The start of the post is copy-pasted below. Note that the post is anonymous, and I am not claiming to have written it.
Some people in the rationalist community are concerned about risks of physical violence from Ziz and some of her associates. Following discussions with several people, I’m posting here to explain where those concerns come from, and recommend some responses.
TLDR (details and links in the post body)
- Over the past few years, Ziz has repeatedly called for the deaths of many different classes of people.
- In August of 2022, Ziz seems to have faked her own death. Ziz’s close associate Gwen Danielson may have done the same thing in April of 2022.
- In November of 2022, three associates of Ziz (Somnulence “Somni” Logencia, Emma Borhanian, and someone going by the alias “Suri Dao”) got into a violent conflict with their landlord in Vallejo, California, according to court records and news reports. Somni stabbed the landlord in the back with a sword, and the landlord shot Somni and Emma. Emma died, and Somni and Suri were arrested. Ziz and Gwen were seen by police at the scene, alive.
- I gather that Pennsylvania police believe, based on a lot of circumstantial evidence and investigation, that one or more of Ziz, Michelle “Jamie” Zajko, or Daniel Blank was very plausibly involved in the murder of Jamie’s parents in Pennsylvania around December 31st, 2022.
- Ziz is currently in police custody on charges related to obstructing a PA police investigation. Daniel, Jamie, and Gwen are not in custody (as far as I know), and I don’t know their locations.
- I don’t know of any concrete plans by Ziz or her associates to do anything else violent, but it seemed like a good idea to raise a loud alarm about all of this now. People should speak up (or at least tell a friend) if they have information, and should take whatever safety precautions make sense for their situation in case more violence occurs at some point in the future.
Even seemingly minor pieces of information might be helpful here, since they could add up to a clearer picture when combined with other information that also seems minor. If you want to share information privately, you can email me at sefashapiro@gmail.com, or submit information anonymously through this form.
This is a complicated situation that I don’t fully understand, and it’s likely that I’m getting some facts wrong. I’ve talked to a lot of people in an attempt to piece together what happened, and I’ll try to update this post with corrections or important details if they’re brought to my attention.
Please keep in mind, as I am trying to keep in mind myself, that every observation is evidence for more than one hypothesis, that things are often not what they seem, and that it’s useful to make the effort to think about both what’s appropriate to do in the world where your best guesses are true, and what’s appropriate to do in the world where your best guesses are wrong. Split and commit is better than seeking confirmation of a single theory.
One thing I'm interested in more info on, not quite related to the OP, is whether SquirrelInHell/Pasek's other mental techniques listed on bewelltuned.com are basically good, or are hazardous in some way. If there are people in this thread who've dug into the details here, or tried their Motor Cortex techniques, I'd like to hear about that.
Their Tuning Your Cognitive Strategies post is one of the most impactful techniques I've tried, that I highly recommend. When I recommend it, people periodically ask "wait, isn't this the person who committed suicide after interacting with Ziz? How do you know their techniques are safe?"
Their Cognitive Strategies and Emotional Processing posts seem extremely straightforwardly useful, and pretty straightforwardly not-harmful to me. I haven't tried their muscle cortex stuff because it seemed both more effortful and less obviously useful. I could imagine it turning out to also be straightforwardly good, or I could imagine in veering into weirder territories.
They stated that bewelltuned.com was where they put stuff that they were confident was safe/good, but, idk how much stock to put in that.
Sure, but, like, people can discover things like "exercise is good for you" or "eating healthy is good for you", and nonetheless have unrelated problems that cause them to commit suicide (they can even end up committing suicide due eating-disorder-related reasons), so, sure an error happened somewhere, but that's not very strong evidence that the error is related to having discovered and got excited about exercise being good for you and eating healthy being good for you.
(Tuning your cognitive strategies paid off for me immediately, in a straightforward way that made sense)
I think there's a thing where people with a lot of mental problems tend to get very enthusiastic about various therapy-type techniques and genuinely get a lot of benefit out of them. But then they still have massive problems because their original problems were so humongous to begin with, even if they improve a lot they're still worse on mental health than the median person. (This has historically also described me, even though I have also been getting better over the long term.)
