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String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

• rdtsc 2y ago
  > self-described “vegan Sith” ideology Had it not been in a serious article I would have believed it had to a parody or a joke of some sort. “We are just like Darth Maul, but we like salads and drink soy milk instead of regular milk… and then kill people while dressed in tactical black outfits”? What is even going on? Real life now sounds like some kinda of a broken LLM hallucination.
  • mnky9800n 2y ago
    people can and do have mental illness. it doesn't absolve them from knowing right from wrong however.
    • rdtsc 2y ago
      Since it’s a group so wonder if a group mental illness would make sense. I guess it could work for the court “look how out of touch with reality my client is, sith vegans, clearly they didn’t know what they were doing!”
      • aziaziazi 2y ago
        I’m sure the court juge will look further that the funny dichotomy in their brand name. Understanding their motivations for the murders, understanding their motivation to call themselves vegan (perhaps it’s a joke for them too, perhaps they’re really vegan) and their motivation to call themselves sith (I would bet for fun joke but it may be branding : and army of determined warriors, or mental illness if their really believe to be sith - yes human brain can to that). It’s very easy to find apparent incoherences in humans behavior by selectively picking out and not searching the motivations. This is the base attack for teenagers bullying book.
        • rdtsc 2y ago
          > I’m sure the court judge will look further that the funny dichotomy in their brand name Oh sure, and the jury. One can do both - mock murderers and their ridiculous ideology and study it seriously to, perhaps, prevent others from taking the same path. One doesn't preclude the other, though. To a certain degree I think these group enjoy being taken seriously, being in the news, fawned over, their writings analyzed by people going over their "deep" and "insightful" ideas. So that direction could be playing into their hands to a certain extent. For now, I'll go the "ridicule" path, I think.
          • aziaziazi 2y ago
            Fair points! Both that taking them seriously is probably the direction they aim, and that we shouldn’t forget to have fun and laugh!
      • uxp100 2y ago
        It was very cult like with Ziz cutting off members from their friends and the internet. And writing long complicated essays that didn’t make sense if you weren’t in the group.
    • h0l0cube 2y ago
      > it doesn't absolve them from knowing right from wrong however Certain mental conditions absolutely do, in a legal sense. Some conditions onset from brain injury and tumors, some to drug exposure, some are genetic, etc. For those unfortunate few who are afflicted, the most humane outcome is to intervene to keep them away from harming themselves and others, though often they are left unattended to by overstretched mental health services.
      • aziaziazi 2y ago
        I totally agree with that, meanwhile I think mnky meant that illness doesn’t necessarily remove all your judgement. You can have totally coherent thinking on a field while being incapable to reason on another. Easy exemple : Math and Empathy, where schizophrenic may excel in the former while lacking the later. Someone affected by trisomy 21 have more chances to get the opposite. <- generalization for illustration purpose, those affections are complex and schizophrenia is a spectrum anyway. Even for non-Ill-defined, PTS and other trauma or just learnings- can do that to anyone and age doesn’t help to escape the reasoning-habits. Wise are those that can stay free from mental cages.
      • mnky9800n 2y ago
        Paranoid delusions related to obsessive compulsive disorders or personality disorders stemming from post traumatic stress rarely seem to qualify insanity pleas except in episodes of law and order even though they can motivate highly irrational and self destructive behaviour.
      • tbrownaw 2y ago
        Does it really count if the difference is "be removed from society for a while by being sent to prison" vs "be removed from society indefinitely by being sent to inpatient lockup"?
    • pjc50 2y ago
      We really need a phrase for "appears to behave normally in regular matters and is capable of independent living, does not match other DSM symptoms, but believes insane things". It's a very common component in mass shootings.
      • incrudible 2y ago
        The things they believe are quite possibly internally consistent and not insane at all, just so far outside the overton window of an ordinary person so as to sound insane. Rather, they are the fringes of the fringes of political ideology and in my view the prime cause of falling prey to these is social alienation.
      • MrLeap 2y ago
        > "appears to behave normally in regular matters and is capable of independent living, does not match other DSM symptoms, but believes insane things" I have met a lot of people in my life who fit this criteria. Not one of them has gone on to become a mass shooter. Saying we need a phrase to label people like this in order to _stop mass killings_ sounds crazy to me. If you really had the option to explore the psyche of everyone to the depth necessary to check for "believes insane things" if we could even agree on what that means, I wouldn't be surprised if the test came back positive on 40-70% of the population. A strict enough test and I think we could get that number to 100%. Isn't it a meme at this point how people win the nobel prize in one field, and then say some nutty nonsense about a completely different field? The human species is rational, insane, brilliant, stupid, compassionate and vicious, ugly and beautiful all at once. All of us. More compassion for self and others would be my preference.
        • vkou 2y ago
          > Not one of them has gone on to become a mass shooter. No, but with a few friends getting together, cheering them along, and feeding into their collective insanity, they could very easily get together and do something serious. Most of the insurrectionists (the people who invaded Congress, not the people who went home after attending the rally) in Jan 6th can be described as such. That network of 'friends' is critical for actually motivating them to get off their ass and act on their beliefs. > More compassion for self and others would be my preference. The problem is that it's much easier to violently destroy, than it is to create, and the damage that a group of angry people who believe an utterly insane thing is disproportionate.
    • deleted 2y ago
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  • Neonlicht 2y ago
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    • s1artibartfast 2y ago
      define insane here. I think modern social acceptability hinges more on the degree to which personal beliefs infringe on others, at least in the west. If someone refuses to personally eat pasta because they believe in the great spaghetti monster, they can knock themselves out for all I care.
      • matthewdgreen 2y ago
        To the extent that your neighbors believe in false or unprovable things that don’t exist in our tangible reality, that should concern you. This can absolutely lead to horrifying violence, and has repeatedly done so in the past. The good thing about most major organized religions is that they’ve developed (some) guardrails against murdering the non-believers based on the theory that some intangible being requires this of them.
        • s1artibartfast 2y ago
          All first principles are unprovable. Theism does not have a monopoly on violence, so I don't see why I should be more concerned about it then anything else.
          • matthewdgreen 2y ago
            Because you can't reason with someone who doesn't employ reason. That doesn't mean they won't kill you - it just shuts down one avenue by which you might talk them out of it.
            • s1artibartfast 2y ago
              But religious people can be reasonable and atheist can be unreasonable.
  • tolerance 2y ago
    Look up Joshua Citarella’s coverage of the ideological milieus that Generation Z cultivated during COVID on platforms like Discord. And then check out the term “metairony” or “postirony” and this story make more sense…at least as much sense as the absurdity of it all will allow you to make of it.
    • teachrdan 2y ago
      We seem to live in a post-ironic moment. Look no further than the Boogaloo Boys. They want to start a second American civil war and are named after the 1984 movie "Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo". It would be a joke except they've engaged in violent attacks up to and including murder in the service of trying to start that aforementioned civil war. Are they serious or a joke? I think their embrace of a ridiculous name makes them almost more frightening because it shows their contempt for reasonableness, for lack of a better term. It's comparable to how the Nazi "goose step" march was terrifying precisely because it was so awkward and unnatural. It's like, if these guys are capable of doing this with a straight face, what else are they capable of? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boogaloo_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boogaloo_movement
      • potato3732842 2y ago
        Jokingly referring to something as "<subject_goes_here> 2: Electric Boogaloo" was a very common turn of phrase on certain parts of the internet in the early-mid 2010s. It sounds like a joke because it grew out of a joke.
