The Zizians and the Rationalist death cults

What is the deal with Rationalism and cults?

Greetings from Read Max HQ! Today’s newsletter is a ~4,700-word missive on the “Zizians,” the transcontinental Rationalist cult implicated in at least six murders since 2022. In the piece, I try to explain “Rationalism,” cover the Ziz lore in a fairly straightforward fashion, and understand why Rationalism has been a breeding ground for so many cult-like objects.

A reminder! I’m able to write big slabs of in-depth newsletter like this because roughly 3,000 people out of 50,000 total subscribers currently pay to keep this newsletter afloat. I spent this week browsing some of the craziest forums online, reading some of the most tediously knotty prose imaginable, untangling the multi-state journey of this group to present in at least semi-comprehensible fashion--I was able to do it because I can treat this newsletter as a full-time job. If you’re one of the 47,000 people who’s been reading this newsletter for free, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. If you value this kind of thing (5,000 words about technocults), I’m only asking for about the price of one beer a week or ten beers a year.

On the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration last week, a Customs and Border Patrol agent was killed in a shootout with two unidentified people following an apparently immigration-related traffic stop miles from the Canadian border in Vermont. You could almost hear the right-wing social-news machine salivating with desire at such an easily metabolizable story: “Border Patrol agent killed during traffic stop with migrant suspect in Vermont,” reported the New York Post almost immediately. Blue-check accounts surfing right-wing outrage for clicks were even less restrained, insisting that the killer was an “illegal immigrant.”

But as it turns out, the story was not quite so easily to instrumentalize. Neither of the suspects was a “migrant,” and both were in the country legally: The surviving occupant of the stopped Honda Prius, a young woman name Teresa Youngblut, was an American citizen and computer-science student. The other, who’d been killed during the gunfight, was a German national with a valid visa and a history of employment as a quant and software developer for well-known hedge funds like Jane Street and Radix. Law-enforcement agents had put the pair under surveillance following a tip from an employee of their Vermont hotel, who reported that they “appeared to be dressed in all-black tactical style clothing with protective equipment, with [Youngblut] carrying an apparent firearm in an exposed-carry holster.”

None of the right-wing accounts that had initially been pushing the story seemed to know what to make of this development. Who were these armed programmers, and how did they get into a gun battle with the C.B.P.? Elsewhere on Twitter, however, the new information was clarifying, rather than confusing. “Oh no,” tweeted the blogger Jessica Taylor, once she learned the identity of the dead suspect. “I know this person. Went by ‘Ophelia’ (transfeminine). Was involved with rationalist discourse. Was somewhat of a Ziz fan. Oh no.”

Our alleged shooters--it has become clear over the past week--weren’t the thuggish murderers and rapists of fevered reactionary imagination, but Rationalists: Members of a large and loose community of autodidact and amateur philosophers and activists focused on self-described rationalist inquiry and self-improvement that’s become influential in A.I. research and philanthropy.

“Rationalism,” in and of itself, doesn’t necessarily lead its adherents into violent confrontations with the state. But it’s also been a breeding ground for a number of--at best--cult-like social formations. For their part, Youngblut and Ophelia, as well as suspects and persons of interest in at least three other murders around the country, seem to have fallen in with the infamous Rationalist blogger “Ziz,” who espouses a hardline philosophy of justice and an eccentric theory of cognition, and whose charisma and rhetorical technique is notable enough among Rationalists to have inspired a number of websites and posts “warning” about her influence.

Within six months I feel confident we’ll get at least two, and possibly as many as four long-form reported pieces written about the Zizians--someone has to create the I.P. that can be bought and repackaged for the true-crime streaming docudrama!--not to mention a number of podcasts. (It’s unlikely that anyone trying to explain and understand this story, including your humble newsletter proprietor, will outdo the homies at TrueAnon, whose episode on the Zizians and Rationalists dropped while I was writing this.) For now, I can do my best to cobble together a kind of explainer based on the copious but often impenetrable documentation of the Zizian world assembled by Rationalists and fellow travelers.