Even if they are genuinely making steady progress, that progress might not be fast enough to ensure that an unexpected shock or a set of adverse consequences won't bring them down.
What the fuck
Conflict (especially about whether one should breed animals to have extreme bodies and then lock them up in tiny unsanitary cages so they can grow up and then slaughter and eat them) + a strong commitment to/philosophy of escalating all the way for incentive reasons are the main ingredients I think.
I don't think it's that far-fetched to view what humanity does to animals as something equivalent to the Holocaust. And if you accept this, almost everyone is either a nazi or nazi collaborator.
When you take this idea seriously and commit to stopping this with all your heart, you get Ziz.
No, you don't, because Ziz-style violence is completely ineffective at improving animal welfare. It's dramatic and self-destructive and might express soundly their factional leanings, but that doesn't make it accomplish the thing in question.
Further, none of the murders & attempted murders the gang has committed so far seem to be against factory farm workers, so I don't understand this idea that Ziz is motivated by ambitions of political terrorism at all. Reading their posts it sounds more like Ziz misunderstood decision theory as saying "retaliate aggressively all the time" and started a cult around that.
While "retaliate aggressively all the time" does seem like a strawman, it is worth noting that Ziz rejects causal decision theory (a la "retaliate aggressively if it seems like it would cause things to go better, and avoid retaliating if it seems like it would cause things to go worse") in favor of some sort of timeless/updateless decision theory (a la "retaliate aggressively even if it would cause things to go worse, as long as this means your retaliation is predictable enough to avoid ever running into the situation where you have to retaliate").
Meanwhile other rationalist orgs might pretend to run on timeless/updateless decision theory but seem in practice to actually run on causal decision theory.
For an example, see the "rationalist fleet" post. Among other conflicts, it describes getting into a drawn-out conflict with a roommate/subletter (who by Ziz's account was pretty abusive), ending with the below; it seems pretty illustrative of Ziz's thought-process (and has nothing to do with veganism):
... (read more)What semi-inteligent humans natively do without thinking all that hard is closer to "updateless" decision theory than causal decision theory, and people who think that fancy decision theories imply radically different optimal behavior on the part of regular people are usually gravely misunderstanding what they actually say. The Zizians are an example of this.
This is such an unrealistically charitable interpretation of the actions of the Ziz gang that I find it hard to understand what you really mean. If you find this at all a plausible underlying motivation for these murders I feel like you should become more acquainted with the history of violent political movements and cults, the majority of which said at some point "we're just acquiring resources that we can use for the grand revolution" and maybe even meant it.
Hating humans and therefore doing mean things to them is compatible with a lot of behavior, but very few of those behaviors are "taking the plight of animals seriously and fighting for them with all of your heart." Taking the plight of animals seriously and not doing obviously counterproductive or insane things in the name of "helping" them are one and the same, for me, and I don't know what else it could be.
Is it tho
If a businessowner makes silly product decisions because of bounded rationality, then yes, it's possible they were earnestly optimizing for success the whole time and just didn't realize what the consequences of their actions would be.
If a(n otherwise intelligent) businessowner decides to shoot the clerk at the competitor taco stand across the street, then at the very least they must have valued something wayyyyy over building the business.
Not necessarily because you might also commit to stopping it in a non-escalatory way. For instance you could work to make economically viable lab-grown meat to replace animal products.
Hence the other key ingredient in Zizianism is commitment to escalating all the way, which allows things to blow up dramatically like this. (And escalating all the way has the potential to go wrong in most conflicts, not just veganism (though veganism seems like the big one here), e.g. I doubt the landlord conflict was about veganism.)
As an analogy, if you were dealing with the Holocaust, you could try to directly destroy all Nazis, or you could try to mitigate against the Holocaust in less escalatory ways (e.g. trying to have Jews emigrate from Nazi territories, which I imagine could be done either with the cooperation of Jews as in the Danish case, or with the cooperation of Nazis as in the Madagascar plan).
