They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed
theguardian.comFor a group that applies rationalism, they appear to have ended up committing very horrible and irrational acts.
The article could have done more to condemn this group and line of thinking.
Also the part of the story on Curtis Lind is both sad and impressive, that old man was built of true grit:
"As he bent to look, something hit him on the head and he blacked out. When he woke up, at least three of the Zizians were allegedly standing around him with knives.
“[T]he right side of my skull was shattered,” Lind later said. “And I was bleeding from numerous puncture wounds … The back of my neck had some severe cuts. Like somebody was trying to cut my head off.” His torso was impaled with a samurai sword.
Lind drew his gun, which was concealed in a pocket, and started shooting. He wounded Leatham and killed Borhanian. He stumbled away with the sword still in him. He survived, but lost an eye."
Don't mess with cowboys.
> For a group that applies rationalism, they appear to have ended up committing very horrible and irrational acts.
Yes, also ironic how they were, per the article, very intrigued by the concept that ideas themselves could be like viruses but were unaware of how they seemed to be heavily impacted by that very thing, many times over.
> they appear to have ended up committing very horrible and irrational acts.
See SBF. The fringes of the 'rationalism' are pretty much a series of rather nasty cults.
Thats some Tarantino Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood story arc right there.
The cult elements of isolation (boat/van life), alienation from self (trans, split brain), false moral superiority (vegan), demands for purity in action (vegan), sense of false higher purpose (AI basilisk), false possession of method for empowerment (rationalism) are there. The hatred of landlords et al (anarchism) and use of drugs (psychedelic, others?) seems to be my guess for the violence part.
Lots of highly exploitative groups don't get to violent assaults. That's got me wondering why.
I think about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manson_Family but I know a lot of people use psychedelic drugs and don't resort to violence.
With the hyperbolic rhetoric about false threats, I'm surprised we haven't seen more violence from "rationalists"; if they really believed we were in that imminent danger, violent attacks would have been the rational thing to do.
Well if we're being rational about it - how confident are we in the accuracy of that assessment, how likely is our attack to succeed, and how likely is our attack to have a positive impact? Worse, what is the probability that our attack instead has a negative impact?
Is it even rational to assume one is rational? Of course I think I am, but I also think basically nobody else is. Yet I'm sure they think the are, and similarly doubt I am. So is the issue that I'm a snowflake and everybody else is wrong, or is the issue that rationality does not really exist (though that does not mean it's not worth striving towards)?
It seems only rational to doubt ones rationality.
Well put. That realization alone makes you wiser than strictly required.
> Is it even rational to assume one is rational?
Depending on your definition. But taken literally, no, obviously not.
Regardless of your skill level, would you ever assume that you were playing a perfect (in the information theoretic sense) game of chess?
Whether chess or real life, all of us merely make the best choices we can given our skill and the information available to us. That includes imperfectly modeling the other agents in the world around us. In that sense, "being rational" means something like "deliberately analyzing the situation" and "more rational" means something like "a superior approach to analysis".
> if they really believed we were in that imminent danger, violent attacks would have been the rational thing to do.
That's what these guys figured. But if we're being rational and realistic, all it accomplishes is getting your group killed or imprisoned.
Depend if you chose the right target, pretty clearly they didn't.
Start further back. Depends on whether you are actually in imminent danger. Then, if you are, then you have to choose the right target.
The fabrication of imminent danger as a means to break people out of the norm and into their matrix reality may make their ability to evaluate real imminent dangers perhaps?
They were terrified of some AI Roko's Basilisk they imputed some fantastic power to.
They had issues with so many different groups and causes they may as well have been raging against society as a whole. A dozen or so kooks resorting to violence against the world will only ever end with their demise. They thought themselves rational but were in fact totally insane to think their course of action was anything other than elaborate suicide.
I don't think its necessarily suicidal if the leadership is competent.
Mao Tse Tung when he decided to become a "mountain bandit" and formed the basis for future Red Army may have had no greater advantage. Except he was a military genius and these guys were just geniuses.
Yes, agreed. Lots of drug using gay vegan anarchists don't assault landlords or kill people.
But drugs seem to be a way that people are destabilized outside of norms.
Manson was a biker gang affiliate and lifelong criminal. The Zizians appear to be mostly middle class kids, not street dealers pimps and wanna be thugs.
> They found some crew members [for a rationalist boat], including one, Dan Powell, who had nautical experience from a stint in the US navy. On 20 July, they set out from Alaska. It went mostly without incident, though one crew member who found Ziz’s assertiveness off-putting debarked early.
What is it with cults and boats? L Ron Hubbard did this, too (albeit for different stated reasons).
> The Coast Guard declared the ship a “threat to the public health” and demanded an improvement plan.
Ah, see, they should have adopted the Hubbard approach of just completely ignoring authorities' complaints about his various dubious boats (this, somehow, tended to more or less work out for him).
