Eliezer Schlomo Yudkowsky / LessWrong

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Wow, did some mild digging, and this whole "Ziz" (real name Jack LaSota) thing is a real fucking rabbit hole.

Up to eight people dead, possibly more suspected, because of this troon antifa cult.

They practice hard-core social and mind control tactics to break members and achieve goals:

In short they're a literal fucking death cult, LaSota and the other leaders are still at large, no one seems to fucking care about the Transon Family Murders other than the Rationalist community who try to cover shit up as much as they warn others away from them.

I wish I had the time and skills to do a deep internet dig on this Jack LaSota person.
 
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I just spent 30 mins reading about this and ziz... all i can say is... What the fuck did i just read?


OrangeJuliusEvola said:
This whole murderous Rationalist Troon cult that's racking up a body count and is still mostly on the street is remarkably undercovered by the Farms. Is anyone working on a thread for this Ziz and the Zizians?
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Agreed.. These people are beyond tinfoil hat level of battshit insane. Ziz seems to be king of them all!
 
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OrangeJuliusEvola said:
They practice hard-core social and mind control tactics to break members and achieve goals
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Well, they are a splinter group of rationalists. See also: Leverage Research.
My Experience with Leverage Research by Zoe Curzi (archive)
Zoe Curzi said:
To give you a picture of where the culture eventually ended up, here’s a list of some things I experienced by the end of my time there:

1. 2–6hr long group debugging sessions in which we as a sub-faction (Alignment Group) would attempt to articulate a “demon” which had infiltrated our psyches from one of the rival groups, its nature and effects, and get it out of our systems using debugging tools.

2. People in my group commenting on a rival group having done “magic” that weekend and clearly having “powered up,” and saying we needed to now go debug the effects of being around that powered-up group, which they said was attacking them or otherwise affecting their ability to trust their own perception

3. Accusations being thrown around about people leaving “objects” (similar to demons) in other people, and people trying to sort out where the bad “object” originated and if it had been left intentionally/malevolently or by accident/subconsciously.

(“Objects” were something that became a topic of study at Leverage, and about which Geoff gave presentations. They were considered to be sort of like autonomous psychological bits that you could accidentally or purposefully leave in another person’s mind to affect or control them. If intentional, it might cause them to subtly view you a different way, make more real or less real certain concepts, change their experience of the passage of time, say, or make them more susceptible to mind-reading attempts in the future, etc.)

4. People doing séances seriously. I was under the impression the purpose was to call on demonic energies and use their power to affect the practitioners’ social standing.

5. Former rationalists clearing their homes of bad energy using crystals.

6. Much talk & theorizing on the subject of “intention reading,” which was something like mind-reading. Geoff gave multiple presentations on this.

7. I personally went through many months of near constant terror at being mentally invaded. My only source of help for this became the leaders of my own subgroup, who unfortunately were also completely caught up in the mania and had their own goals and desires me for that were mostly definitely not in my interest.

8. I personally prayed for hours most nights for months to rid myself of specific “demons” I felt I’d picked up from other members of Leverage.

If this sounds insane, it’s because it was. It was a crazy experience unlike any I’ve ever had. And there are many more weird anecdotes where that came from.
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Extropia's Children, Chapter 2 by Jon Evans (archive) recaps that post and adds an overview of the Zizians, CFAR, MIRI, Michael Vassar, with heavy quotes from posts by Jessica Taylor: My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage (archive) and Occupational Infohazards (archive). (I'm not 100% sure, but Jessica Taylor seems to be the individual Tracing Woodgrains quote-tweeted here:
whatsaZizian.png
Jessica Taylor said:
Most of what was considered bad about the events at Leverage Research also happened around MIRI/CFAR, around the same time period (2017-2019).
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Jessica Taylor said:
  1. Ziz and friends, including Maia, were trying to "jailbreak" themselves and each other, becoming less controlled by social conditioning, more acting from their intrinsic values in an unrestricted way.
  2. Ziz and crew had a "hemisphere" theory, that there are really two people in the same brain, since there are two brain halves, with most of the organ structures replicated.
  3. They also had a theory that you could put a single hemisphere to sleep at a time, by sleeping with one eye open and one eye closed. This allows disambiguating the different hemisphere-people from each other ("debucketing"). (Note that sleep deprivation is a common cause of delirium and psychosis, which was also relevant in my case.)
  4. Maia had been experimenting with unihemispheric sleep. Maia (perhaps in discussion with others) concluded that one brain half was "good" in the Zizian-utilitarian sense of "trying to benefit all sentient life, not prioritizing local life"; and the other half was TDT, in the sense of "selfish, but trying to cooperate with entities that use a similar algorithm to make decisions".
  5. This distinction has important moral implications in Ziz's ideology; Ziz and friends are typically vegan as a way of doing "praxis" of being "good", showing that a world is possible where people care about sentient life in general, not just agents similar to themselves.
  6. These different halves of Maia's brain apparently got into a conflict, due to their different values. One half (by Maia's report) precommitted to killing Maia's body under some conditions.
  7. This condition was triggered, Maia announced it, and Maia killed themselves. [EDIT: ChristianKL reports that Maia was in Poland at the time, not with Ziz].
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As usual for EA/LW/Rationalist/etc stuff, these are massive walls of text that can't be easily chopped down to bite-sized excerpts, but the QRD is: parts of the Rationalist/LessWrong crowd - most notably Leverage Research, but also CFAR and MIRI, which overlap quite a bit - are really into something not unlike Scientology auditing, without the e-meters (but sometimes psychedelics). Ziz seems to have taken things even further, and there is a body count (suicides and murders) that dwarfs the one "reliable sources" on Wikipedia attribute to Kiwi Farms.
 