      • s1artibartfast 2y ago
        >almost more frightening because it shows their contempt for reasonableness, for lack of a better term. I think another way to look at it is willful nonconformance and rejection of mainstream values (and judgement). Not unlike gutter punks dressing the way they did. I think counter culture has a long history of this, from men wearing their hair long to people dressing up as literal clowns.
    • s1artibartfast 2y ago
      This post came to mind for me https://moonmetropolis.substack.com/p/antioch-the-first-foodist-mass-shooting https://moonmetropolis.substack.com/p/antioch-the-first-food...
  • joe_the_user 2y ago
    "Vegan Sith"? For just one thing, when you have a broken education system and omnipresent media franchises, you have a significant percentage of the population who know more about the Star Wars backstory structure and theories of diet than about history, civics or conventional morality.
    • zozbot234 2y ago
      A far more likely possibility is that their ideology is actually centered around "Sith who happen to originate from Vega (a.k.a. α Lyrae)", not "Sith who abstain from animal products". (A residual possibility is "Sith from Las Vegas, Nevada".)
      • s1artibartfast 2y ago
        I don't think so. The people specifically are vegan, and their leader believes that future AI overlords will punish people retroactively for their moral failings. This is reported in some of the other posts on this page. It's wild, but a view that is is fairly widely discussed in the rationality community, but only taken seriously by Fringe groups.[1] My question is what Sith meant to them https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basiliskl https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basiliskl
        • codr7 2y ago
          But punishing humans for killing animals isn't a very rational thing to do, is it? Sounds 100% emotional to me, and emotions computers do not have. I guess if we spew enough of this BS onto the internet, AI could work it from there, but calling that rational doesn't make much sense to me.
          • samatman 2y ago
            Communities are people. They are not definitions.
          • int_19h 2y ago
  • dang 2y ago
    (This was originally posted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42849281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42849281, but we merged that thread hither)
  • nejsjsjsbsb 2y ago
    What is going on: the internet is letting you know all this shit. Imagine you had a ticker feed of every story amongst the 8bn. That would be a crazy story per millisecond.
  • templeOSdotcom 2y ago
    People love to fall into these sort of traps where they convince themselves they are fighting for some sort of cause. The more hopeless the better.
• thehappyfellow 2y ago
  For related background read the (horrifying) description of Leverage, a “research” institution with links to Zizians: https://medium.com/@zoecurzi/my-experience-with-leverage-research-17e96a8e540b https://medium.com/@zoecurzi/my-experience-with-leverage-res... There’s an undercurrent of cults and cult-like institutions in the rationalist crowd (think: lesswrong.com folks) and this is one instance of this.
  • matthewdgreen 2y ago
    I think it’s worth discussing the fact that many folks in EA- and rationalist-adjacent circles are deeply panicked about developments in AI, because they believe these systems pose a threat to human existence. (Not all of them, obviously. But a large and extraordinarily well-funded contingent.) The fear I have with these organizations is that eventually panic - in the name of saving humans - leads to violent action. And while this is just a couple of isolated examples, it does illustrate the danger that violent action can become normalized in insular organizations. I do hope people “on the inside” are aware of this and are working to make sure those organizations don’t have bad ideas that hurt real people.
    • s1artibartfast 2y ago
      I think this is a variant of Walter Russell Mead's abrahamic bomb [1]. when you remove the theology from Psychology based on Judeo Christian Morality, it recreates it's facsimile In this case, AI judgment Day precedes either eternal damnation or salvation. Ziz, like other "radical rationalists" even believe that the singularity AI will punish people retroactively for their moral failings, such as eating meat. https://www.hudson.org/domestic-policy/abraham-bomb-walter-russell-mead https://www.hudson.org/domestic-policy/abraham-bomb-walter-r...
    • stevenwoo 2y ago
      So my speculation from your comment is the data scientists in the group saw what they were doing up close as leading to something that was anathema to what they wanted the world to be, it seemed like a weird trivial connection in the news article, but in context of violent rejection of AI makes sense. https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/bay-area-death-cult-zizian-murders-20064333.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/bay-area-death-cult-z...
• zozbot234 2y ago
  Relevant link (2023): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/T5RzkFcNpRdckGauu/link-a-community-alert-about-ziz https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/T5RzkFcNpRdckGauu/link-a-com... The top comment has an interesting take: "Unless Ziz gets back in the news, there’s not much reason for someone in 2025 or later to be reading this."
• mickelsen 2y ago
  Some bookmarks from early 2023 that seem relevant now: https://zizians.info https://zizians.info https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/ https://aiascendant.substack.com/p/extropias-children-chapter-1-the-wunderkind https://aiascendant.substack.com/p/extropias-children-chapte... I do not engage with any of those people nor their weird communities.
  • s1artibartfast 2y ago
    Just wanted to say fantastic substack writing. Thanks for linking as I go down this rabbit hole
    • mickelsen 2y ago
      Yeah! I devoured the entire series of posts in one go back then, I had no idea about all the people and their ties. Plus it was a super engaging read, I could imagine being there.
  • guerrilla 2y ago
    Holy shit, there are 7 chapters to that last one. Chapter 1 is fucking mind-blowing. I could never figure out why they were obsessed with Roko's basilisk but it makes total sense now considering how it all started. This is such an epic unbelievable story. We live in this world? Chapter 6 covers how StarSlateCodex comes into the picture, by the way. I always wondered that too.
  • dvaun 2y ago
    I especially enjoy how the author from the substack series described the singularity as “The Rapture of the Nerds”.
    • guerrilla 2y ago
      I really loved the language describing the singularity as "an inescapable runaway feedback loop which leads to the ascension of an enemy god". Beautiful.
  • 2y ago
• runnr_az 2y ago
  Uhhh… what? Is this a Aum Shinrikyo type of thing?
• drawkward 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • zoklet-enjoyer 2y ago
    Nah
• matthewdgreen 2y ago
  From the article: A 2023 post on Rationalism forum LessWrong.com warned of coming violence in the Zizian community. “Over the past few years, Ziz has repeatedly called for the deaths of many different classes of people,” the anonymous post read. Jessica Taylor, a friend of Baukholt’s, told Open Vallejo she warned Baukholt about the Zizians, describing the group on X as a “death cult.” The post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/T5RzkFcNpRdckGauu/link-a-community-alert-about-ziz https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/T5RzkFcNpRdckGauu/link-a-com...
  • downrightmike 2y ago
    [flagged]
• nkurz 2y ago
  Most of the news coverage I've seen of this story is omitting what some might consider a relevant detail: almost all the members of this group are trans. This is a divisive topic, but failing to mention this makes me worry a story is pushing a particular agenda rather than trying to tell the facts. Here's what the story looks like if the trans activism is considered central to the story: https://thepostmillennial.com/andy-ngo-reports-trans-terror-trans-duo-revealed-as-suspects-in-killing-of-a-vermont-border-patrol-officer https://thepostmillennial.com/andy-ngo-reports-trans-terror-... While Ngo's version is definitely biased, and while I don't know enough about the story to endorse or refute his view, I think it's important to realize that this part of the story is being suppressed in most of the coverage elsewhere.
  • icameron 2y ago
    Ngo certainly notes the trans aspect with some charged words. Calls them “leftist trans militants with alleged ties to a trans terror cell.”
