(Re)introduction of a rationalist dragon, and clarifications on Ziz's character

Creatrei
Wed, 22 Apr 2026 23:52:52 GMT

Hello.

This is both a (re)introduction post and an attempt to tell the story of my interaction with Ziz in a way that I hope will clarify matters and mend some bridges.

I'm Gwen Danielson, a neuroscientist and bioengineer, who decided as a child that I would end Death (and bring people back if I could) and that I would become a dragon and help generally facilitate a fantastical transhumanist future.

I pivoted in 2014 to AGI development, then to AI safety research. I was briefly active in the Bay area rationality community in late 2016 and early 2017, then co-founded a housing startup with boats (named Rationalist Fleet) intended to free up a lot of rationalist brain-power away from corporate jobs so there would be more work on AI safety. In 2019, I shut the project down, in favor of open designs for custom RVs.

Late in that year I and my co-founder Ziz, along with a couple other rationalists, attempted to do a peaceful but annoying protest at the CFAR alumni reunion where I planned to give a series of talks about mental tech, about how to build off-grid RVs designed to support intellectual work, some things I had learned about psychology, some things that troubled me about the community, and how the community could pivot to improve AI outcomes.

We were immediately SWATted with a false report of a firearm, and then subject to what is hard for me to describe but I could call mobbing, discrediting, gaslighting, harassment, death threats. It was an incredible source of trauma, and deeply shook my faith in humanity, especially the rationalist community. I attempted to document it a few months later in this post.

I stayed in contact with Ziz and the other two who had joined us (Emma and Somni) for a couple years, while largely retreating from the internet, then I parted ways with all of them in March 2022, moved across the country, found a very caring community to which I'm deeply thankful, and spent the next few years focused on personal healing, thinking deeply about philosophy, and returning to threads of my alignment research that I had been neglecting for years due to the hectic conditions.

In terms of mental health and psychology, I'm doing more or less better than I ever have. And my research has advanced well, by my subjective evaluation.

After I parted ways, Emma and Somni and a few people that later affiliated with them did some horrible things, and Ziz has gotten a lot of the blame in the press, and I've caught a few strays in the process from people who don't know I parted ways.

For a few years, I was lying low and taking what precautions I needed to to protect myself from the death threats I had received. Early last year, when the author of the threat I took most seriously (Jamie Zajko) ended up in jail, I quietly returned to the Bay and have been dealing with the old legal headache that followed the peaceful protest at the alumni reunion.

I haven't had contact with Ziz, Emma, Somni, et al since March 2022. Or at least, I've gotten no response to my attempts to reach out. Most of the people involved in the events that made the news, I never knew on a personal level, they seem to have become involved after I left.

My social trauma was the slowest thing to heal. These last six months or so, I have started talking again in some rationalist discussion groups, and had some great discussions where ideas that I find exciting were taken well, and I've started to feel a bit more comfortable with the prospect of returning to the community more generally.

I very desperately want this world to live on. I think I have important things to contribute to that effort. I am sad that I was basically ineffective from 2018 through 2022. But I'm here now, and I hope that I'm not too late.

I'm seeking employment or volunteer work in the field, or I may publish independently. My ideas do little good remaining only in my own head.

I need to address the elephant in the room. My old friend and Rationalist Fleet co-founder Ziz has been on the receiving end of possibly the worst press a person could realistically receive. While there are a few concrete events floating around in that press, a lot of it is speculation, and some people have incorrectly dragged me into it. I think Ziz is being maligned far more than she should be, though I have little comment on anyone else. So I'd like to explain some things the community and the press have been ignorant of.

(This post is not centrally how I wish to be seen/understood, but it is something that must be said before I can talk about the things that I care about.)

Outline

How we met

After the reunion

How I healed

On Ziz's character

A couple more clarifications

My Case Study: CFAR post

On my philosophical divergence

How this came about

My vision

How we met

I came to the Bay area rationalist community in 2016 and met Ziz at Berkeley Less Wrong meetups. I was living on a sailboat I had bought as an attempted clever plan for inexpensive housing.

We discussed the ideas that later became the early posts on her blog, what I might call the Fusion sequence, about internal cohesion and self-trust. This sequence was partially a continuation of CFAR's ideals as well as rebuttal to the self-extortion mindset that was common in the community at the time, that gave rise to things like Beeminder.

