Rationalist-anarchist vegan Sith splinter sect
Ziz blog is here, but I do not recommend reading it unless you feel like degrading your own sanity: https://sinceriously.fyi/
Basically, take the standard rat aesthetic and run it through a filter of intentionally obfuscating madness and completely new, Ziz-specific terminology whose definitions are partially metaphorical and deeply self-referential.
Summarizing the content, as best as I'm able: "mental tech" for thinking more clearly / effectively that also skews into tinpot biological theories of brain structure and trans-ness / gender identity with a side of tulpas / alters.
An actually-pretty-decent (once you get past the obfuscation of the aesthetic) model of society built on "undead types" as metaphors for a person's exercise of agency / where they draw motivation and meaning from.
Severe historical beef with MIRI/CFAR over sexual abuse, blackmail payouts and coverups, trans discrimination, and generally being abjectly ineffective at their stated goal of AI research, including a shitshow protest that resulted in Ziz and a bunch of her friends getting arrested.
A general goal / vibe of "acquire singleton, save world from extinction." Basically a much more radicalized and optimistic version of doompost-Yud who would rather build God themselves than work out how to do so as part of an organization.
Much of the blog and ontology behind it seems to be geared towards identifying small-group collaborators with a similar vision and neurodivergent thought pattern. Mostly this seems to have resulted in collecting a group of not-particularly-mentally-stable transfemmes, several of whom have committed suicide, and one of whom is now dead after stabbing their landlord with a sword and being shot for their trouble.
Basically: here there be madness, and a cautionary tale of why founding your own cult is not a very healthy response to escaping from your previous cult.
Hey it's okay she can see evil.
"Spectral sight is a collection of abilities allowing the user to infer the structure of social interactions, institutions, ideology, and the working of people’s minds. Named after the demon hunters of the Warcraft universe, who destroy their physical eyes to replace them, to become more able to see evil. Often has the cost of seeing less beauty."
IDK, I might want to circulate this sort of information if I was
actually living in the Bay Area and interacting with these people, but
from an outsider POV I have a hard time seeing this speculation as
useful to share.
Like, Ziz’ friends have testified online that the stabbing was
carried out in self-defense, and that the landlord was a transphobe who
had already been harassing them and encouraging other tenants to harass
them. Ziz’ accusations towards MIRI and CFAR parse as dubious because
she and her friends aren’t reliable interlocutors, but their list of
accusations does include sexual violence, and this is obviously
occurring in the context of a subculture where sex abuse is often hushed
up by socially powerful people.
The whole thing feels like a he-said-she-said situation where I’m
suspicious of the defendants (landlords & big-name rationalists) and
more sympathetic towards the accusers (a group of trans women in a
precarious situation) by default, no matter how bad the optics of the
situation are through the grapevine. Even taking it for granted - for
the sake of the argument? - that Ziz’ circle are dangerous, I have to
admit that I don’t know what to do about that situation that wouldn’t
lead to police brutality or stochastic terrorism in response.
I do think that that the reports of suicidality and interpersonal
abuse within Ziz’ friend group are probably legit, however.
I’ve heard from other trans women who had these kinds of negative
experiences with Ziz, and Bay Area rationalism has an established
problem with high control groups & mental health disorders.
It's tawdry and awful, but also on topic as an outcome of the cult-franchise nature of the rationalist movement as we know it.
With my mod hat on (this thing is heavy), I was unsure whether to keep this but feel that on balance it's probably beneficial as a dire warning.
Counterpoint is that another unrelated resident of the property reported that the landlord was jumped and attacked first, and also ziz and friends have huge persecution complexes and repeatedly post about their views that pre-emptive violence and murder is justified to avenge perceived wrongs against them.
I don't know any of these people ([though I do remember this post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uAc7bWgpEhrGwFcv7/i-m-sorry-fluttershy)) and am not in the Bay Area. But I do find this to be generally eye-opening as to the state of rationalism in the area.
That being said, am unsure if it's sneerworthy. I'm happy to have read it, just not certain that it belongs here... but where else would people see it? I don't know.
It doesn't read like a local issue to me. If we're to believe the article, Ziz got in legal trouble, faked her death, and resurfaced in Pennsylvania around a double homicide. There's a mention of some of the circle popping up in Vermont. The legal documents seem to indicate that the court believes Gwen faked her death to resurface in a different locale as well. Given the claims in the article, it makes sense for the call to action to be "Keep an eye out, stay vigilant, and avoid unnecessary escalation."
**Edit**: As a complete aside, it feels odd to sneer at someone for being a landlord because they purchased a vacant lot, live on it, and lease parts of it to others. There's a bit of a class difference between a traditional landlord with multiple properties and someone living out of a trailer home, no? It doesn't scan as a for-profit endeavor as much as a cost-saving strategy. If this is worthy of condemnation, then people with roommates and co-ops would deserve the same judgement.
