Several killings have been linked to a movement that calls itself “rationalist”. But what do they really believe?
On 20 January 2025 – the day of Donald Trump’s second presidential inauguration – US Border Patrol agent David Maland pulled over a car in Vermont, near the Canadian border, in what should have been a routine traffic stop. In the car were Teresa Youngblut and Ophelia Bauckholt, a high-flying quant trader. The pair had just visited a shooting range and were carrying tactical gear. Within minutes, Bauckholt and Maland were dead, and a wounded Youngblut had been detained by police.
To most of the world, reports of the incident seemed bizarre. Violence on the US-Canadian border is rare, as are shootouts involving highly educated financial professionals. But to those who had followed a particular subculture within the “rationalist” movement – now known to the world as “Zizians” – Maland and Bauckholt were just the latest casualties of an escalating spiral of violence.
Rationalism is a philosophical movement with a rich history dating back to Ancient Greece. It came to the fore during the Enlightenment, giving us our modern commitment to reason and logic as primary sources of knowledge. In recent years, a relatively niche but influential online community has also claimed the name “rationalist”. It also emphasises the primacy of logic, and is associated with effective altruism (a movement concerned with maximising the benefit from charitable giving). But an offshoot of the community has twisted this philosophy, taking it to extremes, guided by the writings of Jack LaSota, known by her moniker “Ziz”.
The Zizian grouping has never numbered more than a dozen individuals. Years before the killings began, there were reports that one follower had been driven to suicide by the group’s extreme ideas and practices, including sleep deprivation. After this, two members (including Ziz herself) faked their own deaths, and the group’s closest followers have experimented with alternative living, including on a flotilla of boats and then on trailers.
A series of violent incidents went on to claim the lives of several people in the Zizian orbit, though most cases are ongoing. In 2022, 80-year-old Curtis Lind – the landlord to Ziz and several of the group’s members – was allegedly attacked and ambushed, sustaining more than 50 stab wounds and a blow to the head, as well as being completely run through with a samurai sword. Astonishingly, he survived and shot and killed one of his attackers – only to be murdered on 17 January 2025, three days before the Canadian border standoff, and shortly before he was due to testify on the previous attempt to kill him. Elsewhere, early in 2023, the bodies of Richard and Rita Zajko, the parents of another Zizian, were discovered by police in their home, both with gunshot wounds. Their daughter was named as a person of interest in their killings.
At the time of writing, one small spinoff of the online “rationalist” community has been connected to at least seven deaths. How does a movement grounded in logic and altruism misfire so badly? The question may have significance beyond the Zizians: while the motives of Luigi Mangione, the alleged murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, remain unclear, he too was affiliated with the online rationalist movement.
A fixation with superintelligent AI
The gateway into the online rationalist world is often effective altruism, which is grounded in the genuinely reasonable idea that those who donate to charity should get the most bang for their buck. While measuring the effectiveness of charitable giving is complex, the aim is uncontroversial, firmly grounded in the logic of utilitarianism. But the rationalist community took it further, looking into the future: if we are interested in maximising the potential good we can do in the world, why would we only focus on people alive today? In the future, there could be trillions of people – meaning, from a purely numerical perspective, that making sure that those people can be born (and have good lives) outweighs any good we can do for the current population.
This approach might appear to be rational, given that it follows several logical steps. But these concepts are subject to overreach. The focus of the movement shifted to existential concerns around humanity’s survival, such as multi-planet living (so humanity could survive the end of Earth), and artificial intelligence – both to ensure it doesn’t wipe out humanity once it emerges, but also to make sure it does emerge, because of a belief in its massive potential to fix our societal issues.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of those in the movement work in or around big tech. Ziz had been offered a job by Google (which she never took up), and became fixated on the emergence of superintelligent AIs as she read herself into the rationalist movement. That included a piece of rationalist Harry Potter fan fiction, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, written by the controversial AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky, which deconstructs the contradictions of the wizarding world. Popular blogs like LessWrong and Astral Codex Ten imagined what benevolent but super-powerful AIs might be able to achieve – from solving the problems of modern medicine to making it possible for humans to upload their consciousness.