It's because of the implication
I thought this was going to be about the Freescale Semiconductor employees who were on Malaysia Airlines flight 370.
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/twenty-employees-of-us...
Y'know, I'm totally happy for people to (very, very clearly) use my series "[Extropia's Children](https://aiascendant.com/p/extropias-children)" as a basis for their own work - which has been happening a lot lately - but some kind of citation would have been nice. Sheesh.
Interesting article. I definitely did not have "band of trans militant vegans starts a cult and commits multiple murders" on my bingo card for this century.
Behavior like this is why I'm fairly convinced OpenAI took out a hit on Suchir. The singularity/AI doom pseudo-religion really messes some people up.
The article is drama piece that makes you go on a scavenger hunt for the Five Ws. I stopped reading as soon as I noticed the pattern. I would ask AI to summarize, but my enthusiasm for learning anything from this kind of article has waned dramatically over the years.
Here's some shorter reporting for you if that's what you want:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-timeline-of-cultlike-z...
https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/02/15/northern-california-z...
It's a stylistic choice, many people like reading this kind of piece. You don't have to read it. There's room on the web for different kinds of writing styles.
If I wanted to read a novel, I would read an actual novel. I actually read foreign novels for fun, so that is not hyperbole.
That said, this stylistic choice works for computer security related things (e.g. the spy genre of news). It feels like a waste of time everywhere else.
It was more about the, ya know, murder cult thing, than technology. It's an artifact of telling a story - which is different than relaying a 'classic' journalism piece where the 5W's are most important.
"Years before she became the peculiar central thread linking a double homicide in Pennsylvania, the fatal shooting of a federal agent in Vermont and the murder of an elderly landlord in California, a computer programmer bought a sailboat."
I wanted to keep reading, so I guess I was their audience - not everything has to be up to your personal standards to be worth while.
"If I wanted to read a novel, I would read an actual novel."
As parent mentioned. You do have a choice not to read novels, or to read novels. That doesn't make a novel bad because it is a novel.
I don’t have a choice if I want to know the 5 W’s here. If every news article was like this, nobody could know the news because they would still be reading yesterday’s news when today’s news is published.
Perhaps AI could help here by rewriting the article into the format it should have used, but then you risk hallucinations.
Who are you to say what format a piece of journalism 'should have used'? You could apply your misplaced outrage about the 'Five W's' to any number of Pulitzer Prize winning long-form pieces from the last century.
In short, you appear to only be familiar with the mandated style for factual news-reporting - not for other journalistic output - and seem to think all deviation is in error.
Here's an example from one of the kings of the form - Michael Lewis - and his award-winning piece of financial journalism regarding the Greek bond crisis that nearly brought down the Euro:
https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2010/10/beware-of-gre...
If every article was in your preferred format, I would probably enjoy reading less.
Thankfully, there's a variety of writing styles, so that every one of us can find something we enjoy reading and skip the stuff we don't enjoy.
I don't see why you should be the sole arbiter of what writing style is allowed.
There are various kinds of news articles. This is what’s known as a feature article: in depth coverage of a particular topic. Those topics are not usually the daily headline stories and are not read-it-today urgent. If you don’t want to read features, don’t. There have been other articles on the topic.
ChatGPT, please summarize in bullet points.
This is a non-fiction piece, not really a news story. So not everyone's cup of tea. Joan Didion style. I enjoyed it.
I would summarize it as not being about AI per se. It's nominally about "rationalism," or the inclination to boil everything down to mathematics to an extreme degree. The story points out a growing subculture of rationalist who have become quite radicalized.
For a community like HN, which (rightly, IMO) places high value on rational and critical thought, it can seem strange that there could be a degree at which that sort of thinking is harmful. But there are a lot of examples where taken to an extreme, it can allow people to "rationalize" all sorts of actions. And the article goes into detail about some of the pitfalls this small group fell into.
A side note about my perspective: I studied economics as an undergrad at a time when the Northwestern "pure rationalism" school of thought completely dominated. Some of the conclusions from purely mathematical models built high on dubious assumptions were ridiculous on their face. But anything outside that dogma was heresy and treated as such. Academics were shunned, careers ruined.
It was a few years later that "behavioral economics" began to make inroads. The moniker of "behavioral economics" itself was to distinguish it from "real economics." Alas (for the establishment), behavioral economics proved very popular, and the genie was out of the bottle. It turns out mathematic equations are not all-powerful when it comes to describing certain phenomena, especially when it comes to individual or collective human behavior.
Collective blind faith in models built on dubious assumptions is what gave us the mortgage crisis.
This is the start of modern illiteracy.
Such sentiments have been expressed so many times that I have lost track of all of the times variations on them have been expressed. I think it started with Socrates who claimed the written word would damage human recall. When nobody believed him and he became popular because of the written word, people inverted “literacy is bad” into “literacy is good”. In more recent times, I believe radio and TV were said to be the start of modern illiteracy.
