Ophelia (also called Felix, the German who died in the shootout with border patrol) was an acquaintance of mine, though I hadn't heard anything from or about her in a couple of years. I had read her as a nonviolent nerd, possibly overzealous in protecting her community but definitely not the murdery type. My big questions are about how she got from the person I remember to this. Did she actually try to draw a gun on a cop in the middle of a shootout? It seems likely, as the reporting all seems to be consistent with that, and I don't know why the cops would lie about that when the shooting would likely have been justified either way. If so, what drove her to that point? Even if not, how did she get so involved with such a murderous bunch? What were they trying to do with all that tactical gear in rural Vermont?
How would I notice if I or a friend of mine started to go down a similar road? Ophelia wasn't stupid, whatever happened to her is probably a danger for smart people. I can obviously avoid people associated with ziz, and hemispheric sleep, but is there more I should be thinking about?
My read:
"Zizian ideology" is a cross between rationalist ideas (the historical importance of AI, a warped version timeless decision theory, that more is possible with regards to mental tech) and radical leftist/anarchist ideas (the state and broader society are basically evil oppressive systems, strategic violence is morally justified, veganism), plus some homegrown ideas (all the hemisphere stuff, the undead types, etc).
That mix of ideas is compelling primarily to people who are already deeply invested in both rationality ideas and leftist / social justice ideas, an demographic which is predominantly trans women.
Further, I guess there's a lot of bigoted / oppressive societal dynamics that are more evident to trans people than they are to, say, me, because they have more direct experience with those dynamics. If you personally feel marginalized and oppressed by society, it's an easier sell that society is broadly an oppressive system.
Plus very straightforward social network effects, where I think many trans rationalists tend to hang out with other trans rationalist (for normal "people like to hang out to people they relate to" reasons), and so this group initially formed from that social sub-network.
I disagree but not confident I could write an explanation that's both legible and not losing lots of info by simplifying into "oppressed people more likely to want to oppose oppression". When I saw the question I was looking forwards to you writing a good answer to it, actually. To hint at some starting points, why is queer anarchism a thing? How do different minds decide who they are?
In the largest LW survey, 10.5% of users were transgender. This also increase the most deep in the community you are: 18% restricting to those who are either "sometimes" or "all the times" in the community, 21% restricting to those who are "all the times" in the community.
I think there is a conflation of two different things:
If I understand it correctly, Ziz assumes that these two are the same thing. Which is pseudoscientific, and in my opinion clearly wrong.
First, because there can be more than two identities (but no one has more than two brain hemispheres, I suppose). Yes, two is the most famous number, but that's simply because two is the smallest integer that is greater than one, and more personalities are less frequent.
Second, even if there are exactly two identities, there is no evidence mapping them to two hemispheres (as opposed to each of them using both hemispheres), and a lot of obvious evidence against that, f...
It's not about the eyes, it's about the part of the visual field.
The image from the right half of the visual field (left part of each retina) feeds into the left hemisphere and the image from the left half of the visual field (right part of each retina) feeds into the right hemisphere.
Since in humans each eye observes both sides of the visual field, you need to have ~50% of each eye's fibers (each corresponding to something like a pixel) to go to each hemisphere.
In vertebrates where the overlap in visual fields of each eye is minimal (e.g. horses, rabbits), each eye serves mostly one half of the visual field exclusively, so the entire image from the left eye feeds into the right hemisphere and ditto right eye -> left hemisphere.
So the Zizian technology, which involves sleep deprivation and then having one eye closed and the other eye open (as a way to make one personality sleep), seems completely unsupported by what we know about human biology.
It's just creating a split personality, in a way that has nothing to do with the hemispheres. But if you believe that your personalities are already there, waiting in the hemispheres until you find them, it probably helps with the process of creating them (which then feels like a confirmation of the theory).
I am thankful that the glossary exists, because it makes it easier to decode various Zizian writings, and makes it more difficult to sanewash Ziz.
For example, now I have a convenient proof that Ziz literally believes that there are two persons in each human. Not as a vague metaphor for "people are complicated". Literally two. Literally in everyone. Literally persons, in a way that it makes sense to describe them individually as male or female, good or "nongood". Literally believing that you can talk with the individual persons, make them argue against each other, make one murder another.