Ziz seems to have won her supporters through the strength of her blog’s writing and the esoteric arguments it made – and then, it seems, through sheer strength of
personality once they got to know each other in the real world. Much of her writing focuses on the idea of “timeless decisions”, which bears some resemblance to Kant’s categorical imperative. While Timeless Decision Theory differs from the Kantian perspective, both emphasise the importance of universalisability, and consider if the outcome would be positive if everyone were to make the same choice, regardless of context or individual circumstance.
For most in the rationalist movement, these ideas were merely thought experiments, useful for challenging assumptions and honing their logical skills. Some took a darker turn, for example when people started to consider what an AI might do to maximise the overall “good” for humanity. Perhaps it might punish people who tried to oppose its efforts, or even those who didn’t do enough to help create it sooner. But when Ziz and her associates were still welcome at mainstream rationalist gatherings, they started gaining a reputation for taking these ideas literally, and applying them in their own lives.
Many of those involved in the movement believe that killing animals for food is logically indefensible. But Ziz has made statements to suggest that she sees eating meat as not just immoral, but akin to murder. She is a militant vegan, as are most of her followers. Taking this further, she believes that any super-intelligent AI we might develop would agree, and would punish those who ate meat.
An intellectual exercise gone too far
Marginalisation, isolation and oppression can make people more vulnerable to the appeal of cults, and this may have affected the Zizians in various ways. For example, most members of the group are trans, and felt excluded somewhat from the rationalist mainstream because of that (though the community has accepted several trans influencers). Beliefs like militant veganism, embodied in practice, appear to have further isolated the group from the mainstream movement, and society in general, setting up an outsider dynamic.
Io Dodds, a journalist who considers herself adjacent to the rationalist movement, and who is trans herself, says these group dynamics are important considerations when looking at the violent radicalisation of Ziz and those around her. Dodds described her own intense experience of discovering the community’s ideas. “I remember the feeling of like delving and digging, and the kind of vertigo of it, the compulsion,” she said. “It’s a very intense, emotional process, like being called forward and forward and deeper and deeper and deeper into a set of bizarre ideas, like understanding was just around the corner … It felt so important. You know, it felt like the world was at stake.”
For Dodds, that need to dedicate her life to the cause ebbed as her gender transition progressed and she was able to ground herself in other ways. But the Zizians’ isolation would have added to the intensity – not least because it left them financially vulnerable. Unable to pay for housing around the Bay Area, for example, they ended up living in close quarters together in houseboats and then in trailer trucks.
But how far was it the ideas themselves, rather than the particular circumstances of the group, that produced the intense and eventually deadly culture of the Zizians? The rationalist community actively encourages people to break taboos, push thought experiments to their extremes, and more generally challenge their heuristics (social norms, or basic rules for living). This is fine as an intellectual exercise – it is an essential part of obtaining a degree in philosophy, for example – but can be damaging if it cuts through into everyday life. Dodds speaks of the “little alarm” most of us have if, after following apparently logical steps, we arrive at a conclusion that is morally unacceptable – such as that someone no longer qualifies as a person because of their moral deficiencies – which would stop us pursuing that chain of thought. It seems that some Zizians may have learned to silence that alarm – meaning that when life circumstances pushed them into situations where violence seemed like the right answer, many of their internal moral safeguards failed.
The case of Luigi Mangione
We might dismiss the Zizians as a bizarre phenomenon involving a handful of people who largely knew one another and lived in close proximity, and so deem them irrelevant to the wider rationalist movement. But the influence of this online community on others is apparent, too – not least Luigi Mangione, who is awaiting trial for what might be the most high-profile US assassination of the 21st century to date.
Mangione’s online activity shows he shared a fascination with artificial intelligence and what it meant for decision theory. He followed accounts connected to the community, and was a contributor to another subgroup of online rationalists known as TPOT, or “This Part Of Twitter”. He does not fit in with conventional US political tribes – on his 27th birthday, which he celebrated in prison, he released a list of 27 things for which he is grateful, which included both “liberals” and “conservatives”.