  • EA-3167 2y ago
    I don't think it's so much pushing an agenda, as it is avoiding a thermonuclear hot potato of modern life. If you start talking about gender identity, everyone has STRONG opinions they feel they must share. Worse, a subset of those opinions will be fairly extreme, and you're potentially exposing yourself to harassment or worse. If you sound like you're attacking trans people, that's going to end badly. If you sound like you're supporting them, especially as this new US administration takes off... that's going to end badly. So if you can tell the story without the possibly superfluous detail of the genders of the people involved, that's a pretty obvious angle to omit. Andy Ngo is obviously not doing this, but that's really only because he has a very clear agenda and in fact his entire interest in this story probably stems from that.
    • nkurz 2y ago
      Yes, that's a reasonable possibility as well. It's not proof of an agenda, and might be prudent, but I do think it's a form of bias. There's a thin line between skipping "possibly superfluous" details and skipping core parts of a story that might provide evidence for viewpoints one disagrees with. The result is still that readers need to realize that they are being presented with a consciously edited narrative and not an unbiased set of facts.
• oguz-ismail 2y ago
  How does a 27-year-old fail to kill an 80-year-old with a samurai sword?
  • tibbetts 2y ago
    Probably by trying to do it from first principles.
    • Trasmatta 2y ago
      They failed because they didn't fold the glorious Nippon steel themselves.
    • idontwantthis 2y ago
      Living in a container, playing with a Samurai sword… Neal we need you to go on TV and tell these people to quit fooling around.
  • tolerance 2y ago
    I'm sure a historian could give a more detailed explanation, but my guess is that: Once steel meets flesh the Role Play ends and all that's left is Live Action, and to take a life is not a meager task when life as you knew it was a virtual mediation.
  • vdjskshi 2y ago
    [dead]
  • jnwatson 2y ago
    Perhaps they weren't trying?
  • derbOac 2y ago
    I've worked professionally on cases that have parallels. It suffices to say people sometimes have second thoughts in the moment.
    • codr7 2y ago
• ksynwa 2y ago
  I don't understand how the police encountered a bail-skipping presumed dead person at a crime scene and just let them go.
  • mwkaufma 2y ago
    Cops are fundamentally lazy.
    • falcor84 2y ago
      Unfortunately it seems that a cop's laziness is inversely correlated with the melanin in the suspect's skin.
      • mwkaufma 2y ago
        Race as a surrogate for guilt is entirely-consistent with the lazy ethos.
• Spooky23 2y ago
  I’m surprised the killing of the customs officer has gotten so little press. I guess if you want your killing spree in the press, don’t do it in Vermont. The salacious nature of a group of trans cult members killing people across the country is story made for tabloid insanity. The hooks into Silicon Valley and side-quests about AI overlords etc are frosting on the cake.
  • stevenwoo 2y ago
    That murder was the top story on CNN, AP and NPR for about half a day IIRC. It got pushed off because so much happened in other areas nationally. It took about two days for the prosecutors to announce the connections.
• iamthepieman 2y ago
  This story happened in my backyard. The shootout was about 40 minutes from me but Youngblut and Felix Bauckholt were reported by a hotel clerk dressed in tactical gear and sporting firearms in a hotel a few blocks from me. Weird to see a community I followed show up so close to home and negatively like this. I always just read LW and appreciated some of the fundamentals that this group seems to have ignored. Stuff like rationality has to objectively make your life and the world better or its a failed ideology. Edit: I've been following this story for over a week because it was local news. Why is this showing up here on HN now?
  • wetpaws 2y ago
    [dead]
  • dang 2y ago
    (To answer that last procedural question: there have been assorted submissions, but none spent much time on the front page. More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42901777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42901777)
  • k8sToGo 2y ago
    Why does a hotel clerk wear tactical gear and guns?
    • tsimionescu 2y ago
      That sentence was slightly awkward, the hotel clerk reported that those two people were in tactical gear with guns.
  • ddtaylor 2y ago
    What is LW?
    • thomaslangston 2y ago
      Less Wrong
  • 2y ago
• metalman 2y ago
  Holly crap, it reads like the anti Electric coolaid acid test, with petty revenge ,guns, and murder dejour,instead of , instead of, well, an epic road party that is still going......bobby just played the gramys...there were glitches with the sound system and they raised 15 mill I like some of what Aella has written, but had no idea that ,Rationalists, had just rebranded nialistic hate.....so cleverly.
  • sixo 2y ago
    Well they haven't. It's one group of fewer than 10 people, considerably removed from "the rationalists" as this point.
    • metalman 2y ago
      Stuff like what is happening around ziz, the zit, is all too common. I have met and conversed with people out on the fringes of the intelectual edge,in protest camps and anarchist communes,etc,and they very much discuss and rationalise getting there murder on.....when not bieng all glowy about aliens...and rightious about gender(s), so many)) pronouns, and the rest, but since they play chess a lot, they are rational, right. Guaranteed there will/is more of the same.
• apsec112 2y ago
  This summary doc, "The Zizian Facts", is another collection of relevant information from various sources (including recent events): https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1RpAvd5TO5eMhJrdr2kz43dxT3nNm0XtuPcaW9kBIZL8/mobilebasic https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1RpAvd5TO5eMhJrdr2kz4...
• romaaeterna 2y ago
  These people? https://nypost.com/2025/01/30/us-news/killing-of-border-patrol-agent-appears-linked-to-zizian-radical-leftist-trans-cult/ https://nypost.com/2025/01/30/us-news/killing-of-border-patr... Is the appellation in the headline, "radical vegan trans cult," a true description? > Authorities now say the guns used by Youngblut and Bauckholt are owned by a person of interest in other murders — and connected to a mysterious cult of transgender “geniuses” who follow a trans leader named Jack LaSota, also known by the alias “Ziz.” Is all this murder stuff broadly correct?
  • Trasmatta 2y ago
    The NY Post tried to frame them as "radical leftist", but that's a big stretch. I don't think most rationalists would consider themselves leftist. The article also seems to be leaning into the current "trans panic" - pretty typical for the NYP.
    • romaaeterna 2y ago
      I also dislike Right/Left categorizations. Most people don't even know the history of the terms and their roots in the French Revolution. Though the "Cult of Reason" established then certainly had the Left categorization at the time. But is the trans element not a major part of this cult? It seemed to be from the linked story in the top link. But if there is something incorrect there, or false in the NYP reporting, you should point it out. If it is a major element of this cult, then far from complaining about NYP, I would complain about any news organization leaving it out of its reporting.
      • brokensegue 2y ago
        I don't think being trans is part of their beliefs or a requirement to be a member
        • romaaeterna 2y ago
          That zizians.info page makes several claims about their beliefs in regards to being trans, and both articles make claims about the number of trans people involved in the events described that, if true, seem to indicate large trans representation. But all of this may be false information. I would like to hear specifics, if so.
• expenses3 2y ago
  https://soundcloud.com/trueanonpod/zizian-murder-cult-1 https://soundcloud.com/trueanonpod/zizian-murder-cult-1 the latest episode of trueanon is about these rationalist wierdos
  • ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y ago
    not very informative, throws a lot of mud
• _zagj 2y ago
  The NYPost has an article about them: https://nypost.com/2025/01/30/us-news/killing-of-border-patrol-agent-appears-linked-to-zizian-radical-leftist-trans-cult/ https://nypost.com/2025/01/30/us-news/killing-of-border-patr...
• dang 2y ago
  After puzzling over the threads on this head-spinning story, my sense is that maybe the most neutral thing to do is re-up this submission of a news report and merge most of the comments hither. The other recent threads are/were: The Zizians (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42898323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42898323 The Zizians and the rationalist death cult - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897871 Suspects in 2 murder cases shared connection to 'Zizian' rationalist group - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42849281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42849281 Edit: I guess we can have the current thread be about the recent events and keep https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897871 for discussing / arguing about the generic aspects. Sorry for the complexity but in this case it appears to be essential not accidental.