I downvoted for disagreement but upvoted for Karma - not sure why it's being so heavily downvoted. This comment states in an honest way the preferences that most humans hold.
Well I downvoted, first because I find those preferences pretty abhorrent, and second because Richard is being absurdly confrontational ("bring on the death threats") in a way that doesn't contribute to discussion. The comment is mostly uncalled-for gloating & flag planting, as if he's trying to start a bravery debate.
Any of those things seem to me sufficient enough reasons to downvote, and altogether they made me strong downvote.
This is basically the politician's syllogism:
In general, the politician's syllogism fails because not only must we do something, but we must do something that works and doesn't cause side effects that are worse than its benefits and doesn't have too high opportunity costs etc. In this case, it's valuable for people to "push back against people like Ziz", but it's disvaluable for people to have awful values (like not caring about animal suffering despite believing it to be real), and to be hyperbolic and confrontational (as in "bring on the death threats" or describing a poorly thought-out blog as a "cesspit").
I see your point, but I think that buying Ziz's rhetoric tools is a mistake. This seems like a case of "do not argue with a crazy person, because from outside it will seem like two crazy people arguing".
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Yes, Ziz keeps making death threats left and right. And seems responsible for a few actual deaths.
But also, Ziz seems to successfully drive people crazy (and murderous, or suicidal) with their crazy beliefs and arguments. That seems to me like a reason to reject the frame, rather than join it.
When Ziz screams things like "according to my superior decision theory, using my doubleplus good split personality brain, I have decided to kill you all, because in my crazy imagination you have attacked me first" (not an exact quote), responses like "no, I will kill you" or "I am ready to die" mean buying her frame... that this is somehow about survival, decision theory, and killing. Instead of, merely a crazy person generating a word salad peppered by rationalist keywords and threats of violence.
If a random homeless guy started yelling at you that he wants to kill you, how would you react? I would probably just ignore him, tell everyone "careful, there is some crazy homeless guy, possibly violent", and maybe call the cops. I wouldn't try to steelman his words, or adopt his frame.
How is Ziz meaningfully different from that?
It depends on which "that", a crazy but harmless ranter in the street, or a crazy and dangerous ranter in the street. According to accounts here, Ziz is the latter sort. Heed the words of Hunter S. Thompson: "You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug—especially when it's waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye."
My comment is something I judged needed to be said at some point, and not just in response to Ziz, who is not the only one equating the eating of meat to the murder of humans. According to that comment by FeepingCreature, vegans regard those indifferent to animal suffering as "Nazis" and see themselves as the resistance to Nazis. I do not know which side FeepingCreature takes.
If you see yourself as resisting "Nazis", what does that suggest you will do to a "Nazi"? We know what Ziz wanted to do to anyone she saw as evil: throw them out the airlock. As Insanity Wolf would scream at you, "KNOW SOMEONE EVIL? WHAT ARE YOU DOING ABOUT IT?"
If those vegans started making death threats against specific people around me, I would want them treated like crazy, too. (With a possible exception for making threats against people working directly in the pain factories. There I would probably say "none of my business".)
The proper reaction to Ziz, in my opinion, would be to print a collection of their death threats, and ask a judge for a restraining order. If you succeed, then whenever Ziz comes close to a rationalist meeting or something like that, just call the cops and say "here is a person violating their restraining order". I would assume that the situation would be clearly legible for the cops. No need to explain who you are, who is Ziz, and why do you consider them a danger.
Oh, one more thing that rubbed me the wrong way when reading this thread: It seems like a few people are buying the frame that Ziz is some kind of consistent slightly-superhuman intelligence, operating by actual algorithms, following precommitments, and playing a 4D chess against the rest of the world... like some kind of Roko's basilisk incarnated.
