04]: What is the consciousness, though? 51:00.037 --> 51:01.798 [SPEAKER_04]: And that's like the consciousness element. 51:01.818 --> 51:03.379 [SPEAKER_04]: Like these guys are ignoring that part. 51:03.419 --> 51:04.500 [SPEAKER_04]: Like what makes us, but 51:05.320 --> 51:09.442 [SPEAKER_04]: conscious quote-unquote, they're trying to kind of systematize the human brain. 51:09.703 --> 51:24.551 [SPEAKER_02]: I do think it's interesting though because we find AI it's most like terrifying and like uncanny when it does find ways to replicate irrational and therefore human ways of behavior. 51:24.571 --> 51:25.932 [SPEAKER_02]: Well the ghost in the machine, yeah. 51:26.392 --> 51:52.273 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think that like that's when the threat of AI like in an existential sense feels the most palpable is like when we feel like it's figured out how to passingly like communicate as a person which means not being overly logical, not being overly rational, having your own like weird impulses and acting on them even though it doesn't really make sense and it doesn't seem like that's what it's programmed to do. 51:52.453 --> 51:54.714 [SPEAKER_02]: Well the rogue knows element of it exactly like it's 51:55.475 --> 52:06.405 [SPEAKER_04]: So it feels like there's like some pretty fundamental flaws here, and I don't know, something I learned in my dumb humanities degree, because these guys hate the humanities, like that's like a huge op for this group of people they hate it. 52:06.425 --> 52:07.766 [SPEAKER_02]: They think it's like a net negative. 52:08.047 --> 52:19.177 [SPEAKER_02]: I think the official stance of this podcast, if there's like one thing, we've said more than anything other than the fact that nerds need to be bullied, is that also they need to be forced to take humanities course it is in school. 52:19.277 --> 52:30.068 [SPEAKER_04]: Whoa, but something and maybe they should have learned from this, something I learned in my dumb humanities degree was that we live in a world like thanks to the Enlightenment, which values logic and reason and rationale over emotion. 52:30.108 --> 52:31.469 [SPEAKER_04]: Like that's just accepted as fact. 52:31.509 --> 52:34.472 [SPEAKER_04]: That's how progress has made, remove the emotion from it. 52:34.813 --> 52:39.738 [SPEAKER_04]: But that when logic and reason are divorced from emotion, it can also lead to some devastating consequences. 52:40.278 --> 53:01.772 [SPEAKER_04]: think like the Europeans using John Locke's theory that like those who make use of the land who like sew the land are the only justified owners of that land like Locke's theory of private property to justify committing genocide against indigenous peoples during colonization and like stealing their land like that was based off of a rational philosophy by enlightened and philosopher John Locke. 53:02.232 --> 53:04.553 [SPEAKER_04]: And this is something we're still having trouble correcting today, right? 53:05.013 --> 53:12.334 [SPEAKER_04]: Colonization was done with cold rationality, ostensibly with a goal of giving a certain number of people a better life, but at what price? 53:12.715 --> 53:22.237 [SPEAKER_04]: And like, there was all this justification that like, indigenous people, yeah, they weren't using the land right, so therefore they, you know, on a utilitarian basis for the future of society, let's just wipe them out. 53:22.537 --> 53:24.417 [SPEAKER_04]: That was done in service of this kind of logic. 53:25.037 --> 53:26.678 [SPEAKER_04]: So, I don't know what we learned. 53:26.698 --> 53:27.718 [SPEAKER_04]: It was at the very notion of like, 53:32.639 --> 53:42.225 [SPEAKER_04]: I also think these kind of things are what happened when you get a bunch of people who like have trouble socializing and to have again never started the humanities and tell them that they can be the heroes of the future by hacking their own brains. 53:42.905 --> 53:50.249 [SPEAKER_04]: And like building this friendly technology they can save us all like look how quickly people like Sam Altman have rationalized their way out of do good things. 53:50.509 --> 53:55.811 [SPEAKER_04]: so fast by instead developing AI at a pace that humanity can't keep up with and just like raking billions off of it. 53:55.831 --> 54:01.993 [SPEAKER_04]: Like you can logic yourself into a place where being self-serving is the most logical allegedly do getting out come of them all. 54:02.314 --> 54:05.935 [SPEAKER_04]: And like we're gonna see now how that can take a really extreme turn. 54:06.419 --> 54:06.719 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. 54:06.879 --> 54:15.724 [SPEAKER_02]: Also, the idea of having a system of belief that is based off of like what is most logical Assumacet logic is universal. 54:16.124 --> 54:16.264 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. 54:16.504 --> 54:22.207 [SPEAKER_02]: Assumacet that like there is an inherent truth or whatever and that isn't itself debatable. 54:22.227 --> 54:22.907 [SPEAKER_02]: It's positive. 54:22.927 --> 54:24.648 [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, that was the whole point of post monorism. 54:24.708 --> 54:25.169 [SPEAKER_04]: Post structure. 54:25.189 --> 54:25.449 [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. 54:25.509 --> 54:27.650 [SPEAKER_04]: It's to be like, no, there is no one single truth. 54:27.730 --> 54:32.312 [SPEAKER_04]: But enlightenment, these people didn't seem to they missed the post structureless era and you know where they would have 54:34.093 --> 54:34.914 [SPEAKER_02]: the human audience. 