  • eqmvii 2y ago
    i’ve seen so many posts about this on HN i can’t help but wonder if it’s a recruiting drive…
    • dang 2y ago
      I'm sure it's just the usual sensationalism, but if there are other recent posts with comments, I'd appreciate links in case it makes sense to merge them. Edit: incidentally, I hadn't seen anything about it on HN until today. A reminder of how much randomness affects these perceptions.
  • abecedarius 2y ago
    The submitter of this story inserted 'rationalist' into the title; it's not in the headline and IMO it's calumny. Would you take it back out?
    • dcrazy 2y ago
      I also inserted “rationalist” into my submission of this story because it’s an accurate description of the group.
• morpheos137 2y ago
  Transgender technology cult that kills people somehow doesn't seem "rationalist" to me but who am I to judge.
  • duxup 2y ago
    With religion I think we largely just go with "this is what the group identifies themselves with / as" and leave it as that. Arguably the politically active "religious right" in the US has long since abandoned most everything Jesus had to offer. We still identify them as such.
    • TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
      They self-identify as such. I call them "anti-Christians" because it's more biblically accurate.
      • int_19h 2y ago
        The problem with this approach is that there are also parts of the mainstream Christian doctrine (both modern and historical) that don't have Biblical basis, Trinity being one prominent example. One could go further still and reasonably argue that most of mainstream Christianity is basically teachings of Paul rather than Jesus. And yes, there are also valid arguments against either one of those points. But to meaningfully engage in such a discussion, one needs to be well-versed in theology - more so than the vast majority of people who self-identify and are normally identified as Christians.
        • o11c 2y ago
          Eh, I don't think the "it's all based on Paul" can be a reasonable argument at all. Even when people do argue it, they only ever allege the same 2 points, which even assuming those points are valid would only be a tiny fraction of Christian belief, both theoretically and practically; you don't need theology for this. Of course, to those whose sole exposure to Χianity is Internet arguments this might not be obvious. The whole focus on "Trinity" is weird but makes a little more sense if you realize it was originally developed to stand against certain heresies, but later mutated (often re-entering those same heresies again). This one is indeed theological ... or perhaps we need a word that is to theology as historiography is to history. But this is diverging quite far from this thread.
• dang 2y ago
  A later article by the same author: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/leader-alleged-bay-area-death-cult-faked-death-sf-20066610.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/leader-alleged-bay-ar.... Probably makes sense to read both or neither.
• deleted 2y ago
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• hello_computer 2y ago
  [flagged]
• Hatchback7599 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • codr7 2y ago
    How about presenting any kind of argument against what seems to be obviously true to anyone who has been paying attention? Nah, just downvote it out of perception and get back to Netflix.
  • dang 2y ago
    Could you please not use HN for ideological battle? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, regardless of which ideology you're for or against. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
    • Hatchback7599 2y ago
      [flagged]
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  How the hell haven't I heard of this? Bizarre!
  • WOnderFullGOnzo 2y ago
    [dead]
• pembrook 2y ago
  What I find interesting about these cases and the seemingly unrelated United Healthcare CEO assassination is that all were committed by extremely online data scientists who went to elite universities. I’ve been fairly skeptical of the right wing narrative that these schools have been “radicalized” (seeing as universities and young people have always been the hotbeds of leftist thought, how soon we forget the hippie movement)…but this definitely has me wondering. Also, why is data science a common thread?
  • CalRobert 2y ago
    When your entire philosophy is a jupyter notebook filled with bugs from beginning to end but you don't know it because you've never heard of a unit test things go wrong.
    • llm_trw 2y ago
      Units tests save lives.
  • jinwoo68 2y ago
    Probably because they are focusing on "artificial intelligence destroying humanity", as the article says? Many data scientists work on AI nowadays.
  • drawkward 2y ago
    Because the size is so small, you can connect many dots.
  • ausbah 2y ago
    a good chunk of the current administration is ivy league trained
  • Muromec 2y ago
    >Also, why is data science a common thread? People on the spectrum as susceptible to mind-viruses and enjoy grand ideas. At least two of them it seems.
• yapyap 2y ago
  what nonsense, the gall to call this rationalist
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• mkoubaa 2y ago
  I'm so annoyed at how popular rationalism is. Human rationality (along with symbolic creativity) is only useful at generating testable hypothesis, not for direct knowledge of reality. Once someone grant the axioms of rationality they become delusional and spiral (half life of around 6 years)
• liftIO 2y ago
  Ziz (the cult leader) had a blog at sinceriously.fyi, where she elaborated on her philosophy. The blog has since devolved into a string of death threads and subsequently been deleted, but anyone who's interested in the backstory can still find some posts on archive.ph (e.g. [1]) and more on web.archive.org. From Ziz and other cult members' writings, it's obvious that the cult has been in conflict with the rationalist community, rather than part of it, for years. It's disappointing but not surprising that SFGATE decided to pin the murders on the rationalist community while contorting their writing to avoid mentioning the elephant in the room: the cult leader is a trans vegan, almost all of the members are also trans vegans, and these are core parts of their ideology. They were discussed over and over on Ziz's blog. In fact, after the katana stabbing and the self-defense shooting by the wounded landlord, another cult member used her blog to blame Zack for the events. Zack wasn't involved, physically present, or in communication with the cult at the time, but he does believe in a different theory of transness than they do [2], so they can't stop being enraged at him. That theory was actually one of the main reasons the cult has split off from the rationalist community. I'm worried that Zack may be in danger. [1] https://archive.ph/jChxP https://archive.ph/jChxP [2] http://unremediatedgender.space/about/ http://unremediatedgender.space/about/
  • cgh 2y ago
    "Trans vegan 'Siths' who kill people with katanas" is not a sentence I thought I'd ever read, let alone type, yet here we are, in the most ludicrous timeline.
