"Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil”
Is it a coincidence that the rise of AI has coincided with the return of Northern California cults like the murderous Ziz?
When I was younger, my native California was home to lots of cults and serial killers and serial killer cultists. But in this century it got expensive and genteel. California has been a lot less entertaining in recent years, whereas formerly boring states like Florida and Oregon have taken the lead.
But now there is a Northern California Ziz cult of transgender vegan animal rights effective altruist rationalist high IQ computer geeks who have apparently been involved in about four killings. For some reason, this isn’t a big story yet, perhaps because it’s ridiculously confusing.
From Open Vallejo:
Both suspects attended the prestigious Lakeside School in Seattle,
Lakeside is the expensive private school where Bill Gates and Paul Allen met in the late 1960s. It was a rare high school to have its own computer at the time.
studied computer science, and appear to sympathize with fringe Bay Area group described as a “murder gang.”
by Anna Bauman and Matthew BrownJanuary 27, 2025
Two young people who applied in November for a marriage license in Washington have each been charged by authorities in separate January killings that claimed the lives of a Border Patrol agent in Vermont and an 82-year-old landlord in Vallejo, according to police and court records obtained by Open Vallejo.
Vallejo is the highly diverse San Francisco Bay community that was home to Sly and the Family Stone.
Maximilian Snyder, a 22-year-old data scientist arrested in Northern California on Friday on suspicion of murder, and Teresa Youngblut, the 21-year-old computer science student charged last week in connection with the shooting death of U.S. Border Patrol Agent David Maland, appear to follow a fringe, self-described “vegan Sith” ideology that started in the Bay Area and has connections to violence, according to police records, an interview with a person familiar with the group, and years of social media and blog posts reviewed by Open Vallejo.
... Vallejo police arrested Snyder around 12:40 a.m. Friday in Redding, California, in connection with the Jan. 17 stabbing death of Curtis Lind, according to Solano County jail records, court records, interviews, online posts, and other information reviewed by Open Vallejo. ... The Vallejo homicide suspect was also previously detained but not charged in connection with a double homicide in Pennsylvania, according to federal prosecutors, who did not elaborate.
In 2022, Lind was allegedly impaled with a sword and blinded in one eye during an attack by several young people who lived in box trucks on his Vallejo property and had stopped paying Lind during the pandemic-era rent moratorium. …
Snyder studied computer science and philosophy at the University of Oxford, according to a LinkedIn profile matching his name, in which he noted an interest in artificial general intelligence and a desire to “help advance the technological frontier of humanity in a responsible manner.” He was named a National Merit Scholar semifinalist in 2019 while attending the private Lakeside School in Seattle, according to The Seattle Times. In 2023, Snyder won $11,000 in an AI alignment awards research contest, according to a post on the Effective Altruism Forum.
Youngblut studies computer science and computer software engineering at the University of Washington, according to her LinkedIn profile. She also attended the Lakeside School, according to The Spokesman-Review.
Youngblut and another person, Felix Bauckholt, were driving a 2015 Toyota Prius with a North Carolina license plate in Coventry, Vermont, when multiple Border Patrol agents in three vehicles pulled them over for an immigration inspection around 3 p.m. on Jan. 20, according to an FBI affidavit….
Bauckholt won a bronze medal in an international computing olympiad. He identified as “transfeminine” and called himself “Ophelia.”
During the traffic stop, Youngblut drew and fired a handgun toward at least one agent “without warning,” the FBI alleges. Bauckholt also attempted to draw a firearm, according to the affidavit, and at least one Border Patrol agent fired at the pair with his 9mm service weapon.
Youngblut, Bauckholt, and the agent, Maland, were shot during the exchange of gunfire.
Bauckholt was pronounced dead at the scene and Maland died at North Country Hospital, according to the affidavit.
... During that incident, Lind shot two of his alleged attackers, injuring one person and killing 31-year-old Emma Borhanian, according to court records.
The ‘Zizians’ …
Paywall here:
Posts in various online forums attributed the attack to a group known as the “Zizians.” Called a cult by some, the group is a radical offshoot of the Rationalist movement, an ideology centered on using scientific techniques to enhance human decision making. A post warning about the group on Rationalist forum website LessWrong.com named Dao, Leatham and Borhanian as associates of the group’s namesake “Ziz,” whose legal name is Jack LaSota.
The Zizians look a lot like the famous collection of Portland Antifa 2020 mug shots, although perhaps higher IQ. Although they look like a 1970s rock band, two of the four espouse female first names (which, granted, wouldn’t be that weird for a 1970s rock band). Similarly, Oregon’s law providing free “gender-affirming therapy” appears to have attracted a lot of trans lunatics.
... LaSota, Leatham, Borhanian, and another person were arrested in Sonoma County in 2019 while protesting an alumni reunion of the Center for Applied Rationality, a Rationalist nonprofit based in Berkeley. The group allegedly blocked the exits of the Westminster Camp and Conference Center with multiple vehicles and wore robes and Guy Fawkes masks popularized by the film “V for Vendetta” and, later, the hacker collective Anonymous.
From CFAR’s Wikipedia page:
CFAR is part of the rationality movement surrounding Eliezer Yudkowsky's web site LessWrong, from which CFAR originated. …
On 15 November 2019, four people dressed in Guy Fawkes masks were arrested for allegedly barricading off a wooded retreat where CFAR was holding an event. According to police, the suspects were not cooperative and spoke incoherently. Flyers found by deputies suggested they were protesting artificial intelligence and CFAR.
This is the second murder in recent months attributed to a rationalist-adjacent killer following Luigi Mangione’s December murder of health care executive Brian Thompson.
On Scott Alexander’s Substack, the wise commenter Deiseach suggests:
As an outsider looking in, it seems that the early rationalist coming-together into community was (maybe because it's in California) very open to/prone to everyone who was alienated from their own community running away to join the Bay Area because that was the promised land. This includes minors, trans, people of variant sexualities, neuro-divergent, you name it who felt (and were) weird and excluded but were intelligent and/or autistic enough to fit in with rationalist and adjacent philosophies.
That means you get a lot of the crazy in other ways than "I'm smart, socially awkward, and interested in niche subjects that nobody else in my family, school, or social circle even understands", up to "yeah this is mental illness and not just 'not fitting in'".
I'm in favor of rationality but I think people who make a point of it, to the point of joining a group, often (usually) do so because they can't believe that most of the world doesn't share their (political and political adjacent) opinions.
"transgender vegan animal rights effective altruist rationalist high IQ computer geeks"
the computer stuff aside, that's three orthogonal weirdo belief systems rolling around one human noggin'. If we come across a few more examples, this has the makings of a new Sailer rule.
The Trans thing is distressingly ubiquitous among teen Vermonters, even in public schools. Also Vermont is culturally similar to Northern California.