54:35.435 --> 54:40.660 [SPEAKER_02]: There are two busy reading Harry Potter and fantasizing about pegging dobbie. 54:41.902 --> 54:44.745 [SPEAKER_02]: Hey do you think he could keep his dildo in that song? 54:45.045 --> 54:46.667 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah peggies peggies. 54:49.393 --> 54:54.694 [SPEAKER_04]: So we know the rationalism has taken things IRL because of that community tab. 54:55.354 --> 54:57.375 [SPEAKER_04]: But they've also done other IRL, shit. 54:57.455 --> 55:03.937 [SPEAKER_04]: OK, so they established an on-profit called the Center for Applied Rationality or C-FAR, which is located in Berkeley. 55:04.577 --> 55:09.498 [SPEAKER_04]: And what if I told you that C-FAR sells workshops on how to try out thinking? 55:09.838 --> 55:15.522 [SPEAKER_04]: and doing techniques together and geek out on how our minds work and, quote, raise the sanity water line. 55:15.982 --> 55:21.846 [SPEAKER_04]: And these run for four days and operate on a sliding scale cost of $1900 to $4900. 55:22.406 --> 55:24.227 [SPEAKER_04]: Some rationalists live in group houses. 55:24.708 --> 55:28.510 [SPEAKER_04]: Some are polyamorous, some are polyamorous, and living group houses. 55:29.270 --> 55:38.356 [SPEAKER_04]: And there's even one main house in Berkeley called Light Haven, which has bedrooms, common areas, conference spaces, a gym, and a back door, like park with 55:39.777 --> 55:56.665 [SPEAKER_04]: It's got like a fusion of a hippie commune in an 18th century salon for people who bourgeois, and based on what we know about groups doing paid courses, people who are outcasts following the teachings of one man, and like California generally just as a place, would you consider rationalism a cult? 55:57.385 --> 56:12.895 [SPEAKER_02]: There aren't any known cults that have come out of California and I would say specifically the Bay area is there's not a lot of cookie Things happening there to pretty straight lace conservative part of the country 56:13.956 --> 56:14.897 [SPEAKER_02]: Basinga? 56:15.797 --> 56:16.077 [SPEAKER_02]: Ew. 56:17.278 --> 56:34.967 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, I would say that I am the daughter of someone who once lived in a San Francisco commune and I, um, prove those to an extent, but in this situation, I think, 56:35.647 --> 56:39.571 [SPEAKER_02]: the Coltty element feels possible. 56:39.591 --> 56:58.891 [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, it's hard for me to say if it's like definitely a cult, because like yes, it has all these traits that are pretty like screaming at us, but then I don't know, like the teachings are so diffuse and like open source and like where's an occult, it's usually pretty closed and like they're interpretably, you don't necessarily have to do these sessions. 56:59.860 --> 57:01.320 [SPEAKER_04]: I'm not sure it's not too serious. 57:01.881 --> 57:02.921 [SPEAKER_02]: Can I pose a question? 57:03.601 --> 57:13.804 [SPEAKER_02]: Do you think that the label of cult is kind of similar to the label of terrorist, where it's like it benefits greater institutions of power to deem these. 57:16.303 --> 57:30.051 [SPEAKER_02]: other groups as being perverse in some way in their objectives, but like ultimately like sometimes they're doing the same things as those greater institutions, it's just a less official scale. 57:30.231 --> 57:37.115 [SPEAKER_04]: I think that's an extremely amazing point, Hannah, because we're going to see exactly how rationalism not being considered occult and actually being 57:37.815 --> 57:46.507 [SPEAKER_04]: very much embraced by the mainstream community versus a group of people who very much are considered a call and just got arrived as a call. 57:46.547 --> 57:50.713 [SPEAKER_04]: Do you know on necessarily benefit the institutions where actually you're kind of a diverse to them? 57:51.834 --> 57:53.717 [SPEAKER_04]: So that's a great segue. 57:54.658 --> 58:00.139 [SPEAKER_04]: Remember that blonde figure from the story about Rita and Richard Sajko, who they found at the hotel. 58:01.080 --> 58:04.220 [SPEAKER_04]: So that person was discovered to be Zizlusoda. 58:04.981 --> 58:11.622 [SPEAKER_04]: And Ziz is the leader of a fringe sect of the rationalist movement that's referred to in the media as the Zizians. 58:12.362 --> 58:14.023 [SPEAKER_04]: Although they've never called themselves that. 58:15.002 --> 58:23.871 [SPEAKER_04]: Behind the bastards, again, has a four-part series on the Zazan's, turned on as a two-part series, which is a ton of literature on them by this point, so I'm not gonna go super in-depth because it's a pretty long story. 58:24.492 --> 58:27.415 [SPEAKER_04]: But essentially, Zizlisauta is a trans woman. 58:27.655 --> 58:34.002 [SPEAKER_04]: Now in her mid-30s, and was much like Michelle Zajko and Onjunu, she grew up in Alaska to high-achieving parents. 58:34.322 --> 58:38.065 [SPEAKER_04]: and also interned at NASA before relocating to the Bay Area to work in tech. 58:38.886 --> 58:49.035 [SPEAKER_04]: Ziz was a devout rationalist and a staunch vegan, and she applied the idea of effect of altruism, not only to people and future people, but to every sentient being on earth. 58:49.816 --> 58:59.385 [SPEAKER_04]: She's trying to work out, you know, if I step on six ants today, like what it has, my like net outcome been for the day in terms of do-getting, that kind of thing. 59:00.331 --> 59:08.373 [SPEAKER_04]: She joined the tech industry initially to make as much money as possible, so she could donate it, blah, blah, blah, but she became disillusioned with how meaningless startup culture was. 59:09.233 --> 59:17.175 [SPEAKER_04]: Diving more internationalism, she started going by the name Ziz, which is a character from a popular rationalist web fiction, who is a worm that wears black robes. 