no one looks good in mugshots. Well, most people don't look in mugshots. I've actually seen a website devoted to hot criminal's mugshots. The comments tend to be hilarious.
I probably say this every time Rationalism (oooo capital R) comes up, but I have a friend who is into it. More than a decade ago I was trying to learn what was then called machine learning and Bayesian engines were a subtype. This guy had been FB posting relentlessly about Bayesian reasoning so I took him to lunch hoping for some insight. The insight was that he got into it because he couldn't believe anyone disagreed with him politically and thought if people could become more rational, they would obviously change their minds and see he was right.
Obviously he didn't say it in those words.
He also has some kind of proof that god doesn't exist based on probability. I too am an atheist but the proof struck me as nonsense. It would only "convince" people who already agreed.
Call me a crazy dreamer, but I think if you get into rationality and cognitive bias study, step one is turn the beam on yourself. Of course, no one who calls himself a capital R Rationalist would ever do such a thing. In their minds rationality makes them immune to bias, including confirmation bias.
BTW, I consider it entirely possible that wanting to be an Ex-man highly correlates with being good at software. I would need to see some stats, but it makes a strange kind of sense. Maybe the military should waive the requirement for soldiers who are going to do software related stuff.
The irony for atheists and secularists generally is that Mathematics proves intelligent design --- and consequentially, God --- rather than any refutation.
See a fun discussion with which no "Rationalist" could ever compete:
I got about half-way in. I definitely have the background to understand their arguments but they aren't giving me detail enough to find specific flaws. My initial problem with the argument they appear to be making is that they are assuming that all the possible combinations of amino acids are "tried" with equal probability. My assumption has always been that stepwise change from existing functioning forms, would override almost all of the possible combinations. I concede they might be taking that into account somehow, but they haven't said so.
There is always a problem trying to model complex systems with simple rules plus math. We see this in medicine all the time and our answer is usually "if basic science reasoning and facts show irrefutable that this drug should cure cancer, but we give it to cancer patients and it doesn't cure them, well, we believe the cancer and the death, not the model".
Evolution of course is history so we can't apply that principle definitely but we could wonder if our math says not enough time, if maybe our math is wrong. Maybe there is something we aren't taking account of.
At one point the guy is talking about how all know developmental mutations that radically change the shape of an organism are fatal. It's an interesting point but hardly proves anything. We don't know how embryology works or how it relates to genetic plans--i.e. what in the genome makes you develop in the shape of a human? How is this part of the blueprint read and implemented? I think we only have basic ideas. We are so advanced at knowing how a gene results in a protein laymen might assume we know the rest...but we don't.
Anyway, based on as much of the arguments as I can understand I am not fully convinced by either. I'm no closer to knowing if there is a god and if there is, what his nature is, than I was before I heard either argument.
(This is leaving aside the question of whether autists really are better coders.)
Judging by the Zizians, the troons—autist or not—seem to be lousy at everything they do, including rationality, which would presumably be the prerequisite for coding excellence.
I went down the rabbit hole of looking at Ziz's blog describing his philosophy once. It's very logically deduced from his (mostly correct) premises. At least if one ignores the rather large contradictions in parts of his philosophy.
The problem with rationality is that it's fragile in the Talebian sense, i.e., a single false premise or mistake in reasoning causes everything that follows to become junk.
Amusingly he even has a complex classification system of people including how many people, but certainly not himself, have a massive blind spot in their philosophy that keeps them from seeing its contradictions.
Yeah, the leading edge, expensive AI hires in Big Tech I see are usually nerdish Asian or white guys: a little awkward perhaps, but not overtly perverse.
But when it comes to strapping blinders onto the model, trannies are suddenly thick on the ground.
In a weird "coincidence" the troons are most represented where value is destroyed, but not where value is made.
Hard stats on the whole population may be hard to come by, but I promise, if you go to any software meetup hosted by a tech/finance company, the ex-man to biological female ratio can easily reach 5:1. As I believe our host has said, It’s easier to turn engineers into women than women into engineers.
