The post-rationalist murder spree’s so-called “cult” leader has finally been arrested. What?
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Silicon Valley breeds visionary ideas, and with them, communities of dreamers. But not all those ideas and communities are benevolent. It can be hard to separate harmful movements from aspirational ones, but it’s easy to exploit those who mistake one for the other.
Throughout tech culture, this exploitation frequently generates dogmatic thinking and rigid adherence to a leader or idea — on the most extreme end, you have a group like the “Zizians,” followers of a “post-rationalist” leader named Ziz. The cultlike Zizians are allegedly responsible for a string of violence across the country: at least six confirmed deaths — three within the last month alone — two alleged suicides, and one disappearance. Just last week, Ziz and another group member were arrested in Maryland, charged with multiple minor offenses. Larger indictments seem likely to follow.
Rationalism is a centuries-old philosophical belief that elevates reason over intuition or faith. Modern-day rationalists are often fixated on how we prepare for the Singularity — the moment when, in theory, AI will gain sentience — and it’s in this sense that rationalism has profoundly influenced Silicon Valley. Rationalism takes a fundamentally optimistic, if limiting, approach toward human co-existence with AI.
Post-rationalists, by contrast, tend to think an evil, world-destroying AI is inevitable. A post-rationalist leans into contrarianism, spiritualism, and preparing for the worst. This bleak cocktail has proved heady for the Zizians, encouraging them to embrace grandiose moral frameworks alongside self-destructive ideas like sleeping with half your brain.
It’s also led the group to a headline-making spree of bizarre crimes and murders, all with an elusive leader at the center.
Ziz LaSota joined the rationalist community through its lodestar online forum LessWrong in 2012, when she was in her early 20s. She attended at least one workshop hosted by the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), a rationalist offshoot that some have accused of being cult-like itself, and which in 2014 faced backlash as part of unproven, anonymous child sex-trafficking allegations against its parent group, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI). In 2016, Ziz moved to the Bay Area from Alaska and gathered a small community to live on boats in the San Francisco Bay to avoid paying rent. The boats were short-lived; the community — most of whom were vegan and trans like Ziz — and what grew out of it, persists in some form to this day.
She soon started a niche but attention-getting blog (since deleted but mirrored here) where she divided people into categories like “living,” “vampire,” and “zombie.” She was obsessed with willpower, seemed to view psychopathy as liberational and aspirational, and claimed mind control. “Sometimes cops harass me for wearing my religious attire as a Sith,” she wrote, referring to wielders of the dark Force in Star Wars.
On her blog, Ziz peddled “unihemispheric sleep” (UHS), a real but very unhealthy practice in which people attempt to rest only one half of their brain at a time. Sleep deprivation is a tactic religious cults have long used to render their followers psychologically vulnerable; in this case, it tied into Ziz’s theory that the left and right brain separated people into two different identities.
According to Ziz, humans could exist as two entirely different people, even entirely separate genders with different states of awareness and capacities. (This is very similar to the TV show Severance and a lot like the “two wolves” meme brought to life.) Ziz claimed that these divided inner selves had different cores that were either “good” or “nongood.” The likelihood of a person’s two cores both being good, or “double good,” was infinitesimal. Naturally, she herself was double good.
In her comment section, people now seriously debated the merits of Ziz’s ideas. Some had taken workshops through CFAR, but often directed negative attention their way now. Many commenters were highly educated and working in tech; one was building future-prediction apps and algorithms.
You might not think this sounds rooted in rationalism at all — or even post-rationalism, with its renewed interest in intuition and “woo stuff.” But in fact, modern-day rationalism cultivates all types of wild thinking. On top of having been popularized in its current incarnation through a Harry Potter fanfic, the belief system abounds with fantastical thought experiments, like Roko’s Basilisk — in which a vengeful future AI punishes those who did not help to create it.
Ziz frequently extrapolated these lines of thinking, weaponizing them into potentially dangerous mindsets. “Zizians do not think it is ever valid to surrender,” one pseudonymous ex-Zizian wrote. “Giving in is choosing a strategy that gets coerced into surrender.”
By 2019, Ziz and a handful of her acolytes had transitioned from houseboats to living in an RV lot in Vallejo, another city in the Bay Area, owned by an elderly landlord named Curtis Lind. A nebulous cluster of dedicated followers who had found her through her blog continued to interact with her and the other community members online.
That year, Ziz began claiming that the allegations against MIRI were true and that higher-ups had been blackmailed into a payout. This all led to Ziz shutting down a CFAR alumni reunion in Occidental, California, “to protest the coverup of child molestation” by CFAR attendants, according to court documents. Ziz and followers showed up to the retreat wearing robes and Anonymous-style masks and blocked the entrance. A SWAT team later detained them amid disputed reports that protesters were armed.
Content retrieved from: https://www.vox.com/culture/400722/zizians-ziz-murders-cult-what-happened.