Which is convenient, because currently I am working on an article explaining how the popular "left brain, right brain" theory is complete bullshit from the scientific perspective. Which means, the Zizian model is bullshit, because it builds on the popular misconception. -- Without the glossary, if I succeed to write the article and it turned out to be convincing, fans of Ziz could simply say "but of course Ziz didn't mean it that way, stop strawmanning her". But now we have written evidence that yes, Ziz meant it literally that way, therefore all the supposed insights people gained from talking to t...
My visual metaphor is the angel and the devil sitting on your shoulders, each whispering in one of your ears. Except, they live inside your respective brain hemispheres, because obviously literal angels and devils are unscientific, but left and right brain are the Science™.
That makes Ziz like Jesus, born without sin. Explained by having two angels, conveniently.
(Also, both the angels and the devils can be male or female, which provides a theological Rationalist foundation for explaining trans-sexuality. Makes it easier to recruit among trans-sexual rationalists. Know yourself, by listening to the only person who has the knowledge.)
i think an important thing to remember is that i recorded this interview prior to Audere's arrest and the link between Jamie and Ziz and Ophelia being made public. At the time the situation was a lot more open ended and proposing that everything was linked in a conspiratorial manner seemed like somewhat of a stretch to justify without evidence. That said, a lot of new evidence has in fact come to light, which presents the events as being fairly interrelated, and so at this point to claim there's no connection between any of these things would be kinda dumb of me. How organized is this inner group? idk, but it seems pretty clear that people are at least talking to each other and coordinating on things in some way.
Here's a podcast with @Slimepriestess on the whole affair. I'm not particularly involved in any of this, and had some violent disagreements with things said in the podcast[1], but found it informative on the whole. Listen with a critical ear.
E.g. that the right thing to do wrt to people in the Ziz-egregome is to talk to them—if there is a social scene near yours where people start dropping like flies then it's good & wise to say "I will leave and not interact with those people, leaving them alone." Put on your own mask first. (Also the claim that Ziz "did the math" with relation to making decisions using FDT-ish theories—which IIUC isn't possible because (1) FDT-ish theories aren't fully formalized yet and (2) the formalized parts are extremely computationally demanding to execute.) Plus a smattering of other things. ↩︎
I think that Octavia is confused / mistaken about a number of points here, such that her testimony seems likely to be misleading to people without much context.
[I could find citations for many of my claims here, but I'm going to write and post this fast, mostly without the links, for the time being. I am largely going off of my memory of blog post comments that I read months to years ago, and my memory is fallible. I'll try to accurately represent my epistemic status inline. If anyone knows the links that I'm referring to, feel free to put them in the comments. Same if you think that I'm misremembering something.
To Octavia, if I've gotten any of the following wrong, I encourage you to correct it. I apologize for any rudeness. I'm speaking somewhat more bluntly here than I often would, because it seems more important than usual to help people get clear models of the situation, urgently.]
Most importantly, I think she is mistaken about whether or not she is "a Zizian".
There are at least types of people that the term "Zizian" might refer to:
Also the claim that Ziz "did the math" with relation to making decisions using FDT-ish theories
IMO Eliezer correctly identifies a crucial thing Ziz got wrong about decision theory:
... the misinterpretation "No matter what, I must act as if everyone in the world will perfectly predict me, even though they won't." ...
i think "actually most of your situations do not have that much subjunctive dependence" is pretty compelling personally
it's not so much that most of the espoused decision theory is fundamentally incorrect but rather that subjunctive dependence is an empirical claim about how the world works, can be tested empirically, and seems insufficiently justified to me
however i think the obvious limitation of this kind of approach is that it has no model for ppl behaving incoherent ways except as a strategy for gaslighting ppl about how accountable you are for your actions. this is a real strategy ppl often do but is not the whole of it imo
...this is implied by how, as soon as ppl are not oppressing you "strategically", the game theory around escalation breaks. by doing the Ziz approach, you wind up walking into bullets that were not meant for you, or maybe
The same interviewer has now done two more podcasts on Ziz.
With Adrusi:
With @jessicata:
Edit: Another one with toasterlighting/Celene Nightengale. This one is mostly about Audere, the alleged murderer of the landlord.
due to Taking Seriously things like radical veganism
I take seriously radical animal-suffering-is-bad-ism[1], but we would only save a small portion of animals by trading ourselves off 1-for-1 against animal eaters, and just convincing one of them to go vegan would prevent at least as many torturous animal lives in expectation, while being legal. I think there must be additional causes, like the weird decision theory people have mentioned, although I think even that is insufficiently explanatory, as I explain near the end.