From my perspective, it seems like a crazy person making up bullshit theories, making random threats, but... (read more)
The possible involvement of Daniel Blank is the most surprising to me. As the linked article notes, Daniel seems like about the least likely person to commit a homicide. I've not had contact with him in a few years, but I recall Daniel as sensitive, serious, and caring, and a person who would go out of his way to avoid causing someone else harm. I don't know what's happened in the intervening time to lead to his involvement here.
Part of the process that Ziz seems to advocate involves inducing alternative personalities in people. The process that unleashed the Maia personality in Chris Pazek led in Ziz's words to their suicide.
This process could easily lead to a personality being active in a person that has very different characteristics among various axis than the personality you knew years earlier.
"Least likely person to do X" is an interesting concept. People who deal with a shadow that has an attribute they despise often overcompensate to fight that shadow. That shadow might provide a substance based on which the alternative personality that acts very differently can be built.
I feel complicated about this; in a world where everyone is doing split-and-commit (or something similar) by default, this feels straightforwardly good to note.
But like. In this world, this feels like fodder for "you should interpret evidence that someone is unusually unlikely to X as evidence that they're actually quite likely to X, given some trigger."
And I think this is the sort of thing that is true in some very small minority of cases and an outright (and false) weapon all the other times.
I think we should be real careful about interpreting evidence against X as evidence of X, even given that the psychological structure you just described is one that exists.
I do agree that it's not an easy subject to speak about.
There are two separate issues at hand:
Sometimes abused children develop multiple-personality disorders where they develop new personalities to deal with situations where the characteristics.
I have one friend who has the multiple-personality disorder and is able to switch between them. According to him, he often faced situations where a person was used to dealing with one of his personalities and really surprised when he switched to another personality that has different personality characteristics.
The technique that Ziz advocates seems to intentionally created something that's similar to multiple personality disorder and I would expect that the same pattern hold where at least one of the personalities is able to do things that are far outside of what the old unified self would do.
I think good evidence that someone is unlikely to cause harm is about observing that they have functional strategies for taking care of boundary violations. If someone's reaction is instead to ignore their own needs, repress any anger that come... (read more)
I think that this misidentifies the crux of the internal argument Ziz created and the actual chain of events a bit.
imo, Maia was trans and the components of her mind (the alter(s) they debucketed into "Shine") saw the body was physically male and decided that the decision-theoretically correct thing to do was to basically ignore being trans in favor of maximizing influence to save the world. Choosing to transition was pitted against being trans because of the cultural oppression against queers. I've run into this attitude among rationalist queers numerous times independently from Ziz and "I can't transition that will stop me from being a good EA" seems troubling common sentiment.
Prior to getting involved with Ziz, the "Shine" half of her personality had basically been running her system on an adversarial 'we must act or else' fear response loop around saving the multiverse from evil using timeless decision theory in order to brute force the subjunctive evolution of the multiverse.
So Ziz and Paseks start interacting, and at that point the "Maia" parts of her had basically been like, traumatized into submission an... (read more)
things i'm going off:
the pdf archive of Maia's blog posted by Ziz to sinseriously (I have it downloaded to backup as well)
the archive.org backup of Fluttershy's blog
Ziz's account of the event (and how sparse and weirdly guilt ridden it is for her)
several oblique references to the situation that Ziz makes
various reports about the situation posted to LW which can be found by searching Pasek
From this i've developed my own model of what ziz et al have been calling "single-good interhemispheric game theory" which is just extremely advanced and high level beating yourself up while insisting you're great at your emotions. There is a particular flavor of cPTSD that seems disproportionately overrepresented within the LW/EA community umbrella, and it looks like this:
hyperactivity
perfectionist compulsion to overachieve
always-on
constantly thinking with a rich inner world
high scrupulosity blurring into OCD tendencies
anxiety with seemingly good justifications (it's not paranoia if...)
an impressive degree of self-control (and the inability to relax fully)
catastrophizing
dissociation from the body
this is a mode of a cPTSD flight response. Under the cPTSD model, "Shine" could be thought of as a toxi... (read more)
Random fact: I just assumed Pasek was trans, based on some vague writing style / username, and then one day met with them on Google Hangouts to discuss some AI stuff, and they brought up that just yesterday they had decided/realized they were female. I brought up "uh, oh, I had just kinda assumed you were a trans woman this whole time" and they said "well, bayes points to you I guess".