I've been to a couple small meetups and it was fun to talk to a couple of centrist or center-right nerds about nerd stuff for a few hours. Learned quite a bit about how to use ChatGPT well. The ideology, well, I'm too old, but none of them seemed crazy about it either. About the only place I've ever mentioned Steve Sailer IRL and people knew who he was. ;)
There are an awful lot of top-tier trans programmers for some reason. Something to do with living entirely in your head and wanting to be the nerdgirl of your dreams, or perhaps escape judgment for the evil of being a cishetwhiteman, I'd guess.
Or maybe people in their own heads feel "something isn't right" and tend to hop on the latest fad for an answer.
I recently did a project which involved coding against OpenAI's API. Learned some cool things. It is most assuredly not all about prompt engineering. In fact, the most power aspect of the system might be the way it takes groups of words and turns them into high dimensional vectors that reflect the semantic meaning of the words. There's a lot of cool stuff WRT how you search a database of those vectors to find similar meaning to what you're working on and then incorporate those into the prompt you send to the GPT.
Also interesting challenges mediating between the randomly non-deterministic results from GPT into software that behaves (and is expected to behave) deterministically.
I'm hoping this keeps me relevant for another 10 years. :)
That I would believe as well--they feel uncomfortable in their own body and if you go trans you've got lots of new friends, especially online where those types spend all their time.
That does sound interesting; I figured it was all high-end linear algebra (and read a short book about the math) but am curious where you learned this!
Web search, online resources, and OpenAI's API pages. Look for RAG architecture. No high end algebra required. Under the covers it's using matrices but you don't need to know that. You don't even have to know how the embedding of meanings into vectors is done. That's just an API call. The cool thing about the semantic vectors is that they add like vectors. If you have a vector for "King" and add the vector for "Girl" the resulting vector should be close to the vector for "Queen". Even forgetting about the LLM, this vector embedding enables very good semantic search.
Certain issues or topics have generated what we can only term as [blank]-fatigue. Of course, everyone can "fill in the blank" as "they" see fit. For the above article, sodomy and its numerous disordered variations come to mind. Thus, we feel compelled to share quotes from Dr. Albert Ellis and St. Catherine.
I respect Dr. Albert Ellis but I prefer St. Catherine. As Dr. Albert Ellis said during an interview:
"….there are homosexuals who are better adjusted than others; usually they're less guilty about their deviation and don't condemn themselves for it. *** I used to think that most homosexuals were neurotic. Now I think that maybe 50 per cent of them are borderline psychotics. *** [M]ost homosexuals I see are…seriously disturbed. And since they wrongly prefer to believe they were born as they are, they often refuse to work very hard at tackling basic problems.
"The usual fixed homosexual is a severe phobic. *** It's foolish and inhuman to make homosexuality a legal offense. But that hardly means it's wrong to acknowledge that it's a pronounced psychological disorder.
"But I'm sorry to say that many of the other authorities who claim homosexuality is innate, that homosexuals can't change and should be adjusted to their handicap, are homosexuals themselves." --- Sexuality and Homosexuality, A New View (Arno Karlen) (1971) : Interviews with Dr. Albert Ellis, P. 223
Further on, Dr. Ellis briefly discussed trannies:
"I've never seen a transvestite who wasn't a serious neurotic. ... As for transsexuals who want their penises and testicles amputated to make them 'true' women, can anyone doubt whether practically all of them are out of their minds? I've interviewed a dozen, all of whom tried to get me to help them be castrated. They were all paranoid schizophrenics. ***
"Now homosexuals, like other seriously disturbed people, have tremendous resistance to working to overcome their inborn and acquired tendencies to be neurotic, borderline psychotic or psychotic. Although they weren't born homosexual, they generally have innate tendencies toward severe general disturbance." --- Sexuality and Homosexuality, A New View (Arno Karlen) pp. 224, 226
And these are the words spoken by Our Lord to St. Catherine:
"They [the homosexuals] not only fail from resisting the weakness [of fallen human nature] …. but they do even worse when they commit the cursed sin against nature. Like the blind and stupid, having dimmed the light of their understanding, they do not recognize the disease and misery in which they find themselves. For this not only causes *Me nausea, but is disgusting even to the devils themselves whom these depraved creatures have chosen as their lords.