In January 2017, she offered to pay my docking expenses if she could stay on the boat with me, and I agreed. A couple months later, after I had some conversations with Eric Bruylant about the AI safety accelerator project he was part of, we had the idea to create a small fleet of boats as a low-cost housing project for people working on AI safety and in effective altruism.

Ziz has always had a tendency to express her ideas through metaphors in fiction that are familiar to her. We spoke at length about Contessa and Doctor Mother from Worm; the Wardens from World of Warcraft; Frisk, Sans, and especially Undyne from Undertale; Tassadar from Starcraft; Harry and Dumbledore from HPMOR; Iji.

But a frequent topic was the light side sith from Star Wars (in the pre-Disney canon). They were an avenue for her to express the fusion of the altruistic motive of the jedi with the passion and power-seeking of the sith. They were, for her, an expression of the idea that truly meaningful altruism comes from the heart rather than from societal pressure, and that it is not strengthened by self-restraint--an extension of the idea that "power reveals" and magnifies what a person already is. For many people, power reveals motives like Vader's or Sidius', but sometimes it reveals compassionate motive.

She also introduced me to the Gervais Principle sequence by Venkatesh Rao of Ribbonfarm, which expresses cynicism about institutions, and argues that it's necessary when interacting with institutions to have a sensitivity to a kind of abject dynamic of power through strength. This led both of us to adopt a 'Karen'-like set of methods with ordinary institutions, although we remained committed to earnest principle within the broader effective altruist community.

I'm getting ahead of myself, but I do today see flaws in these starting ideas. Even though, Ziz before the alumni reunion was committed to finding ways to cooperate with those to whom she applied her cynicism.

After the reunion

Jumping ahead, in 2020 and 2021 I was still living with Ziz, and with Somni and Emma who had moved in together with us. I kind of psychologically deteriorated, and largely withdrew from the internet and from anything other than fixing myself or building my RV.

I was deeply traumatized by how several members of the rationality community treated me/us following the reunion, as well as by the sexual assault and torture I experienced at the hands of the police (which I have described elsewhere and filed a lawsuit about). Among other things, I developed a stutter, for the only time in my life, and for a while struggled to speak. It was a years long process for me to rebuild the ability to trust anyone again.

In March 2022, I parted ways, due to a combination of mental collapse and a relational falling out. I ended up homeless for a while, then moved across the country to a place I had no connections, and encountered very kind people who helped me heal, to whom I am deeply thankful.

There have been some reports that I faked my suicide, but that's not true. I was considering suicide, and I never said anything contrary to that. I never reported anything, I just left a note for Ziz and left on foot and had a very bad time for a while. If I had committed suicide, the purpose would have been to contain the harm I might cause, as in my deteriorated state I was not much good at doing good despite my deepest wishes. Instead I identified, then walked, a path to heal myself without causing harm.

I got a job in the trades to support myself. I focused on psychological healing and revisiting and reevaluating cached philosophy from all stages of my life, and ended up healing quite rapidly. I had many long conversations with a new friend about philosophy, and I started talk with a not-formally-a-therapist. I am now, in most ways, doing better psychologically than I ever have before. My mind works better than it ever has before.

To the few who actually understand my hemi theory (which still has not been published), both of my hemis are in great health, and we function well as a fused unit, something which had not been the case from 2018 until 2023.

I was afraid to return to the case in Sonoma because of the death threats I had received. The one that scared me the most was anonymous, but later Jamie Zajko admitted to having sent it. When I left, that was still the state of affairs, and I took precautions for years to protect myself from Zajko. The moment Zajko was in custody, I returned to Sonoma and have been setting my affairs straight this last year. It has been reduced to a misdemeanor and the worst two charges were found to have no basis even worth bringing to trial. I just pled 'No Contest' to trespassing, conspiracy, wearing a mask, and resisting arrest. I regret my actions, but I continue to maintain that I did not break the law. This just ended up being an acceptable resolution of the case that has taken up half of my adult life.

So, I have already been settling my outstanding affairs in what society considers the right way. With regards to the cases involving Ziz and the others in her circle, I don't have anything to offer law enforcement, because I had no contact with anyone involved after March 2022, and I was living in a different part of the country doing my own thing. Nothing that happened was planned by my knowledge.

