Can we talk about how the Rationalists seem to attract mentally unstable people to their trainings in mental technology, while also targeting the young with so-called rationality camps?
If at the apex of an organization you have a person who has organized his life in such a way as to have sex with several other people, and if many people involved in the movement pay a tithe to the organization or charities it designates, and if many of the members of this organization go crazy thinking about the impending hell (of AGI), how is this different from a cult?
Am I missing something? The only mention of "rationalists" in this article is a note about how this cult leader considers rationalists to be her enemies. What's the relevance of your hostility towards them?
About ten years ago, Ziz participated in a workshop (multiple workshops? not sure) organized by the so-called rationalist community in the Bay Area. Later she was banned from the community, organized a protest against it, got briefly arrested, faked her suicide and disappeared... now appeared again...
She also recruited some of her cult members from the community (not sure which ones).
So, if you want, you can frame it as the rationalist community being a dangerous place that attracts sick people. Or you could frame is as anarchists being violent, vegans being intolerant, or trans women being crazy... because the Zizans are all of that. Everyone is free to chose their own story about them.
It may or may not be important that most rationalists / anarchists / vegans / trans women are not crazy murderers, so maybe the story is mostly about Ziz being Ziz and succeeding to get a few (less than ten) followers.
It has a lot in common with cults and religions, "we've found a way of thinking that can let you make perfect decisions and figure out things in new fields quickly sometime even figuring out things that elude 'experts' in that field". It's not inherently cultish but that idea can attract the same kinds of people who might get sucked into other cults but don't because they're atheist or agnostic.
Says the subscriber to the other one. Both sides are rank with this, there are surface differences and differences in MO but this has become the default state of both. If one vehemently disagree with that, their side has done its job well.
Your previous comment implies the same. Regardless, I’m not saying that anyone who disagrees is necessarily, just observing that the natural consequence of said manipulation would be to hold a dogmatic insistence that “it’s them, not me”.
It's mis- or disinformation to say that all sides, all people are the same. It's the ultimate cover for people doing wrong - it eliminates any 'wrongness'.
A corrupt politician might say, 'everyone is corrupt'. Now their flaw is wiped away, in a relative sense. But it's not true.
I think this is about as reasonable as conflating all hippies with Manson, or all Christians with the Waco people.
I have met a few "rationalist" types, and I went to a "rationalist" meetup in San Francisco, although they called it something else and didn't care for that label, but couldn't really get other people to stop calling them that.
The overall vibe was like a tech meetup crossed with a church picnic. There were a lot of programmers and grad students there to do a little professional networking, talk about books they like, whether they should be donating to charity a little, which charities worked best, and how to avoid throwing away the leftover cookies.
The subject of AI millennialism was not broached in my presence, all though I did meet some people who were working on AI. If there were any psychos or cult leaders there (or trans people for that matter), I didn't notice, and no one tried to recruit me to anything. It was a totally normal and pleasant experience.
That cult is kind of the opposite tho, they were looking forward to the impending hell of AGI and thought they were doing things that would get on the good side of the evil overseer AI of the future. If anything they weren't going crazy over it they felt comforted.
They are too rational for religion but desperately need meaning (or whatever) so they convinced themselves they could literally talk directly to god (after he exists he will simulate their exact personalities at this exact moment in time).
They probably believe(d) they are/were but cults exploit a lot of fundamental human biases, desires and weaknesses. Pretty much anyone could fall in with a cult given the right approach. IMO all believing you're too smart for a cult gets you is a blind spot that lets the right cult sneak up on you even easier.
Pick your favourite cult checklist and see how much applies. Rationalists certainly have some cult-like characteristics, but e.g. practically any environmentalist group has all the ones you list and more (especially the targeting the young part). In particular the Rationalists I know don't discourage questioning and dissent (quite the opposite), don't focus much on bringing in money or members, don't give their leaders any exalted status or obey them unquestioningly (quite the opposite), don't encourage people to break the law or disobey the proper authorities, and don't try to isolate people from their outside friends or family.
