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We have sat down on a rock, eaten a Clif bar, & are ready to resume our journey in pursuit of Katie’s & Andrew’s pursuit of “cult behavior in the Zizians”.
To our left, we see a red squirrel flapping its tail as it clucks at us: we are in its territory! To our right, we see K & A deadnaming Ziz, implying “Ziz” is a nickname, & barking up the tree of unihemispheric sleep. We take a closer look at this tree’s bark, buds, & leaf arrangement, & realize they are barking up— The Unnamed Site! Which they shrink down to size as “An anonymous blog post”.
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We are bored to death by unihemispheric sleep (US). It’s on our bingo card, but we have, so far, never mentioned it. It sends us into duohemispheric sleep 😴 The Unnamed Site presents it as a mesmeric means of mind control, but from what we’ve read on the girls’ blogs, it sounds more like meditation wrapped up in STEM-enthusiast lingo. Most importantly: there’s no indication they or their friends substituted it for real sleep, or used it to break each other down.
We’ve also skirted around US bc The Unnamed Site blames it for the death of Maia Pasek, which we find to be in abhorrent taste.
We sadly never had the pleasure of knowing Maia. We don’t know what led to her suicide— neither does The Unnamed Site, & neither do K & A, altho here, they do not hesitate to parrot The Unnamed Site’s abhorrent hypothesis. We have read only that Maia felt a lot of turmoil over her gender, & that her quasi-suicide note references Rationalist ideas which she may have used to intellectualize her decision. It makes no reference to “Zizian” ideas.
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We are dragging K & A away from this tree, but they let out one more yelp:
According to [Jamie] Zajko’s LinkedIn page, while working at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, [they] conducted research regarding “sleep deprived individuals.” Zajko is a person of interest in the double homicide of [their] parents, Richard and Rita Zajko, who were killed in their home in late 2022.
This is a yelp of desperation, but we think K & A are hoping we’ll read it as: 😮 could Jamie have known all the ins & outs of how to manipulate sleep-deprived individuals?
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We apologize to readers, but this is specifically what Jamie was up to at Children’s Hospital:
• [Determining] how predictive miRNAs are of neurobehavioral susceptibility in sleep deprived individuals
• [Using] statistical methods… and machine learning methods… to detect predictive biomarkers of acute sleep deprivation and stress.
😴😴😴 How could studying miRNAs & detecting predictive biomarkers have made Jamie an expert in brainwashing their friends? Would they have deprived them of sleep, then tested their miRNAs to find just the right moment for ~indoctrination~?
K & A have parked in front of this tree, & have clumsily tried their hand at some journalistic stage magic— shoulda added “illusions” to the bingo card!
We might call their gambit “The Conjuror’s Collage”— layering unrelated images & facts, & hoping we see something that isn’t rlly there.
It’s an associative sleight of hand. They move from talk of Maia’s suicide to talk of Jamie at Children’s, which— they hope!— will create an illusion of thematic or causal connection.
They construct a speculative claim: Jamie studied sleep deprivation → sleep deprivation is associated with cults and manipulation → maybe Jamie became an expert in controlling people! But this is a leap w/ no evidentiary bridge. It banks on folk science & media tropes of brainwashing, not on any real understanding of sleep research.
Speaking of sleep research: it banks on their omission of Jamie’s actual areas of research!
K & A want to make Jamie’s research exciting: we, who are bored to tears by Jamie’s research (no offense, Jamie) can understand the impulse! Yet they use razzmatazz for a no-good cause: they use it to flatten the distinction b/w diagnostic research, & research into— say— behavioral manipulation.
These are not the same thing! Jamie is not running the Stanford Prison Experiment, they are running biomarkers thru stats! 😴😴😴 All this STEM talk is making our head hurt. We are moving on.
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Alas, we have reached the most sinister bit of stagecraft that we have ever seen: the smoke & mirrors illusion which made us run thru this cursèd Gate to begin with!
We are referring to K & A’s slimy line:
Allegations of sexual abuse (AOSA) within the Zizians are littered throughout the lengthy blogs written by its members.
Indeed, these blogs are littered w/ AOSA— but not w/in “the Zizians”! These AOSA take place around “the Zizians”: they take place chez the Rationalists, & w/in that, chez Alice Monday— who, however much K & A insist otherwise, was not a member of this friend-group: they were in fact an enemy. It is too kind to call this sinister stagecraft: this is flat-out misinformation.
Weirdly, K & A’s own examples undermine their monstrous misinformation. They talk of Emma being beaten— by whom? By Alice; but ofc, Alice’s name is never mentioned. They talk of Somni publicly calling this out, & of Gwen’s own experience w/ abusive housemates. They also do not know that Jamie & Jamie’s deadname are the same person. Finally, we receive one grim piece of New News: Alice’s house was called Guilt or Guilt House, & was called, by one anonymous commenter, “a brothel”, which is deeply unfair to brothels.
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Thennn we learn all abt how cults “create enemies”— as if the Rationalists had not “created”, out of Ziz; Gwen; Somni; & Emma, a bunch of scary shadows on the wall, & as if they had not then gotten spooked by their own campfire tale. It’s again weird that K & A never tell us who the “enemies” of this friend-group were— they’ve told us all abt Jim Jones’s & Scientology’s enemies, but we get no “Zizian” enemies 🤷🏻♀️ It is just as well.
At last, we break into a dark chuckle when K & A hit us w/:
The fractures created in the group culminated in Ziz ordering [Jamie] to kill [Alice].
🥲 We are honored to have Alice make a fashionably-late appearance! & yet: this is… not how it went down.
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Ziz’s recommendation, chronologically if not causally, is what led to her & Jamie’s blossoming allyship 🤗 Never mind, tho, bc for the next 3 paragraphs, K & A do sthng that has never been done before: they give us lots of information on the elusive Alice 😮 …ofc ending w/ our fav statement:
Alice’s digital footprint is described as “sporadic”. From it, K & A have chosen the following tidbits to round out our understanding of their character:
• Alice once worked for the Oregon startup Beeminder.
• Alice’s bio for the company described her as “an autodidactic student of mathematics and applied rationality.”
• Alice’s pronouns in this bio are “Ze/Zir,” but “The linguistically less radical can by all means call her she.” 😮 our apologies, Alice, we will Ze/Zir you accordingly 🙏
• In various profile pictures of Alice, ze can be seen smiling, often wearing glasses, with curly strawberry blond hair.
We rubbed our hands in delight at this last one, & dove into some Heavy Googling to procure for our readers a long-awaited Alice visual 🙌 Alas, we resurfaced w/ only
and
to show for our efforts.
• In 2017, Alice signed up to attend a violin concerto in a home in the Lower Haight in San Francisco.
• As far back as 2014, Alice interacted with rationalist thinker Scott Alexander on his influential Slate Star Codex blog.
We wish this duo had given us more info than just “interacted with”, bc Scott Alexander is a curious figure: a man who sent us spiraling down a Scott Soliloquy, which we will recite for you now.
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