How I healed

When I parted ways with Ziz in March 2022, I was, I think, in a similar philosophical position to Ziz: majority but not total belief in a severely cynical model of the human spirit, though with caution around acting on it completely.

When I moved across the country, I ended up in a small town of kind, good-hearted people. At first I was hiding my extreme distrust of nonvegans for my own survival. But again and again people treated me with substantial degrees of kindness that I couldn't trace back to a cynical selfish explanation--despite being people who ate meat. Kind in ways that I never saw in the Bay area, or growing up (that I can remember). This confused me, as it conflicted with my models, and I had to halt and reevaluate and reformulate new models that took the new evidence into account. I was also pondering neoplatonist philosophy at the time, by way of Mage the Ascension, and the mystic-optimism and unity of creation that expresses also influenced me.

Early 2022 was a psychological nadir for me, that I barely survived. The other major thing that caused me to update my model was watching my right hemisphere heal over the course of a few years from a place of extreme degradation and self-consumption to a place of joy and compassion exceeding the degrees I remember from even my childhood. Not the journey as an abstract whole, but watching from the inside the decisions, watching myself heal old philosophical knots and errors, including many that I had long since lost awareness of, served as an experimental confirmation of some of those mystic ideas and a refutation of Emma's accelerationist ideas.

In 2024, I was mildly influenced by Contrapoints and Philosophy Tube, who both make interesting efforts to truly understand the people who believe positions they (and I) disagree with in a sympathetic way. And late that year I read the HPMOR fan sequel Harry Potter and the Prancing of Ponies, which presented some explicit models of how psychological errors arise mostly through childhood experiences in a way that added clarity to my models and presented a different path by which I could have healed myself.

I was lucky enough to heal; Ziz hasn't had that luck yet but could if I could guide her. Prior to the reunion, she was a much kinder person, and she still believed in the human spirit in a way not too far from how I see it now.

On Ziz's character

About the events that happened, I can only speculate, like everyone else. I knew Ziz when she was at her best, during Rationalist Fleet. I knew her then as a kind person, strongly motivated by compassion, lightly cynical about human nature but committed to finding ways to cooperate with those to whom she applied her cynicism.

Ziz has made mistakes, consequential ones even, but I cannot imagine her being responsible for a lot of what people have accused her of. I speculate that Emma and Jamie are the primary causes of what happened, as well as the bad judgment of the people Ziz associated with, and I suspect that Ziz was the moderate in that circle after I left.

First, to be clear, what happened was horrifying. Curt was a friend and minor mentor of mine, and no theory of justice I can support would have killed him, and I think the responsible parties owe the work of reassembling Curt atom by atom, however long that takes.

I knew Emma and Somni and silver-and-ivory. I don't personally know the other people that got involved with that group. I don't think Ziz would have caused the killing of Curt or of Zajko's parents, and she obviously wasn't involved in the border patrol shooting.

The point of distinction here is that I think Ziz's actual beliefs and commitments are not the same as the actions of the people around her, and neither is the same as what the social consensus seems to think her ideas are.

With every set of ideals, there are those who apply them badly, through mistakes in the original philosophy combining with mistakes in the individual in a way that channels all of the negativity in the individual. The consequences of that can be magnified by the nature of the philosophy.

A 'perfect' philosophy would be capable of preventing all such misinterpretation and mistakes, but as humans who are not logically omniscient, any theory we present is a work in progress at best.

All theories are by-necessity living theory, and I can't imagine Ziz messing up / misapplying up her own theory that badly. But I can imagine her being around people who mess up her theory that badly.

My understanding of Ziz's beliefs, even though I disagree with them, contradict with the deaths that actually happened.

If I zoom out and blur my eyes, what happened feels like Emma thinking not Ziz thinking, the Ziz I knew is too careful and cautious to full send an idea, even one she nominally supports, if there remains an unresolved note of confusion/wrongness to it. Full sending is trashfire behavior that doesn't match her personality even in a state like what I could imagine she'd be like under severe degradation. It is, moreover, accelerationist behavior. (And Emma was an accelerationist.)

So, I don't hold Ziz responsible for the horrifying actions of the people nominally interested in her philosophy, just like I don't hold Eliezer responsible for the actions of Anna Salamon or Davis Tower Kingsley or Elon Musk.