    • zozbot234 2y ago
      It's an actual Zizian belief that you must always do the craziest thing you can possibly think of, in order to "collapse" the weight of your current timeline in some sort of totally counterfactual probability space... This is arguably the closest linkage they share to actual Rationalist-ish ideas. (Many Rationalists do genuinely advocate for some sort of improvement to animal welfare - but I don't know of any Rationalist who thinks that an ant has the exact same right to moral worth as the average human, which is the actual Zizian position on the matter - including the "and if you disagree with this, it means you're double-plus nongood" part)
• t_mann 2y ago
  Rationalism? The term has been used a lot of times since Pythagoras [0], but the combination of Bay Area, Oxford, existential risks, AI safety makes it sound like this particular movement could have formed in the same mold as Effective Altruism and Long-Termism (ie, the "it's objectively better for humanity if you give us money to buy a castle in France than whatever you'd do with it" crowd that SBF sprung from). Can somebody in know weigh in? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalism#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalism#History
  • hollerith 2y ago
    Just like HN grew around the writing of Paul Graham, the "rationalist community" grew around the writings of Eliezer Yudkowsky. Similar to how Paul Graham no longer participates on HN, Eliezer rarely participates on http://lesswrong.com http://lesswrong.com anymore, and the benevolent dictator for life of lesswrong.com is someone other than Eliezer. Eliezer's career has always been centered around AI. At first Eliezer was wholly optimistic about AI progress. In fact, in the 1990s, I would say that Eliezer was the loudest voice advocating for the development of AI technology that would greatly exceed human cognitive capabilities. "Intentionally causing a technological singularity," was the way he phrased it in the 1990s IIRC. (Later "singularity" would be replaced by "intelligence explosion".) From 2001 to 2004 he started to believe that AI has a strong tendency to become very dangerous once it starts exceeding the human level of cognitive capabilities. Still, he hoped that before AI starts exceeding human capabilities, he and his organization could develop a methodology to keep it safe. As part of that effort, he coined the term "alignment". The meaning of the term has broadened drastically: when Eliezer coined it, he meant the creation of an AI that stays aligned with human values and human preferences even as its capabilities greatly exceed human capabilities. In contrast, these days, when you see the phrase "aligned AI", it is usually being applied to an AI system that is not a threat to people only because it's not cognitively capable enough to dis-empower human civilization. By the end of 2015, Eliezer had lost most of the hope he initially had for the alignment project in part because of conversations he had with Elon Musk and Sam Altman at an AGI conference in Puerto Rico followed by Elon and Sam's actions later that year, which actions included the founding of OpenAI. Eliezer still considers the alignment problem solvable in principle if a sufficiently-smart and sufficiently-careful team attacks it, but considers it extremely unlikely any team will manage a solution before the AI labs cause human extinction. In April 2022 he went public with his despair and announced that his organization (MIRI) will cease technical work on the alignment project and will focus on lobbying the governments of the world to ban AI (or at least the deep-learning paradigm, which he considers too hard to align) before it is too late. The rationalist movement began in November 2006 when Eliezer began posting daily about human rationality on overcomingbias.com. (The community moved to lesswrong.com in 2009, at which time overcomingbias.com became the personal blog of Robin Hanson.) The rationalist movement was always seen by Eliezer as secondary to the AI-alignment enterprise. Specifically, Eliezer hoped that by explaining to people how to become more rational, he could increase the number of people who are capable of realizing that AI research was a potent threat to human survival. To help advance this secondary project, the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) was founded as a non-profit in 2012. Eliezer is neither an employee nor a member of the board of this CFAR. He is employed by and on the board of the non-profit Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) which was founded in 2000 as the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. I stress that believing that AI research is dangerous has never been a requirement for posting on lesswrong.com or for participating in workshops run by CFAR. Effective altruism (EA) has separate roots, but the two communities have become close over the years, and EA organizations have donated millions to MIRI.
• tester756 2y ago
  What the fuck is this history The more I read, the more I'm confused
  • Muromec 2y ago
    Its like four people from a wierd communuty doing violent shit, but online.
• rachofsunshine 2y ago
  [Former member of that world, roommates with one of Ziz's friends for a while, so I feel reasonably qualified to speak on this.] The problem with rationalists/EA as a group has never been the rationality, but the people practicing it and the cultural norms they endorse as a community. As relevant here: 1) While following logical threads to their conclusions is a useful exercise, each logical step often involves some degree of rounding or unknown-unknowns. A -> B and B -> C means A -> C in a formal sense, but A -almostcertainly-> B and B -almostcertainly-> C does not mean A -almostcertainly-> C. Rationalists, by tending to overly formalist approaches, tend to lose the thread of the messiness of the real world and follow these lossy implications as though they are lossless. That leads to... 2) Precision errors in utility calculations that are numerically-unstable. Any small chance of harm times infinity equals infinity. This framing shows up a lot in the context of AI risk, but it works in other settings too: infinity times a speck of dust in your eye >>> 1 times murder, so murder is "justified" to prevent a speck of dust in the eye of eternity. When the thing you're trying to create is infinitely good or the thing you're trying to prevent is infinitely bad, anything is justified to bring it about/prevent it respectively. 3) Its leadership - or some of it, anyway - is extremely egotistical and borderline cult-like to begin with. I think even people who like e.g. Eliezer would agree that he is not a humble man by any stretch of the imagination (the guy makes Neil deGrasse Tyson look like a monk). They have, in the past, responded to criticism with statements to the effect of "anyone who would criticize us for any reason is a bad person who is lying to cause us harm". That kind of framing can't help but get culty. 4) The nature of being a "freethinker" is that you're at the mercy of your own neural circuitry. If there is a feedback loop in your brain, you'll get stuck in it, because there's no external "drag" or forcing functions to pull you back to reality. That can lead you to be a genius who sees what others cannot. It can also lead you into schizophrenia really easily. So you've got a culty environment that is particularly susceptible to internally-consistent madness, and finally: 5) It's a bunch of very weird people who have nowhere else they feel at home. I totally get this. I'd never felt like I was in a room with people so like me, and ripping myself away from that world was not easy. (There's some folks down the thread wondering why trans people are overrepresented in this particular group: well, take your standard weird nerd, and then make two-thirds of the world hate your guts more than anything else, you might be pretty vulnerable to whoever will give you the time of day, too.) TLDR: isolation, very strong in-group defenses, logical "doctrine" that is formally valid and leaks in hard-to-notice ways, apocalyptic utility-scale, and being a very appealing environment for the kind of person who goes super nuts -> pretty much perfect conditions for a cult. Or multiple cults, really. Ziz's group is only one of several.
• renewiltord 2y ago
  Yeah they're TPOT adjacent. While the original rationalists group were pretty good about watching their biases the later ones are more accurately rationalizers. Some TPOT people have warned them they're making mistakes to no avail. It's just the MOPs, geeks, sociopaths and Eternal September thing again. They all use the jargon and reach absurd conclusions and don't have the wisdom to realize that an absurd conclusion with a sound argument means a false assumption. Just because you say "my priors" like priests say "my prayers" doesn't make you rational. They are in the midwit area where you can reason. The fool dismisses the absurd conclusion because he cannot reason. The wise man because he knows what it means. The average rationalist decides it's true.
• whoknowsidont 2y ago
  This whole story is so bizarre. I honestly can barely wrap my head around it.
  • sgt 2y ago
    It also vaguely reminds me of a Monk episode.
• captainhulllo 2y ago
  [dead]
• ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y ago
  Related thread from a few hours earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897871
• gdevenyi 2y ago
  Coming soon from Scott Alexander: Rationalist Death Cult House Party
• __turbobrew__ 2y ago
  This whole rabbit hole of rationalism, less wrong, and ziz feels like a fever dream to me. Roaming trans veganist tatical death squads shooting border officers and stabbing 80 year olds with swords. This is the kind of thing where it is warranted that the feds gets every single wiretap, interception, and surveillance possible on everyone involved in the zizian movement.
  • nejsjsjsbsb 2y ago
    Split the beliefs from the crime. A bunch of murderers were caught. Given they are dangerous killers, one killing a witness and one faking their death yeah they should get warrants.
    • __turbobrew__ 2y ago
      It appears the ven diagram of the beliefs and crimes overlap quite a bit. Sometimes the beliefs are that certain crimes should be committed. This is a free country (disputably) and you should be able to think and say whatever you want, but I also think it is reasonable for law enforcement in the investigation of said crimes to also investigate links to other members in the movement.
      • nejsjsjsbsb 2y ago
        Probable cause is the key term here. Cops can do a lot without it. They can choose what leads to follow. But not sure what you are suggesting with respect to wiretapping.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • concordDance 2y ago
        > It appears the ven diagram of the beliefs and crimes overlap quite a bit. There are hundreds of thousands of rationalists (to a greater or lesser extent). Very few go shoot people.