By the way, for what it is worth, only 2% of the population can read at a college level. It had been that way for so long that I heard that the category was merged into the high school level several years ago to make the literacy rate in the top bracket 4% instead of the prior 2%. i.e. “modern illiteracy” started a long time ago if we go by numbers.
Maybe Socrates was correct? I certainly think Google has damaged my memory, or maybe just age, hard to say.
Who knows? The guy was not a really good teacher. His student Plato ignored the meaning of what he said about learning to write a book on it. A major point of the book was that reading the book was pointless because it was a form of sophism.
Before I am downvoted into oblivion, the above text is half joking and half serious. Socrates in Plato’s Republic really does make the case that formal training via methods intended to teach is pointless by comparing education to training horses. I made that point in my college philosophy class hoping the professor would skip it on the basis that it was a bad book (my thoughts on a book that suggested you could not learn its material by being lead to it - see the cave analogy). The professor then stopped the entire class to try to make sure everyone understood the point and then continued as if the material was not criticizing him.
Probably so. Socrates witnessed the end of the Athenian Golden Age during his lifetime.
Yes. People forget that Charles Dickens was considered trash, pulp, un-intellectual. That people were reading such trash would lead to the downfall of civilization. Basically what everyone says today about whatever latest media type.
You lie:
"From the beginning of his career in the 1830s, his achievements in English literature were compared to those of Shakespeare."
lie is really strong term in this case.
in his time he was not 'literature', it was pulp, common, 'popular'.
is Stephen King today, 'literature' or just 'pulp fiction'?
this is a subjective thing. authors that are 'popular' sometimes aren't considered 'literature'.
in your very own citation:::
"Among fellow writers, there was a range of opinions on Dickens. Poet laureate, William Wordsworth (1770–1850), thought him a "very talkative, vulgar young person", adding he had not read a line of his work, while novelist George Meredith (1828–1909), found Dickens "intellectually lacking"."
"Henry James denied him a premier position, calling him "the greatest of superficial novelists":
Literacy rates have fallen in the past 20 years and something tells me that Dickens is not responsible.
The point is, that when Charles Dickens came out, people also blamed him on lowering the literacy rate. Called something different back then.
But maybe, it's not population wide.
More people were reading Dickens, so rate of reading in population was increasing. But the elites that thought everything should be in Greek/Latin, thought everyone reading Dickens was a downgrade.
Every generation argument.
Weren't Egyptian hieroglyphs basically emoji's.
Outside of classical studies, papish notions regarding Greek and Latin were decidedly unpopular in Church of England era Britain (for obvious reasons!).
The real argument against Dickens at the time was more to do with his habit of serialising his novels in cheap newspapers. This then rendered his subject matter of choice - social commentary, fiscal egalitarianism, and empathy for the poor - a little too accessible for the comfort of the ruling classes.
He did so even in his own Newspaper 'Household Words' - which while championing the cause of the poor and working classes, did so by addressing itself almost exclusively to the middle classes!
"...We seek to bring to innumerable homes, from the stirring world around us, the knowledge of many social wonders, good and evil, that are not calculated to render any of us less ardently persevering in ourselves, less faithful in the progress of mankind, less thankful for the privilege of living in this summer-dawn of time." Charles Dickens
He started this with 'Hard Times' - a thinly veiled socialist critique against unbridled capitalism and immorality. It specifically targeted Edwin Chadwick, who helped design the Malthusian basis of the appalling Poor Law of 1834, but was more generally an attack on the Utilitarians of the time. Shaw described it as a "passionate revolt against the whole industrial order of the modern world".
ah. I did not know that. Good point. His subject matter put a negative spin on the 'elite's, and so naturally they criticized him.
my elderly neighbor sometimes mistakes the difference between one hundred thousand and one hundred million. The point is, she thinks they are similar numbers. So when "people who are capable of reading Dickens blame Dickens for being less literate" and "people who read Twitter/X blame Twitter/X for being less literate" .. perhaps there really is a difference in those two despite the claim being similar.
Start... We are already very far advanced as far as I can see. You wouldn't know if you hang with university students; they seem, at least the ones I employ/talk to, far more knowledgeable than the young me was, however, when I talk to other young people, they don't want to and are not very good at processing textual information. They need to have it spoken and in a very information sparse format. It's somewhat depressing, so I hope it's just the people I meet and what I read online, but I don't think so.
Name a generation that didn't think the youth 'lost it.'
Yep, like I said; I hope it's just me. That's fine too. It's just actively annoying that people just refuse to read stuff. It's very wasteful timewise for me.
This is adblock for text.
I mean.. yeah, but.. I just fed this into grok and it did a fair job of summarising it (I know because I've done a fair bit of reading on the zizian nutters.)
No, just a way to say "tl;dr" which also somehow manages to be offensively classist.
Unwise. You don't want to bring it to the basilisk's attention that you know about the basilisk, just in case this lot are right ;)