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So a border patrol agent was killed by a trans vegan-extremist terror cult that came out of Bay Area rationalist culture. they seem to be responsible for at least 3 other deaths (including family members and a former landlord who was going to testify against one of their members on a felony murder charge), but have taken 40% casualties in the process.
Here is an archive link to the leader's blog
As usual Andy ngo is the only person talking about the case at all, although his summary seems to miss a lot of important details.
This is the same group that got arrested in Sonoma a few years ago while raiding a CFAR camp. I predicted at the time that this group would make the news again, so you can imagine that I am Steve's Complete Lack Of Surprise.
So, thoughts. San Francisco continues to generate weird murder suicide cults just as it has for the past... 80 years? This really needs to be investigated because the effect has persisted over numerous different ideological movements. My running theory outside of "something in the water" is that selective migration brings a lot of that sort of person to SF (with flowers in their hair); you'll notice the men in this group were from all over the country (and one from Germany), but were all the sorts of people who were looking for some militant cult to give them a sense of belonging.
Second, and this might be beating a dead horse here, consider the reaction of the "rationalist community" to this group over the years. Even after the murders started, the "horrible dangers of moldbug and why reactionaries must be purged from the community" got oceans of ink spilled compared to one or two blog posts about this group. Meanwhile rationalist groups were still awarding these guys grants. Here is another trans-vegan-r/sneerclub-LW activist who still supports them because murdering landlords is good.
The ability to selectively "problematize" and craft narratives continues to be the main source of leftist power, and seems to be almost completely impervious to evidence-based arguments.
Lastly, it seems like literally every member of this group was a transexual (it's hard to be sure when the news steadfastly refuses to notice "Emma's" Adam's apple) Considering this case alongside the now-infamous "trans-alpaca ranch holocaust", it really does seem like sexual ideologies act as a social technology that allows disturbed and dysfunctional men to overcome social atomization and organize into warbands. "Cut off your family but keep demanding money from them to fund the group" seems to be the main way the cult leaders both control people and fund their lifestyles, when they're not getting grants or NPR fundraisers organized for them.
One of these cultists described as an "Oxford trained computer scientist" recently (17th of january) killed the 82 year old landlord who previously fought off an attack by Zizians and survived a sword through his chest. He had a gun, of course.
https://openvallejo.org/2025/01/28/man-accused-of-killing-witness-in-vallejo-could-face-death-penalty-da-says/
It's a seemingly pretty irrational cult as these guys first attacked a guy with knives and then stabbed him to death. Quietly poisoning him with something that'd look like a natural death seems far more rational and within the abilities of computer scientists, yet..
One of their beliefs is that unrelenting violence against oppressors such as BBQers, landlords, and elderly parents who keep calling you their son is justified even if it's not effective, because it can improve your ideology's bargaining position averaged across every other reality in the multiverse.
It's sort of like dying in a game of chicken and saying "yeah but committing to that head-on collision helped me win in other worldlines"
Wait, is this actually what they believe, or are you exaggerating? This is Scientology levels of completely delusional.
From the dive I did, I'd say that sounds reasonably accurate. I linked the glossary below if you want to dive yourself. That, combined with the report on the attempted murder of their landlord and the personal accounts related to it, were more than enough to identify Ziz as ten pounds of crazy in a two-pound sack.
I'm not sure "timeless-decision-theoretic-blackmail-absolute-morality theory" is the term they actually used, but I'm not sure it's not the term either, and it seems like a reasonably accurate description from what I recall.
Thanks, I appreciate it. I did look at the lesswrong post and I was bewildered at how seriously the commenters took the ideas of alternate personalities and behavior modification; for people who declare themselves scientific and anti-superstition they seem pretty stitious to me. Family systems therapy pervades the commentariat, which I find rather disturbing; I was sold that this was a tool to help people deal with mental illness and not a means to manipulate or explain the world in real terms, but they're treating it like they're talking about real-world magic. If this is what people mean by "therapy culture" then I agree wholeheartedly with the criticism of it. At this point, I'm ready to declare family systems therapy a cause of psychogenic illness, whatever good it might have done it's now clearly driving people mad.
That being said, I try to avoid prying too deeply into either delusional thinking or true crime; the former I fear might infest me (though I don't have a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia) and the latter just makes me angry. I have finite grey matter and I'd rather spend it on things that don't make me feel like the only sane man in an insane world. We need connection to reality and to other people and to average people and to people of different perspectives to remain sane, and this is a great example of why.
Scott had a whole book review where he strongly suggested this was true. One of the main practitioners of family systems therapy wrote a book claiming demons are real and he was literally exorcising spirits. Scott thought he was just creating psychogenic illness in people.
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In and of itself, there is nothing particularly weird about having fictional characters in your head: many famous authors talk to their characters while they're out and about in order to round out said characters' personalities. Children have imaginary friends, artists have muses. And it seems entirely plausible that if you go on doing it for long enough, you will start habitually supporting this kind of 'virtual machine' of another person in your head in the same way that docker environments run on a virtual machine inside your pc. I tried it for a couple of weeks with my favourite character from the novel I was writing, until I realised that actually I didn't want to never be alone in my own head. It works, more or less.
Of course, the true believers run away with it. 'My tulpa is real in the sense that this thought pattern currently exists in my brain' becomes 'my tulpa is an entity deserving of respect and ethical treatment' becomes 'I am a system of 32 personalities, none of whom claims precedence'. Imaginary friends, being imaginary, become whatever you imagine them to be. And if you're asking your imaginary friends to help you perform self-therapy on the already warped and delusional brain that spawned them, that isn't going to end well for anybody.
[pushes up glasses]
Well actually, virtual machines and containers are different things. It is certainly possible to run containers inside a VM, but a VM is not strictly necessary.
(OK, in fairness, I think Docker in particular relies on features of the Linux kernel, namely cgroups and namespaces, so e.g. Docker Desktop on Mac or Windows will indeed spin up a Linux VM)
/pedantry
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These don't sound particularly anti-scientific to me. At least, not magically so.
Technobabble is indistinguishable from religious invocations. Chanting to the a Machine God is silly to us because the recognizable words we understand are mutated, but stringing technological sounding terms together into a single compound word like german gone wild is exactly that. Dressing up a wrong scientific concept, like 90% of your brain is unused or biohacking through blood transfusions, is just misreading of reality, like sacrificing virgins on the solstice for a good harvest.
See, your examples sound silly to me because those specific ones are implausible/debunked. Behaviour modification, on the other hand, sounds like this quaint "building a habit" thing.
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