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Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Vegan Sith"? For just one thing, when you have a broken education system and omnipresent media franchises, you have a significant percentage of the population who know more about the Star Wars backstory structure and theories of diet than about history, civics or conventional morality.
These kids were very well educated and went to some of high end schools according to the article
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Vegan Sith"? For just one thing, when you have a broken education system and omnipresent media franchises, you have a significant percentage of the population who know more about the Star Wars backstory structure and theories of diet than about history, civics or conventional morality.
A far more likely possibility is that their ideology is actually centered around "Sith who happen to originate from Vega (a.k.a. α Lyrae )", not "Sith who abstain from animal products". (A residual possibility is "Sith from Las Vegas, Nevada".)
It's wild, but a view that is is fairly widely discussed in the rationality community, but only taken seriously by Fringe groups.[1]
My question is what Sith meant to them
Some bookmarks from early 2023 that seem relevant now: https://zizians.info https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/ https://aiascendant.substack.com/p/extropias-children-chapte... I do not engage with any of those people nor their weird communities.
Some bookmarks from early 2023 that seem relevant now: https://zizians.info https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/ https://aiascendant.substack.com/p/extropias-children-chapte... I do not engage with any of those people nor their weird communities.
Just wanted to say fantastic substack writing. Thanks for linking as I go down this rabbit hole
For related background read the (horrifying) description of Leverage, a “research” institution with links to Zizians: https://medium.com/@zoecurzi/my-experience-with-leverage-res... There’s an undercurrent of cults and cult-like institutions in the rationalist crowd (think: lesswrong.com folks) and this is one instance of this.
I think it’s worth discussing the fact that many folks in EA- and rationalist-adjacent circles are deeply panicked about developments in AI, because they believe these systems pose a threat to human existence. (Not all of them, obviously. But a large and extraordinarily well-funded contingent.) The fear I have with these organizations is that eventually panic - in the name of saving humans - leads to violent action.…
A 2023 post on Rationalism forum LessWrong.com warned of coming violence in the Zizian community. “Over the past few years, Ziz has repeatedly called for the deaths of many different classes of people,” the anonymous post read. Jessica Taylor, a friend of Baukholt’s, told Open Vallejo she warned Baukholt about the Zizians, describing the group on X as a “death cult.”
The post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/T5RzkFcNpRdckGauu/link-a-com...
This is a divisive topic, but failing to mention this makes me worry a story is pushing a particular agenda rather than trying to tell the facts. Here's what the story looks like if the trans activism is considered central to the story:
https://thepostmillennial.com/andy-ngo-reports-trans-terror-...
While Ngo's version is definitely biased, and while I don't know enough about the story to endorse or refute his view, I think it's important to realize that this part of the story is being suppressed in most of the coverage elsewhere.
Most of the news coverage I've seen of this story is omitting what some might consider a relevant detail: almost all the members of this group are trans. This is a divisive topic, but failing to mention this makes me worry a story is pushing a particular agenda rather than trying to tell the facts. Here's what the story looks like if the trans activism is considered central to the story: https://thepostmillennial.com…
So if you can tell the story without the possibly superfluous detail of the genders of the people involved, that's a pretty obvious angle to omit. Andy Ngo is obviously not doing this, but that's really only because he has a very clear agenda and in fact his entire interest in this story probably stems from that.