I separately knew Ziz but I think didn't know there was a connection there at the time.
I imagine him being manipulated into giving them a place to live. I have trouble imagining him being manipulated into conspiring towards a specific goal of murder. I wouldn't be surprised if the police care little for such a distinction.
AFAIK most religious people don't start suddenly committing homicide. It more seems like the relevant factor is specific to Zizianism, which appears to compel people who adopt it to take extreme actions, even if they are sensitive, serious, caring, and would go out of their way to avoid causing someone else harm.
Or perhaps, especially if they are like that? I had interacted with somnilogical a while ago, and I was quite suprised that ey had joined Zizianism as that was not my impression of the kind of person ey were. But I didn't interact hugely much with somni so I may have misjudged em.
People can do bad things if they think something much larger is at stake. Some but not all religions suggest that. Some non religious philosophies do as well, notably utilitarianism. Many, but not all, utilitarians solve the problem by not fully believing in it. Zizians adopt extreme utilitarianism about animal welfare.
On the one hand.
And on the other hand.
Actually, this makes me think of something.
We sometimes see with rationalists and utilitarian EAs do something like the same thing we worry about with AI: unaligned optimization that produces outcomes we don't like. Unfortunately, because humans disagree on norms/ethics/values, it's kind of hard to know the difference between "going off the rails" and "correcting a massive oversight or collective moral failing", especially from the inside.
I'm gonna add an even more pessimistic hypothesis: That the disagreements around values are fundamentally irresolvable because there is no truth at the end of the tunnel.
Or, one man's "going off the rails" is another man's "correcting a massive oversight or collective moral failing", and these perspectives can't be reconciled.
Also related: Scott Alexander on epistemic learned helplessness: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/
In my head this is related to Scott's Robustness to Relative Scale. Reasoning is great, but if you take a particular agent and scale up the part of it that does explicit reasoning by 100x whilst leaving the rest at the same power level, then it may overpower other parts of the system designed to keep it in-check.
To tell an overly specific concrete story of how this might happen:
“Taking ideas too seriously” is unlikely to be what went wrong with Ziz, but I do think that it’s a large part of what went wrong with all the misguided individuals who’ve allowed themselves to be drawn into Ziz’s orbit, have adopted Ziz’s bizarre perspectives, etc.
Who is Ziz and what relation does she have to the rationalist community?
Ziz is a blogger at sinceriously.fyi. She used to hang around the rationality community a fair bit (I met her at a CFAR/MIRI workshop). She has since decided that some figures and institutions in the rationality community are worth protesting (see e.g. this protest at a CFAR reunion, "Jack LaSota" is Ziz). More, possibly biased information is available at zizians.info.
Ziz's blog is openly, obviously evil. And not in a fun, trolly way—or even inadvertent mundane evil. Boringly explicit evil, with literal endorsement of the Star Wars Sith religion.
Here's a quote from Ziz's post My Journey to the Dark Side.
Here's a quote from Ziz's post Neutral and Evil.
FYI I don't think this is the right summary. Ziz's morality is something more like "society's conception of good is corrupt, therefore you should be prioritizing unlocking yourself from society's frame".
They have a bunch of complicated worldview relating to how to do this. I do think they go off the rails, and given how many people ended up either committing suicide or getting involved in ways that seemed to make their life worse, I do not recommend trying to follow their worldview and understand the details of it.
But I wanted to flag this because, if you start with an assumption "Ziz is cartoonishly Star Wars Evil", and then you start reading any of their content, you might notice "oh wait this isn't as cartoonishly Star Wars Evil as it sounded at first glance, maybe there's something to this." And then you might frogboil yourself into taking it too seriously.
