By Christopher Beam for The New York Times on July 6, 2025.
Quote:At first, Ziz LaSota seemed much like any other philosophically inclined young tech aspirant. Now, she and her followers are in jail, six people are dead, and Rationalists are examining whether their ideas played a role.
This is just for interest's sake. It doesn't seem to belong strictly in any A.I. thread, nor to be directly topical, but perhaps is indirectly topical given the references to Rationalism.
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I've come across a couple of other recent articles in my feeds about rationalism in general that I thought were worth sharing, despite that only the second explicitly mentions the Zizian sect which is the subject of the article in the OP. I found that second article, written by an insider, to be more revealing and intriguing than the first, which nevertheless prevents pertinent facts.
Quote:Many of the A.I. world’s biggest names — including Shane Legg, a co-founder of Google’s DeepMind; Anthropic’s chief executive, Dario Amodei; and Paul Christiano, a former OpenAI researcher who now leads safety work at the U.S. Center for A.I. Standards and Innovation — have been influenced by Rationalist philosophy. Elon Musk, who runs his own A.I. company, said many of the community’s ideas aligned with his own.
Quote:Rationalists often identify as E.A.s ["effective altruists" --Laird]. And E.A.s often adopt Rationalist philosophies. Together, these two movements have pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into companies, research labs and think tanks that aim to build A.I. and ensure its safety. The biggest funders include wealthy tech moguls like Jaan Tallinn, a creator of the internet calling service Skype, and Dustin Moskovitz, a Facebook co-founder.
Quote:“What do cultish and fundamentalist religions often do?” Mr. Epstein added. “They get people to ignore their common sense about problems in the here and now in order to focus their attention on some fantastical future.”
Quote:The rationalist community was drawn together by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky’s blog post series The Sequences, a set of essays about how to think more rationally. You would think, then, that they’d be paragons of critical thinking and skepticism — or at least that they wouldn’t wind up summoning demons.
And yet, the rationalist community has hosted perhaps half a dozen small groups with very strange beliefs (including two separate groups that wound up interacting with demons). Some — which I won’t name in this article for privacy reasons — seem to have caused no harm but bad takes. But the most famous, a loose group of vegan anarchist transhumanists nicknamed the Zizians, have been linked to six violent deaths. Other groups, while less violent, have left a trail of trauma in their wake. One is Black Lotus, a Burning Man camp led by alleged rapist Brent Dill, which developed a metaphysical system based on the tabletop roleplaying game Mage the Ascension. Another is Leverage Research, an independent research organization that became sucked into the occult and wound up as Workplace Harassment With New Age Characteristics.
Quote:The rationalist community as a whole is remarkably functional. Like any subculture, it is rife with gossip, personality conflicts, and drama that is utterly incomprehensible to outsiders. But overall, the community’s activities are less drinking the Kool-Aid and more mutual support and vegan-inclusive summer barbeques.
Nevertheless, some groups within the community have wound up wildly dysfunctional–a term I’m using to sidestep definitional arguments about what is and isn’t a cult. And some of the blame can be put on the rationalist community’s marketing.
The Sequences make certain implicit promises. There is an art of thinking better, and we’ve figured it out. If you learn it, you can solve all your problems, become brilliant and hardworking and successful and happy, and be one of the small elite shaping not only society but the entire future of humanity.
This is, not to put too fine a point on it, not true.
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