And what I would like to see, even if I'm the only person in the world left who would advocate for this, is for Ziz to pivot, leave the pile of fools behind her, and heal, like I did. Perhaps nobody else knows her potential and kind heart, but I do. Others want to paint a simple story, with a simple villain, but I know that to be not true.

A couple more clarifications

Nothing was a cult during the time I was present, and I have no reason to speculate that it became one. That accusation came originally from people speaking in bad faith, particularly GabrilovichRatio (aka J.D. Pressman), and was magnified through repetition. A group that discusses philosophy and strange ideas together, has in-group jargon and references, and is helping each other build RVs to live in, is not dissimilar from other rationalist friend groups, or really any intellectual friend group, and that is the environment I knew.

The slander of my dual agency theory (hemi theory), which still has not been published, among other things, aggravates me. Hopefully that will be clear when I publish it (which I plan to do soon). The core of it is simple, and the people I've directly explained it to in recent years have found it reasonable and compelling, unlike the distorted presentations I've seen online.

There are at least two additional factors behind the scenes that nobody seems to know about. Following the alumni reunion, Zajko began a harassment and infiltration campaign under a variety of anonymous guises. Most of the anonymous comments on Ziz's blog around that time, Zajko later admitted to having written, as well as some emails. Zajko also admitted to egging GabrilovichRatio on to be hostile towards Ziz and to fear Ziz. I also learned in late 2020 that there was an anonymous account that had been messaging, I believe it was Regex, which was claiming to be me, and claiming to be suicidal, when I very much wasn't. I got a phone call from Regex (who I had never spoken with before or given my phone number) when I was out hiking telling me "don't do it, you have so much to live for" when I had literally never been suicidal in my life, and Regex refused to believe me when I told her that. I found this alarming and threatening, given the context, where Hive had been talking publicly about practicing with a gun. I don't know what else that account said, whether that account made threats in my name or misstated my own theories/philosophy, and I don't know if Zajko was the one responsible. But I saw GabrilovichRatio posting very paranoid things.

GabrilovichRatio, with Hive, admitted to being the author of the smear/slander site that has been uncritically picked up like fact by most of the press nowadays. Regex was in the same friend group IIUC.

Furthermore, I think a lot of her readers missed some important context. During 2020 and 2021 we were becoming more aware of the philosophy of people explicitly trying to destroy the world, and/or explicitly counter-altruistic. There was one person who self-described as the 'Goddess of Rape and Death' who was sending Ziz rambling emails (to which IIUC Ziz was not responding).

This was the class of people that was Ziz's primary identified enemy, and her hardest-line stances were directed at this rare and extreme category of person.

(To clarify, I disagree with her philosophy even on this matter. Which is not to say I believe the inverse philosophy--I have precise, careful, nuanced strategies on this subject which I will slowly publish as part of my other writings alongside other things.)

My Case Study CFAR post

My Case Study CFAR post was imperfect, but it was the best I could do in my more-traumatized-than-I-had-ever-been state. I regret the part I wrote about Ratheka and Sebastian, that was a wrong action. I now disagree with some of the things I said about MIRI. I also now realize that what alarmed me wasn't just a rationalist phenomenon but a broader societal current. I largely still agree with the rest. The actions of a number of people in the community were deplorable, many of them were employed by CFAR, and this has negative impacts on AI outcomes. If I could have waited a few years, I could have presented it all more clearly.

On my philosophical divergence

I've made a hard break with Ziz's philosophy on a few key, consequential points. Though, her philosophy is obviously a part of my history, and my current philosophy is built largely in response to Ziz's.

Kind of the core point of divergence is that I think most of her mistakes are rooted in a kind of vegan/Vassarian cynicism about human nature (of nonvegans), whereas my current beliefs are a fusion of that cynicism with mystic-optimism about human nature--something she outright rejected after 2019.

(Within Ziz's own model, this makes me a phoenix as opposed to a revenant.)

This has influenced me to develop a divergent model of justice and of post-singleton trajectories, as well as to take a much greater interest in psychological healing as means and ends.

How this came about

In the initial set of ideas Ziz had when I first met her, I can identify two slight mistakes--the adoption of a dark aesthetic indicating an expectation of being seen negatively probably rooted in childhood trauma, and her adoption of the ideas in the Gervais Principle sequence. Neither of these is a particularly big issue.