**Edit 2**: I think part of the blame is just the lossy nature of language. Practically-speaking, Ziz and the owner were housemates (shared facilities). However, they all lived in separate trailer homes and container homes on the property, so "housemates" is technically inaccurate.
> Edit: As a complete aside, it feels odd to sneer at someone for being a landlord because they purchased a vacant lot, live on it, and lease parts of it to others. There's a bit of a class difference between a traditional landlord with multiple properties and someone living out of a trailer home, no? It doesn't scan as a for-profit endeavor as much as a cost-saving strategy. If this is worthy of condemnation, then people with roommates and co-ops would deserve the same judgement.
Roommates and co-ops probably aren't worthy of suspicion in the general case, but in this context? I'd actually bite that bullet, yeah.
I realize that sounds pretty radical and I understand if you disagree, but my biggest takeaway from hearing out the negative experiences of Bay Area rationalists is that material circumstances are a noticeable part of what makes interpersonal abuse so punishing in these communities in the first place.
Their housing market is very inhospitable, above and beyond what any reasonable person might be willing to write off as a necessary evil from the free market. So victims regularly stay in very bad living situations as a matter of survival, or have other difficulties changing careers and moving away from the people who harmed them, including their putative peers in roommates and co-ops.
Circumstances would be better if the culture was better, but the material relations do too much to enable abusers for me to feel comfortable with that situation.
That makes some amount of sense, but I think the nuance here is that necessity goes both ways. If you're rooming with someone or living in a co-op, yes, *someone's* name is on the paperwork, but it's more of a collective effort than a strict hierarchy because no single person can afford the housing by themselves. Victims being forced to live with their abuser applies both ways as the real world doesn't run on a single-dimensional hierarchy but a multi-dimensional one. The "flipped" dynamic is often the case with domestic abuse in a society where dual-income families are more common, women have reversed the education gap, and income insecurity is very much a thing (in both senses of the term).
It's obviously a he-said, she-said scenario here, but the alternate hypothesis paints the Zixians as the abusers.
> So victims regularly stay in very bad living situations as a matter of survival, or have other difficulties changing careers and moving away from the people who harmed them, including their putative peers in roommates and co-ops.
The landlord claimed that they regularly threatened him and other tenants of the affordable housing experiment with violence. Those people didn't have the resources to move elsewhere, so they were stuck living with their abusers. Zix freely admits to threatening people who don't fall into her worldview with violence, so the conflict in their accounts is more likely about who was the instigator and who was acting in self-defense. Both sides are claiming that the other side was the abusers, and, given the specific context of the affordable housing trailer park in Vallejo, it doesn't make sense to give too much weight to whose name is actually on the lot paperwork for calculating total power dynamics.
**Edit:** Details
> It's obviously a he-said, she-said scenario here, but the alternate hypothesis paints the Zixians as the abusers.
That's also a fair interpretation. I certainly don't know enough about the situation to speak confidently about culpability in either direction, so I guess I'm just projecting my frustrations after seeing other people treat Ziz as a lolcow in the past. The whole fucked up situation just makes me feel sad and angry, not sneering.
I like the idea that this subreddit, designed to sneer at people for endorsing “bad ideas” is suddenly ok with stabbing people when they have the temerity to ask for rent when you’re living on the property they themselves occupy or can’t consider the possibility that mentally ill people who go around stabbing people in disputes that 99.99999% of people handle peacefully might not be the most reliable narrators as to the cause of a dispute.
> I like the idea that this subreddit, designed to sneer at people for endorsing “bad ideas” is suddenly ok with stabbing people when they have the temerity to ask for rent when you’re living on the property they themselves occupy
If this subreddit was about 'sneering at people with bad ideas' it would just be /r/leopardsatemyface or /r/badphilosophy and none of the really serious allegations (e.g. about fraud & sexual misconduct) would ever be shared here.
Rationalism is sneerworthy not just because it's silly, but also because of its adoption by high control groups and by its role in a wider landscape of Californian Ideology that justifies the abusive behavior of the socially and economically powerful. Sneering at a group of mentally unwell poor people for their behavior in eviction disputes OTOH is just punching down, and the only thing that makes their blogposts more objectionable than https://timecube.2enp.com/ is the implication that they were evangelizing their neuroses to the only (equally marginalized) people who would listen.
> or can’t consider the possibility that mentally ill people who go around stabbing people in disputes that 99.99999% of people handle peacefully might not be the most reliable narrators as to the cause of a dispute.
Lol, all eviction disputes are resolved through violence and the threat of violence; landowners just outsource their use of force to the state and enjoy tacit approval for their rent-seeking behavior.