• thunkingdeep 2y ago
  [flagged]
• sam345 2y ago
  Doesn't sound rationalist to me (from Ziz quoted section of article linked below): "Ziz Impostors keep thinking it's safe to impersonate single goods. A nice place to slide in psyche/shadow, false faces, "who could ever falsify that I'm blaming it on my headmate!" Saying you're single good is saying, "Help, I have a Yeerk in my head that's a mirror image of me. I need you to surgically destroy it, even if I'm then crippled for life or might die in the process. Then kill me if I ever do one evil act for the rest of my life. That's better than being a slave. Save me even though it is so easy to impersonate me. And you will aggro so many impostors you'll then be in a fight to the death(s) with. Might as well then kill me too if I don't pass an unthinkable gom jabbar. That'll make us both safer from them and I care zero about pain relative to freedom from my Yeerk at any cost." It's an outsized consequentialist priority, even in a doomed timeline, to make it unsafe to impersonate single goods. Critical to the destiny of the world. The most vulnerable souls impostors vex. To bring justice to individual people, from collective punishment." https://openvallejo.org/2025/01/31/zizian-namesake-who-faked-death-in-2022-is-wanted-in-two-states/ https://openvallejo.org/2025/01/31/zizian-namesake-who-faked.... More detail.
  • zoklet-enjoyer 2y ago
    I put this post into Suno https://suno.com/song/13bdb0ef-a219-4a2c-b1bf-646698593e56 https://suno.com/song/13bdb0ef-a219-4a2c-b1bf-646698593e56
    • templeOSdotcom 2y ago
      needs more male falsetto
  • anon84873628 2y ago
    what the heck does any of this mean??
    • Muromec 2y ago
      One of the many rabbit holes, the deeper layers of.
• mordae 2y ago
  When will people learn to identify and stay away from narcissists?
  • MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
    Almost everybody does. But probably there will always be those who don't. Some people's lives are a sad story, and manipulators can learn who is most vulnerable.
• catigula 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • EdwardDiego 2y ago
    What does comment even mean. I assume food was meant to be full, but why "trans"?
• parentheses 2y ago
  Sadly rationalism is a movement where it's easy for someone who doesn't understand to wrap their desires in "rationality" and carry them out without any moral guilt.
• NotMichaelBay 2y ago
  > focusing on matters such as veganism and artificial intelligence destroying humanity Not sure if they are proponents of veganism or if they think it will, in addition to AI, destroy humanity.
• elif 2y ago
  Well should be pretty easy for the prosecutor, it sounds like, by their own definition, they meet the criteria for rico. Should be able to wrap up every zizian and at least shake them down for a plea.
• Frummy 2y ago
  Pardon the cult-like musings ahead of time, but it’s par for the course. My initial thought was rationalism is obviously egoic and selfobsessed, loving and trusting ones own thoughts. Set theory should tell you that you cant make a mental image of yourself to act by that will be more encompassing than the totality of what you are. You can’t build a mental model inside of your ego that will work better than your natural instinct for all interaction with reality. Trust sheer emotion to say that rationalising any loss of life means an upside down philosophy, a castle in the sky. This cult with its ”functional decision theory” […that the normative principle for action is to treat one’s decision as the output of a fixed mathematical function”] makes actions a sort of cold choice without emotion. Like people using religion in war to remain cool when killing, a misuse of a neutral idea such as a mathematical function. But it can’t be that easy to handwave it away. When Aum Shinrikyo was mentioned down below, I changed my mind, there’s no easy answers. A sick leader can justify anything and you can judge any tree from its fruits. From doctrine section on that wikipedia: ”Their teachings claimed a nuclear apocalypse was predicted to occur soon” (Parallell to AI now in rationalism), ”Furthermore, Lifton believes, Asahara "interpreted the Tibetan Buddhist concept of phowa in order to claim that by killing someone contrary to the group's aims, they were preventing them from accumulating bad karma and thus saving them" ” (Parallell to rational behavior guidance gone wrong, these datascientists just lost touch, Norm Macdonald would say theyre real jerks pardon the humor). I just the other day listened to Eckhart Tolles podcast where he talked about doomsday fear, on the bottom of the transcript it says: [“There's also an unconscious desire in many human beings for what we could call the collapse of the human made world. Because most humans experience the world as a burden. They have to live in this world, but the world is problematic. The world has a heaviness to it. You have your job, you have the taxes, you have money, and the world is complex and heavy. And there's an unconscious longing for people in what we might bluntly call the end of the world. But ultimately, what they are longing for is, yes, it is a kind of liberation, but the ultimate liberation that they are really longing for is the liberation from themselves, the liberation from what they experience as their problematic, heavy sense of self that's inseparable from the so-called outer world. And so there's a longing in every human for that. But that's not going to happen yet.”] Eckhart Tolle: Essential Teachings: Essential Teachings Special: Challenging Times Can Awaken Us 30 jan. 2025 Obvious parallell to AI doomsaying can be drawn. When we were children we experienced unfiltered reality without formulas to replace our decisions. But we could even then be wrong, stupid, or convinced to do stupid shit by a charismatic playground bully. But when we were wrong it resulted in falling and scraping our knee or whatever. Theres no reality checks in internet culture bubbles. This is sick people huddling together under a sick charismatic warlord-ish leader whose castle in the sky is so selfcoherent that it makes others want to systemize it aided by the brainwashing methods.[”Zizians believe normal ideas about morality are mostly obfuscated nonsense. They think real morality is simple and has already been put to paper by Jeremy Bentham with his utilitarian ideas. Bentham famously predicted an expanding scope of moral concern. He says if humanity is honest with itself it will eventually adopt uncompromising veganism. Zizians think arguments which don't acknowledge this are not about morality at all, they're about local struggles for power delaying the removal of an unjust status quo.”] Insert Watchmen pic of grandiose narc Adrian Veidt asking Dr Manhattan if utilitarian masskilling was the right choice And then the sleep deprivation indoctrination method dulls even their rationality even further. So they can all become ego clones of the cultleader. And that other link in this thread mentioned other groups of rationalists debugging from demons sent by adversary groups and other psychotic stuff, yeah is it the chicken or the egg where those people gather in a place where people loop with their mind or is it the mindlooping that sends them in a downwards spiral. Maybe we should calculate the bayesian.
• TechDebtDevin 2y ago
  True Anon just did a great episode on this. https://www.patreon.com/posts/121111568?utm_campaign=postshare_fan&utm_content=android_share https://www.patreon.com/posts/121111568?utm_campaign=postsha...
• wanderingbit 2y ago
  I’m from Burlington and a couple weeks ago downtown I noticed a group of 2 or 3 people walking past me in full black clothing with ski masks (the kind you rob banks with). I thought it was strange, having never seen that before except on Halloween, but didn’t think to alert any authorities specifically because Burlington is filled with people dressing differently and doing strange things. But 99% of the time it’s totally non violent and benign. I’m guessing this was them. Scary!
  • taurknaut 2y ago
    I can't speak to Burlington but in philly balaclavas (which is what those masks are called) are quite common and have been since 2020. I suspect this is true of many cities. It's been the subject of some controversy involving mask bans. In fact seeing someone in all black with a ski mask on is a pretty typical, if intimidating, fashion.
• culi 2y ago
  Lots of parallels here with Luigi Mangione who also referenced a lot of LessWrong ideas
  • nejsjsjsbsb 2y ago
    Couldn't be more different.
• cubefox 2y ago
  This title here is editorialized. The original title on the website is "String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'death cult'" No mention of "rationalist".