I suggest you read the section starting "The Zizians, believe it or not, are not the only cult-like groupuscule to have emerged from the heady stew of the Rationalist community" from [1]
Some quotes:
> (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
> there were also psychotic breaks involving demonic subprocess narratives,” and where people in positions of power would “debug” underlings. “I experienced myself and others being distanced from old family and friends, who didn't understand how high-impact the work we were doing was,”
> Scott Alexander, maybe the most prominent Rationalist besides Yudkowsky, suggested that the problem was not really M.I.R.I. or C.F.A.R. so much as that Taylor was in a cult-like group centered around a former M.I.R.I. head
> I don’t know that I have the patience or energy to really get to the bottom of it all except to say: It all kinda sounds pretty culty to me! And I haven’t even gotten into the Burning Man camp Black Lotus or the Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth
> The Zizians, believe it or not, are not the only cult-like groupuscule to have emerged from the heady stew of the Rationalist community
Many communities have cultlike offshoots. What frequency, what proportion are we talking about? And surely the fact that mainstream Rationalists have been loudly denouncing and warning people about the Zizians for the past 5 years counts for something.
> (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
> there were also psychotic breaks involving demonic subprocess narratives,” and where people in positions of power would “debug” underlings.
Yeah, that's crazy. I don't think any of the people I know would get involved in anything like that. Again, is that "normal Rationalists" or is that what a snake-handler sect is to Christians?
> I don’t know that I have the patience or energy to really get to the bottom of it all except to say: It all kinda sounds pretty culty to me!
This is the kind of thing you'd say if you wanted to smear a group but knew the dirt was actually pretty limited.
Just noting I was just quoting it, but it seems accurate.
My personal view is that Rationalism is more like a religion, and there are spin-offs that are cults.
> And surely the fact that mainstream Rationalists have been loudly denouncing and warning people about the Zizians for the past 5 years counts for something.
Religions usually are very vocal to denounce breakaways as apostates.
The OP said:
> If at the apex of an organization you have a person who has organized his life in such a way as to have sex with several other people, and if many people involved in the movement pay a tithe to the organization or charities it designates, and if many of the members of this organization go crazy thinking about the impending hell (of AGI), how is this different from a cult?
It seems your main objection is to the "many" word in "if many of the members of this organization go crazy".
>> It all kinda sounds pretty culty to me!
> This is the kind of thing you'd say if you wanted to smear a group but knew the dirt was actually pretty limited.
> (The way the page is written, I get the impression that the word "infohazardous" markets the content of the glossary as "extra powerful and intriguing occult material", as I noted is common in my recent post about infohazards.)
> Given that I thought I may had started World War 3 and was continuing to harm and control people with my mental powers, I seriously considered suicide.
> There is a very disturbing possibility (with some evidence for it) here, that people may be picked off one by one (by partially-subconscious and partially-memetic influences, sometimes in ways they cooperate with, e.g. through suicide), with most everyone being too scared to investigate the circumstances.
etc etc
Decide for yourself if "pretty culty" is a reasonable label.
There's a lot of things that I'd qualify as "religious" that I probably wouldn't as a kid, even in my very Catholic upbringing. Most of the companies I've worked for command loyalty and have rituals that border on religious ceremonies. They use legal avenues rather than social avenues for control, but who's to say the modern corporate ethos isn't a cult? I feel semi-confident in saying that broadly of Fortune 500 companies and especially technology industry companies (and their leaders.)
That isn't to say rationalists on the whole are one thing or another, but rather my hypothesis is as society gets more desperate and divided this kind of order is a natural consequence.
> Can we talk about how the Rationalists seem to attract mentally unstable people to their trainings in mental technology, while also targeting the young with so-called rationality camps?
This AGI doomerism, which is now also popularized on YouTube etc, is very closely related to the kind of existential questions that mentally unstable people probably ask themselves.
The bar of entry is pretty low, as you need no skills really. You can bootstrap ideas that sound convincing to yourself from nothing pretty quick. That's my hot take anyways.
AI doomerism I've seen largely boils down to pretty standard critiques of capitalism -- who controls the means of production (the capital class), who will benefit most from increases in productivity (capital class), who is going to end up poorer (working class).
Unless you mean the folks who believe AI will become AGI and start hurting people directly. Those folks are pretty fringe.
