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Hey guys, a new death cult just dropped and I absolutely must insist that you NOT join it.
“Me, join a death cult?” you ask.
But look, I know my audience and I can tell immediately when someone has come up with a death cult specifically designed to appeal to you. Remember the other week when we talked about how shitty Tulsi Gabbard’s cult is? Well this one is almost the opposite of that:
First of all, they’re super into animal rights and champion veganism, which is cool but is also pretty standard for cults, for some reason. Except for the cults that go the opposite way and only eat red meat, like Jordan Peterson’s, and honestly if you have to pick an extreme, go vegan. It’s at least better for the planet, and your heart health.
Second of all, they’re trans. See? I know, even my cis viewers are currently thinking, “Hmm, trans cult? Kind of cool to be honest.” NO! All death cults are wrong. Stop it.
Okay, as far as I can tell being trans or nonbinary doesn’t seem to be a requirement for entry to this cult, but several of the now prominent members of the cult are trans or nonbinary.
Finally, the reason why you may be persuaded to like this death cult is because it’s an offshoot of rationalism, which at its start was a pretty reasonable philosophy that suggested rational thought is the best way to obtain knowledge. Tough to argue with that, huh?
Even after the rationalists forked from the empiricists, “rationalism” is still today considered somewhat analogous to humanism, agnosticism, and secularism.
So: vegan, trans, rationalist? Sign me up! Death cult? NO. BAD. That is the Zizians.
Let me begin with the reason the Zizian death cult is in the news right now. Last month here in the Bay Area, a 22-year-old data scientist was arrested in connection with the murder of an 82-year old man who owned some land in Vallejo where the suspect was living. A few days after that killing, a 21-year-old computer science student was arrested for the killing of a border agent on the other side of the country in Vermont. The two alleged murderers had together applied for a marriage license, and both were associated with the Zizian death cult.
Oh, I debated bringing this up as a possible fourth reason some of you might be sympathetic to this cult and that’s because their victims thus far have been cops, landlords, and themselves, but is that too dark? Probably. I’m going to get angry comments for joking about tragic deaths. Please don’t join death cults. These men did not deserve to die and their deaths are a horrific tragedy. Do not kill people. Thank you.
So! How did we get from the idea of “rationalism” as an elevation of careful thought and reason to advance our understanding to a cult that kills people with swords? To be honest, I found the mainstream crime reports a bit lacking on all this, so I tumbled down a rabbit hole to find some answers. And let me tell you, this one was pretty painful because a lot of these people–the Zizians as well as the “Rationalists” they split from who disagree with them–write like 15-year olds who read Nietzche for the first time and think they’re about to revolutionize the philosophical world.
After spending far too long reading these children’s screeds, here’s how I think things went: the closest thing to a true, accepted philosophy they all get is to what “rationalism” became during the Enlightenment, when, as I mentioned, it sort of forked from empiricism. The two philosophies had a lot of overlap, but the empiricists like John Locke insisted that you could rationally understand the world by observing and testing it with your senses. (And yes, I will be simplifying this dramatically but philosophers, feel free to go nuts in the comments.) Many “rationalists,” however, doubted our flawed senses and thought that we have the tools to understand the universe in our own brains–an innate knowledge that we just need to learn to access.
The “rationalists” I’m talking about today definitely seem to hold onto that mode of thought, though it’s important to note that they are not philosophers doing philosophy as some commitment to furthering understanding, but a loose-knit internet-based collection of people who think they’re smarter than everyone else, and are obsessed with science, reason, and philosophy. They’re spread across a variety of sites and social media networks, and one of the best known areas of congregation was Scott Alexander Siskind’s Slate Star Codex and LessWrong (where Siskind also wrote).
This group has a lot of overlap with advocates for effective altruism, another seemingly reasonable philosophy that led to horrible things, which I detailed back in 2022.
There was also an offline component: here in the Bay Area, the “rationalists” came for their tech jobs, found one another, and formed communes where they could hang out and discuss their super deep, revolutionary theories of mind. Over time, their most notable shared believe became being scared of a future all-powerful artificial intelligence that would torture them to death for knowing that it would eventually exist but not working towards its inevitable creation, with that future torture being used now in the past to convince everyone to work on building AI.
That may seem silly to you and me, who currently understand “AI” to mean “a stupid waste of Earth’s resources that makes pictures of humans with three fingers on each hand,” but this idea that future actions can influence past behavior is central to many “rationalists” understanding of the world. They’ve even given it an official name: Timeless Decision Theory. And yes, they do use “theory” in the same way that creationists use it, to mean “idea I thought of while high.” The idea is that sometimes, you might want to make a decision that is costly at the present (like wasting your time on a large language model owned by Elon Musk) but beneficial or otherwise logical in the long run (because All Powerful Grok won’t torture you to death in the distant future).