  • dcrazy 2y ago
    But it’s an accurate and useful summary. This group is specifically organized around the principles of veganism and Rationalism.
    • cubefox 2y ago
      Ziz clearly doesn't consider himself/herself a "Bay Area rationalist": E.g. he/she uses that term twice here, both times to talk negatively about them: https://web.archive.org/web/20230531043930/https://sinceriously.fyi/glossary/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230531043930/https://sinceriou...
• captainhulllo 2y ago
  [dead]
• teractiveodular 2y ago
  [flagged]
• concordDance 2y ago
  Pretty sure Zizians haven't been considered rationalists for at least five years.
• WOnderFullGOnzo 2y ago
  [dead]
• booleandilemma 2y ago
  LessWrong always felt culty and weird to me, tbh. It's why I stick to HN for my social discourse. No central personality drives this place. It's the opposite of culty. It can be a bit of an echo chamber, maybe, but that's a different problem.
• jimrandomh 2y ago
  The HN title added the word "rationalist", which isn't in the source article. This is editorializing in a way that feels kind of slander-y. Their relationship to the bay area rationalist community is that we kicked them out long before any of this started.
  • butter999 2y ago
    It does appear in the article. > The group is a radical offshoot of the Rationalism movement, focusing on matters such as veganism and artificial intelligence destroying humanity. You yourself seem to acknowledge this as a fact.
  • kevinmchugh 2y ago
    Can you tell us more about how they were kicked out? Are there other groups that have been kicked out?
    • habryka 2y ago
      I mean, they seemed kind of visibly crazy, often saying threatening things to others, talking about doing crazy experiments with their sleep, often insinuating violence. They were pretty solidly banned from the community after their crazy "CFAR Alumni Reunion" protest stunt, and before then were already very far into the fringes.
• grensley 2y ago
  I don't know if these statistics are even kept, but the current social environment in the US feels like a ripe breeding ground for cults. I've had so many people in the past couple years be like "I just want to farm with my friends and family and get away from all this".
  • rozap 2y ago
    It has become a bit of a meme lately. I think there's something to be said about a malaise era leading to an uptick in erratic behavior. But at the risk of sounding smug and condescending, as someone who actually bought 10 acres "to get away from it all", I get the sense that the type of people in this saga would pack up pretty quick after a little taste. Lesswrongers aren't exactly known for pragmatism, which is sorta the only mindset that works. There's all this work that you don't know you don't know about. I just fell down the rabbit hole of the ziz lore and goddamn do these people sound inept. Like they couldn't even fix their RV to get off their landlord's property. Lots of quasi-intellectual masturbatory posting and not a lot of skills. All that is to say I'm not super worried about any of these cults really taking off. Logistics remain challenging.
• anon291 2y ago
  [flagged]
• coldpepper 2y ago
  Every time I hear about these "rationalist" guys they always seem completely bonkers. Not rational at all.
  • HKH2 2y ago
    Well, believing that you can be strictly rational is going to lead you down that dark path.
  • nkrisc 2y ago
    That’s because the “rational” part is a personal shroud for their delusion.
• smeeger 2y ago
  this cult leader hatched a scheme to house people on a fleet of boats… this is a great analogy for the rest of the story. she could have just moved.
• jongjong 2y ago
  Feels like we're going back to a period of political decentralization. History suggests that large empires tend to collapse after the rule of law loses its meaning and power. I've been predicting the rise of political gangs for a long time. It already feels like everyone is in a tribe... Now the level of violence is being dialed up and the overarching structures are losing their ability to enforce the law. Look at how many criminals have been pardoned, nobody cares anymore. Nobody even agrees about what a criminal is. How can we reduce crime if we cannot even agree on what it means?
• 55555 2y ago
  Who is Ziz? Is she still alive and active and free? Does anyone know her real identity?
  • some_furry 2y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42902017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42902017 covers your questions
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• awinter-py 2y ago
  most 2025 headline I have yet to see
• lz400 2y ago
  Everytime lesswrong or rationalists or Yudkowski or any derivative show up here, I try to read some of the materials around and frankly, I don't understand most of it, it's all so self referential, full of impenetrable jargon and intentionally obtuse. It sounds mentally deranged and cultish. And it turns out that it can one-shot you into a death cult.
  • guerrilla 2y ago
    Me too, until now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42904925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42904925
• juanani 2y ago
  yikes the results of attention seeking mentally ill being normalized and not getting the attention they feel they deserve for snipping themselves. maybe we shouldnt normalize mental illnesses..
• shadowgovt 2y ago
  By "string" here, we mean one. Not to imply the Zizians aren't embracing some dangerous ideas, but this is the strangest use of "string of killings" I've ever seen. Author could have gone with "wave of violence," but even then they'd be talking about a "wave" of three incidents in three years.
  • titanomachy 2y ago
    Four killings. The landlord in Villejo, Michelle Zajko's parents Richard and Rita in Pennsylvania, and now the border patrol agent in Vermont.
    • shadowgovt 2y ago
      Ah, thank you. Developing story; I'd only heard of the two, and now we seem to be investigating six. Six is a lot, but still a bit unclear whether we have a Manson Family situation or a One Serial Killer Who Read Too Much Nietzsche situation.
• lykahb 2y ago
  This story goes as mad as a sub-plot in a Philip Dick novel. If a lot of weird stuff happens, how would this affect observers' estimation for the probability that we live in a simulation? I wonder if that was one of the intents.
• hollerith 2y ago
  The Zizians were only ever a tiny fraction of lesswrong.com, which gets about 2 million page views per month (according to a site maintainer) -- not as much as HN surely, but not a small web site. Lesswrong.com has been in operation since 2009 and is closely related to the SL4 mailing list which dates back to 1998 or 1999.
  • timmytokyo 2y ago
    And yet so many cults and politically extreme movements seem to originate out of the LessWrong-o-sphere. Strange, that.
    • hollerith 2y ago
      What politically extreme movement do you imagine originated out of Less Wrong? Eliezer is very idealistic and attracted many idealistic young people. On one or 2 or 3 occasions, some man with sociopathic or narcissistic tendencies on the periphery of the community around Eliezer has taken advantage of some of the idealist young people (which BTW got these one or 2 or 3 men banned from Less Wrong and banned from in-person gatherings).
• cess11 2y ago
  So these are related to the "Effective Altruism" far-right movement? If so, I'm not surprised they've started killing.
• zxexz 2y ago
  This story just keeps getting more and more bizarre. Reading the charges and supporting affidavits, the whole thing is reading more and more like some sort of Yorgos Lanthimos film. The rationalist connection - a literal sequel to the 2022 events (in turn a sequel to the 2019 CFAR stuff) - is already weird enough. But I can't get over the ridiculousness of the VT situation. I have spent time in that area of VT, and the charged parties must have been acting quite bizarre for the clerk to alert the police. Checking into a motel wearing all black, open carrying does NOT cut it. The phones wrapped in foil is comical, and the fact that they were surveilled over several days is interesting, especially because it reads like the FBI only became aware of their presence after the stop and shootout? The arresting agent seems pretty interesting, a former risk adjuster who recently successfully led the case against a large inter-state fraud scheme. This may just be the plot of Fargo season 10. Looking forward to the season arc of the FBI trying to understand the "rationalist" community. The episode titled "Roko's Basilisk", with no thematically tied elements, but they manage to turn Yudkowsky into a rat.