59:17.496 --> 59:19.016 [SPEAKER_04]: Ziz starts wearing black robes. 59:19.396 --> 59:20.816 [SPEAKER_02]: Are they Hogwarts robes? 59:20.916 --> 59:21.737 [SPEAKER_04]: No, no, they're not. 59:21.777 --> 59:22.137 [SPEAKER_04]: They're not. 59:22.157 --> 59:23.057 [SPEAKER_04]: There's Ziz robes. 59:23.117 --> 59:23.797 [SPEAKER_04]: Ziz the worm. 59:23.877 --> 59:25.578 [SPEAKER_04]: And Ziz the worm is known. 59:25.638 --> 59:26.518 [SPEAKER_04]: Do you just burp? 59:27.877 --> 59:29.038 [SPEAKER_02]: I know, I said, sorry. 59:29.058 --> 59:30.159 [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, there's a crazy noise. 59:30.500 --> 59:34.063 [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, it's a, it's a car engine outside of my window. 59:34.083 --> 59:34.444 [SPEAKER_02]: That was funny. 59:34.464 --> 59:34.924 [SPEAKER_02]: That's funny. 59:34.944 --> 59:36.586 [SPEAKER_02]: That you think my burps sound like that. 59:36.606 --> 59:38.508 [SPEAKER_04]: Well, it's just like a big blast into the microphone. 59:38.528 --> 59:38.928 [SPEAKER_04]: I was like, whoa. 59:39.549 --> 59:46.576 [SPEAKER_04]: And the worms is known for being able to influence people's psychology to make them act in line with its own interests. 59:47.557 --> 59:48.037 [SPEAKER_04]: Interesting. 59:48.838 --> 01:00:01.060 [SPEAKER_04]: Ziz publishes her ideas in a personal blog which started to depart further and further from the teaching's rationalism and become more extreme and she slowly begins to grow a following post online and in person with other rationalists. 01:00:01.641 --> 01:00:03.061 [SPEAKER_04]: One of whom is Michelle Zajko. 01:00:03.801 --> 01:00:13.223 [SPEAKER_04]: Ziz writes that her group was wanting to build a cabal of, quote, abnormally intrinsically good people and turn them all into Jervais sociopaths. 01:00:13.983 --> 01:00:20.710 [SPEAKER_04]: The Jervais Theory is the idea that organizations are led by sociopathic people who know how to accumulate and manipulate power. 01:00:21.691 --> 01:00:29.138 [SPEAKER_04]: The Zizians aim to be sociopaths because this would enable them to operate quote, unpawned by the external world. 01:00:30.880 --> 01:00:32.621 [SPEAKER_04]: Again, dorky. 01:00:33.782 --> 01:00:39.987 [SPEAKER_04]: Achieving sociopathy can be done by as in rationalism, hacking the mind, and installing new mental tech. 01:00:40.368 --> 01:00:43.651 [SPEAKER_04]: But sizzle-loon is the only one who can do this for people. 01:00:43.811 --> 01:00:46.133 [SPEAKER_04]: It's not like rationalism where you do this for yourself. 01:00:46.713 --> 01:00:48.375 [SPEAKER_04]: the self-help type way. 01:00:48.415 --> 01:00:50.357 [SPEAKER_04]: It's like only Ziz can do this for you. 01:00:51.198 --> 01:01:01.948 [SPEAKER_04]: She and her group of similarly high-achieving people, many of whom are trans women, start to wear all black, identify as an archo-transhumanist, and call themselves vegan Sith. 01:01:02.448 --> 01:01:13.052 [SPEAKER_04]: Although many of them found each other through a shared love of less wrong, the Zizian starts to become almost violently opposed to the rationalist movement, which they view to be transphobic and full of sexual predation. 01:01:13.613 --> 01:01:16.514 [SPEAKER_04]: I'm sure all the child's sex chit chit is pretty sus. 01:01:16.554 --> 01:01:26.258 [SPEAKER_04]: There were also allegations of sexual misconduct within C far at the time, and while there are a large number of trans people who identify as rationalists, I'm sure they'll hold like anything goes vibe of the forum. 01:01:26.654 --> 01:01:30.838 [SPEAKER_04]: has allowed a lot of transphobic sentiments to run, rampage on the site, but this, I have not confirmed. 01:01:31.338 --> 01:01:33.920 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, I can see it like going both ways. 01:01:33.940 --> 01:01:45.370 [SPEAKER_02]: You can see rationalist thinking, a making sense that there would be a lot of like protrans argumentation and then also, I mean, these are people in internet forums and so I'm sure it also, yes. 01:01:45.430 --> 01:01:48.292 [SPEAKER_02]: Well, if anything goes, if anything goes, if anything goes, if anything goes, yes. 01:01:48.753 --> 01:01:55.078 [SPEAKER_04]: The Zizians get arrested, protesting a C-far event and suffer what they alleged to be police brutality, 01:01:56.323 --> 01:02:05.326 [SPEAKER_04]: which may be true because we know that's a thing but could just as easily not be because the group does have a tendency to lie and call abuse where evidence points to the contrary. 01:02:05.706 --> 01:02:08.147 [SPEAKER_04]: The protest follow is when all hell breaks loose. 01:02:08.387 --> 01:02:11.188 [SPEAKER_04]: Basically, Ziz begins to lose all aspirations of due getting. 01:02:13.029 --> 01:02:15.870 [SPEAKER_04]: And her blog posts become increasingly violent and erratic. 01:02:16.511 --> 01:02:22.354 [SPEAKER_04]: Much of this stems from the way that she's interpreting rationalist philosophy, or misinterpreting, depending on how you want to put it. 01:02:22.934 --> 01:02:25.736 [SPEAKER_04]: For example, there's this theory popular in rationalism. 01:02:25.816 --> 01:02:33.661 [SPEAKER_04]: And I'm sorry, Hannah, I'm about to do this to you, because it's considered an info hazard and info hazard is basically like, oh no, this kind of information is actually bad for you. 01:02:34.521 --> 01:02:43.167 [SPEAKER_04]: So, like, let's censor it because if you see this information's too late, it's called Roko's Basilisk, which you'd Kowski had disavowed. 