Because our choices extend infinitely to the past and to the future, they are obviously of the utmost importance. And so a similar application of Timeless Decision Theory might be that if you care about the welfare of animals and think that going vegan is a net benefit for the universe, to pick a topic at random, you could kill any person who refuses to go vegan. That would influence people in the past and future to go vegan in order to avoid being killed, which would be a good thing.
Oh, but I didn’t actually pick that at random. That’s the stated philosophy of “Ziz,” the “rationalist” who has successfully forked off into their own cult.
I run into a little issue here, because Ziz is a real person with a real legal first and last name that is known, but that first and last name appear to be a deadname, i.e., their name given at birth which is no longer applicable. Some fellow rationalists refer to Ziz as she or her, though I’ve also seen acquaintances and outlets use “they/them.” On the one hand, when it comes to criminals committing crimes, it is helpful to know their legal name, but after thinking about it a bit I decided that that’s helpful for the police and not a YouTuber. So I will call Ziz “Ziz” and I’ll use “they/them” to be consistent throughout this video.
In addition to expanding the use of Timeless Decision Theory to murder, Ziz also expanded the rationalist idea of the brain containing multitudes, by deciding that with practice, people can separate the two hemispheres of their brain and only sleep with one at a time, enabling them a full 24 hours to come up with more crackpot ideas. These separate hemispheres are two distinct personalities, one of which could be male and the other female, and who often want to kill each other, an idea tailor made for TikTok tweens.
Ziz must be charismatic, because over time they got more and more naive rationalists to join their commune. They eventually set up their living quarters in some cargo vans that they parked on a lot in Vallejo, owned by an elderly man named Curtis Lind. Lind also lived on the property and had said that he wanted to offer space to artists and other people who otherwise couldn’t afford steep Bay Area rents.
In 2019, Ziz and their acolytes went to the annual meeting of the Center for Applied Rationality to protest, for reasons they couldn’t quite articulate. A flyer they handed out read, “CFAR does not do remotely what they claim to do on their website: they do not appreciably develop novel rationality/mental tech,” the flyer claimed. “CFAR’s founding premise (that people were blocked in having the tools to think) was falsified long ago.” Okay, sure.
The protestors blocked the exits of the property, which freaked out the management, who called the police and had them arrested. They were released but Ziz and one other protestor named Gwen failed to show back up in court. Instead, they apparently faked their own deaths, with Ziz releasing an obituary claiming they died in a boating accident and loved blueberries. That was a lie. Well, I’m not sure about the blueberries. Who doesn’t love a good bloob?
They apparently evaded capture, and when COVID hit they also stopped paying rent to Mr. Lind in accordance with the decrees meant to protect people who had lost their jobs or could not do them during the pandemic. But when it was time to pay rent again, they decided to just not do that for the next few years. Eventually, Lind tried to evict them. Three of the Ziz’s cult members responded to this by slicing Lind’s eye with a samurai sword and then plunging it straight through his body. Lind grabbed a gun and shot two of them, killing one. Lind survived, and the surviving cult members were charged with attempted murder on Lind and murder for the death of the other cult member.
The following January, Ziz was in Pennsylvania with a friend named Jamie Zajko, around the time that Zajko’s parents were found shot to death in their home in that state. In a lengthy Medium post written at that time, a fellow rationalist points out blog posts in which Zajko discusses Ziz threatening to kill her, and insisting that she kill a third friend named Alice, though Zajko accepts that maybe she misheard and Ziz just wanted her to kill Alice “in minecraft.”
Also, another friend reports that Zajko had “justified” reasons to hate her parents like “concrete” examples of abuse like when they made her dye her hair blonde. Did you think I was kidding when I said this was like reading the diary of an emo 15-year old? Yeah. No. My mom forced me to get a painful and boring perm every six months until I was old enough to put my foot down. I can’t believe I didn’t think to murder my parents and throw myself into the foster care system.
Anyway, that investigation is ongoing. A real puzzle for the PA cops.
Finally, we get to this year, when one of Ziz’s cult members seems to have finished the job by murdering poor Curtis Lind, and another two got into a shootout with border patrol in Vermont, resulting in one of them dying along with a border agent named David Maland. Local authorities had been following the pair of cultists since they checked into a hotel dressed in tactical equipment and walking around with a gun. I’m actually shocked that someone called the cops on a white person carrying a gun in Vermont but it looks like the hotel workers accurately clocked the vibes, there. Or it was because they clocked them as trans. Hm.
Oh and by the way, the police say the gun used to kill Maland is also connected to the Pennsylvania double homicide.
So that’s where we are today: two of Ziz’s cultists are in custody, one is dead, but several others, including Ziz, are wandering free with heads full of lethal potential decisions that may seem “suboptimal” when considering the risk of prison time but may be ultimately beneficial, in an infinite timeline where an omniscient and omnipotent artificial intelligence promises a flying unicorn to whomsoever punishes those who would nonconsensually dye their children’s hair.
Death cults: not even once! Not even if they call themselves “rational!”