A quick note on Rationalists

To best understand Zizians, it helps to have at least a small grounding in the world of Rationalism, which I’m using here as an umbrella term to cover a capacious number of people and groups with overlapping jobs, hobbies, institutions, and interests. (I’m capitalizing the “R” to specify that I mean a very specific contemporary community and school of thought, and not referring to the Enlightenment epistemology, or to any use of reason to pursue or arrive at truth.)

The main idea behind the “Rationalist Movement,” as the community sometimes calls itself, is that human beings can and should develop their reasoning skills to better purse good (personal, political, economic) outcomes. In practice this tends to mean (1) coming up and experimenting with “cognitive hacks” and “de-bugging” tricks to think more rationally and (2) pursuing abstract but meticulously thought-through philosophical games and experiments and then attempting to live in compliance with the (often seemingly ridiculous) consequences of that reasoning.¹ The most famous version of this Rationalist impulse is reasoning yourself into a belief that a godlike computer-based super-intelligence is inevitably coming, and therefore the best use of your time in the present is to devote yourself to ensuring its compliance with human morality.

This is, more or less, what the godfather of the Rationalist Movement, a man named Eliezer Yudkowsky, believes. Yudkowsky is the founder of the LessWrong forums--the main online gathering place for Rationalists--as well as the author of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a series-length fanfic in which Harry Potter applies Yudkowsky’s reasoning principles to the magic world. (HPMoR, as it’s known, is many budding Rationalists’ gateway to the community.) Yudkowsky is also the founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (M.I.R.I.), a nonprofit dedicated to ensuring that “smarter-than-human A.I.” is safe.

Yudkowsky’s long history of banging on about A.I. has helped make both his anxiety about the singularity, and his style of thinking, prominent in the A.I. industry. (OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit, and nearly broke apart in 2023, in part over Yudkowsky-type concerns over “alignment.”) But not everyone under the broad Rationalist umbrella is so intently focused on A.I.: “Effective Altruism,” the utilitarian school of philanthropy that famously lay behind Sam Bankman-Fried’s desire to amass wealth, owes a huge debt to the Rationalist movement (seen in, e.g., the idea of “longtermism”).

And the other key Rationalist institution, the Center for Applied Rationality (C.F.A.R.)--which was founded by a number of prominent LessWrong posters--avoids much A.I. talk and focuses on holding workshops for businesses or interested would-be Rationalists “where we teach and train techniques for forming accurate beliefs, navigating intellectual disagreement, making better use of our internal advisors, developing non-self-deceptive motivation, and building the habit of getting things done.”

Anyway, this should cover enough to follow the rise of the Zizians. If you want a somewhat deeper dive into the world and culture of the Rational movement, I recommend Ellen Huet’s Bloomberg article “The Real-Life Consequences of Silicon Valley’s AI Obsession,” Cade Metz’s New York Times piece “Silicon Valley’s Safe Space,” and Timni Gebru and Émile P. Torres’ paper “The TESCREAL Bundle.”

The Zizians, a sort-of timeline

Ziz, in a booking shot from 2019.

The story of the Zizians, such as it is, begins in 2019. Ziz, a computer engineer, graduated from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2013 and moved to the Bay Area in 2016 with the intent of finding a job and becoming more involved in A.I. safety and alignment initiatives. She seems to have become well-known around M.I.R.I. and C.F.A.R., attending workshops and lecture, but by 2019, after being told by a C.F.A.R. higher-up that she was likely “net negative” to the cause of “doing something about A.I.,” Ziz had become disillusioned with the institutions of Rationalism. She began writing that she’d been convinced of the truth of a former employee’s accusation (made on a now-defunct website located at “miricult.com”) that “numerous MIRI employees, board members, and donors have all had sex with minors below the age of consent,” and that money donated to the nonprofit was being used to cover up these crimes.²

As she became further alienated from the Rationalist scene, Ziz was elaborating on her blog a far-out cognitive model and moral philosophy. As complex and jargon-heavy as much of the writing is outwardly, the gist of what Ziz beleieves is relatively straightforward; here’s an excerpt from a good 2021 gloss by a semi-sympathetic interlocutor who goes by the name Slimepriestess:

Ziz adheres to a moral principle which classifies all life which has even the potential to be sentient as people and believes that all beings with enough of a mind to possess some semblance of selfhood should have the same rights that are afforded to humans. To her, carnism is a literal holocaust, on ongoing and perpetual nightmare of torture, rape, and murder being conducted on a horrifyingly vast scale by a race of flesh eating monsters.