That said, taking animal suffering seriously does change the moral status of killing an average knowing animal-eater to something which is deontologically understandable, even if it's still strategically very bad.
So while I don't endorse the actions, I mostly feel empathy for Ophelia and the others and hope that they'll be okay. Maybe it's like how I'd feel empathy for an altruist who couldn't handle living in this world and committed suicide, cause that's also strategically bad and reckless.. but very understandable to me, as one who knows how alienating it can be.
I haven't seen others on LW with this sentiment, maybe they've felt afraid to express it (as I do). I...
Few people who take radical veganism and left-anarchism seriously either ever kill anyone, or are as weird as the Zizians, so that can't be the primary explanation. Unless you set a bar for 'take seriously' that almost only they pass, but then, it seems relevant that (a) their actions have been grossly imprudent and predictably ineffective by any normal standard + (b) the charitable[1] explanations I've seen offered for why they'd do imprudent and ineffective things all involve their esoteric beliefs.
I do think 'they take [uncommon, but not esoteric, moral views like veganism and anarchism] seriously' shouldn't be underrated as a factor, and modeling them without putting weight on it is wrong.
to their rationality, not necessarily their ethics
Violence by radical vegans and left-anarchists has historically not been extremely rare. Nothing in Zizians' actions strike me as particularly different (in kind if not in competency) than, say, the Belle Époque illegalists like the Bonnot Gang, or the Years of Lead leftist groups like the Red Army Fraction or the Weather Underground.
I know you're not endorsing the quoted claim, but just to make this extra explicit: running terrorist organizations is illegal, so this is the type of thing you would also say if Ziz was leading a terrorist organization, and you didn't want to see her arrested.
There are a lot of journalists and documentarians who are inquiring about this, wanting to write articles and make documentaries.
What are people's heuristics for how to speak well with journalists and to choose whether and which journalists to talk with? Here are two that I've heard:
I'd be careful about talking to journalists at all, and default to not doing it. People writing about these murders have an incentive to make the Bay Area rationalist community sound bizarre, depraved, or salacious, and I'm sure some of them won't hesitate. Like the cops, journalists know how to make you feel like they're your best opportunity to get justice, and some will use that to get you to let down your guard. "Off the record" is not a legally binding agreement, and even if they don't attribute your quote, they can still twist it to make it sound like someone told them something sinister. It's tempting to try to set the record straight! But unless you're skilled in managing the media or have a reason to trust the specific person you're talking to (and a way to verify their identity), I'd steer clear.
In the corporate / government world, the standard is to have one informed, skilled person whose job it is to interface with media, and everyone else's job is to direct the media to that person. Is there someone in the community who wants to take that role?
Let's list some mysteries in this case! Here are 3 of mine.
Why did 2 killings happen within the span of one week?
According to law enforcement the two people involved in the shootout received weapons and munitions from Jamie Zajko, and one of them also applied for a marriage certificate with the person who killed Curtis Lind. Additionally I think it's also safe to say from all of their preparations that they were preparing to commit violent acts.
So my best guess is that:
The border patrol officer seems like a hero. Whether he meant it or not, he died to save the lives of several other people.
I think it is worth knowing that—I haven't heard of any examples of people who have been radicalizing in a Zizianish direction, lately, who are unaccounted for. I and people I know thought about it when we heard about the border patrol shootout, and the only person we came up with was Audere / Maximilian Snyder, who is now under arrest for the murder of Curtis Lind.
Seeing the one person you and your partner have been kind of worried about for a while... end up being the one who did a murder... it's, well, a hell of an observation to have to update on. Apparently a ball was dropped.
I haven't made a particular point of going around thoroughly asking everyone who might plausibly know someone, but—all three of the people who recently got in conflicts were known by someone or another I've spoken with, to at least plausibly be at risk. So I think there's some chance that we mostly do collectively have eyes on the "new people becoming Zizian" part.
Of course, maybe it becoming a national news story entirely changes the dynamics there, I don't know what the situation will look like in a year. But—despite there having been three new people here that haven't been discussed in any previous community alerts on Zizians, which maybe most people around hadn't heard of at all, I don't currently worry much that there's some substantial number of unknown Zizians out there or something.
Hi Dean (?)! If you have any pressing questions in this vein (or heck, any other vein for that matter) re: me, you've always been welcome to ask me in a DM or in the group chat you mentioned. Which I am still in. I'd be down to schedule a zoom call even. I'm an open book. Thanks for your concern (I think?).