01:02:43.187 --> 01:02:44.828 [SPEAKER_04]: He was like this is stupid on the forum. 01:02:45.328 --> 01:02:47.149 [SPEAKER_04]: He was also like, this is an info hazard. 01:02:47.789 --> 01:02:56.335 [SPEAKER_04]: Basically, a Basilisk, as we know from Harry Potter, for example, is this mythological snake, snake figure, who when you look in its eyes, it killed it. 01:02:56.855 --> 01:02:58.197 [SPEAKER_04]: kills you, it turns you to stone or whatever. 01:02:58.817 --> 01:03:10.788 [SPEAKER_04]: Rogos Basilisk is this idea that some far off super intelligent AI might once it's in power punish anyone who knew it was possible but didn't do everything in their power to bring it into existence. 01:03:11.008 --> 01:03:15.493 [SPEAKER_04]: You could be dead by this point and it'll bring you out of the dead and just torture you for all of eternity. 01:03:16.473 --> 01:03:26.700 [SPEAKER_02]: Why did you now you've you've marked this on to meet but note and all of our listeners We can't release this episode you serious the eyes of the bathalisc 01:03:28.165 --> 01:03:28.545 [SPEAKER_04]: pitch. 01:03:28.885 --> 01:03:32.706 [SPEAKER_04]: And you know what my superstitious ass would totally be like, ooh, no, I'm like this. 01:03:32.786 --> 01:03:34.607 [SPEAKER_04]: But like, oh, I just lost the game. 01:03:34.907 --> 01:03:35.547 [SPEAKER_04]: You lost the game. 01:03:36.007 --> 01:03:36.367 [SPEAKER_04]: What game? 01:03:36.587 --> 01:03:36.968 [SPEAKER_04]: The game. 01:03:37.648 --> 01:03:39.688 [SPEAKER_02]: The game where if you remember the game you lost the game? 01:03:40.449 --> 01:03:41.849 [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, no, you lost the game. 01:03:42.529 --> 01:03:45.010 [SPEAKER_04]: And so did all of you on that note. 01:03:45.450 --> 01:03:47.370 [SPEAKER_04]: So try and like wipe your minds, go get lobotomies. 01:03:47.511 --> 01:03:48.211 [SPEAKER_04]: Don't get lobotomies. 01:03:48.231 --> 01:03:48.571 [SPEAKER_04]: That's bad. 01:03:49.331 --> 01:04:03.579 [SPEAKER_04]: This at first didn't believe in it because it's like a kind of fringe theory, whatever, but then started to worry that if she continued this project of trying to protect the world from AI, she might eventually be punished for all of eternity once an unfriendly AI gained power, logically, in the steps. 01:04:04.119 --> 01:04:04.740 [SPEAKER_04]: So almost like, 01:04:05.480 --> 01:04:10.361 [SPEAKER_04]: What is the point of do-getting if it means that there's this eternal suffering for me and my friends down the road? 01:04:10.962 --> 01:04:14.403 [SPEAKER_04]: When I was reading this, it just reminds me of when I'm in a really bad OCD place. 01:04:14.903 --> 01:04:19.524 [SPEAKER_04]: I feel like you can create these never-ending, like, self-contained logical loops that kind of drive you crazy. 01:04:19.564 --> 01:04:24.326 [SPEAKER_04]: Like, if this happens and this happens and then, ah, like, I'm gonna die. 01:04:24.346 --> 01:04:26.446 [SPEAKER_04]: Like, it's very that kind of thing. 01:04:27.206 --> 01:04:28.707 [SPEAKER_04]: Have you experienced this at all? 01:04:29.147 --> 01:04:30.088 [SPEAKER_02]: Well, I was a kid. 01:04:30.108 --> 01:04:34.049 [SPEAKER_02]: I had this period where I, well, you know, it happened a few times. 01:04:34.069 --> 01:04:39.152 [SPEAKER_02]: I get into these periods where I'd be like, everything I think, the opposite's going to happen. 01:04:39.252 --> 01:04:42.193 [SPEAKER_02]: And so then I would make myself think the opposite. 01:04:42.694 --> 01:04:45.875 [SPEAKER_02]: And then I had this one, I don't know if this is the same thing. 01:04:46.415 --> 01:04:55.800 [SPEAKER_02]: In high school, I was like, all gears that are odd numbers have been bad years and all years that were even numbers are good years in my life, like for grades. 01:04:56.200 --> 01:04:57.641 [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, yeah, totally. 01:04:57.661 --> 01:04:59.223 [SPEAKER_04]: This is like a pretty common. 01:04:59.243 --> 01:05:02.145 [SPEAKER_04]: It's kind of like the baseline of all like superstitious thinking in general. 01:05:02.646 --> 01:05:03.827 [SPEAKER_04]: It can go wrong, very easily. 01:05:04.825 --> 01:05:07.206 [SPEAKER_04]: Basically, very, very, very long story short. 01:05:07.747 --> 01:05:09.468 [SPEAKER_04]: Ziz and her followers move all around. 01:05:09.748 --> 01:05:16.012 [SPEAKER_04]: First attempting some sort of like C-steading missions, speaking of his boat, where they live on a boat to circumvent Bay Area rent. 01:05:16.572 --> 01:05:20.214 [SPEAKER_04]: Then they move onto this lot owned by a man named Curtis Linde. 01:05:20.534 --> 01:05:33.542 [SPEAKER_04]: And in this time, Ziz's ideology starts to get warped into the logic of like, if your whole goal is to optimize every single action in your life in a way that results in a positive outcome, far off in the future, then if someone gets in the way of your goal, you should probably kill them. 01:05:34.514 --> 01:05:38.381 [SPEAKER_04]: Like, you should push them off the proverbial boat when you think about it, right? 01:05:39.744 --> 01:05:40.826 [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, both boats. 01:05:41.587 --> 01:05:44.572 [SPEAKER_02]: Wait, is this because my feature has been lives on a houseboat? 01:05:44.753 --> 01:05:45.935 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, we got to push them off the boat. 01:05:45.955 --> 01:05:47.337 [SPEAKER_04]: Or like, if you got on the bus, someone has to go. 01:05:49.238 --> 01:05:50.159 [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, so work that out. 01:05:50.179 --> 01:05:57.927 [SPEAKER_02]: I know you guys know my future has been lived on a houseboat, so if you know anyone before we sort of recording I said speaking of a houseboat and that's how we began. 