Sva did say AGI doomerism, which I think is distinct from the more mundane and grounded concerns about how extant "AI" systems will effect the labor market, and related concerns. The LessWrong people talking about AIs exterminating humanity because we failed to worship it correctly, not the artists complaining about AI mimicking their style and turning art into a commodities available to anybody.
Some of the attempts in this comment section to tar the entire rationalist
community with the Zizian brush are ideologically motivated. The third most popular ideology in the US is the hope that
technological progress will lead to a good future. (The most popular ideology is Christianity, with Leftism in second place. Note that a single person can subscribe to more than one ideology.) In contrast, the rationalist community grew around
publications by Eliezer Yudkowsky written with the hope that they would help people
realize that AI research is dangerous [1]. Of course, if technological
progress is your ideology, then you are going to resist the idea that the most exciting and powerful technology of the
decade is dangerous.
> the rationalist community grew around publications by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Rationalism (in its current form) has been around since long before someone on the internet became famous for their epic-length Harry Potter fanfiction, and it will continue to exist long after LessWrong has become a domain parking page.
Sure, but currently we are discussing (inaccurate portrayals of) the community that grew starting in 2006 around Eliezer's writings. I regret that there is no better name for this community. (The community has tried to acquire a more descriptive name, but none have stuck.)
Hope is not an ideology, but it can be deeply comforting for a person to identify with an entity or process bigger than any person. Some identify with our civilization's process of scientific discovery and technological development.
Ideology is not the only motivation: many here hope to profit personally from the continued rapid development of AI.
So, no source then. You cannot include everyone with “hope” or everyone with capitalist leanings as adherents of a relatively fringe belief system. Hoping for personal profit is again not an ideology.
"The Religion of Technology" by David F. Noble is a good historical summary of such ideology. The ideology has been around for a long time, the new phase with tech is just the latest iteration of it.
There's also the other time the rationalist community made national news, when a similar cult accidentally gambled away ten billion dollars in cryptocurrency.
Effective altruism has different roots than the rationalists (although, yes, the 2 communities have become close over the years). I have seen any statement by Sam Bankman-Fried where he identified as a rationalist.
Well, if we're ignoring everyone else's descriptions of SBF, Caroline Ellison had a tumblr on which she repeatedly self-identified as a rationalist: https://caroline.milkyeggs.com/worldoptimization
> The third most popular ideology in the US is the hope that technological progress will lead to a good future. (The most popular ideology is Christianity, with Leftism in second place
Eh? Can you link a source on this, preferably one that defines 'leftism' as well?
Leftism is the belief that society contains a system of oppression and that society's most pressing need is the dismantling of this system. For example, most Americans are opposed to racism IMHO, but being opposed to racism is not enough to qualify a person as a Leftist: the Leftist believes that dismantling the racist system almost always trumps other considerations whereas the non-racist non-Leftist tends to think that many thorny problems would remain in our society even if miraculously all racism, sexism, etc, were eliminated.
Ideology might be necessary for healthy human mental functioning. I'm not trying to make anyone feel bad for having a commitment to an ideology. But there is so much scorn of the rationalist community here in this comment section that rather than reply to every falsehood and every exaggeration, I thought it would be more effective to point out that a commitment to and identification with technological progress can rise to the level of an ideology.
I kind of wish I hadn't brought up ideology here: it would probably have sufficed for me to point out that many here on HN hope to strike it rich (and many who hope to make a career) in the AI boom and to point out why these many would see the rationalist community as an enemy.
I tried to write a genuine ELI5 explanation but I'm not sure it's possible unless you can assume a five-year-old knows what "philosophy" means, lol.
You could say "a group of people think that being smart gives them magic powers, and that most people are evil zombies, but they think everyone in their own special group is good and can do whatever they want" but you lose a lot of nuance.
You lose a lot of nuance but that’s actually a pretty good explanation because it reveals the obvious parallels to nearly every mainstream religion throughout history.
Interesting challenge: put all of this crazy information into a LLM prompt and ask it to explain everything as if to a real five year old. Maybe the newer "Deep research" models could do it. (See also https://xkcd.com/547/ of course.)