Like many within the community, Mangione is a gifted mathematician who worked in tech. He posted about “the singularity” – a hypothetical breakthrough in which an AI will be capable of improving itself repeatedly and iteratively, so as to reach super intelligence at a stroke – and its consequences on society. A note found in his possession when he was arrested set out logical reasonings for the apparent crime, including his hopes that it would bring public attention to the greed of the health insurance industry and influence the decision making of executives and investors alike. Mangione has pleaded not guilty, so his full actions and motives may never truly be revealed, but the killing can be seen as the result of moral reasoning, taken too far.
Stepping back, what does this mean for this small but apparently influential rationalist subculture? And how might the broader movement respond – a movement that believes in secular reason and its ability to improve the world? These are isolated incidents, and there is certainly no equivalence between these criminal acts and religious violence across the globe. Some may even look at it as little more than individual cases of radicalisation, which is possible in any group.
But there are aspects of this distorted version of rationalism that seem to be dangerous in themselves. There is the idea of “decoupling”, of judging moral claims in the abstract, removed from their social context. Followers are encouraged to push against cultural taboos, ignoring their own gut reactions. Elaborate thought experiments are applied to debates on race and IQ, eugenics, disability and other sensitive topics in ways that seem distasteful or outright abhorrent to those outside the movement.
The community as a whole cannot entirely absolve itself from the consequences of encouraging people to overcome natural heuristics against certain patterns of thought – or against violence and criminality. This way of thinking – these extreme thought experiments – might be fine for the vast majority of people, but that still leaves a minority who could go on to cause harm because of it.
A technological cult?
If this way of thinking is dangerous, we might ask how it emerged. The idea of committing “rational” murder is hardly a new one. Numerous perpetrators of assassinations have sought to justify their crime through the idea of weighing up the life of one individual, the victim, against the many lives predicted to be saved as a consequence of that person’s death. Dodds recalls the case of the German nationalist Friedrich Staps, an 18-year-old who tried to assassinate Napoleon to “render the highest service to my country and to Europe”. Napoleon, admiring Staps’s bravery and patriotism, if not his goals, tried to grant him a pardon. (Staps refused, saying that if he went free, he would only give it another go.) We might see the same kind of admiration in the public’s reaction to Mangione, with some regarding him as a folk hero, who has sacrificed his freedom for a noble cause.
But there is another, more novel idea, which is worth extra attention – and that’s superintelligent AI. Many of the movement’s thought experiments are less interesting than they first appear: utilitarianism long ago considered the matter of countless future lives (and thus utility) and addressed it in their mathematical models. These ideas can be found in mainstream economics, and don’t justify the movement’s fixation on AI. It is as if their worldview is working backwards from its intended conclusion, which is actually more akin to supernatural beliefs.
There is evidence to suggest that artificial intelligence is advancing exponentially, but not to justify the beliefs common to the online rationalist movement. Many of its followers believe that we will someday be able to upload ourselves into the cloud – essentially creating digital heavens and hells (where the AI may one day reward or punish us). We can transcend our bodies and extend our lives – promises that previously belonged firmly in the realm of religion. There is no hard data to suggest that this “singularity” moment will occur. It is a speculative belief, essentially in a digital god that we are building ourselves.
Such beliefs are worryingly widespread in the tech sector, and seem to have found an expression in the rationalist movement. For someone absorbed in the movement, they would have a seismic impact on their thinking, morality and priorities. It’s doubtful whether this community should be calling themselves rationalists, let alone claiming to represent the modern iteration of this centuries-long philosophical movement. They might be better described as belonging to a technological cult – one that, through its links to Silicon Valley, has an outsized influenced on our world.
With many of the Zizians, including LaSota, facing charges, the group may be losing steam. But perhaps the biggest surprise is that these extreme views haven’t caused more social upheaval – or at least, they haven’t yet.
This article is from New Humanist’s Autumn 2025 issue. Subscribe now.
