First as tragedy: the Scientologists call their teachings “tech”

Then as farce: Maximilian Snyder calls his methods of optimizing D&D characters “tech” (I am told that people who attended CFAR workshops used to call their teachings “tech”)

He posted on LessWrong and won an AI Alignment Award in 2023. Nate Soares, Yudkowsky’s right-hand man, endorsed his paper. Curtis Lind was attacked with a sword in November 2022, and the Zaijkos were murdered in their daughter’s childhood bedroom around 31 December 2023. It sounds like at least one Zizian was still having friendly exchanges with MIRI leaders well after the 2019 protest at the CFAR reunion (although it is possible that Snyder discovered Ziz in 2024, the year he applied to marry Youngblut).

As of May 2026, four Zizians have tried to explain what they were doing:

• Ziz Lasota had her blog and sometimes speaks briefly in court
• Michelle Zajko, who is accused of arming the Zizians who got into a gunfight in Vermont, sent a 20-page handwritten letter to her lawyer who shared it with reporters
• Maximilian Snyder (sometimes spelled Maximillian with two Ls), accused of murdering his former landlord in California, dictated a 1500-word letter to Eliezer Yudkowsky urging him to become a vegan (SF Chronicle with full transcription at the bottom)
• Gwen Danielson left after inventing the “good brain hemisphere, bad brain hemisphere” theory and talked to reporters in 2026

I think the chances are good that the 20-page letter has specific claims about sexual misconduct by senior rationalists in California but a small-town reporter in Vermont chose not to explore them. In the screenshot below, Ziz claims that Ana Salamon told him that trans women are not real women (waves a copy of Alfred Korzybski and a textbook on semantics and sighs).

Christopher Beam asked many Rationalists about the Zizians for the NYT and did not push back when they made excuses.

Also a year ago, Maximilian Bentley Snyder the Zizian dictated a 1,500 word manifesto telling Yudkowsky to become a vegan. This one was published in full. Three of the Zizians have issued statements leaving just Ziz, Youngblut, Suri Dao, and Alexander Jeffrey Leatham alive but silent. Two died after attacking outsiders, and two took their own lives, so I count 11 known associates.

e/ Unlilke the 20-pager this was published!

I vaguely remember the shotgun to the forehead as a reference to the Turing Authority

I think there was a case where a hostage taker in the US taped the barrel of his gun to a victim which was featured on TV and started to show up in crime dramas and thrillers. No idea why Yudkowsky likes Terminator but not Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep or William Gibson.

Coefficient Giving / OpenPhilanthropy has donated $25,000 to a little web magazine called Liberal Currents which is popular with the BlueSky pundits. Liberal Currents seem to be actual middle-class liberals not Libertarians and 1890s Progressives but I will keep an eye on them.

Both the rationalists and chatbots in delusion mode offer people the chance to be the main characters in a story and not just part of a team. Organizing lawyers and lobbyists to make chatbot companies’ lives hell over years is much more effective than firebombing an office or stalking a random vehicle which the bot says has a team of corporate assassins inside.

Taka in Japan is a neurologist which I think is a type of MD.

He does seem to list Kissinger as one of several “smart people” which is odd for a US military veteran. Lots of nonagenarians with PhDs say stupid shit.

A few details that remind us of the horrors we are skirting around. Imprimis:

(The landlord’s friend Thomas) Young said he searched the property after the attack and found used surgical equipment, more than a dozen laptops, and expensive electronics stashed inside the cargo trucks where the alleged assailants lived, which were registered in Vermont.

“It was actually very uncomfortable,” Young said about walking into the trucks. “You kinda wanted to put on a hazmat suit before going into it. It was really just creepy in the extreme.”

II. Another local story about a court appearance.

(A Zizian’s lawyer) Stelzig raised specific concerns that Youngblut’s confidential medical records would be incorrectly opened as part of the case. “Our client was shot and is still receiving frequent medical treatment” in jail, she said, referring to injuries Youngblut sustained in the shootout.

III. Ziz Lasota asked a rhetorical question about what might have happened to missing people who got too close to her:

Did I drive them to suicide by whistling komm susser tod (sic)? Maybe they died in a series of experimental brain surgeries that I performed without anesthetic since that’s against my religion, in an improvised medical facility? (Evan Ratliff, Wired)

The medical records might just mention trans stuff or an Asperger’s diagnosis. Sneering has not felt adequate for a while but I don’t know what else to write.

Edit/ Zajko, who wrote “I’ve never seen (Ziz) do an evil thing,” also wrote that Ziz told her to murder an associate or Ziz would murder her. Our intuitions about what went on in those box trucks and on the boats are unreliable and the reality may have been worse than sleep deprivation and paranoid ramblings.

A year ago, a local Vermont reporter summarized the manifesto of Zajko the Zizian. She seemed to blame what went wrong on Rationalists + the government + Maximilian Snyder who is accused of killing their former landlord. She denied murdering her parents and wanted the world to know that she and her friends never called themselves Zizians.

Another review of Yudkowsky and Soares: if anyone reads it, everyone laughs (sadly, Substack). This one gestures to the whole university of academic fields that a book like this touches on.

The reviewer mentions “The wickedly smart Scott Aaronson” and maybe he means Aaronson’s academic publications because his general blogging is not impressive.