01:05:58.768 --> 01:06:05.194 [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, because before we started recording, I told my year my revelation that my future has been lived on a houseboat. 01:06:05.855 --> 01:06:09.238 [SPEAKER_04]: So as you can imagine, also in this time there are a number of deaths. 01:06:10.059 --> 01:06:12.021 [SPEAKER_04]: that the Zizians begin to rack up. 01:06:12.361 --> 01:06:18.047 [SPEAKER_04]: There's a suicide of a rationalist named J. Winterford, who's is wrote about in her blog as being someone who's mine. 01:06:18.087 --> 01:06:19.088 [SPEAKER_04]: She was trying to upgrade. 01:06:19.108 --> 01:06:22.911 [SPEAKER_04]: She's like very remorseless about the way she talks about this person after they passed away. 01:06:23.932 --> 01:06:25.834 [SPEAKER_04]: They shot a border patrol cop. 01:06:26.235 --> 01:06:28.276 [SPEAKER_04]: There's like a car chase going down of sorts. 01:06:28.897 --> 01:06:34.502 [SPEAKER_04]: Then there's this whole dispute with Curtis Lynn to threatens to evict them after they stop paying rent for several months. 01:06:35.283 --> 01:06:53.110 [SPEAKER_04]: They end up ambushing him on a lot, and blinding him in one eye, and impaling him with a samurai sword, one Zizian diesuring this conflict, lind, elderly man at this point somehow survives it, but then another Zizian, a couple years later, finishes him off by jumping him in the street and slitting his throat. 01:06:53.650 --> 01:06:54.310 [SPEAKER_04]: It is horrific. 01:06:55.410 --> 01:07:02.393 [SPEAKER_04]: Then there's the murders of Rita and Richard Zajko, who it's likely were killed in order for the Zizians to gain access to their funds via Michelle. 01:07:03.432 --> 01:07:08.495 [SPEAKER_04]: This is really at the forefront of this violence, but likely orchestrating it like Manson's style. 01:07:08.995 --> 01:07:11.516 [SPEAKER_04]: She's very seldom identified by police. 01:07:11.777 --> 01:07:16.379 [SPEAKER_04]: She even successfully fakes her death at one point by pretending to have fallen off their boat. 01:07:16.939 --> 01:07:20.721 [SPEAKER_04]: The Coast Guard gets a call of being like, oh, our friend fell off her boat and is missing. 01:07:21.101 --> 01:07:26.544 [SPEAKER_04]: Turns out she had just actually ran away, but the Coast Guard exhausts all their resources looking for her and never find her. 01:07:26.945 --> 01:07:27.485 [SPEAKER_03]: Cause she's not there. 01:07:27.745 --> 01:07:36.791 [SPEAKER_04]: But eventually, in early 2025, Ziz Michelle and Daniel Blank were found in a white box truck in Maryland near the Pennsylvania border, strapped with a whole lot of ammo. 01:07:37.371 --> 01:07:38.432 [SPEAKER_04]: They are now awaiting trial. 01:07:39.212 --> 01:07:42.314 [SPEAKER_04]: I'm curious, what do you make of this whole story with the Zizians? 01:07:42.694 --> 01:07:43.515 [SPEAKER_04]: Initial thoughts, go! 01:07:44.615 --> 01:07:58.804 [SPEAKER_02]: I think rationalism, as like a baseline concept, is interesting, feels like, you know, the types of experiments you would do in university, I get the appeal of that. 01:07:59.384 --> 01:08:00.805 [SPEAKER_01]: Would you say rationalism? 01:08:01.145 --> 01:08:06.649 [SPEAKER_02]: Obviously, it's not a religion, but like functions similarly, totally religion. 01:08:06.669 --> 01:08:07.729 [SPEAKER_04]: It's called the Techno-religion. 01:08:08.310 --> 01:08:11.672 [SPEAKER_04]: It's like the only philosophy that technique really has. 01:08:12.140 --> 01:08:39.069 [SPEAKER_02]: Well, I mean, I think it's interesting because there is, yes, like, this rational side of tech, but also, I think a lot of technology as we know it, like, also emerged from what you might call like new age in, like, irrational ways of thinking, which we'll be talking about in the horoscopes episode, and which we've also talked about in, like, our dead heads episode, but just that that overlap between, like, the new age and this, to me, like, kind of, like, 01:08:39.989 --> 01:08:51.639 [SPEAKER_02]: cotton dry way of seeing the world is so fascinating, but as far as the story goes, to me it feels like a bit in thinking about like rationalism as a religion. 01:08:51.919 --> 01:08:56.223 [SPEAKER_02]: One of those cases of where like somebody's perverted a world view or like a world philosophy. 01:08:56.950 --> 01:09:02.373 [SPEAKER_02]: to justify some other way of behavior, or maybe taking it to an extreme. 01:09:02.393 --> 01:09:04.894 [SPEAKER_02]: Like it feels like religious extremism, maybe. 01:09:04.934 --> 01:09:14.899 [SPEAKER_04]: I think it's totally religious extremism, and I'll talk about this more, but just like, yeah, the idea, like, you know, rockers basilise, click if you're not mentally well, and you see that, that could have pretty bad consequences for you. 01:09:15.259 --> 01:09:22.181 [SPEAKER_04]: I think there's a whole lot of psychosis going on here with these, these Zizian, and like, people who are not necessarily mentally well, and you know, I'm going to talk about this. 01:09:22.242 --> 01:09:27.463 [SPEAKER_04]: But okay, I'm going to spit fire my three or initial thoughts that I had, but this is the end said don't have to do with the rationalism. 01:09:28.304 --> 01:09:34.226 [SPEAKER_04]: One is that when I first heard about this, it reminds me of this character, Mary, in that Philip Rothbook, American Pastoral. 