This kind of radical veganism isn’t, in the grand scheme of things, all that strange, especially not among the utilitarians of LessWrong and its associated evirons.³ Nor, for that matter, is Ziz’s well-documented identification with all kinds of fictional characters and dynamics--in particular the evil Sith order of the Star Wars universe.⁴ (Hence the frequent headline description of Zizians as “Vegan Sith.”) More distinctive is what Slimepriestess calls Ziz’s “hemisphere theory”:

Ziz states… that most of humanity is neutral or evil, a combined category she calls nongood. They have let evil social norms siphon off their agency and turn them into puppets of an evil system. They have no free will and are okay being puppets of that evil system because they themselves are either actively evil or just don’t care. […] Ziz believes that good is a property of a person’s core. In her earlier posts… this is defined as a sort of nebulous thing that exists at the bottom of a stack of mental structures. Later posts go on to describe this as the specific property of a hemisphere, as in the kind you have two of sitting in your head. You have a left brain and a right brain, and Ziz claims these hemispheres are each a separate person.

[…] In 1 out of 20 people, one hemisphere will have this defect that causes them to see all creatures the way an average person might see a human child. This makes them Single Good. In 1 out of every 400 people, both of these hemispheres will have this glitch, and the person will be Double Good.

Separately from this, one or both of these hemispheres can be the opposite sex to the body, an “intersex brain condition” which leads one to end up trans or nonbinary. If someone has one hemisphere of one sex, and the other hemisphere another sex, they’re bigender. The Left hemisphere tends to be the male one in bigender humans and the right hemisphere tends to be the female one.

According to Ziz, these two separate hemispheres can be “debucketed” and given independent awareness, not unlike the controversial dissociative identity disorder diagnosis. In 2018, Ziz and some friends experimented with “unihemispheric sleep” i.e., an attempt to put one half of your brain to sleep, as a means of “debucketing.” One friend, Maia Pasek--who, Ziz writes, later “changed ‘Maia’ to just the name of their right hemisphere. And ‘Shine’ to be the name of the left hemisphere”--allegedly died by suicide in the midst of these experiments.

But Pasek’s death didn’t seem to have much effect on Ziz’s developing radical practice. In November 2019, Ziz, then 28, and three associates--“Zizians,” though they probably wouldn’t have described themselves as such--donned Guy Fawkes masks and barricaded the entrance to a C.F.A.R. reunion celebration, refusing to let participants leave. The police were called, a S.W.A.T. team was sent in, and the four protestors were arrested. A transcript of the two-page pamphlet the protestors were said to be handing out is still available online; here’s a selection from the second page:

Eliezer offered us heaven
Ill considered-solace in hopes of heaven worships hell

Two futures only? Extinction vs Utopia
Why two? What really prevents an evil/unjust singleton?
“No motive for predation post scarcity??” - false. Indifference is not enough
1. Evil cannot create (but can capture)
2. Good will destroy hell and punish all those who would build it

Claiming we’re safe because good would destroy hell puts the cart before the horse. Dark gods whisper lies of logical order. MIRI claims to align the seed of power. What is alignment but morality? Who builds the seed of morality now? We are that seed. We are that process created already in motion. Each choices shapes our future.⁵

C.F.A.R. and the broader Rationalist community were sufficiently rattled by the protest that a website was created (at http://zizians.info) warning people away from Ziz. For their part, Ziz and the Zizians were, based on their own blog posts, further radicalized by the aggressive and violent tactics of the police who were called to break up the barricade. They eventually filed a lawsuit against Sonoma County over civil-rights violations.