"For *Me this sin against nature is so abominable that for it alone five cities were destroyed by virtue of the judgment of *My Divine Justice, which could no longer bear their iniquity …. "It is disgusting to the devils not because evil displeases them or because they find pleasure in good, but rather because their nature is angelic and flees upon seeing such a repulsive sin being committed. For while certainly it is the devil that first strikes the sinner with the poisoned arrow of concupiscence, nonetheless when a man actually carries out such a sinful act, the devil goes away."
> "All but four of the parents, student athletes and staff members spoke in favor of keeping Yates as a tennis coach."
In other words, even though this guy had been "identifying as woman", undressing in girls' locker rooms, and asking girls about their menstrual cycles, almost everyone supported this obvious pervert and condemned the opposition to him as a "witch hunt".
This was in 2023.
Thank God for the Vibe Shift, which could really be called The Return To Sanity.
Excellent question that nobody else seems to have asked.
Zizian leader Jack/Ziz LaSota is being held in the Allegany County Detention Center in Maryland. But I can't find anything about whether LaSota is in the male or female section.
"LaSota, a transgender woman who blogged under the name “Ziz” and has been described by police as the leader of the group, was federally indicted last month in Maryland charged as an armed fugitive in the Frostburg arrest.
"LaSota is listed as male in charging documents and held in the men’s detention center.
"Elliott [the DA] has referred to LaSota in court as “he” while Twigg [the judge] called her “Ms. LaSota.”
The person who first raised the ziz-murder spree connection is also a Bay Area trans rationalist tech worker. Even before that the Bay Area rationalists were so alarmed by zizians’ beliefs and behavior they banned the zizians from events and would sometimes even hire security to enforce that.
Tragically no one hired security for the parents of zizians (zizians endorse killing “abusive” parents).
Allegany County is closer in mentality to West Virginia and central Pennsylvania than it is to metro Washington DC. I expect a lot of convictions. For the visiting press, I highly recommend Liberty Liquors, Ledo Pizza and Long John Silver's when court adjourns. The Ziz isn't going to like life in the 80% black Maryland prison system.
Interesting thing to me about the article is the NYT wasn't really attacking the rationalists as a whole and seemed to be careful to clarify the Zizians were an insane splinter group. Seems to show a certain Thermidorian reaction among the elite left--they've realized holy war on dissenters isn't helping their side.
Why couldn't they have spent their time discussing hair products? Not enough personal vanity?
no one looks good in mugshots. Well, most people don't look in mugshots. I've actually seen a website devoted to hot criminal's mugshots. The comments tend to be hilarious.
In looking for the hot mugshots, I found the Scarface mugshots. Maybe one should not be wearing a Scarface t-shirt when arrested.
https://www.thesmokinggun.com/mugshots/general/pacino
That's hilarious. I like the guy with the scarface tattoo and the barbed wire/bondage above.
Wasn't it a running theme on "MTV Cribs" that dumb celebrities (like pro athletes) love Scarface?
I like the iconic scenes a but but have never sat through a full viewing. It's mostly boring as I recall.
Scarface is the patron saint of rappers and black drug dealers. Mexican drug dealers have their own patron saint, Jesús Malverde.
I probably say this every time Rationalism (oooo capital R) comes up, but I have a friend who is into it. More than a decade ago I was trying to learn what was then called machine learning and Bayesian engines were a subtype. This guy had been FB posting relentlessly about Bayesian reasoning so I took him to lunch hoping for some insight. The insight was that he got into it because he couldn't believe anyone disagreed with him politically and thought if people could become more rational, they would obviously change their minds and see he was right.
Obviously he didn't say it in those words.
He also has some kind of proof that god doesn't exist based on probability. I too am an atheist but the proof struck me as nonsense. It would only "convince" people who already agreed.
Call me a crazy dreamer, but I think if you get into rationality and cognitive bias study, step one is turn the beam on yourself. Of course, no one who calls himself a capital R Rationalist would ever do such a thing. In their minds rationality makes them immune to bias, including confirmation bias.