17,555 words of blather according to the Linux Text Editor app. Compare his classic advice on salary negotiation which has longer paragraphs and a clear focus and structure and still apologizes for being almost 7,000 words long.

Sheffield’s toots and boosts: music sites are full of slop and bots making money from free donwloads! social media is full of propaganda where computer-generated influencers repeat talking points! a professor fell victim to AI psychosis! A follower’s family member was encouraged in delusions and paranoia by a chatbot! Mr. Sheffield, should we stop using chatbots?

LLMs are mind augmentation programs. They amplify what you tell them.

They can be very useful, but for narcissists like Dawkins, this is the inevitable product.

Very “I use cocaine, but only in careful doses when I have a really important trade to make, not like the other guys in my department.”

After the 1870s, southern whites learned to bar Blacks from voting or keep their votes from mattering without saying “nigger.” In 1965, the USA passed the Voting Rights Act to stop that. A few days ago, the US Supreme Court voided the last remaining effective part of the Voting Rights Act. Yesterday, on May Day, patio11 published a rambling and interminable essay approving of bank fraud charges which will shut down the Southern Poverty Law Center. It contains a passive-aggressive whine that the New York Times did not thank him by name for sending a NYT reporter key facts about the FTX fraud. Notice me senpai!

He takes so long and is so indirect but I think the offence was giving donor money to people like the wife of a Grand Wizard of the KKK who was acting as an informant, and passing the money through shell companies to avoid restrictions on paying people like her which the SPLC had lobbied for. But choosing that topic, that day, after that ruling is a choice.

Most of us: “she smells good and the sounds she makes when she gets excited grip something deep inside me”

Tech Bros: “her vaginal microbiome is in the 99th percentile and her Verbal SAT is in the 95th percentile”

Sounds like we could have a fun conversation about gender, sex, and why we use maps even though they are never the same as the territory in person. I don’t have detailed talks about gender theory online.

Thinking that your favourite lover is the best person ever is natural, but this guy wants to quantify and rank and make it scientific.

Families of the victims of the mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge, Canada, which was planned on ChatGPT, plan to sue Sam Altman and OpenAI for at least one billion dollars. OpenAI staff investigated the murderer’s interactions with the bot before the killings but decided not to warn anyone outside the company.

Bryan Johnson also has free unsolicited sex tips for men on twitter including the wonderful combination “control the speed you touch her to the cm per second” and “try not to monitor yourself it turns you off” https://xcancel.com/bryan_johnson/status/2022490768099938487#m

edit/ The first point seems to take for granted that penetration is real sex and should be part of every encounter. There is a whole world of delicious possibilities once you realize that intimacy does not have to follow a checklist from teasing to penetration to orgasm.

edit/ not just penetration but vaginal penetration! There are so many delightful things you can hump if you have an open mind.

First paragraph!

in a previous post, “Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky’s Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems”, I told the part about how I’ve “always” (since puberty) had this obsessive sexual fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman and also thought it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I got set straight by these really great Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky, which taught me (incidentally, among many other things) how absurdly unrealistic my obsessive sexual fantasy was given merely human-level technology, and that it’s actually immoral not to believe in psychological sex differences given that psychological sex differences are actually real. … If my fellow rationalists merely weren’t sold on the thesis about autogynephilia as a cause of transsexuality, I would be disappointed, but it wouldn’t be grounds to denounce the entire community as a failure or a fraud. And indeed, I did end up moderating my views compared to the extent to which my thinking in 2016–7 took the views of Ray Blanchard, J. Michael Bailey, and Anne Lawrence as received truth. (At the same time, I don’t particularly regret saying what I said in 2016–7, because Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence is still obviously directionally correct compared to the nonsense everyone else was telling me.)

Davis is the first person to blame transsexuality on autogynephilia I have seen in the wild.

“Humans have biological sex and socially constructed gender, sex is mostly binary, gender is two or more categories made up and constantly contested and redefined by a society and performed by individuals, pronouns generally refer to gender” is not hard.

Edit/ linked the cranks in question (Bailey is the fucksaw guy?)

I stumbled over a 2023 blog post by Zack Davis, “San Francisco software developer,” Charles Murray stan, and dissident rationalist. Davis had a breakdown after Yud dared to tweet that you don’t need to solve “what is gender? what is sex?” to call someone by their preferred pronouns, and then Scott Alexander did not have a lot of time to discuss this terrible tweet with him.

My dayjob boss made it clear that he was expecting me to have code for my current Jira tickets by noon the next day, so I deceived myself into thinking I could accomplish that by staying at the office late. Maybe I could have caught up, if it were just a matter of the task being slightly harder than anticipated and I weren’t psychologically impaired from being hyper-focused on the religious war. The problem was that focus is worth 30 IQ points, and an IQ 100 person can’t do my job. … I did eventually get some dayjob work done that night, but I didn’t finish the whole thing my manager wanted done by the next day, and at 4 a.m., I concluded that I needed sleep, the lack of which had historically been very dangerous for me (being the trigger for my 2013 and 2017 psychotic breaks and subsequent psych imprisonments).

Davis was featured in a SF Chronicle article about psychiatric crises among AI doomsdayers (sic). Davis previously appeared on SneerClub. I hope he has found some support for his mental health because he does not seem happy or well.

Edit/link post