The Zizians laid low for the next few years, continuing to blog and elaborate their theories of the mind as the pandemic spread across the country. In 2021, another Ziz associate, Jay Winterford, died by suicide; his final blog post refers obliquely to some of Ziz’s philosophical concepts. That same year, Ziz and another C.F.A.R. protest arrestee, Gwen Danielson, skipped bail and failed to show up to their court dates. In November, the group’s lawyer attested in a filing that Ziz had apparently died in a boating accident, and that Danielson had disappeared and was rumored to have killed herself at the age of 28.

Around the same time, the other two Zizian arrestees--Emma Borhanian, 31, and a 27-year-old who goes by “Somni”--were, along with someone called Suri Dao, involved in an altercation with their landlord, an 80-year-old man named Carl Lind who’d opened up some property to RVs and container housing. Lind had been attempting to evict the Zizians, who were supposedly in arrears; in November 2022, a few days before law enforcement was scheduled to undertake the eviction, Somni stabbed Lind through the chest with a samurai sword. Lind in turn shot Somni and Borhanian; Borhanian later died of her wounds, while Lind and Somni survived.

And who else was at the scene? None other than Ziz and Danielson, still quite alive. (Danielson’s name was apparently on the lease.) According to SefaShapiro’s meticulous writeup of Zizian activities over the last few years:

Someone I know contacted the police to learn more, and was told that Solano County law enforcement encountered Ziz at the scene, and were aware that Ziz had skipped bail and had a warrant out for her arrest. Bizarrely, however, they didn’t arrest Ziz. Allegedly Ziz said she was in pain and that she needed to go to the hospital, and the police didn’t want the extra trouble of waiting for Ziz to be discharged.

Bizarre, indeed. Just a few weeks later, Ziz was arrested in Pennsylvania for obstruction of justice and disorderly conduct in connection with the double homicide of Richard Zajko, 72, and Rita Zajko, 69. The Zajkos’ daughter, Michelle, who went by “plum” online, is a friend of Ziz who once wrote a blog post describing Ziz’s attempts to convince her to murder Ziz’s mentor Alice; according to SefaShapiro, Pennsylvania police have said that Ziz, Michelle, and a third person named Daniel Blank were “very plausibly involved in the double homicide.”

Ziz was released by Pennsylvania authorities in mid-2023, and the Zizians were largely unheard from for the next 18 months. Then, on January 17, three days before the Vermont shootout, Carl Lind, the Zizians’ former landlord, was stabbed to death in Vallejo. A week later, cops arrested a 22-year-old data scientist named Maximilian Snyder--who had previously applied for a marriage license with Teresa Youngblut in Washington state in November.

Meanwhile, Michelle Zajko, who owns property in Vermont not far from the location of the shootout, is back in the news--because she appears to have purchased the guns that Ophelia and Youngblut were carrying last Monday and has been named a person of interest in the shooting. In a court filing from earlier this week, the prosecutor on Youngblut’s case obliquely referenced Ziz, who’s clearly of interest to law enforcement now:

Both Youngblut and the person who allegedly purchased the firearms used in the Vermont shooting, Lasher wrote, were “acquainted with and have been in frequent contact with an individual who was detained by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania during that homicide investigation; that individual is also a person of interest in a homicide investigation in Vallejo, California.”

Ziz, as far as I know, as still at large.

What’s with all the Rationalist cults?

The Zizians, believe it or not, are not the only cult-like groupuscule to have emerged from the heady stew of the Rationalist community. In 2021, Zoe Curzi wrote a long Medium post about her time at the Rationalism-adjacent nonprofit Leverage Research, which held “2–6hr long group debugging sessions in which we as a sub-faction (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,” and whose employees “genuinely thought we were going to take over the US government.”