BTW, I consider it entirely possible that wanting to be an Ex-man highly correlates with being good at software. I would need to see some stats, but it makes a strange kind of sense. Maybe the military should waive the requirement for soldiers who are going to do software related stuff.
The irony for atheists and secularists generally is that Mathematics proves intelligent design --- and consequentially, God --- rather than any refutation.
See a fun discussion with which no "Rationalist" could ever compete:
https://youtu.be/noj4phMT9OE
I got about half-way in. I definitely have the background to understand their arguments but they aren't giving me detail enough to find specific flaws. My initial problem with the argument they appear to be making is that they are assuming that all the possible combinations of amino acids are "tried" with equal probability. My assumption has always been that stepwise change from existing functioning forms, would override almost all of the possible combinations. I concede they might be taking that into account somehow, but they haven't said so.
There is always a problem trying to model complex systems with simple rules plus math. We see this in medicine all the time and our answer is usually "if basic science reasoning and facts show irrefutable that this drug should cure cancer, but we give it to cancer patients and it doesn't cure them, well, we believe the cancer and the death, not the model".
Evolution of course is history so we can't apply that principle definitely but we could wonder if our math says not enough time, if maybe our math is wrong. Maybe there is something we aren't taking account of.
At one point the guy is talking about how all know developmental mutations that radically change the shape of an organism are fatal. It's an interesting point but hardly proves anything. We don't know how embryology works or how it relates to genetic plans--i.e. what in the genome makes you develop in the shape of a human? How is this part of the blueprint read and implemented? I think we only have basic ideas. We are so advanced at knowing how a gene results in a protein laymen might assume we know the rest...but we don't.
Anyway, based on as much of the arguments as I can understand I am not fully convinced by either. I'm no closer to knowing if there is a god and if there is, what his nature is, than I was before I heard either argument.
Besides the troons themselves claiming that they somehow have a special aptitude for software, is there any evidence that that they do?
Well autists are more likely to become troons.
Is there a shortage of non-troon autists?
(This is leaving aside the question of whether autists really are better coders.)
Judging by the Zizians, the troons—autist or not—seem to be lousy at everything they do, including rationality, which would presumably be the prerequisite for coding excellence.
I went down the rabbit hole of looking at Ziz's blog describing his philosophy once. It's very logically deduced from his (mostly correct) premises. At least if one ignores the rather large contradictions in parts of his philosophy.
The problem with rationality is that it's fragile in the Talebian sense, i.e., a single false premise or mistake in reasoning causes everything that follows to become junk.
Amusingly he even has a complex classification system of people including how many people, but certainly not himself, have a massive blind spot in their philosophy that keeps them from seeing its contradictions.
They're into "AI safety" which is not the hardcore techy side.
Yeah, the leading edge, expensive AI hires in Big Tech I see are usually nerdish Asian or white guys: a little awkward perhaps, but not overtly perverse.
But when it comes to strapping blinders onto the model, trannies are suddenly thick on the ground.
In a weird "coincidence" the troons are most represented where value is destroyed, but not where value is made.
Hard stats on the whole population may be hard to come by, but I promise, if you go to any software meetup hosted by a tech/finance company, the ex-man to biological female ratio can easily reach 5:1. As I believe our host has said, It’s easier to turn engineers into women than women into engineers.
Ime it’s more like 1:1. Of course that’s still very high.
The rust programming language community is famously trans. 5:1 is plausible there.
"Rusty" being the texture of my trombone when they play it 🫡
Do we have any idea what the connection is?
Autism
I've been to a couple small meetups and it was fun to talk to a couple of centrist or center-right nerds about nerd stuff for a few hours. Learned quite a bit about how to use ChatGPT well. The ideology, well, I'm too old, but none of them seemed crazy about it either. About the only place I've ever mentioned Steve Sailer IRL and people knew who he was. ;)
There are an awful lot of top-tier trans programmers for some reason. Something to do with living entirely in your head and wanting to be the nerdgirl of your dreams, or perhaps escape judgment for the evil of being a cishetwhiteman, I'd guess.
Or maybe people in their own heads feel "something isn't right" and tend to hop on the latest fad for an answer.