More to the point, it may very well be that these transfems are unreliable narrators as to the events that took place during the incident itself, but they also testify that their landlord was always a transmisogynist, that he regularly threatened them with personal violence for failing to pay rent during the period of the COVID eviction moratorium, and that he ostracized them and encouraged or allowed his other tenants to violently assault them.
None of these behaviors are particularly implausible or uncommon on balance, so I have no particular reason - aside from, IDK, how silly the incident sounds when you hear about the katana? - to assume that their feeling of being threatened by him was completely hallucinatory and unjustified. Even in the worst case scenario, if their landlord was a perfectly nice guy who was just politely knocking on their door when they came out and jumped him, I would blame that less on any particular bullet point of rationalist thought and more on the fact that living in poverty conditions while worrying about hate crimes can drive even the sanest people to high-stress paranoia. The PTSD drives the ideology, not the other way around.
> I have no particular reason - aside from, IDK, how silly the incident sounds when you hear about the katana? - to assume that their feeling of being threatened by him was completely hallucinatory and unjustified
too charitable. There's also the fact that they are part of a high control group, and also that their verifiable past behavior --or rather ziz's in particular -- marks them as more than a little mentally troubled.
Their feelings of being threatened also don't need to be "completely unjustified" (i agree that it probably wasn't entirely) for them to be unjustified in stabbing a man with a fucking sword. While you have a perspective that evictions are necessarily violent, which i mostly agree with, it doesn't make it smart, logical or moral to commit physical violence against someone.
A cult of unstable, psychotic people jumping and stabbing a man (ending with one of them dead) is literally in no way 'silly' even if they stabbed him with a katana like a bunch of weebs, wtf?
Edit: I know this comment is quite ironic given my username.
One of them put a sword into an 80-year-old man's body and the tip came out the other side. The witnesses said they were harassing HIM because he wanted them to move. What are the odds that a "transphobe" would let a gaggle of trans people live on his property in the first place? Please think.
Nah, actually, this kick-back was a lot more convincing coming from the other people in this subreddit who don't put "transphobe" in scare quotes and have a post history dedicated in no small part to transmisogyny and true crime.
I'm curious, are you on /r/sneerclub because you're actually acquainted with LessWrong and its offshoots, or just because you heard a trans woman committed a stabbing?
Because I'm East Bay and I'm acquainted with a lot of this. I put "transphobe" in quotes because I saw no evidence of that and I know this person has a persecution complex.
I've met one of them too and I'm guessing it's the same person since there are only a couple men named in this post. If we're thinking about the same person, somewhere in the middle of the Medium post the author mentions that he is a nice person that tends to get swept up by high-control groups led by charismatic weirdos. He also isn't named as one of those who allegedly perpetrated any violence. Maybe that's kind of relieving that he hasn't broken as bad himself, or whatever, though it's still sad and scary. (Without passing moral judgement on anything he and others did, the seemingly least violent person among this crew doesn't absolve him of whatever responsibility or complicity he might have for any violent acts committed.)
The what and the who?
I just finished reading all this, and my main conclusion is that we should start putting lithium in Bay Area water pipes.
IDK, I might want to circulate this sort of information if I was actually living in the Bay Area and interacting with these people, but from an outsider POV I have a hard time seeing this speculation as useful to share.
Like, Ziz’ friends have testified online that the stabbing was carried out in self-defense, and that the landlord was a transphobe who had already been harassing them and encouraging other tenants to harass them. Ziz’ accusations towards MIRI and CFAR parse as dubious because she and her friends aren’t reliable interlocutors, but their list of accusations does include sexual violence, and this is obviously occurring in the context of a subculture where sex abuse is often hushed up by socially powerful people.
The whole thing feels like a he-said-she-said situation where I’m suspicious of the defendants (landlords & big-name rationalists) and more sympathetic towards the accusers (a group of trans women in a precarious situation) by default, no matter how bad the optics of the situation are through the grapevine. Even taking it for granted - for the sake of the argument? - that Ziz’ circle are dangerous, I have to admit that I don’t know what to do about that situation that wouldn’t lead to police brutality or stochastic terrorism in response.
I do think that that the reports of suicidality and interpersonal abuse within Ziz’ friend group are probably legit, however. I’ve heard from other trans women who had these kinds of negative experiences with Ziz, and Bay Area rationalism has an established problem with high control groups & mental health disorders.
I’m torn, on the one hand, yeah, on the other, stabbing landlords is an epistemically pure ontological increase in utility.
Man, I’ve been reading too much Worm fic.
Oh huh. I met one of those people at a party once. He seemed nice, if awkward :(
What the fuck is a Ziz
Been a long time since I heard of her
Glad Somni’s hunger strike ended without greater suffering.
The real question is where is Michelle Zajko? Anyone know?