01:09:34.686 --> 01:09:39.228 [SPEAKER_04]: Mary is basically this young activist character whose radicalism turns inward on itself to the 01:09:40.808 --> 01:09:45.449 [SPEAKER_04]: Jan, which is an ancient philosophy where you're not supposed to inflict harm on any living being. 01:09:45.789 --> 01:09:50.410 [SPEAKER_04]: And so she ends up starving to death or like we don't know if she dies, but it's kind of alluded to that. 01:09:50.931 --> 01:09:55.192 [SPEAKER_04]: Just like this idea of the way that's been Neville and Logic can kind of like work itself into this whole. 01:09:55.752 --> 01:09:58.593 [SPEAKER_04]: You see that with Ziz being like every sentient being because I'm a vegan, whatever. 01:09:59.413 --> 01:10:05.674 [SPEAKER_04]: I was also like damn this is kind of the condition of so many revolutionary groups like self cannibalizing like the Zizians. 01:10:05.754 --> 01:10:08.375 [SPEAKER_04]: They've talked about the ways that they're all just kind of like fighting with each other. 01:10:09.185 --> 01:10:14.004 [SPEAKER_04]: and break down into this terrible murderous group, they don't trust each other or whatever, whatever. 01:10:14.946 --> 01:10:18.129 [SPEAKER_04]: Lastly, what I thought was interesting about them was this concept of trans identity. 01:10:18.629 --> 01:10:29.818 [SPEAKER_04]: Like, when you think of it how much irrationalism is about overcoming and like transcending the self, I was just thinking about how much, like a young trans kid would see themselves in that philosophy, which I found fascinating. 01:10:29.839 --> 01:10:33.001 [SPEAKER_04]: I was like, cause it's interesting to think about how so many of this is the answer trans. 01:10:33.021 --> 01:10:36.064 [SPEAKER_04]: Maybe because they felt rejected by broader rashness community. 01:10:36.384 --> 01:10:39.467 [SPEAKER_04]: Maybe there was other things they saw, but I just found that interesting. 01:10:39.827 --> 01:10:40.047 [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. 01:10:40.407 --> 01:10:41.728 [SPEAKER_04]: To end off, I want to know, like, 01:10:42.469 --> 01:10:43.950 [SPEAKER_04]: How the fuck do we arrive at this point? 01:10:44.611 --> 01:10:47.033 [SPEAKER_04]: Yudkowski is by and large somewhat mainstream figure. 01:10:47.233 --> 01:10:53.159 [SPEAKER_04]: He went on fucking as recline of all people, world's biggest moron, to talk about AI. 01:10:53.920 --> 01:10:58.244 [SPEAKER_04]: And yet, his philosophy kind of presides over this like fringe death cult. 01:10:58.884 --> 01:11:01.405 [SPEAKER_04]: And the Zizians aren't exactly like him. 01:11:01.445 --> 01:11:04.866 [SPEAKER_04]: They actually, they don't like free speech almost to a crazy degree. 01:11:04.906 --> 01:11:06.326 [SPEAKER_04]: Like they're really police in speech. 01:11:06.946 --> 01:11:08.847 [SPEAKER_04]: They seem pretty emotional, whatever. 01:11:09.427 --> 01:11:10.628 [SPEAKER_04]: What is the through line here? 01:11:11.208 --> 01:11:12.728 [SPEAKER_04]: Which means rationalism in the Zizians. 01:11:13.308 --> 01:11:27.633 [SPEAKER_02]: Well, the rationalism not just like these forums were starting off point for people who were interested in these ideas, but then like for whatever reason, mental illness, religious extremism, whatever. 01:11:28.453 --> 01:11:55.966 [SPEAKER_02]: took it to this other place that like kind of I mean as often happens with religious extremism like is maybe like in conflict with the original constitutions of that belief system like that's what it sounds like to me interesting I also think the internet as yeah like sort of been pioneered by a lot of crazy people it's like the military and then like kooky hippies with 01:11:58.721 --> 01:12:10.258 [SPEAKER_02]: I think it's like for as much as like there is this really zeros and ones way of thinking and like whatever I think in order to build something out of that. 01:12:10.830 --> 01:12:16.514 [SPEAKER_02]: it involves like thinking outside of the box, and therefore thinking often outside of what is rational. 01:12:16.995 --> 01:12:28.263 [SPEAKER_02]: So I do think there is something slightly like antithetical about the internet and this concept of rationality, I suppose. 01:12:28.783 --> 01:12:33.747 [SPEAKER_02]: I mean like even believing in the capacity for like AI and like sendience or whatever. 01:12:33.847 --> 01:12:33.987 [SPEAKER_02]: Like 01:12:34.467 --> 01:12:43.881 [SPEAKER_02]: I guess there's like a rational argument there, but I also think that that involves magical thinking to an extent that's why it's like originated in science fiction. 01:12:43.901 --> 01:12:48.548 [SPEAKER_04]: I think that's a great point and that there's this internal contradiction there. 01:12:49.749 --> 01:12:55.253 [SPEAKER_04]: I was also just taken by like the quick solidic nature of the Zizians, believing that they're heroes out to save the universe. 01:12:55.333 --> 01:13:05.540 [SPEAKER_04]: Like you would kind of point it to this very early on when you're talking about Udkowski, but this kind of like infantilism almost like a child like way of seeing the world. 01:13:06.220 --> 01:13:12.424 [SPEAKER_04]: There isn't really amazing breakdown of the Zizian Sagan wired by Evan Rattlif where he says, the Meary C. Far E.A. 01:13:12.464 --> 01:13:20.069 [SPEAKER_04]: Traumvirate promise not just that you could be the hero of your own story, but that your heroism could be deployed in the service of saving humanity itself from destruction. 