The Bluestocking 355: Zizians and gators
group debugging sessions
Happy Friday!
A disjointed newsletter today, because I’ve been ill (see below). I was fully an octave lower than usual in this long conversation I just had with Sam Harris about US vs UK politics, social contagion, Rotherham, DEI and about 12 other topics.
I really enjoyed talking to Sam, who has shown a commendable willingness to point out when people he knows have gone bananas, for example in this post about Elon Musk breaking off their friendship after making a bet that fewer than 35,000 people in the US would catch Covid.
Helen
The Zizians and the Rationalist Death Cults (Max Read, Substack)
The Zizians, believe it or not, are not the only cult-like groupuscule to have emerged from the heady stew of the Rationalist community. In 2021, Zoe Curzi wrote a long Medium post about her time at the Rationalism-adjacent nonprofit Leverage Research, which held “2–6hr long group debugging sessions in which we as a sub-faction (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,” and whose employees “genuinely thought we were going to take over the US government.”
That essay inspired a LessWrong post from Jessica Taylor about her experiences at M.I.R.I. and C.F.A.R., where “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,” she writes.
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Honestly, the story of the Zizians had me at “trans vegan rationalist death cult”, but I still haven’t read a proper piece fully explaining the ideology and operations of this group, which is accused of being behind several killings in America. In lieu of that, here’s Max Read asking why the rationalists—who pride themselves on being ultra-sceptical of everything—might be generating so much cult-like behaviour. “The basic answer, I think, is that the whole Rationalist program effectively generates potential cult subjects,” he writes.
(Don’t) Question Everything.
Marianne Faithfull: ‘You know, I'm not everybody's cup of tea!’ (Guardian, 2001)
Marianne Faithfull once said, “I am a Fabulous Beast, and as such, I should only be glimpsed very rarely, through the forest, running away for dear life.” How wise she was. If I were ever asked to interview her again, I would turn into a Fabulous Beast myself and hightail it to the forest. I first glimpsed Her Fabulousness ages ago at a restaurant in Notting Hill, 192, where she was sitting all alone at lunchtime reading the papers. 192 is a very sociable sort of table-hopping restaurant, so I thought there was something faintly sad about her solitude. But then a man joined her—it might even have been my future nemesis, François—and she simply handed him a slice of newspaper and carried on reading right through lunch. It was so devastatingly drop-dead cool that all the chattering at the other tables somehow died—we farmyard animals knew we were in the presence of a Fabulous Beast.
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The age of the mean celebrity interview is definitely over—stars have no reason to agree to talk to writers, like Lynn Barber, who are known to be hatchet-wielders. So enjoy this arctic blast from the turn of the century, as Barber becomes charmed, exasperated and finally quite lovingly brutal about Marianne Faithfull, who recently died at the age of 78.
Bluestocking recommends: Doechii’s Grammy performance. The whole of the Grammys was very fun this year—Sabrina Carpenter being the new Dolly Parton, doing physical comedy. Taylor Swift giving Beyonce a country award, while Kanye West wasn’t allowed inside. The entire crowd chanting “A MINORRRRR” as Kendrick Lamar came up to receive his prize. Chappell Roan doing “Pink Pony Club” on a giant pony sculpture. Charli XCX doing her slightly impenetrable lo-fi headbanging to “Guess” surrounded by club kids. I even enjoyed Benson Boone—whose styling was halfway between Paul Mescal and Harry Styles—doing a forward roll off the piano while performing a song that you only know from it being overlaid on Mormon wife TikToks.
But for me the highlight was Doechii performing two of her songs, both of which have a 90s hip hop feel. She has one of those new, individual, fully formed aesthetics that just somehow works—Thom Browne preppiness and visible face tapes. I’ve now been catching up on her Tiny Desk concert and self-choreographed Colbert performance.
Incidentally, the cover of her mixtape Alligator Bites Don’t Heal shows Doechii holding an alligator. DO NOT DO THIS. Why? Because I’m pretty sure that doing this at Gatorland in Orlando last week is how I caught the terrible cold that I’ve been labouring under ever since. (They did not sanitise the alligator between customers.)
Worst of all, when I told my mother this, instead of being sympathetic, she said: “I can’t believe any child of mine would be stupid enough not to wash their hands immediately after handling an alligator.” Funnily enough, this parenting advice did not previously come up during my childhood in the West Midlands.
Quick Links
‘She told Frost she was sorry for the loss of his daughter, but added: “The Quran is a sacred book to Muslims and treating it as you did is going to cause extreme distress. This is a tolerant country, but we just do not tolerate this behaviour.”” So I guess we have a blasphemy law again now, huh (Manchester Evening News)
Does Jane Austen hate you? Henry Oliver asks the question (Common Reader, Substack).
“How useful is any of this to the average reader? If you had fallen into a coma on December 1st and woken up at Christmas, you would be no less informed. In fact for most of the month you would have been better informed, by virtue of being unconscious.” Martin Robbins on news overwhelm and the problem of iterative journalism; I’m definitely feeling this with Donald Trump, who keeps doing and undoing policies and threats with breakneck speed (Substack).
“Technically, Sophie Cress, with her as-of-now unreachable website, remains a mystery, though I feel pretty confident I understand what’s going on here. And 3,000 words into this story, I’m sure you do too. While this is unlikely to be some sort of election-altering Russian disinformation campaign, I wouldn’t say it’s a sign of a particularly bright future.” AI has made it trivially easy to create fake people online. This is the story of an imaginary therapist who was pitched to legit news outlets as an expert source, all with the apparent intention of boosting traffic to a sex toy website (Allure, via the Browser, whose daily links are always a source of inspiration).
“For days, I was haunted by the fear that we somehow hadn’t done it right. At the same time, I knew that this was the only right thing we could do, the last loving thing, a final kindness. Ours were the last hands she felt alive, and the last ones to touch her body.” Sarah Ditum on losing her dog (Substack).
“I have a lot of positive things to say about men, like I will staunchly defend being empathetic towards them, but this is one avenue in which my hopes about them were repeatedly, regularly crushed.” I found Aella’s explanation of the economics of OnlyFans quite bleak, but also very enlightening (Substack).
This week’s Strong Message Here sees wire service reporter turned political sketchwriter Rob Hutton join me and Armando Iannucci to talk about political speeches, including the vexed question of whether a speech that has been pre-briefed but doesn’t actually take place still counts as a speech (BBC).
See you next time . . . if you’ve just subscribed, then you can expect a weekly round-up of commentary and links from across the internet, delivered for free to your inbox every Friday.
I haven't read anything as brilliantly depressing as the Aella piece in ages. "If I, who to my cost already am / one of those strange prodigious creatures, Man" ...
I am an atheist and I am against blasphemy laws. People should be free to criticise the activities of religious groups. And in my view, there is a great deal of harm done by people who justify harmful or even hateful acts in the name of religion. That harm should be condemned and in many cases should be made unlawful.
But burning books is a violent act and should never be tolerated. Burning books is a violent denial of freedom of speech to others. I realise that this is not a fashionable view today. But there are so many non-violent ways in which one can criticise a belief system, and protest about a belief system, and try to get a government to ban harmful acts done in the name of a religion. Fire is violence and violence is NOT a form of free speech. And violence achieves nothing except the promotion of violence.