• niemandhier 2y ago
  Is there a grand figure of rationalist philosophy? Someone like a rationalist “Satre” or “Heidegger”? I think a lot of the weirdness of rational communities comes from them not properly integrating the existing canon of western philosophy and rediscovering pitfalls. Without the benefit of centuries of discussions it’s easy to come to strange conclusions.
  • guerrilla 2y ago
    Yes, https://aiascendant.substack.com/p/extropias-children-chapter-1-the-wunderkind https://aiascendant.substack.com/p/extropias-children-chapte... I agree with your diagnosis as well. It's Dunning-Krueger. They keep re-inventing the wheel poorly due to their ignorance which is maintained because of their confidence which stems from their ignorance.
    • niemandhier 2y ago
      The link you provided is unsettling. I cannot verify it’s claims, but if true that would indeed explain a lot.
• bagels 2y ago
  Every time I hear about anything related to Effective Altruism, it's because people who believe this stuff have done crimes sufficient to make it in to the news. Are there other contexts they show up where they are not doing crimes, or really non-normative things?
  • killerstorm 2y ago
    Effective Altruists donate to charities which save lives, etc. They help people to choose effective charities using evidence-based approach, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GiveWell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GiveWell But that doesn't get into the news. Saving people is boring. Killing people? That gets the clicks. Suppose you have 1000 people in the movement. 998 well-adjusted people. 1 is a crook who uses movement as a shield. 1 is insane freak. Of course, you'll hear about the crook and the freak. Well-adjusted people are not newsworthy.
• cassepipe 2y ago
  The fact that you can make a cult of the Rationalist movement is truly a testament to the fact that some humans are able to turn anything into a cult If anything, the reading I have done (mostly SSC and LW) have made me less radical and much much more humble
  • timmytokyo 2y ago
    Rationalism has a number of characteristics typical of cults. 1. Apocalyptic world view. 2. Charismatic and/or exploitative leader. 3. Insularity. 4. Esoteric jargon. 5. Lack of transparency or accountability (often about finances or governance). 6. Communal living arrangements. 7. Sexual mores outside social norms, especially around the leader. 8. Schismatic offshoots. 9. Outsized appeal and/or outreach to the socially vulnerable.
• hackandthink 2y ago
  On the fringes of the rationalist community, there are obviously questionable figures who may be playing an evil game (Bankman Fried) or have lost their way intellectually and morally. My impression from occasional visits to astral codex ten, however, is that the vast majority of people are reasonable and sometimes succeed to make the world a better place. Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
  • Hasu 2y ago
    > My impression from occasional visits to astral codex ten, however, is that the vast majority of people are reasonable and sometimes succeed to make the world a better place. This is a blog that for the last several months had a vigorous ongoing debate about whether or not shoplifters should be subject to capital punishment. 'Reasonable' is not the word I would choose.
    • hackandthink 2y ago
      Scott Alexander writes very well, perhaps he is blinding me. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-effective https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-eff...
  • Aurornis 2y ago
    > My impression from occasional visits to astral codex ten, however, is that the vast majority of people are reasonable and sometimes succeed to make the world a better place. The rationalist bloggers are very good at optics and carefully distance themselves from the fringes at the surface. They have a somewhat circular definition of rationalism that defines rationalists as being reasonable, which makes it easy to create post facto rationalizations that anyone who ends up on the wrong side of public opinion was actually not part of their tribe, rewriting any history. The more uncomfortable topics are generally masked in coded language or carefully split off into isolated subforums for plausible deniability. Slate Star Codex (Astral Codex Ten’s precursor) had a “culture war thread” for years that was well known to contain a lot of very toxic positions dressed up in rationalist style language. Around 2019 they realized how much of a problem it was and split it into a separate forum (“The Motte”) for distance and plausible deniability. The Motte was a wild place where you could find people pushing things like holocaust denial or stolen election theories but wrapped up in rationalist language (I remember phrases “questions about orthodox holocaust narratives” instead of outright denial) There’s also a long history of Slate Star Codex engaging with neoreactionary content over and over again and flirting with neoreactionary ideas in a classic rationalist “what if they’re actually right” context for plausible deniability. There have been some leaked emails from Scott revealing his engagement with the topic and it’s been an ongoing point of confusion for followers for years (See https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9xm2p8/why_are_there_so_many_neoreactionaries_in_this_sub/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9xm2p8/why_... ) The history of rationalist blogs and communities is largely lost on people who only occasionally visit the blogs and enjoy the writing style. There is a long history of some very unsavory topics not only being discussed, but given the benefit of the doubt or even upvotes. These are harder to associate with the main blogs since the 2019 split of contentious topics into “The Motte” side forum, but anyone around the community long enough remembers the ever-present weirdness of things like this Reddit thread on /r/SlateStarCodex preaches white nationalism and gets nearly 50 upvotes (in 2014): https://web.archive.org/web/20180912215243/https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6j9yse/what_are_some_true_beliefs_deep_down_you_knew/djde7xb/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180912215243/https://www.reddi...
• overu589 2y ago
  We are not alone in our own minds. There is an exogenous driving us crazy from within.
• spicy-punk-fog 2y ago
  Is this thread an exemplary performance of bleeding edge AI models or just a bunch of delusional e/acc zealots on too much Prozac?
• spicy-punk-fog 2y ago
  Psyops and synthetic narratives out of nowhere always look like this https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=zizian&hl=en-US https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=zizian&hl=...
• pinkmuffinere 2y ago
  In addition to the tragedy of the killings, I worry that this will give rationalism _as a concept_ a bad name. Deep thought is so important to progress, and already is somewhat stigmatized. My church underwent a nasty split when I was a kid, and the reason I heard was “pastor Bobby read too many books”. Obviously it wasn’t as simple as that, but the message was clear — don’t read too many books. I suspect this will interpreted similarly. It feels that our world has a resurgence of anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-data, etc movements. I hate that.
  • rendall 2y ago
    > ...our world has a resurgence of anti-intellectual... That's the US, not the world. There has always been an anti-intellectual strain in American culture.
    • tbrownaw 2y ago
      I believe Stalin's purges included intellectuals as a group. Mao's hundred flowers thing was a purge of people who dared think they knew better than him. Or for current popular things, the US is far from alone in seeing the electorate reject the standard academic position on national borders.
      • kragen 2y ago
        Pol Pot tried to kill anyone who wore glasses, and Boko Haram are literally named after anti-intellectualism.
• gverrilla 2y ago
  "Rationalism"
• habryka 2y ago
  Head of LessWrong and generally active rationality community leader here. Happy to answer any questions people have. These people haven't been around the community for a long time, but I am happy to answer questions with my best guesses on why they are doing what they are doing. They've been banned on LW and practically all in-person things for like 5+ years now. My guess is the reason why they hung around the rationality community this much years ago is just that it's a community with much higher openness to people and ideas than normal, especially in the Bay Area. IMO in this instance that was quite bad and they should have been kicked out earlier than they did end up getting kicked out (which was like 4 years ago or so).
• temptemptemp111 2y ago
  [dead]
• captainhulllo 2y ago
  [dead]
• DrNosferatu 2y ago
  Who are these people? Some sort or EA on steroids? Eugenics? Genuinely curious: what are their typical beliefs?
• bitwize 2y ago
  The more I read about these Zizians, the more I'm reminded of Final Fantasy House, whose members had been led to believe, or at least go along with, the idea that they were spiritual manifestations of Final Fantasy VII characters, and were manipulated and exploited by the house's dysfunctional leader, "Jenova": http://www.demon-sushi.com/warning/ http://www.demon-sushi.com/warning/ But with deadly consequences in the Zizians' case.