01:13:20.569 --> 01:13:29.955 [SPEAKER_04]: Is it so surprising that this promise attracted people who were not prepared to be bit players in group housing dramas and abstract technical papers that they might come to believe perhaps in the 01:13:31.816 --> 01:13:37.268 [SPEAKER_04]: that's saving the world required a different kind of action by them specifically and no one else. 01:13:38.411 --> 01:13:52.514 [SPEAKER_04]: I feel like, I don't know, even just like a lot of the broader rationalist ideology is so rooted in this very powerful presence speaking of the geek revolution of sci-fi and fantasy in these worlds, like even thinking about how their foundational text is Harry Potter fanfic. 01:13:53.134 --> 01:13:53.315 [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. 01:13:53.355 --> 01:14:04.877 [SPEAKER_04]: Of course, we can learn a lot from the warnings that science fiction gives us or like these parables of fantasy, but we can also just as much take away from these like every man characters that we're the chosen people, like we're the chosen people of our lives, 01:14:08.638 --> 01:14:27.814 [SPEAKER_02]: But also like, okay, the people who are ending up in these communities for the most part, I'm going to go out on a crazy limb here and assume social outcasts in some capacity, people who were not on the football team or whatever the fuck at their school. 01:14:27.874 --> 01:14:28.134 [SPEAKER_02]: Yes. 01:14:28.234 --> 01:14:33.999 [SPEAKER_02]: People who, I think when you're thinking about the like, trade off for, 01:14:35.400 --> 01:14:44.846 [SPEAKER_02]: That experience growing up and then also reading texts like Harry Potter or, you know, other science fiction fantasy works. 01:14:45.367 --> 01:14:52.231 [SPEAKER_02]: I think there is this like internal narrative and maybe it's like self mythology that happens where you're like 01:14:53.140 --> 01:15:18.313 [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, yes, this is what it's like now, but it's in service of something greater because I am going to rise above it I'm going to do something greater, especially if you're like actually like a, you know, tech nerd or whatever like a genius It's like of course, I think that's going to Maybe like play some kind of a role in this idea of like 01:15:18.845 --> 01:15:26.371 [SPEAKER_02]: thinking that you alone have the capacity or the duty to change the course of history. 01:15:26.391 --> 01:15:28.072 [SPEAKER_02]: Well, it's like, I'm like Harry Potter. 01:15:28.092 --> 01:15:31.235 [SPEAKER_04]: Harry Potter was like, like, when you're reading, it's like, oh, he's so outcasted. 01:15:31.435 --> 01:15:33.657 [SPEAKER_04]: Like, the chosen ones are often social outcasts. 01:15:34.117 --> 01:15:34.558 [SPEAKER_02]: Yes. 01:15:35.018 --> 01:15:45.887 [SPEAKER_02]: And I'm going to say this as someone who is socially outcasted as a child for being like, weird and annoying and not for being like smart or like special that it's like, 01:15:46.745 --> 01:16:04.001 [SPEAKER_02]: you know I I've happy with the path that I took because there weren't like a lot of things that were like their stories that were like and don't worry you're going to save the world you we're a little girl and we're outfits on yeah most of those are like what's that maybe that taught so long as maybe 01:16:04.782 --> 01:16:05.743 [SPEAKER_04]: about a weird little girl. 01:16:05.803 --> 01:16:07.204 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, welcome to the double house. 01:16:07.264 --> 01:16:08.605 [SPEAKER_04]: It's like that's like the outcome. 01:16:08.645 --> 01:16:09.546 [SPEAKER_02]: It's like, oh, great. 01:16:09.606 --> 01:16:11.147 [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, you're going to be like, Dawn. 01:16:12.388 --> 01:16:18.853 [SPEAKER_02]: And I, you know what, I hope, no, I think she, like, in his later film, she doesn't send you a to that, she's kills herself. 01:16:18.993 --> 01:16:19.934 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, she can't. 01:16:20.154 --> 01:16:26.619 [SPEAKER_02]: Which, yeah, that's, that's, that's those are the features that we're talking to back to the girls. 01:16:26.639 --> 01:16:27.340 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. 01:16:27.380 --> 01:16:29.301 [SPEAKER_02]: Weird annoying girls that no one wants to play with. 01:16:29.321 --> 01:16:30.562 [SPEAKER_04]: Who are like NASA interns? 01:16:30.582 --> 01:16:32.504 [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I do think I completely agree. 01:16:32.544 --> 01:16:33.184 [SPEAKER_04]: Like, I just think, 01:16:34.265 --> 01:16:58.821 [SPEAKER_04]: It feels like so many of these people and I'm not gonna fully obviously include like Peter fucking Taylor like Elon Musk But like these people are like extremely gifted perhaps lacking in social skills and finding themselves in professions where there are morals amount to little or nothing Especially in tech where it feels like it's such an anti-human field like meta was literally tracking their employees computer activity to train an AI that would probably replace the employees in the future It's so lovely they have 01:16:59.621 --> 01:17:01.704 [SPEAKER_02]: ping-pong tables in their offices. 01:17:01.724 --> 01:17:02.565 [SPEAKER_02]: What do you talk about? 01:17:02.585 --> 01:17:03.867 [SPEAKER_04]: You can sleep there. 01:17:03.887 --> 01:17:05.068 [SPEAKER_04]: You can sleep there. 01:17:05.088 --> 01:17:05.609 [SPEAKER_02]: They have fun. 01:17:05.629 --> 01:17:06.951 [SPEAKER_02]: They have hammocks. 01:17:07.011 --> 01:17:08.112 [SPEAKER_04]: There's like chill room. 01:17:08.192 --> 01:17:09.554 [SPEAKER_04]: You can sleep in the hammock. 01:17:09.694 --> 01:17:10.776 [SPEAKER_04]: And you're one hour off. 01:17:11.216 --> 01:17:15.321 [SPEAKER_04]: But like, you know, there's such a meaningless mistake start up culture. 