A journalist wrote a long article about a weird, extreme group called the “Zizians.” They’re a mix of radical thinkers from the Rationalist movement—a community of people obsessed with using logic to solve big problems, like AI safety or moral philosophy. The Zizians, led by a person named Ziz, took these ideas to an extreme, combining them with unusual beliefs about morality, consciousness, and even Star Wars-like "Sith" philosophy.
This group has been connected to multiple violent incidents, including murders and standoffs with police. Some of its members have been arrested, gone into hiding, or mysteriously died. The author explains that Rationalist groups, while not inherently violent, often attract highly analytical but socially disconnected people, making them vulnerable to cult-like thinking.
The article also touches on how similar communities—like Effective Altruists and AI researchers—can sometimes create intense, insular environments that lead to extreme behavior. Basically, the Zizians are an example of how even smart, logical people can end up in very bizarre and dangerous places when they take ideas too far.
> following a traffic stop, United States Border Patrol agent David Maland was killed in a shootout with Teresa Youngblut, who was wounded, and German national Ophelia Bauckholt, who also died in the shootout. The pair were traveling south on Interstate 91 in Coventry, Vermont, when they were pulled over as part of a traffic stop.[1] The two were put under "periodic surveillance" nearly one week before the shooting after they were reported to be armed and wearing all-black tactical clothing when checking in to their hotel.
So these guys were being surveilled for being armed and decked out in tactical gear, so the authorities send in a lone traffic cop to pull them over? And predictably, the cop is killed.
This isn't the first time I've heard of this kind of thing happening. That agent was basically set up to die, sacrificed like a pawn by his superiors playing a sick game of chess. The same thing happened to Darian Jarott, who was directed by his boss to arrest an armed and dangerous meth smuggler without being briefed of the danger, despite the fact that the danger was clearly understood by his superiors (a tactical team with medics were stationed nearby, but Jarott was sent in alone without knowledge of this.) The meth smuggler stepped out of his truck with an AR-15, taking Jarott completely by surprise, and murdered him. The meth smuggler was then chased down and killed by the other officers and agents.
>So these guys were being surveilled for being armed and decked out in tactical gear, so the authorities send in a lone traffic cop to pull them over? And predictably, the cop is killed.
Was there any indication the police was "sent" to pull them over, rather than some sort of routine traffic stop? The article mentions the DHS surveillance was only "periodic", which implied they weren't really keeping tabs on them 24/7.
I appreciate the info, hadn't heard about the Jarott case, and I hadn't considered this possible angle. That said, I don't think Maland was alone when he was shot. Details haven't been released, but the initial reporting was clear that multiple officers were involved.
Here for example is the AP: "Youngblut got out and opened fire on Maland and other officers without warning, the FBI said. Bauckholt tried to draw a gun but was shot, according to the affidavit. At least one border agent fired on Youngblut and Bauckholt, but authorities haven’t specified whose bullets hit whom."
They? There is no they. No plan. No conspiracy . Just a guy who gets up in the morning to write speeding tickets to fill a counties chest, while also filter feeding for outstanding warrants running into two armed psychos.The observation team (aka sigint fat dude) has zero connection to the traffic cop.
At least in the case of Darian Jarott, he absolutely was directed by his boss to pull over the smuggler. "A State Police supervisor had asked Jarrott to pull over Cueva-Felix at the behest of federal agents"https://apnews.com/article/officer-killed-new-mexico-highway...
In the case of David Maland, the chance of it being a completely normal "traffic stop" by a federal border patrol agent (who's job is not to fill the counties chest by writing tickets, as you incorrectly state), completely unrelated to these people being under surveillance at the time for being armed and in tactical gear, is dubious to put it mildly.
How is this more plausible then any of the alternative explanations?
e.g. the decision makers could be incompetent, they might not care that much, they had some other contradicting information not publicly revealed, etc…
A possibly mentally ill trans woman with the moniker Ziz developed a following blogging and posting on philosophy groups. Ziz developed that following into a cult.
For anyone unfamiliar with Andy Ngo he has an extreme far right bias and associates with the proud boys. Worth taking anything he says we a heap of salt.
