Police arrest apparent leader of 'Zizian' group
pressdemocrat.com
pressdemocrat.com
If at the apex of an organization you have a person who has organized his life in such a way as to have sex with several other people, and if many people involved in the movement pay a tithe to the organization or charities it designates, and if many of the members of this organization go crazy thinking about the impending hell (of AGI), how is this different from a cult?
She also recruited some of her cult members from the community (not sure which ones).
So, if you want, you can frame it as the rationalist community being a dangerous place that attracts sick people. Or you could frame is as anarchists being violent, vegans being intolerant, or trans women being crazy... because the Zizans are all of that. Everyone is free to chose their own story about them.
It may or may not be important that most rationalists / anarchists / vegans / trans women are not crazy murderers, so maybe the story is mostly about Ziz being Ziz and succeeding to get a few (less than ten) followers.
I suspect that as with many off-shots they hate the original community.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/vermont-border-agent-death-expo... is a better, longer form of this article
It seem they were a fan of Eliezer Yudkowsky and maybe Nick Bostrom (although a bit unclear) but they hate MIRI
LessWrong has a summary of their involvement: https://www.lesswrong.com/w/j-lasota-ziz
Calling themselves rationalists are more ironic than a concentration camp having a sign promising freedom to those who work.
A corrupt politician might say, 'everyone is corrupt'. Now their flaw is wiped away, in a relative sense. But it's not true.
It just takes time and/or the right circumstances.
This includes propaganda.
Some quotes:
> (Alignment Group) would attempt to articulate a ‘demon’ which had infiltrated our psyches from one of the rival groups, its nature and effects, and get it out of our systems using debugging tools
> there were also psychotic breaks involving demonic subprocess narratives,” and where people in positions of power would “debug” underlings. “I experienced myself and others being distanced from old family and friends, who didn't understand how high-impact the work we were doing was,”
> Scott Alexander, maybe the most prominent Rationalist besides Yudkowsky, suggested that the problem was not really M.I.R.I. or C.F.A.R. so much as that Taylor was in a cult-like group centered around a former M.I.R.I. head
> I don’t know that I have the patience or energy to really get to the bottom of it all except to say: It all kinda sounds pretty culty to me! And I haven’t even gotten into the Burning Man camp Black Lotus or the Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth
etc
[1] https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-zizians-and-the-rationali...
> The Zizians, believe it or not, are not the only cult-like groupuscule to have emerged from the heady stew of the Rationalist community
Many communities have cultlike offshoots. What frequency, what proportion are we talking about? And surely the fact that mainstream Rationalists have been loudly denouncing and warning people about the Zizians for the past 5 years counts for something.
> (Alignment Group) would attempt to articulate a ‘demon’ which had infiltrated our psyches from one of the rival groups, its nature and effects, and get it out of our systems using debugging tools
> there were also psychotic breaks involving demonic subprocess narratives,” and where people in positions of power would “debug” underlings.
Yeah, that's crazy. I don't think any of the people I know would get involved in anything like that. Again, is that "normal Rationalists" or is that what a snake-handler sect is to Christians?
> I don’t know that I have the patience or energy to really get to the bottom of it all except to say: It all kinda sounds pretty culty to me!
This is the kind of thing you'd say if you wanted to smear a group but knew the dirt was actually pretty limited.
My personal view is that Rationalism is more like a religion, and there are spin-offs that are cults.
> And surely the fact that mainstream Rationalists have been loudly denouncing and warning people about the Zizians for the past 5 years counts for something.
Religions usually are very vocal to denounce breakaways as apostates.
The OP said:
> If at the apex of an organization you have a person who has organized his life in such a way as to have sex with several other people, and if many people involved in the movement pay a tithe to the organization or charities it designates, and if many of the members of this organization go crazy thinking about the impending hell (of AGI), how is this different from a cult?
It seems your main objection is to the "many" word in "if many of the members of this organization go crazy".
>> It all kinda sounds pretty culty to me!
> This is the kind of thing you'd say if you wanted to smear a group but knew the dirt was actually pretty limited.