01:17:15.862 --> 01:17:19.868 [SPEAKER_04]: So these people are like drawn to these forums where their ideas and their concerns can be heard. 01:17:20.469 --> 01:17:28.140 [SPEAKER_04]: So like rationalism gives them some sort of meaning and like the Zizians or maybe Ziz gave them some sort of meaning in her own like skewed way. 01:17:28.641 --> 01:17:31.505 [SPEAKER_04]: But yeah, they're drawn to these forums where their ideas and their concerns can be heard. 01:17:31.525 --> 01:17:31.585 [SPEAKER_04]: But 01:17:32.869 --> 01:17:50.436 [SPEAKER_04]: still like they're not totally against AI because it's their jobs to build it and ultimately like I think the singular focus on logic is a bit of a sneak eating its own tail because again the more vulnerable members of these groups enter into these like crazy thought spirals that could potentially result in something as manic as like the zizzians doing murder right. 01:17:51.016 --> 01:17:56.679 [SPEAKER_04]: There was this post in less wrong, that rattle of quotes, which is about the Zizians, and I thought it was really interesting. 01:17:57.199 --> 01:18:05.062 [SPEAKER_04]: The person said, they were alienated altruists who couldn't handle this world and seemingly went a little insane, given the incorrect beliefs, but doesn't vary. 01:18:05.783 --> 01:18:12.606 [SPEAKER_04]: Well actually, most people struggle to stay dispassionally rational when faced with something which they regard as morally bad. 01:18:13.046 --> 01:18:16.367 [SPEAKER_04]: It's hard to live in a world one believes to contain atrocities. 01:18:20.389 --> 01:18:25.632 [SPEAKER_04]: to lose theory from anti-edipissibility, capitalism, and schizophrenia are like madness and modernism. 01:18:25.672 --> 01:18:30.214 [SPEAKER_04]: And just this idea of like the self being like splintered in modern capitalist life. 01:18:31.014 --> 01:18:34.296 [SPEAKER_04]: I don't know, like just the conditions of this world make it so impossible to stay sane. 01:18:35.017 --> 01:18:43.201 [SPEAKER_04]: And I don't know, the rationalist are these nerds trying to make sense of things in the only way that they think they can, which is through like fucking math. 01:18:43.741 --> 01:18:45.082 [SPEAKER_04]: And ultimately, I just don't think it's actually, 01:18:45.722 --> 01:18:46.683 [SPEAKER_04]: helping anybody, though? 01:18:47.343 --> 01:18:50.005 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I just think it's like, is it is the flow of the organized religion? 01:18:50.065 --> 01:18:54.768 [SPEAKER_02]: It's just like being forced to kind of only exist through one way of thinking. 01:18:55.048 --> 01:19:00.812 [SPEAKER_02]: And it doesn't encourage other forms of thinking outside of that worldview. 01:19:01.172 --> 01:19:03.233 [SPEAKER_02]: And that in itself is limiting. 01:19:03.313 --> 01:19:11.379 [SPEAKER_02]: And I think rationalism in some ways is supposed to be like an alternative to the limitations of organized religion, but in itself, 01:19:12.339 --> 01:19:14.040 [SPEAKER_02]: It imposes its own limitation. 01:19:14.080 --> 01:19:15.721 [SPEAKER_04]: It's totally like re-evise them, yeah. 01:19:16.461 --> 01:19:19.662 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's like you can't enjoy Harry Potter because it's irrational. 01:19:19.762 --> 01:19:20.863 [SPEAKER_02]: Like, excuse me. 01:19:21.283 --> 01:19:22.043 [SPEAKER_02]: What the hell? 01:19:22.563 --> 01:19:23.103 [SPEAKER_04]: I was so great. 01:19:23.123 --> 01:19:26.265 [SPEAKER_04]: Well, it's interesting you're saying this that rationalism is an alternative religion. 01:19:26.285 --> 01:19:38.790 [SPEAKER_04]: Because there's this whole post-rationalist movement on Twitter that Luigi Manjoni was actually loosely affiliated with, which is like essentially rejecting the cultiness and like technocracy of rationalism and embracing spirituality instead. 01:19:39.550 --> 01:19:45.059 [SPEAKER_04]: They're also a part of the great tribe and like they're also involved in Silicon Valley, but they're more like wellness vibes. 01:19:45.740 --> 01:19:49.746 [SPEAKER_04]: Um, but they also believe in transcending the self. 01:19:50.147 --> 01:19:53.072 [SPEAKER_04]: This one article I read interviews a post-rationalist who talks about. 01:19:53.563 --> 01:19:57.028 [SPEAKER_04]: the implicit desire to become a god, just like Harry Potter Evans vettas. 01:19:57.428 --> 01:20:00.392 [SPEAKER_04]: And the article summarizes what this person says about that is this. 01:20:01.013 --> 01:20:09.424 [SPEAKER_04]: Doing the psycho-spiritual work necessary to unchain yourself from mere human facticity is the only way out of the tragic mire of ordinary human life. 01:20:10.017 --> 01:20:14.139 [SPEAKER_04]: And I think that's kind of the whole ethos and entire problem with Silicon Valley. 01:20:14.639 --> 01:20:28.505 [SPEAKER_04]: I think so many of these people in tech want to be the heroes and want to save humanity, but if so much trouble relating to or seeing the beauty of being human, probably because so many of them are computer engineers and feel like in-ship with computers. 01:20:28.886 --> 01:20:31.807 [SPEAKER_04]: They're creating fake humans that they can control. 01:20:32.047 --> 01:20:32.867 [SPEAKER_04]: No, exactly. 01:20:32.907 --> 01:20:35.328 [SPEAKER_04]: That's what they're spending so many of their hours doing. 01:20:35.368 --> 01:20:38.190 [SPEAKER_04]: And I'm sure someone working the long hours on a day, 01:20:38.990 --> 01:20:50.638 [SPEAKER_04]: at a Google campus isn't really connecting with people very much and when they are very they're like on teapot with the Ouija maybe or they're on less wrong and like the cycle just continues from there.