I recently did a project which involved coding against OpenAI's API. Learned some cool things. It is most assuredly not all about prompt engineering. In fact, the most power aspect of the system might be the way it takes groups of words and turns them into high dimensional vectors that reflect the semantic meaning of the words. There's a lot of cool stuff WRT how you search a database of those vectors to find similar meaning to what you're working on and then incorporate those into the prompt you send to the GPT.
Also interesting challenges mediating between the randomly non-deterministic results from GPT into software that behaves (and is expected to behave) deterministically.
I'm hoping this keeps me relevant for another 10 years. :)
That I would believe as well--they feel uncomfortable in their own body and if you go trans you've got lots of new friends, especially online where those types spend all their time.
That does sound interesting; I figured it was all high-end linear algebra (and read a short book about the math) but am curious where you learned this!
A white, middle-aged Australian autist on youtube said he had no friends in college until he grew dreadlocks. I hope the friends were worth it.
Dreadlocks? You can *shave* those.
The trans thing, is, uh, more permanent in many cases. what's that meme?
1965: I grew out my hair
1995: I pierced my nose
2025: I cut off my ****!
Web search, online resources, and OpenAI's API pages. Look for RAG architecture. No high end algebra required. Under the covers it's using matrices but you don't need to know that. You don't even have to know how the embedding of meanings into vectors is done. That's just an API call. The cool thing about the semantic vectors is that they add like vectors. If you have a vector for "King" and add the vector for "Girl" the resulting vector should be close to the vector for "Queen". Even forgetting about the LLM, this vector embedding enables very good semantic search.
Certain issues or topics have generated what we can only term as [blank]-fatigue. Of course, everyone can "fill in the blank" as "they" see fit. For the above article, sodomy and its numerous disordered variations come to mind. Thus, we feel compelled to share quotes from Dr. Albert Ellis and St. Catherine.
I respect Dr. Albert Ellis but I prefer St. Catherine. As Dr. Albert Ellis said during an interview:
"….there are homosexuals who are better adjusted than others; usually they're less guilty about their deviation and don't condemn themselves for it. *** I used to think that most homosexuals were neurotic. Now I think that maybe 50 per cent of them are borderline psychotics. *** [M]ost homosexuals I see are…seriously disturbed. And since they wrongly prefer to believe they were born as they are, they often refuse to work very hard at tackling basic problems.
"The usual fixed homosexual is a severe phobic. *** It's foolish and inhuman to make homosexuality a legal offense. But that hardly means it's wrong to acknowledge that it's a pronounced psychological disorder.
"But I'm sorry to say that many of the other authorities who claim homosexuality is innate, that homosexuals can't change and should be adjusted to their handicap, are homosexuals themselves." --- Sexuality and Homosexuality, A New View (Arno Karlen) (1971) : Interviews with Dr. Albert Ellis, P. 223
Further on, Dr. Ellis briefly discussed trannies:
"I've never seen a transvestite who wasn't a serious neurotic. ... As for transsexuals who want their penises and testicles amputated to make them 'true' women, can anyone doubt whether practically all of them are out of their minds? I've interviewed a dozen, all of whom tried to get me to help them be castrated. They were all paranoid schizophrenics. ***
"Now homosexuals, like other seriously disturbed people, have tremendous resistance to working to overcome their inborn and acquired tendencies to be neurotic, borderline psychotic or psychotic. Although they weren't born homosexual, they generally have innate tendencies toward severe general disturbance." --- Sexuality and Homosexuality, A New View (Arno Karlen) pp. 224, 226
And these are the words spoken by Our Lord to St. Catherine:
"They [the homosexuals] not only fail from resisting the weakness [of fallen human nature] …. but they do even worse when they commit the cursed sin against nature. Like the blind and stupid, having dimmed the light of their understanding, they do not recognize the disease and misery in which they find themselves. For this not only causes *Me nausea, but is disgusting even to the devils themselves whom these depraved creatures have chosen as their lords.