That essay inspired a LessWrong post from Jessica Taylor about her experiences at M.I.R.I. and C.F.A.R., where “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,” she writes. In the comments at the time, 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 named Michael Vassar⁶:

Jessica was (I don't know if she still is) part of a group centered around a person named Vassar, informally dubbed "the Vassarites". Their philosophy is complicated, but they basically have a kind of gnostic stance where regular society is infinitely corrupt and conformist and traumatizing and you need to "jailbreak" yourself from it (I'm using a term I found on Ziz's discussion of her conversations with Vassar; I don't know if Vassar uses it himself). Jailbreaking involves a lot of tough conversations, breaking down of self, and (at least sometimes) lots of psychedelic drugs.

Vassar ran MIRI a very long time ago, but either quit or got fired […] Since then, he's tried to "jailbreak" a lot of people associated with MIRI and CFAR - again, this involves making them paranoid about MIRI/CFAR and convincing them to take lots of drugs. The combination of drugs and paranoia caused a lot of borderline psychosis, which the Vassarites mostly interpreted as success ("these people have been jailbroken out of the complacent/conformist world, and are now correctly paranoid and weird"). Occasionally it would also cause full-blown psychosis, which they would discourage people from seeking treatment for, because they thought psychiatrists were especially evil and corrupt and traumatizing and unable to understand that psychosis is just breaking mental shackles.

Taylor wrote a follow-up post disputing Alexander’s account of the situation; 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!

Why does Rationalism have a tendency to produce cults, or at least cult-like clusters? The basic answer, I think, is that the whole Rationalist program effectively generates potential cult subjects. Here, to give an example, is an excerpted list of personal qualities that make for a likely Rationalist:

LessWrong is a good place for someone who:

• values curiosity, learning, self-improvement, figuring out what's actually true (rather than just what you want to be true or just winning arguments)

• will change their mind or admit they're wrong in response to compelling evidence or argument

• wants to work collaboratively with others to figure out what's true […]

• is nerdy and interested in all questions of how the world works and who is not afraid to reach weird conclusions if the arguments seem valid

These are all good qualities individually. But as a whole package what you have is a person convinced of their own inadequacy, eager for social connection and personal development, and endlessly persuadable by sophistry. Feeling comfortable with your own epistemological position, even if you know it’s flawed, is not the preferred mode for Rationalist development, but it’s pretty foundational to building a stable sense of self. By the same token, the ability to dismiss an argument with a “that sounds nuts,” without needing recourse to a point-by-point rebuttal, is anathema to the rationalist project. But it’s a pretty important skill to have if you want to avoid joining cults.

Just based on its name and its most prominent interests, it’s easy to imagine the Rationalist Movement as a kind of empirically grounded alliance of engineers promoting the scientific method. And there are certainly groups underneath the big Rationalist umbrella for whom that is a fair description. But when you poke around a little bit--when you read about how “Rationalism” plays out in its communities in practice--the “movement” starts to feel a little less STEM and a lot more New Age: A suspect program for self-improvement, with existential stakes, a strong emphasis on self-experimentation, and a deleterious commitment to openness. In this sense its predecessors are not really the original enlightenment rationalists, but the dubious touchstones of ‘60s-hangover California--Scientology and Dianetics, Werner Erhard and est, the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Manson Family.

1. As a consequence of this approach to thinking and life, rationalists are, as a rule, unbelievably prolix, wall-eyed, and tedious writers, and also polyamorous.

2. Without endorsing any of the specific accusations of the MIRIcult website, it’s worth noting that there is a lot of credible reporting about sexual assault and misconduct around C.F.A.R., M.I.R.I, and the Rationalist scene:

On the extreme end, five women, some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they fear retribution, say men in the community committed sexual assault or misconduct against them. In the aftermath, they say, they often had to deal with professional repercussions along with the emotional and social ones. The social scene overlapped heavily with the AI industry in the Bay Area, including founders, executives, investors and researchers. Women who reported sexual abuse, either to the police or community mediators, say they were branded as trouble and ostracized while the men were protected.

