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#Cult

6 entries tagged Cult.

People (3)

  • Jack LaSota Jack LaSota, who writes under the persona 'Ziz,' is an Alaska-born computer programmer and former rationalist who founded the group known as the Zizians around a theory of brain hemispheres and militant veganism, and who was arrested in Maryland in February 2025 as the group was tied to six deaths across three states.
  • Jim Jones Founder and leader of the People's Temple, a politically connected preacher who moved his followers to Guyana where over 900 died in the 1978 Jonestown massacre. Multiple CIA agents were present at the compound and investigators alleged connections to behavioral modification programs.
  • Michael Vassar Michael Vassar is an American businessman who served as president of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence from 2009 to 2011 and later led an informal circle, the Vassarites, that recruited from the rationalist movement and used confrontational psychological methods and psychedelics, and that is widely cited as the tendency from which the Zizian group splintered.

Organizations (3)

  • Leverage Research Leverage Research is a Bay Area organization run from 2011 to 2019 by the philosopher Geoff Anders that recruited from the rationalist and effective-altruism milieu to pursue a 'one true theory of psychology' through intensive group experimentation, and that former members later described as a coercive, cult-like environment.
  • The Finders and The Odyssey Network On February 4, 1987, police in Tallahassee, Florida received a call about six dishevelled children in a park under the supervision of two well-dressed men.
  • The Zizians The Zizians are a small group led by the computer programmer Jack LaSota that splintered from the Bay Area rationalist movement around an idiosyncratic theory of brain hemispheres, militant veganism, and AI-apocalypse decision theory, and that has been tied to six deaths across California, Pennsylvania, and Vermont between 2022 and 2025, including the killing of a Border Patrol agent that produced a federal death-penalty prosecution.