I think the fact that Zizians are in large part composed of trans women also leads to some of the susceptibility to cults -- when you're estranged from support networks and going through major life changes it's going to be easier to fall prey to cults, especially those that offer support and housing.
A few years ago, the author Bruce Sterling commented on the Soylent founders that 'it was just a matter of time before they went and got good and weird in the desert,' and that's stuck with me ever since, as, for instance,the 'effective altruists' have managed to find ways to stop caring about altruisism and instead retreat to fanfic pages about robot gods, and shit like this. I poked around the edges of the rationalism movement years ago because, as Max noted, the bullet points on the front door are basically unobjectionable. I like thinking, I like thinking about thinking, I think some better thinking in the world sometimes might make it better, etc. But it didn't take long to reveal that there were core tenets of wisdom, or, perhaps the most zoomed out Bayesian priors, that just weren't in the room- of acknowledging personal and psychological finitude, and uncertainty, and the utility of diversity of ideas, of the necessity of finding people to trust, of sometimes just getting on with it, and all the rest. It was kids in a dorm room trying to make a spreadsheet about who they should date and missing that they were supplying all the numbers and were still gonna have to ask the girl.
I also recall some sociologists years ago presenting a case that the prototypical international terrorist was an engineering student with a fresh and routinely very shallow case of religion, and there might still be something to that analysis...
David Gerard has always been a great source for understanding just how bizarre and ridiculous the Rationalists are. There's a subreddit that used to give real time breakdowns and insights into the LessWrong crew (the appropriately named r/Sneerclub), but I am not sure if it is very active anymore. Also, don't forget, SBF and Caroline Ellison bonded over Yudkowsky's bat-shit Harry Potter fanfic. Digging into the Rationalists, and all of their connections to people and institutions with real influence in our world, will make one question their own sanity.
I think one of the most underappreciated essays ever written about the rat scene is Ozy's "Rationalists and the Cultic Milieu" https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/rationalists-and-the-cultic-milieu "Cultic" in this case means a specific academic thing about "stigmatized knowledge", not "cults". Ozy is also a big-name rat, so it's not like they're making the critique as an outsider. It gets at something similar to the points you're making here.
Ken has also been doing to great research into the Ziz stuff https://x.com/kenthecowboy_/status/1884393311827550716 He's actually been going out and doing legwork, interviewing people, getting court documents, finding info that contradicts previous reporting. Really useful stuff.
The best use of human time is developing "safe" A.I.? I mean... that is a thing a person could think... But what a chore of an idea to start a cult around.
Fascinating, as all cults are fascinating, but this one is so contemporary. I remember reading about Roko's Basilisk back in the day (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk), and that it had driven some people a little bit insane... which got my attention. Like casting a spell or something. (I'm a big fan of sci-fi so I've always loved this thought experiment, but the only real effect it had on me is that I always say please and thank you when I talk to AI now.)
But after delving into some of the links in this article (scary), there seem to be a lot of psychedelics involved in this Rationalist culture (jailbreaking minds? debugging brains? wtf). So it isn't a magic spell after all, it's a culture of instrumentalizing bad trips/psychotic breaks, which is basically what cults have been doing since the 60s innit.
I think psychs are a medical wonder, a recreational delight, and a therapeutic tool of huge potential, but these culty subcultures really give them a bad name... I've met people at festivals who talk like Zik writes, the ones who "have seen the light", and while some are harmless, some of them give me the absolute creeps (they do tend to have the best gear though ngl).
I took a class in college on critical reasoning that introduced me to the effective altruism community and Rationalists. I thought it was brilliant (it’s all about choice! Critical thought! Being logical and aware of your biases! Pro-human despite a holier-than-thou stance against sheeple!). I thought I was going to dedicate my career to AI ethics. COVID happened and I dropped all interest as my values radically shifted, but it’s bizarre to reflect on now. Between Zizians and Luigi Mangione, I had no idea what I was so close to.
i, being of a particular age, immediately thought in terms of scientology, jim jones, and all that. being from texas, i was eating peyote in the age of timothy leary and ended up in northern california doing art at ucsc. and reading this, i could not help but think of julian jaynes and “the origins of consciousness and the bicameral mind”…not that it is completely pertinent to your essay, but that it conjured the thought. were i not on a very limited pension, i would gladly support your work.
Appreciate the bit about cult members generally not being strict conformists. I mean, the whole piece was great, but that bit resonated. People get this sense that cults attract conformists who don't like to ask questions, but the opposite is true. I really wish the modern proliferation of cult-related media didn't just mean spreading myths about cults far and wide, but oh well.
I think there's a simpler foundational answer as to why Rationalism seems to produce cults or cult-adjacent groups. It's perhaps not a comfortable one. Autistic people are overrepresented in rationalist spheres. While some traits of autism are protective against vulnerability to cults, others make autistics more vulnerable. Especially when there are risk amplifiers like trauma history (from what I know, the Zizians, for example, are quite traumatized individuals).
I say this because I've been around the community for a while, am very interested in cults (in an academic sense), and am autistic myself.
To be clear, having trauma doesn't make murdering people an okay thing to do. The Zizians are, in my opinion, batshit.
i think there's also a lot to be said for how the movement attracts people with a lot of math/verbal intelligence and very little social intelligence. makes for people who are easily manipulated, and who will write you a 10,000 word essay about how they're not being manipulated if confronted
I think the fact that Zizians are in large part composed of trans women also leads to some of the susceptibility to cults -- when you're estranged from support networks and going through major life changes it's going to be easier to fall prey to cults, especially those that offer support and housing.