People can read what this "it sounds pretty culty to me" was about and decide for themselves: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pQGFeKvjydztpgnsY/occupation...
Some quotes:
> (The way the page is written, I get the impression that the word "infohazardous" markets the content of the glossary as "extra powerful and intriguing occult material", as I noted is common in my recent post about infohazards.)
> Given that I thought I may had started World War 3 and was continuing to harm and control people with my mental powers, I seriously considered suicide.
> There is a very disturbing possibility (with some evidence for it) here, that people may be picked off one by one (by partially-subconscious and partially-memetic influences, sometimes in ways they cooperate with, e.g. through suicide), with most everyone being too scared to investigate the circumstances.
etc etc
Decide for yourself if "pretty culty" is a reasonable label.
That isn't to say rationalists on the whole are one thing or another, but rather my hypothesis is as society gets more desperate and divided this kind of order is a natural consequence.
I have met a few "rationalist" types, and I went to a "rationalist" meetup in San Francisco, although they called it something else and didn't care for that label, but couldn't really get other people to stop calling them that.
The overall vibe was like a tech meetup crossed with a church picnic. There were a lot of programmers and grad students there to do a little professional networking, talk about books they like, whether they should be donating to charity a little, which charities worked best, and how to avoid throwing away the leftover cookies.
The subject of AI millennialism was not broached in my presence, all though I did meet some people who were working on AI. If there were any psychos or cult leaders there (or trans people for that matter), I didn't notice, and no one tried to recruit me to anything. It was a totally normal and pleasant experience.
Probably not, at least not here.
This AGI doomerism, which is now also popularized on YouTube etc, is very closely related to the kind of existential questions that mentally unstable people probably ask themselves.
The bar of entry is pretty low, as you need no skills really. You can bootstrap ideas that sound convincing to yourself from nothing pretty quick. That's my hot take anyways.
Unless you mean the folks who believe AI will become AGI and start hurting people directly. Those folks are pretty fringe.
By "AI-doomer", I mean any person or group that believes that AI research is a threat to human survival.
The Zizians and the rationalist death cult - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897871 - Feb 2025 (205 comments)
String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42877910 - Jan 2025 (858 comments)
[1] More history here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42902731
Rationalism (in its current form) has been around since long before someone on the internet became famous for their epic-length Harry Potter fanfiction, and it will continue to exist long after LessWrong has become a domain parking page.
Hope is not an ideology, but I would be interested to see what kind of source you have on that.
Ideology is not the only motivation: many here hope to profit personally from the continued rapid development of AI.
Totally recommend the read!
https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-zizians-and-the-rationali...
And can you quote the part of the web page you consider relevant to the not-true thing?
Eh? Can you link a source on this, preferably one that defines 'leftism' as well?
Ideology might be necessary for healthy human mental functioning. I'm not trying to make anyone feel bad for having a commitment to an ideology. But there is so much scorn of the rationalist community here in this comment section that rather than reply to every falsehood and every exaggeration, I thought it would be more effective to point out that a commitment to and identification with technological progress can rise to the level of an ideology.
I kind of wish I hadn't brought up ideology here: it would probably have sufficed for me to point out that many here on HN hope to strike it rich (and many who hope to make a career) in the AI boom and to point out why these many would see the rationalist community as an enemy.
This is (1) a thorough write-up (2) with quotes/info multiple sources (3) whose author is NOT affiliated with any of these communities.
A warning about them, started over five years ago.
You could say "a group of people think that being smart gives them magic powers, and that most people are evil zombies, but they think everyone in their own special group is good and can do whatever they want" but you lose a lot of nuance.
I expect you are simply trolling, but for those that are not aware ELI5 has been defined in popular culture for well over a decade.
This is what it created:
A journalist wrote a long article about a weird, extreme group called the “Zizians.” They’re a mix of radical thinkers from the Rationalist movement—a community of people obsessed with using logic to solve big problems, like AI safety or moral philosophy. The Zizians, led by a person named Ziz, took these ideas to an extreme, combining them with unusual beliefs about morality, consciousness, and even Star Wars-like "Sith" philosophy.