Idk about factually incorrect, but the piece repeatedly misgenders the cultists, puts their names in scare quotes and favors their old names (and calls those old names their “real names”) and leads with “trans terror” in the headline.
At every turn the purpose of the piece is demonize trans people, even if it got the facts right.
In my experience, biased authors are unintentionally reliable narrators. The reader can use that bias as an anchor for truth, to triangulate facts that might be less obvious in a neutral narrative. I would rather read two articles from biased opposing authors, than a single article from the middle. That’s why I read CNN and Fox instead of Reuters. And it’s the basis of sites like Ground News.
Of course, this only works as long as the reader is aware of the bias, so your comment is a valid warning in that respect.
>In my experience, biased authors are unintentionally reliable narrators. The reader can use that bias as an anchor for truth
This is absolutely nonsensical. No amount of watching InfoWars can help you understand global warming or the operations of FEMA.
Bad information isn't like the "picking stocks" problem where being reliably wrong can be mapped to being right. Enough bias just comprehensively ruins the data.
Reading InfoWars can give you information about upcoming narratives that will seep through the right-wing infosphere. If you see them talking about some mainstream story with a controversial angle not present in the other sources, then – despite being wildly exaggerated, cherry picked and out of context – there is probably some kernel of truth to it. And even if it’s a tiny kernel, it could be enough for a few influencers to latch onto it and promote the narrative.
For example, not every article about the Zizians mentions their gender identity. But the right wing articles do. If you only read some news sources, you would miss this bit of information. Is it relevant to the story? Maybe, maybe not – that’s up to the reader to decide. Is it relevant to the narrative that will take hold as it propagates throughout social media? Yes absolutely. And the fact that only one side mentions it means it’s even more likely to become a central point of contention, because each side will weaponize it against the other. The right will claim the left is hiding it and the left will claim the right is unnecessarily elevating it. In the end, it will become the most controversial (and therefore popular) part of the narrative, and the hook of engagement bait that keeps the story going.
You wouldn’t be able to anticipate this if you only read a few mainstream left-leaning articles about the story. And there is value to anticipating these narratives because if you catch them early, you know to ignore them as they expand into a larger waste of time.
Just because he has, um, interesting ideas about what's worth covering or what lens to view things through, does not change that he does in fact report things and is therefore a reporter.
I'll copy someone's comment from a related thread:
G.K.Chesterton knew it, 100 years ago:
"... insanity is often marked by the dominance of reason and the exclusion of creativity and humour. Pure reason is inhuman. The madman’s mind moves in a perfect, but narrow, circle, and his explanation of the world is comprehensive, at least to him."
It's a very common failure mode, in fact. We tend to swipe inconvenient emotions under the rug, into our subconscious basement. Those emotions don't disappear, and their fumes start poisoning the mind, who believes that it sees clearly. Instead, it quickly surrounds itself with a shell of illusion. In that imaginary castle it sits and slowly goes insane. A simple self-test is asking yourself: do you feel compassion to those around you? Mind alone cannot create compassion, it comes from above to guide the mind. That's also why living a solitary life is a bad idea, especially when your mind wants to self-isolate to guard its precious inner world.
Given that people with an agenda have already tried to make this about illegal immigration and failed, I look forward to them trying to make it about trans people instead. It's already a standard play in the book to take any headline-grabbing violent crime and try to blame it on a trans person, so when that's actually true there are absolutely gonna be people who think the whole community needs to answer for it.
As far as I'm aware, the cult leader targeted trans women for recruitment.
I think it's natural for people who are going through many changes with their body and their self-perception as well as their relationship to society to be vulnerable to certain kinds of cognitive biases and perhaps susceptible to millenarian philosophies presented by charismatic leaders. If you feel like you don't fit in your body, don't fit into society's categories and expectations for you, it may be easier for you to be persuaded to join a movement which rejects the current social construct.
As far as media reporting or ignoring certain details, that's normal these days when it comes to politically sensitive topics or groups. I have seen many news stories about more mundane murder cases where the prime suspect was a minority and the media did not report it. Here in Canada, it's particularly common for the media to ignore the fact that a crime suspect is Indigenous, presumably to avoid feeding the stereotype that Indigenous people are more likely to commit crimes (Indigenous people are massively overrepresented in the incarceration statistics here).
