David Boree

So this is a result.

So Ziz commits herself to turning Gwyn to the dark side, which is a term she started to use.

Obviously, it's a Star Wars term.

And it comes out as a result of her obsession with what's called akrasia.

Akrasia is an actual Greek term for a lack of willpower that leads someone to act in ways that take them further from their goals in life.

It's an actual like,

I think akrasia often was like an early term for like what we call ADHD, right?

Like people who have difficulty like focusing on tasks that they need to complete.

One of the promises of rationalism was to arm a person with tools to escape this state of being and act more powerfully and effectively in the world.

Ziz adds to this some ideas cribbed from Star Wars.

She decides that the quote unquote way of the Jedi, which is like accepting moral restrictions, you know, about like not murdering people and the like, is a prison for someone who's like truly great and has the opportunity to accomplish important goals, right?

If you're that kind of person, you can't afford to be limited by moral beliefs, right?

So in order to achieve the kind of vegan singularity that she thinks is critical to save the cosmos, she and her fellow rationalists need to free themselves from the restrictions of the Jedi and become vegan Sith.

That's more or less –

Where things are going here.

So I'd say I should note that while Gwynn and Ziz are spinning out on their own, everything that you're seeing from them, these feelings of grandiosity and cosmic significance, but also paranoid obsession are the norm in rationalist and effective altruist circles.

There's a great article in Bloomberg News by Ellen Hewitt.

It discusses how many in the EA set would suffer paralyzing panic attacks over things like spending money on a nice dinner or buying ice cream, obsessing over how many people they'd killed by not better optimizing their expenses.

End quote.

In extreme pockets of the rationality community, AI researchers believed their apocalypse-related stress was contributing to psychotic breaks.