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Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults?

asteriskmag.substack.com · 4,299 words · saved by 3 readers

The rationalist community was drawn together by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky’s blog post series The Sequences, a set of essays about how to think more rationally. You would think, then, that they’d be paragons of critical thinking and skepticism — or at least that they wouldn’t wind up summoning demons. And yet, the rationalist community has hosted perhaps half a dozen small groups with very strange beliefs (including two separate groups that wound up interacting with demons). Some — which I won’t name in this article for privacy reasons — seem to have caused no harm but bad takes. But the most famous, a loose group of vegan anarchist transhumanists nicknamed the Zizians, have been linked to six violent deaths. Other groups, while less violent, have left a trail of trauma in their wake. One is Black Lotus, a Burning Man camp led by alleged rapist Brent Dill, which developed a metaphysical system based on the tabletop roleplaying game Mage the Ascension. Another is Leverage Research,

Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults? There’s a lot to like about the Rationalist community, but they do have a certain tendency to spawn — shall we say — high demand groups. We sent a card-carrying Rat to investigate what’s going on. Asterisk Magazine and Ozy Brennan Aug 11, 2025 172 21 33 Share The rationalist community was drawn together by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky’s blog post series The Sequences, a set of essays about how to think more rationally. You would think, then, that they’d be paragons of critical thinking and skepticism — or at least that they wouldn’t wind up summoning

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