....I know someone named Chase Novinha? I don't think it's the same person, though.
Edit: Confirmed same person, slimepriestess has said they are "safe and accounted for," and are one of the cofounders of its alignment company.
If we are going to be destroyed by Zizianism
I don't understand why rationalism would be destroyed by Zizianism. The murders have not been against rationalists. Do you mean, "If rationalism's reputation is damaged as a result of association"?
The quoted paragraph is a reference to a CS Lewis essay about living under the threat of global thermonuclear war. The euphony and symmetry with the original quote is damaged by making it slightly more accurate by using that phrase instead of "if we are going to be destroyed by Zizianism."
I wrote a shortform about Zizians, before I noticed this thread.
Short version is: could the rationalist community have handled these things better (even if we magically knew a decade ago that something like this would happen, but we wouldn't know the specific names)? Is there a lesson to learn, or is it just bad luck that sometimes if you have a workshop, a future serial killer will participate?
It seems that we are not responsible for Ziz existing, or coming to our workshop, or coming up with a crazy theory that allowed them to create a murderous cult.
But ...
There's a lot more complexity, obviously, but one thing that sticks out to me is this paragraph, from https://sinceriously.blog-mirror.com/net-negative/ :
I described how I felt like I was the only one with my values in a world of flesh eating monsters, how it was horrifying seeing the amoral bullet biting consistency of the rationality community, where people said it was okay to eat human babies as long as they weren’t someone else’s property if I compared animals to babies. How I was constantly afraid that their values would leak into me and my resolve would weaken and no one would be judging futures according to sentient beings in general. How it was scary Eliezer Yudkowsky seemed to use “sentient” to mean “sapient”. How I was constantly afraid if I let my brain categorize them as my “in-group” then I’d lose my values.
This is one among several top hypothesis-parts for something at the core of how Ziz, and by influence other Zizians, gets so far gone from normal structures of relating. It is indeed true that normal people (I mean, including the vast majority of rationalists) live deep in an ocean of {algorithm, stance, world, god}-sharing with people around them. And it's true...
Ziz is actually straight edge
Thank you for the info.
you can't just inflict severe trauma on someone and wash your hands of them, eventually that will come back to bite you.
Could you please clarify what do you mean in this context by "inflicting severe trauma"? Like, learning about timeless decision theory? (At the CFAR workshop, or would reading the Sequences online already qualify as inflicting trauma?)
If CFAR workshops were inflicting trauma on Ziz, then... more workshops mean more trauma? (Or don't they? How should CFAR predict which workshops will have a traumatizing effect and which ones will be okay? Especially for a person that seems unusual, because hundreds of others have participated at the workshops without being traumatized by them.) So it's like "if you inflict trauma on someone, you can't just stop inflicting more trauma on them"?
it would have exacerbated the issue and possibly just brought things to a head faster
This seems to match patterns like "you can't just break up with an abusive boyfriend, because that would escalate the situation and he might seriously hurt you". Like, maybe yes, but what is the proposed alternative, because obviously "doing more of the same"...
When it comes to Ziz, the articles that discuss her seem to leave out her interpretation of decision theory from explaining actions.
Ziz seem to engage in some reasoning based on her understanding of timeless decision theory that suggests cooperating with police is bad to the extent that she closed her eyes and didn't respond and let the police carry her out of her flat instead of just going along with the police.
Starting a shoot-out with the police when the police tries to arrest you is likely similar, if trying to arrest you means getting shot game ...
In the time, I was interacting with Pasek, he was male. In the interaction with Ziz (as far as I can assess from data Ziz published), they adopted Ziz's idea of being bigender with one hemisphere being male and the other female.
The Chris Pasek, I meet was very much into TDT. Maia, the female personality that developed in the interaction with Ziz, cared more about feeling good. As far as I understand, the post laying out the case for committing suicide was not written by the female personality but the male one.
I know that I can create a male or female tupla via hypnosis in someone who's open to accepting that mental change work regardless of the gender they had before. I can see the path of how someone might make that created tulpa the new main actor in the person.
When looking at multiple of the Zizians who commit violence, people who knew them before say that the person who committed the violence is very different from the person they knew beforehand.
I don't have a good reason to believe that the personality that's created through the Zizian techniques is more legitimate than the older personality and thus is more deserving of the overall identity of the per...
