The article could have done more to condemn this group and line of thinking.
Also the part of the story on Curtis Lind is both sad and impressive, that old man was built of true grit:
"As he bent to look, something hit him on the head and he blacked out. When he woke up, at least three of the Zizians were allegedly standing around him with knives.
“[T]he right side of my skull was shattered,” Lind later said. “And I was bleeding from numerous puncture wounds … The back of my neck had some severe cuts. Like somebody was trying to cut my head off.” His torso was impaled with a samurai sword.
Lind drew his gun, which was concealed in a pocket, and started shooting. He wounded Leatham and killed Borhanian. He stumbled away with the sword still in him. He survived, but lost an eye."
Yes, also ironic how they were, per the article, very intrigued by the concept that ideas themselves could be like viruses but were unaware of how they seemed to be heavily impacted by that very thing, many times over.
See SBF. The fringes of the 'rationalism' are pretty much a series of rather nasty cults.
Lots of highly exploitative groups don't get to violent assaults. That's got me wondering why.
With the hyperbolic rhetoric about false threats, I'm surprised we haven't seen more violence from "rationalists"; if they really believed we were in that imminent danger, violent attacks would have been the rational thing to do.
That's what these guys figured. But if we're being rational and realistic, all it accomplishes is getting your group killed or imprisoned.
But drugs seem to be a way that people are destabilized outside of norms.
What is it with cults and boats? L Ron Hubbard did this, too (albeit for different stated reasons).
> The Coast Guard declared the ship a “threat to the public health” and demanded an improvement plan.
Ah, see, they should have adopted the Hubbard approach of just completely ignoring authorities' complaints about his various dubious boats (this, somehow, tended to more or less work out for him).
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/twenty-employees-of-us...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-timeline-of-cultlike-z...
https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/02/15/northern-california-z...
That said, this stylistic choice works for computer security related things (e.g. the spy genre of news). It feels like a waste of time everywhere else.
I would summarize it as not being about AI per se. It's nominally about "rationalism," or the inclination to boil everything down to mathematics to an extreme degree. The story points out a growing subculture of rationalist who have become quite radicalized.
For a community like HN, which (rightly, IMO) places high value on rational and critical thought, it can seem strange that there could be a degree at which that sort of thinking is harmful. But there are a lot of examples where taken to an extreme, it can allow people to "rationalize" all sorts of actions. And the article goes into detail about some of the pitfalls this small group fell into.
It was a few years later that "behavioral economics" began to make inroads. The moniker of "behavioral economics" itself was to distinguish it from "real economics." Alas (for the establishment), behavioral economics proved very popular, and the genie was out of the bottle. It turns out mathematic equations are not all-powerful when it comes to describing certain phenomena, especially when it comes to individual or collective human behavior.
Collective blind faith in models built on dubious assumptions is what gave us the mortgage crisis.
By the way, for what it is worth, only 2% of the population can read at a college level. It had been that way for so long that I heard that the category was merged into the high school level several years ago to make the literacy rate in the top bracket 4% instead of the prior 2%. i.e. “modern illiteracy” started a long time ago if we go by numbers.