There have been several instances where the QAnon types (e.g. Marjorie Taylor Greene) have baselessly accused mass murder suspects of being trans, or incorrectly accusing trans people of being the culprit in a violent incident. There is good reason to try to protect a vulnerable group as it can result in ostracization and violence against people who have nothing to do with the violent incident and are only connected by being a member of that group.
But do you think the media ignoring the connection makes the situation better or worse? I feel like it feeds into the bigoted narratives like "x group is doing y crimes and the media doesn't want you to know!".
I agree with this idea and line of thinking, and it's well-intentioned but it comes with its own costs. There's a risk that over time, people might start to feel like they're being gaslit by a media conspiracy, and this feeling may build up until eventually society snaps into an extreme backlash, which may be worse than the original prejudice.
Present events feel like one example of this.
I think a similar thing happened with COVID; early on the media and government went hard on filtering information, in order to suppress anti-asian discrimination (as a sibling commenter mentions) or to prevent shortages of masks, but it ended up like squeezing a water balloon. Trying to control public opinion this way might have had short-term success but caused all sorts of radical conspiracy outbursts and a loss of trust in institutions.
So as a long term strategy, it might just not work that well.
I see what you're saying. Perhaps an upfront messaging would have been sensible, e.g. stating that Americans of Asian descent have no connection to this virus. But I'm unsure of how much effect it would have on bigots who will be bigots. During that administration bigots were emboldened, as they are even more so during this one.
I've filtered it down to only where race is mentioned in the title itself. Plenty of results for the intended query. Notably, there were zero results (in this search, and judging by the title only, in the first ~5 pages) for white victims - it correctly parsed "killed by white" to include only white perpetrators. Results for "killed by black site:apnews.com":
Again filtered for only cases reporting on killings, where race is mentioned in the title. In the first ~5 pages, there were zero results (judging by title alone) about black perpetrators - all the stories were about black victims, even though it had no trouble parsing the query correctly when asking about white perpetrators.
This is despite the fact that in 2019 (the most recent year for which the FBI published this data [1]), there were 566 black-on-white killings, and 246 white-on-black killings (where the FBI includes latinos in "white"). So it's not that the AP's reporting simply reflects reality. Their journalists are simply following the official AP style on race - only identify it when it is "pertinent" [2]. It just so happens that when a white kills a black, race is pertinent, and when a black kills a white, it is a "random act of violence".
[2] Consider carefully when deciding whether to identify people by race. Often, it is an irrelevant factor and drawing unnecessary attention to someone’s race or ethnicity can be interpreted as bigotry. There are, however, occasions when race is pertinent - https://web.archive.org/web/20220715000414/https://www.apsty...
Yes that’s a bit disturbing when presented like that.
I doubt the perpetrator being white was a necessary part of the headline in all those stories. Though I definitely don’t think including race in the story more often would make things better.
Thanks for doing the work and bringing the receipts. I don't consider this some "grand conspiracy" in the sense that it's well coordinated amongst organizations. It's just been politically expedient to act this way in the last decade or so.
The false appearance of conspiracy can easily arise when you have numerous people with roughly aligned ideologies and incentives independently responding to similar stimuli in whatever way they personally think is the most prudent. That's probably what's going on here.
This idea was explained by Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent.
No, a conspiracy has a very specific definition that has gotten lost in all the noise:
noun (plural conspiracies)
a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful: she served five years in prison for taking part in a conspiracy to sell stolen art works.
The key is that it's a secret plan. People have to have gotten together to meet, in secret, and agree on a plan. This is why true grand conspiracies are so rare: it's hard to get a lot of people together in one room, get them all to agree on a plan, and get them all to keep it a secret. The more people involved, the more likely there will be a leaker.
Criminal conspiracies are quite common though. Of course, those can involve as few as 2 people making a plan to commit a crime together.
People who live far outside of the mainstream do often come to believe that mainstream society is all one grand conspiracy. That perception is an illusion, created by the mechanism I described.
Despite the downvotes, this may actually have been happening, since a big part of Zizian theory was the idea that everybody has two hemispheres, one male and one female.