While I was reading about Monty Python on The Guardian, I saw this article: "Killings across three states shine spotlight on cultlike ‘Zizian’ group: Police search for member currently on the run from charges linked to homicides across the US". I dug into what that was all about and found this post.
So, in case anyone here was interested, these "Zizian group killings" have made international news.
Here are some posts with a lot of links, although the author is quite confused about some things ("Singularity – is this an organization?")
https://genderdesk.wordpress.com/2025/01/25/zizians-a-glossary/
https://genderdesk.wordpress.com/2025/01/28/united-states-v-youngblut/
https://genderdesk.wordpress.com/2025/02/01/zizians-missing-pieces/
BTW, on Ziz's obituary someone wrote:
Like Jesus, he will arise from the dead.
not sure if sincere or trolling...
I barely know what a rationalist is and my introduction to effective altruism was SBF. And now I'm reading about a modern day Manson family. Can't forget about Annie Altman.
As an outsider looking in, it's not looking good.
People who use the term TESCREAL generally don't realize that science fiction authors often take the futures they write about seriously (if not literally). They will talk about "TESCREALists taking sci-fi books too seriously" without knowing Marvin Minsky, the AI pioneer whose "AI tasked to solve the Riemann hypothesis" thought experiment is effectively the origin of the paperclip-minimizer thought experiment, was the technical consultant for 2001: A Space Odyssey and was considered by Isaac Asimov to be one of the two smartest people he ever met (alongside cosmist Carl Sagan).
TBF, Torres denies using it to mean this, instead claiming it refers to some obscure 2010 article by Ben Goertzel alone. This doesn't seem a very credible excuse, and it has been largely understood by proponents of the theory (like Dave Troy or Céline Keller) to mean Russian cosmism (and consequently that "TESCREAL" is actually a plot by Russian intelligence to re-establish the Soviet Union).
I've started a wiki to help organize information about recent events, and could use help building it out: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZpnPxn433EMWw2t6m/wiki-on-suspects-in-lind-zajko-and-maland-killings
In case you have not heard, there have been some recent and not-so-recent killings allegedly by people who have participated in aspiring rationalist spaces.
I've put some links in a footnote for those who want the basic info.[1]
I believe many people are thinking about this and how to orient. People have questions like:
I hereby demarcate this thread as a place for people to ask and answer questions about this topic.
Three virtues for this thread are (1) Taking care of yourself, (2) Courage, and (3) Informing.
Airlines have standard advice to put your own oxygen mask on first, before helping others. The reasoning being that if you don't help yourself, you won't then be able to help others. In a similar spirit, please take responsibility for keeping yourself safe first, and then help others. There are violent people about who, it seems to me, have thought carefully about how to hurt others and not be caught by law enforcement. Take the time to think through that before volunteering yourself to help out with something, or before sharing information you know about what people involved did, that might lead the foolish murderers to be aggressive.
I think courage is what lets people do difficult things together, and is helpful here. A society of brave and courageous people sees problems solved that are unpleasant and unrewarding and require taking personal risk, and gets better outcomes than other society. I also want to quote a friend of mine on this subject:
Finally, informing: People and institutions all around the world are trying to figure out what is going on, how to update their priors around general threat models, and how to help respond. These include aspiring-rationalist group organizers, family and friends of people involved, news organizations, local law enforcement institutions, people understanding how safe their town is, and so many more. Talking about it clearly, sharing accurate information about active threats is the sort of thing that improves people's maps of reality and helps them to better protect themselves and others. So I implore you to share what you know, questions you have, and considerations that haven't been articulated yet.
Pseudonymity notes
And remember: you can make pseudonymous accounts to talk on this thread. I do not expect to leave many comments with my own username. My one request is that you don't pick ugly names like "anon031234" but something pretty like "Morning Grass" or "Curious George".
Also, if you want to make sure your writing is unrecognizable, you can have your comments re-written by a language model. Example prompt: "Here is a comment I'd like to write. Please can you re-phrase it in your own words."
P.S. If this thread gets over 200 comments, I will make a 2nd one.
List of resources / articles with the basic info.
1. Open Vallejo's News Article on the Subject (the best one so far IMO).
2. Timeline of Events (1k words)
3. Detailed timeline of events (10k words)
4. Google Drive of Relevant Documents
5. A medium article from Feb 2023 (plus LW discussion)