"For *Me this sin against nature is so abominable that for it alone five cities were destroyed by virtue of the judgment of *My Divine Justice, which could no longer bear their iniquity …. "It is disgusting to the devils not because evil displeases them or because they find pleasure in good, but rather because their nature is angelic and flees upon seeing such a repulsive sin being committed. For while certainly it is the devil that first strikes the sinner with the poisoned arrow of concupiscence, nonetheless when a man actually carries out such a sinful act, the devil goes away."
The middle two look like they were from opposing sides of the Battle of Mohi.
s/at it's most/at its most/
You pegged it Steve. The problem, which will be unnamed by the Times, is Transgenderism, of which the radicals are the most visible example.
Another trans weirdo:
https://genevievegluck.substack.com/p/exclusive-trans-identified-male-high
Most remarkable line in that story:
> "All but four of the parents, student athletes and staff members spoke in favor of keeping Yates as a tennis coach."
In other words, even though this guy had been "identifying as woman", undressing in girls' locker rooms, and asking girls about their menstrual cycles, almost everyone supported this obvious pervert and condemned the opposition to him as a "witch hunt".
This was in 2023.
Thank God for the Vibe Shift, which could really be called The Return To Sanity.
Outrageous isn’t it?
Curious if he is being held in a men or woman's prison?
Excellent question that nobody else seems to have asked.
Zizian leader Jack/Ziz LaSota is being held in the Allegany County Detention Center in Maryland. But I can't find anything about whether LaSota is in the male or female section.
3 days ago the local newspaper cleared up that question:
Three Zizians granted joint trial
Teresa McMinn, Cumberland Times-News, Md.
Thu, July 10, 2025 at 3:17 PM GMT+2
https://www.yahoo.com/news/three-zizians-granted-joint-trial-131700370.html
"LaSota, a transgender woman who blogged under the name “Ziz” and has been described by police as the leader of the group, was federally indicted last month in Maryland charged as an armed fugitive in the Frostburg arrest.
"LaSota is listed as male in charging documents and held in the men’s detention center.
"Elliott [the DA] has referred to LaSota in court as “he” while Twigg [the judge] called her “Ms. LaSota.”
Local newspapers are better at answering that kind of question than national newspapers.
Wait until the Ziz is incarcerated in the Maryland State prison system that is roughly 80 % black. They will become girls by force.
They must be glad they're in federal court, though there's no parole.
I didn't know it was a federal case. Lucky Zizes.
As far as I'm concerned, we'll just have to shut Information Technology down until we figure out what's going on.
The zizians are in prison. It’s over.
The person who first raised the ziz-murder spree connection is also a Bay Area trans rationalist tech worker. Even before that the Bay Area rationalists were so alarmed by zizians’ beliefs and behavior they banned the zizians from events and would sometimes even hire security to enforce that.
Tragically no one hired security for the parents of zizians (zizians endorse killing “abusive” parents).
Better safe than sorry.
The rational yet illegible tranny murderers that specialize in safety represent great progress from our bigoted religious past, Y or N?
...masculinity at it's most toxic...
Please erase that apostrophe.
“… a transgender vegan animal rights effective altruist rationalist high IQ computer geek murder cult…”
What, no crystal worship?
No, crystal worship is an irrational superstition, just like religion, and the belief that gender is based on biological sex.
Gender is based on DNA, with a few mutant exceptions of course 👍
Yikes. More stuff to worry about when I wake up at 2:15 in the morning.
Way too many people have way too much spare time to think up this stuff.
Do they have access to the internet while in jail? I hope not.
Allegany County is closer in mentality to West Virginia and central Pennsylvania than it is to metro Washington DC. I expect a lot of convictions. For the visiting press, I highly recommend Liberty Liquors, Ledo Pizza and Long John Silver's when court adjourns. The Ziz isn't going to like life in the 80% black Maryland prison system.
Interesting thing to me about the article is the NYT wasn't really attacking the rationalists as a whole and seemed to be careful to clarify the Zizians were an insane splinter group. Seems to show a certain Thermidorian reaction among the elite left--they've realized holy war on dissenters isn't helping their side.
Well the general rationalist movement has been fairly on the ball about distancing themselves from this.
Ooh, with that blond hair and delicate features, he's bound to be the cellblock favorite.