NYT covers the Zizians

Original link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/06/business/ziz-lasota-zizians-rationalists.html

Archive link: https://archive.is/9ZI2c

Choice quotes:

Big Yud is shocked and surprised that craziness is happening in this casino:

Eliezer Yudkowsky, a writer whose warnings about A.I. are canonical to the movement, called the story of the Zizians “sad.”

“A lot of the early Rationalists thought it was important to tolerate weird people, a lot of weird people encountered that tolerance and decided they’d found their new home,” he wrote in a message to me, “and some of those weird people turned out to be genuinely crazy and in a contagious way among the susceptible.”

Good news everyone, it's popular to discuss the Basilisk and not at all a profundly weird incident which first led peopel to discover the crazy among Rats

Rationalists like to talk about a thought experiment known as Roko’s Basilisk. The theory imagines a future superintelligence that will dedicate itself to torturing anyone who did not help bring it into existence. By this logic, engineers should drop everything and build it now so as not to suffer later.

Keep saving money for retirement and keep having kids, but for god's sake don't stop blogging about how AI is gonna kill us all in 5 years:

To Brennan, the Rationalist writer, the healthy response to fears of an A.I. apocalypse is to embrace “strategic hypocrisy”: Save for retirement, have children if you want them. “You cannot live in the world acting like the world is going to end in five years, even if it is, in fact, going to end in five years,” they said. “You’re just going to go insane.”