37 karma · joined October 12, 2020
Pretty hard to do that when the beliefs explicitly endorse murder. Ziz used to run a blog on which she made thinly veiled death threats, argued for a personal philosophy of hair-trigger escalation and massive retribution, raged at the rationalist community for not agreeing with her on that philosophy and on theories of transness, and considered most people on Earth to be irredeemably evil for eating meat.
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.
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.
This is obviously a "creative" calculation done in order to get the highest number possible, which makes the best clickbait. I'm disappointed that so many Hacker News commenters are stupid enough to fall for this.