But seeing the corruption of the rationalist community, including many people she had deeply and naively trusted. And then the almost indescribable gaslighting and smearing that happened after the alumni reunion. And then getting death threats, after being tortured by the police and unjustly charged (while the torturers and false reporter were never charged) and losing faith/trust in that foundational institution of society. And then receiving the insane ramblings of a self-proclaimed 'Goddess of Rape and Death'. While also having to grapple with the horror of the ongoing holocaust of nonhuman animals called factory farming and most people's acceptance of it (to those who don't understand, imagine seeing the spark of a soul worth protecting in every animal--vegans can see their infinite potential in their Turing completeness and goal-seeking behavior despite their mostly simpler-than-symbolic thought, and love every one of them--how would you cope when people you love are massacring other people you love in unthinkable quantities). At the same time as she came into the acquaintance of Emma--an accelerationist, and the most intelligent person I've ever met.

In this environment, Ziz made the mistake of mostly believing a bit of accelerationist (i.e. Emma's) propaganda: the idea that any moral flaw was a sign of an event horizon signalling eventual total commitment to fractal defection. In the extreme social trauma, that affected us both in different ways, a subset of vegans was the only people she could imagine trusting at all.

My model is that Ziz adopted this while retaining moral caution because she never believed it completely, it just seemed like a hypothesis more likely true than not given the evidence about human behavior she was regularly facing; but Emma adopted it as a way to channel a complicated malice in a seemingly justifiable way. Emma accelerated themself.

The phenomena demanded explaining, since Ziz's earlier models of human behavior had not expected what happened.

Even under the best of circumstances, being a vegan moralist puts a tremendous demand on the precision and nuance of a person's models of justice and of human nature. It's not at all an easy bar to meet, and requires quite a bit of intellectual work. The effect of any mistake is magnified by the extremity of the context.

My vision

So what is the world that I wish to see and how do I intend for us to get there?

My intention to gain a draconic form through transhumanist technology is, in a way, emblematic of my vision, and I hope for my draconity to inspire others, to cause people to see that more is possible than they believe.

I want the future to be a place of wonders, of story and creation, of magic and the fantastic, of meaning and self-actualization for everyone, and I mean everyone. I dream of non-Euclidean geometries, of countless worlds visible and accessible in the daytime sky, of competent infrastructure, of soul forges continually working to bring back the dead, of mage academies and of exploration of beautiful wilds and the wondrous creations of ten thousand artists, each communicating something otherwise incommunicable. I dream of the stories to be told of growth and interaction, of meeting alien species and piercing the veil of understanding between us and establishing our commonality in love itself. I dream of reaching through warps in the spacetime fabric to save the dying across time, and of welcoming them to a brighter world, of healing their wounds, physical, mental, and spiritual. I dream of forests with trees so tall they take days to climb, of villages in glittering caverns, of craft-markets cluttering up space stations. I dream of morphological freedom. I dream of teaching language to nonhuman animals through advanced pedagogy and welcoming them to the collective knowledge and endeavor of our civilization, and making possibilities available to them in line with their inclinations, whatever those may be. I dream of a world where things are not done for us by a machine, but where each person has, if they want it, a pillar of the world to uphold matched to what they love--in the space of all definable people, there is enough diversity for such matching to exist and be fluid. I dream of the work of expanding the aegis of this civilization, to protect and support ever more people. I dream of learning to understand people I would maybe never have been able to imagine on my own, and building stories together with them.

I'm working to establish the preconditions to ensure that any positive vision for the future comes about that has full potential to grow/mature/blossom, which isn't quite the same thing as building it directly.

My own particular vision of beauty should have some part in it, but a truly good world is not something that could come in every particular out of any single individual's mind. So I concern myself far more with the organizing/foundational principles, and ask myself how those principles can be made inevitable milestones of many different paths into the future, and how those principles remain cornerstones of every successive development that follows.

my own art, colored pencil, 2025

Lately my focus has returned to alignment theory / agent foundations and container theory; and I've been writing a series of posts about game theory and trajectories in a multipolar post-singleton world. I'm quite excited about this series, and I think it will provide some unexpected hope and improved clarity to the community.

Signed,
the dragon of creation
Creatrei (cree-AH-trey)
also known as Gwen Danielson
or as Char and Astria (when referring to my hemis as distinct individuals)

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