I do wonder how much it's people in the media trying to protect the rest of the trans community from association with this story, and how much it's just people writing stories based on the other coverage and not realizing that the trans connection even exists.
In any case, I find it encouraging that the more recent coverage has often been more complete than that of the first couple weeks.
> I do wonder how much it's people in the media trying to protect the rest of the trans community from association with this story, and how much it's just people writing stories based on the other coverage and not realizing that the trans connection even exists.
There is also the possibility that writers or editors feared being unpersonned.
it's very common for violent cults of personality to target potential members who are social outsiders, there's a dual benefit that such individual are more likely to offer loyalty in exchange for membership and they also provide ideological cover as the cult can blend in to a larger perceived movement
the fact that this particular set of outsiders creates skewed media reactions (from total misdirection on one end to unfair over indexing on the other) is a novel third benefit
I don't doubt at all that that's a major or even complete explanation of why trans women have been targeted by this cult. I am most certainly not making the claim that they're doing this because they are trans.
I just think that it's interesting that this very notable fact is being ignored - if this group were made up entirely of right wing men, or ballet dancers, or museum curators this would no doubt be reported on.
How is it being ignored? It's literally the primary thing which is being reported on about this, because 6 murders in the US is a drop in the bucket of murders which happen in a non-mass shooting week.
Is it? In the linked article as well as the source article posted elsewhere in this thread it's not mentioned at all. I confirmed this by googling the story and clicking on other mainstream websites like The Guardian and it was the same. They mentioned the gender situation of LaSota but not that the cult is almost entirely the same.
Yeah I agree, I think that this is just a case where the transness of the cult members was actually beneficial in a Darwinian memetics sense - there have been public warnings about the Zizians for half a decade but they were all pattern matched to 'bigoted transphobic fear mongering' and excluded from the Overton Window. It took the random murder of a federal agent (which got media coverage on an entirely separate axis of attention) to break this, and I wonder how long Ziz would have walked free even if the group continued to commit less headline worthy crimes.
Bigotry causes cover for this shit. If trans people were just accepted for humans who just want to live their lives, then the pattern matching defense wouldn't need to exist. There'd be no need to assume "well, first and foremost, this is probably just some bigot claiming trans people are evil again".
But no, some people have to punch down, which means others have to develop defenses that assume all punches are punching down.
If nothing else, it would seem bigotry is highly inefficient.
For what it's worth, I always downvote "I can't speak my mind because my opinions are too controversial" comments, but I don't downvote controversial comments if they're thoughtful.
I think most of the time when people feel they can't speak their mind, the reality is that their opinions are shallow and poorly thought out, and they're not willing to receive that feedback or put more energy into formulating an opinion.
If you're jumping to conclusions by looking at people's photos - you're probably not really coming to a considered conclusion based on the breadth of evidence. The downvotes you were anticipating were probably deserved.
> If you're jumping to conclusions by looking at people's photos - you're probably not really coming to a considered conclusion based on the breadth of evidence.
There's a reason "me or your lying eyes" is a joke. At some point you have to be willing to look at something rather than thinking yourself into a position when you can't see what's in front of you.
I invite you to elaborate, because because while I see how it's true you should draw conclusions from what you see in general, abstract terms, I don't understand what you mean to imply in the context of the comment I made (eg "don't judge a book by it's cover" or "if you're judging a book by it's cover, don't be surprised or claim victimhood if you get the feedback you've come to errant conclusions").
What I'm saying is that looking at a photo is a reality-check and a valuable one. Yes, sometimes something isn't what it looks like. But often things are exactly what they look like. If your elaborate theory leads you to one conclusion, and looking at the photo leads you to another, you should at least consider the possibility that it's the elaborate theory that's wrong.
NXIVM is something different and comes from another crowd, at least that is the only other recent notorious sex cult which comes to mind. (Although I only remembered the name as Nexium.)
If at the apex of an organization you have a person who has organized his life in such a way as to have sex with several other people, and if many people involved in the movement pay a tithe to the organization or charities it designates, and if many of the members of this organization go crazy thinking about the impending hell (of AGI), how is this different from a cult?
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