In 2018 two people accused Brent Dill, a rationalist who volunteered and worked for CFAR, of abusing them while they were in relationships with him. They were both 19, and he was about twice their age. Both partners said he used drugs and emotional manipulation to pressure them into extreme BDSM scenarios that went far beyond their comfort level. In response to the allegations, a CFAR committee circulated a summary of an investigation it conducted into earlier claims against Dill, which largely exculpated him. “He is aligned with CFAR’s goals and strategy and should be seen as an ally,” the committee wrote, calling him “an important community hub and driver” who “embodies a rare kind of agency and a sense of heroic responsibility.” (After an outcry, CFAR apologized for its “terribly inadequate” response, disbanded the committee and banned Dill from its events. Dill didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

3. The Zizians.info site claims that Zizians “do not think it is ever valid to surrender. The reasoning goes that if someone is trying to extract a surrender from you, giving in is choosing a strategy that gets coerced into surrender. If you fight bitterly you prevent the coercion in the first place by making it too costly to fight you.” That sounds like something Ziz might say or believe, but I can’t find any specific reference to it in her own writing.

4. From a 2022 blog comment:

Something I don’t think I ended up writing, was a random conversation on what it meant to be good and a Sith. In which I said, something like, well, I’m doing whatever I want, no matter what, which in my case is good things. Darth Sidious said there was only one reality of the Sith, that there can be only two. And he himself broke that rule left and right. I guess he wanted to. So that basically says what a Sith is on a meta level.

I said something like I claimed the mantle of a Sith because I wanted to, and if any evil Sith thought I was breaking the rules, abusing and tarnishing the concept, they’d have to come try and kill me, try and stop me, and if I won, then I got to decide what a Sith was, just as every Sith in Star Wars wanted to hijack the entire Sith “order”.

5. This has the cadence of a Dr. Bronner or a Gene Ray, but if I’m being honest it’s only slightly more impenetrable to me than a lot of Rationalist blogging, and similarly reliant on insider-y jargon and concepts that will only really make sense to people who are themselves knee-deep in Rationalist argumentation. (E.g., “singleton,” a term coined by the Rationalist-aligned Oxford philospher Nick Bostrom, which means “a world order in which there is a single decision-making agency at the highest level”--i.e., a post-singularity superintelligence.)

6. Vassar appears prominently in Sam Frank’s 2015 Harper’s article “Come With Us if You Want to Live,” an early documentation of the eschatological Rationalist scene that also features soon-to-be-famous characters like Blake Masters:

After sitting through an hour of “The Transformation of Humankind — Extreme Paradigm Shifts Are Ahead of Us,” I left the auditorium of Alice Tully Hall. Bleary beside the silver coffee urn in the nearly empty lobby, I was buttonholed by a man whose name tag read michael vassar, metamed research. He wore a black-and-white paisley shirt and a jacket that was slightly too big for him. “What did you think of that talk?” he asked, without introducing himself. “Disorganized, wasn’t it?” A theory of everything followed. Heroes like Elon and Peter (did I have to ask? Musk and Thiel). The relative abilities of physicists and biologists, their standard deviations calculated out loud. How exactly Vassar would save the world. His left eyelid twitched, his full face winced with effort as he told me about his “personal war against the universe.” My brain hurt. I backed away and headed home.

But Vassar had spoken like no one I had ever met, and after Kurzweil’s keynote the next morning, I sought him out. He continued as if uninterrupted. Among the acolytes of eternal life, Vassar was an eschatologist. “There are all of these different countdowns going on,” he said. “There’s the countdown to the broad postmodern memeplex undermining our civilization and causing everything to break down, there’s the countdown to the broad modernist memeplex destroying our environment or killing everyone in a nuclear war, and there’s the countdown to the modernist civilization learning to critique itself fully and creating an artificial intelligence that it can’t control. There are so many different — on different timescales — ways in which the self-modifying intelligent processes that we are embedded in undermine themselves. I’m trying to figure out ways of disentangling all of that. . . .

“I’m not sure that what I’m trying to do is as hard as founding the Roman Empire or the Catholic Church or something. But it’s harder than people’s normal big-picture ambitions, like making a billion dollars.”