This group has been connected to multiple violent incidents, including murders and standoffs with police. Some of its members have been arrested, gone into hiding, or mysteriously died. The author explains that Rationalist groups, while not inherently violent, often attract highly analytical but socially disconnected people, making them vulnerable to cult-like thinking.
The article also touches on how similar communities—like Effective Altruists and AI researchers—can sometimes create intense, insular environments that lead to extreme behavior. Basically, the Zizians are an example of how even smart, logical people can end up in very bizarre and dangerous places when they take ideas too far.
So these guys were being surveilled for being armed and decked out in tactical gear, so the authorities send in a lone traffic cop to pull them over? And predictably, the cop is killed.
This isn't the first time I've heard of this kind of thing happening. That agent was basically set up to die, sacrificed like a pawn by his superiors playing a sick game of chess. The same thing happened to Darian Jarott, who was directed by his boss to arrest an armed and dangerous meth smuggler without being briefed of the danger, despite the fact that the danger was clearly understood by his superiors (a tactical team with medics were stationed nearby, but Jarott was sent in alone without knowledge of this.) The meth smuggler stepped out of his truck with an AR-15, taking Jarott completely by surprise, and murdered him. The meth smuggler was then chased down and killed by the other officers and agents.
It was more than one agent who pulled them over, and it isn't clear they were pulled over as a result of being put under surveillance.
Was there any indication the police was "sent" to pull them over, rather than some sort of routine traffic stop? The article mentions the DHS surveillance was only "periodic", which implied they weren't really keeping tabs on them 24/7.
Do you think that if the meth smuggler had been met by two or more officers he would have acted differently?
It's a lot more likely that he just didn't know rather than some conspiracy for unknown purposes.
Having many adjectives is nice, because it allows everyone to make this story be about their favorite topic.
https://thepostmillennial.com/andy-ngo-reports-trans-terror-...
At every turn the purpose of the piece is demonize trans people, even if it got the facts right.
Of course, this only works as long as the reader is aware of the bias, so your comment is a valid warning in that respect.
This is absolutely nonsensical. No amount of watching InfoWars can help you understand global warming or the operations of FEMA.
Bad information isn't like the "picking stocks" problem where being reliably wrong can be mapped to being right. Enough bias just comprehensively ruins the data.
For example, not every article about the Zizians mentions their gender identity. But the right wing articles do. If you only read some news sources, you would miss this bit of information. Is it relevant to the story? Maybe, maybe not – that’s up to the reader to decide. Is it relevant to the narrative that will take hold as it propagates throughout social media? Yes absolutely. And the fact that only one side mentions it means it’s even more likely to become a central point of contention, because each side will weaponize it against the other. The right will claim the left is hiding it and the left will claim the right is unnecessarily elevating it. In the end, it will become the most controversial (and therefore popular) part of the narrative, and the hook of engagement bait that keeps the story going.
You wouldn’t be able to anticipate this if you only read a few mainstream left-leaning articles about the story. And there is value to anticipating these narratives because if you catch them early, you know to ignore them as they expand into a larger waste of time.
But regardless of his political opinions, has anything he said been false?
G.K.Chesterton knew it, 100 years ago:
"... insanity is often marked by the dominance of reason and the exclusion of creativity and humour. Pure reason is inhuman. The madman’s mind moves in a perfect, but narrow, circle, and his explanation of the world is comprehensive, at least to him."
It's a very common failure mode, in fact. We tend to swipe inconvenient emotions under the rug, into our subconscious basement. Those emotions don't disappear, and their fumes start poisoning the mind, who believes that it sees clearly. Instead, it quickly surrounds itself with a shell of illusion. In that imaginary castle it sits and slowly goes insane. A simple self-test is asking yourself: do you feel compassion to those around you? Mind alone cannot create compassion, it comes from above to guide the mind. That's also why living a solitary life is a bad idea, especially when your mind wants to self-isolate to guard its precious inner world.
Once I got to this we diverged.
> Mind alone cannot create compassion
How did you come to this conclusion?
https://apnews.com/article/zizians-killings-border-patrol-bf...