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CervixHammer said:
CFAR
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The concept of CFAR was always cult-ish. If you are teaching someone "reason" and they don't have enough time to go through the derivations in their own textbooks that they brought, you aren't teaching reason. If they can't check what you are saying against their own books, you could be spouting total nonsense and they wouldn't be able to tell as long as it sounds cool and "truth-y" enough.

It wasn't an actual cult because no one took it seriously. Their curriculum and culture were too different from Yudkowsky's other organizations and what Yudkowsky wrote himself. Were they better? Were they worse? I don't know, but the whole idea is flawed. I'm sure they had some hangers-on, but if almost everyone always left after going for a short time, you aren't going to get any cult followers.

If there was increased mixing between MIRI and CFAR staff, plus a CFAR "student" around 2017, that's more of a problem. I'm not sure if this counts as Yudkowksy running a full-blown in-person cult, maybe he wasn't directly involved at all, but if there was hierarchical control involved then rounding up to a small cult is correct.

I don't see Yudkowsky running a cult at MIRI now, but who knows what he's doing is his personal capacity.
 
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reference.
CervixHammer said:
See also: Leverage Research.
My Experience with Leverage Research by Zoe Curzi (archive)
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Very interesting, thank you for linking that.
“Objects” were something that became a topic of study at Leverage, and about which Geoff gave presentations. They were considered to be sort of like autonomous psychological bits that you could accidentally or purposefully leave in another person’s mind to affect or control them. If intentional, it might cause them to subtly view you a different way
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We already have a word for that, they're called "memes".
 
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Found a photo of Eleizer in the wild while scrolling

So maximilian Snyders argument is that if you brainwash yourself into thinking chickens on a farm are humans getting murdered in a holocaust you will become vegan? I thought he was supposed to be smart.
 
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big pauper said:
the whole lesswrong community's obsession with rokko's basilisk is really funny because it's just the plot of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. i know this guy is probably really proud of the community he built but i thought it was retarded before i had a frontal lobe and now that i do have one it just confounds me
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True and reverse-lobotomy-pilled.
 
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きたい said:
True and reverse-lobotomy-pilled.
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theres lots of stuff you read when you're like 14 where you dont really know how the world works so you just put it in the vault for later and i definitely put rokko's basilisk in the same mental category as vril or bigfoot because the number of people obsessed with it lends to the assumption that it would make more sense when i got older. now that i am older, i realized that it doesn't make any sense, its just a community run by jews
 
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big pauper said:
theres lots of stuff you read when you're like 14 where you dont really know how the world works so you just put it in the vault for later and i definitely put rokko's basilisk in the same mental category as vril or bigfoot because the number of people obsessed with it lends to the assumption that it would make more sense when i got older. now that i am older, i realized that it doesn't make any sense, its just a community run by jews
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Yep, you basically realize that some people will never fire on all cylinders... their high school selves already were their peak performance level, which is pretty frightening to a smart teenager, which is why those tend to assume the optimistic stance: giving ALL adults the benefit of a doubt, because you have to rely on them for jobs, training and protection... that's actually a problem, now that you made me think about it, I'm not sure how many otherwise O.K teens who aren't slow in the minds, still don't make it because they're just stuck with chemtrail obsessed trailer trash for guidance... or outright troon worshsippers and the likes...
 
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