Comment by liftIO | Hacker News Reader

Comment by liftIO | Hacker News Reader

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

[2] http://unremediatedgender.space/about/

"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.

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)

Yep. I'm not sure about the particulars because while the writing is clearly intelligent, it's also clearly insane. But it does seem that Ziz sincerely believes

1) Most people aren't vegan, therefore the average person is a moral monster barely worthy of consideration. What's one more murder when most people are already mass murderers of animals?

2) Some people in the rationalist community have a theory of transness which doesn't match what we know to be true from our internal experience. Therefore, you can't trust even smart people to get factual questions right. They will get them maliciously wrong. Trust our cult instead.

3) Due to [extremely convoluted game-theoretic reasons], it is imperative that you never back down in any disagreement about values. You must escalate, even if that means killing the other person. You must also take disproportionate revenge on those who have wronged you.

Isn’t that a plot point in “everything everywhere all at once”? Did she watch that movie and take the silliest element way too seriously?

Pretty much, except that Zizianism is like the evil nihilist version of the main character who has just looked into the Everything-Bagel, taken to the most ludicrous extreme; whereas in the movie, the good and empathetic version ultimately prevails.

any violence that is adjacent to rationalism will see a media response like this and a healthy dose of astroturfing to support it. the cia is very eager to make rationalists persona non grata because they provide a cultural nucleation point for anti-AI sentiment. they want to suppress these ideas so that our victory in the AI arms race is secure — unhindered by pesky human rights nonsense. they killed suchir balaji, too.

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