A few years ago, the author Bruce Sterling commented on the Soylent founders that 'it was just a matter of time before they went and got good and weird in the desert,' and that's stuck with me ever since, as, for instance,the 'effective altruists' have managed to find ways to stop caring about altruisism and instead retreat to fanfic pages about robot gods, and shit like this. I poked around the edges of the rationalism movement years ago because, as Max noted, the bullet points on the front door are basically unobjectionable. I like thinking, I like thinking about thinking, I think some better thinking in the world sometimes might make it better, etc. But it didn't take long to reveal that there were core tenets of wisdom, or, perhaps the most zoomed out Bayesian priors, that just weren't in the room- of acknowledging personal and psychological finitude, and uncertainty, and the utility of diversity of ideas, of the necessity of finding people to trust, of sometimes just getting on with it, and all the rest. It was kids in a dorm room trying to make a spreadsheet about who they should date and missing that they were supplying all the numbers and were still gonna have to ask the girl.
I also recall some sociologists years ago presenting a case that the prototypical international terrorist was an engineering student with a fresh and routinely very shallow case of religion, and there might still be something to that analysis...
True anon podcast about rationalists and now a Max Read post on zizians? Is it Christmas??
David Gerard has always been a great source for understanding just how bizarre and ridiculous the Rationalists are. There's a subreddit that used to give real time breakdowns and insights into the LessWrong crew (the appropriately named r/Sneerclub), but I am not sure if it is very active anymore. Also, don't forget, SBF and Caroline Ellison bonded over Yudkowsky's bat-shit Harry Potter fanfic. Digging into the Rationalists, and all of their connections to people and institutions with real influence in our world, will make one question their own sanity.
I think one of the most underappreciated essays ever written about the rat scene is Ozy's "Rationalists and the Cultic Milieu" https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/rationalists-and-the-cultic-milieu "Cultic" in this case means a specific academic thing about "stigmatized knowledge", not "cults". Ozy is also a big-name rat, so it's not like they're making the critique as an outsider. It gets at something similar to the points you're making here.
Ken has also been doing to great research into the Ziz stuff https://x.com/kenthecowboy_/status/1884393311827550716 He's actually been going out and doing legwork, interviewing people, getting court documents, finding info that contradicts previous reporting. Really useful stuff.
The best use of human time is developing "safe" A.I.? I mean... that is a thing a person could think... But what a chore of an idea to start a cult around.
😵
Fascinating, as all cults are fascinating, but this one is so contemporary. I remember reading about Roko's Basilisk back in the day (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk), and that it had driven some people a little bit insane... which got my attention. Like casting a spell or something. (I'm a big fan of sci-fi so I've always loved this thought experiment, but the only real effect it had on me is that I always say please and thank you when I talk to AI now.)
But after delving into some of the links in this article (scary), there seem to be a lot of psychedelics involved in this Rationalist culture (jailbreaking minds? debugging brains? wtf). So it isn't a magic spell after all, it's a culture of instrumentalizing bad trips/psychotic breaks, which is basically what cults have been doing since the 60s innit.
I think psychs are a medical wonder, a recreational delight, and a therapeutic tool of huge potential, but these culty subcultures really give them a bad name... I've met people at festivals who talk like Zik writes, the ones who "have seen the light", and while some are harmless, some of them give me the absolute creeps (they do tend to have the best gear though ngl).
I took a class in college on critical reasoning that introduced me to the effective altruism community and Rationalists. I thought it was brilliant (it’s all about choice! Critical thought! Being logical and aware of your biases! Pro-human despite a holier-than-thou stance against sheeple!). I thought I was going to dedicate my career to AI ethics. COVID happened and I dropped all interest as my values radically shifted, but it’s bizarre to reflect on now. Between Zizians and Luigi Mangione, I had no idea what I was so close to.
i, being of a particular age, immediately thought in terms of scientology, jim jones, and all that. being from texas, i was eating peyote in the age of timothy leary and ended up in northern california doing art at ucsc. and reading this, i could not help but think of julian jaynes and “the origins of consciousness and the bicameral mind”…not that it is completely pertinent to your essay, but that it conjured the thought. were i not on a very limited pension, i would gladly support your work.
These people need God
Appreciate the bit about cult members generally not being strict conformists. I mean, the whole piece was great, but that bit resonated. People get this sense that cults attract conformists who don't like to ask questions, but the opposite is true. I really wish the modern proliferation of cult-related media didn't just mean spreading myths about cults far and wide, but oh well.
I think there's a simpler foundational answer as to why Rationalism seems to produce cults or cult-adjacent groups. It's perhaps not a comfortable one. Autistic people are overrepresented in rationalist spheres. While some traits of autism are protective against vulnerability to cults, others make autistics more vulnerable. Especially when there are risk amplifiers like trauma history (from what I know, the Zizians, for example, are quite traumatized individuals).
I say this because I've been around the community for a while, am very interested in cults (in an academic sense), and am autistic myself.
To be clear, having trauma doesn't make murdering people an okay thing to do. The Zizians are, in my opinion, batshit.
i think there's also a lot to be said for how the movement attracts people with a lot of math/verbal intelligence and very little social intelligence. makes for people who are easily manipulated, and who will write you a 10,000 word essay about how they're not being manipulated if confronted
100%