I suspect that as with many off-shots they hate the original community.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/vermont-border-agent-death-expo... is a better, longer form of this article
It seem they were a fan of Eliezer Yudkowsky and maybe Nick Bostrom (although a bit unclear) but they hate MIRI
LessWrong has a summary of their involvement: https://www.lesswrong.com/w/j-lasota-ziz
Calling themselves rationalists are more ironic than a concentration camp having a sign promising freedom to those who work.
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.
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
etc
[1] https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-zizians-and-the-rationali...
> 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.
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.
People can read what this "it sounds pretty culty to me" was about and decide for themselves: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pQGFeKvjydztpgnsY/occupation...
Some quotes:
> (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.
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.
A corrupt politician might say, 'everyone is corrupt'. Now their flaw is wiped away, in a relative sense. But it's not true.
It just takes time and/or the right circumstances.
This includes propaganda.
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.
Unless you mean the folks who believe AI will become AGI and start hurting people directly. Those folks are pretty fringe.
Probably not, at least not here.
By "AI-doomer", I mean any person or group that believes that AI research is a threat to human survival.
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.
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?