(I might have slightly more nuanced advice on how to relate to Ziz for people I'm having an in-depth 1-1 conversation with, but, this is the default advice I feel good about sharing in a low-fidelity way)
To offer a contrasting viewpoint:
I’ve read some of the stuff on Ziz’s website. In my experience, there were a few scattered bits here and there that were sensible (those were the things that were basically restatements of views found in plenty of other places, e.g. most of this post—until the last handful of paragraphs, where it goes off the rails—is an insightful analysis of one of the fundamental problems related to NVC and similar techniques… but of course plenty of other people have written about this sort of thing).
The rest was just very obviously wrong and insane. I found myself utterly baffled by the notion that anyone could even be tempted to take any of it seriously, or believe it, etc. My reaction wasn’t “oh no, this sounds disturbingly plausible!”; it was “wow, this is sheer nonsense—the deranged ramblings of a very obviously mentally disturbed individual”.
Now, not everyone reacts to this stuff like I did—obviously! But the right takeaway, I think, isn’t “this ‘Zizianism’ is dangerous, mere humans shouldn’t consider it too closely”. Rather, the takeaway is a question: “what mental quirks make some people incapable of seeing this for the insane absurdity that it is?” Why do some people find this stuff plausible? And: by what means can we identify such tendencies in ourselves, and counteract them?
Ziz's tendency towards inscrutable metaphors and loaded jargon serve essentially the same purpose as typos in a spam email - it's meant to filter you out. If the hypnotic language made more literal sense, it would bring in people who weren't especially susceptible in particular to Ziz's brand of rhetoric, and thus might not be good recruits for her criminal organization.
that was definitely a large part of it, i let people sort of 'epistemically bully' me for a long time out of the belief that it was the virtuous and rationally correct thing to do. The first person who linked me sinceriously retracted her endorsements of it pretty quickly, but i had already sort of gotten hooked on the content at that point and had no one to actually help steer me out of it so i kept passively flirting with it over time. That was an exploitable hole, and someone eventually found it and exploited me using it for a while in a way that kept me further hooked into the content through this compulsive fear that ziz was wrong but also correct and going to win and that was bad so she had to be stopped.
The person who kept me hooked on her writing for years was in a constant paranoia spiral about AI doom and was engaging with Zi... (read more)
I believe that reading about Zizianism is not dangerous. Actually meeting Ziz and debating them for a long time is. (Reading is only dangerous indirectly, as it may make you curious.) Kinda like a difference between reading a Scientology book, and joining an actual Scientology organization.
One of the tricks Ziz uses is redefining the meaning of the words (including words such as "good" and "evil", or even "person"). This works much better if you are overwhelmed, and do not have enough time to track the relations of Zizian jargon with actual words. The trick works -- and this is what many cults do -- by attaching your cached connotations of the old words to the new ones.
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As an example, imagine the word "good". If you are like me, you probably do not have an exact definition, but you still have a vague idea that "good" is somehow correlated to helping people and anticorrelated to hurting them. And you probably have a cached thought like "I want to be good (perhaps unless the cost is too high)".
Now imagine that Ziz gives you a very complicated argument why "good" should be redefined to... something very abstract and complicated, based on many incorrect assumptions... but in effect, no... (read more)
There's this guy Michael Vassar who strikes me - from afar - as a failed cult leader, and Ziz as a disciple of his who took some followers in a different direction. Even before this new information, I thought her faith sounded like a breakaway sect of the Church of Asmodeus.
Michael Vassar was one of the inspirations for Eliezer's Professor Quirrell, but otherwise seems to have little influence.
At the risk of this looking too much like me fighting a strawman...
Cults may have a tendency to interact and pick up adaptations from each other, but it seems wrong to operate on the assumption that they're all derivatives of one ancestral "proto-cult" or whatever. Cult leaders are not literal vampires, where you only become a cult leader by getting bit by a previous cult leader or whatever.
It's a cultural attractor, and a cult is a social technology simple enough that it can be spontaneously re-derived. But cults can sometimes pick up or swap beliefs & virulence factors with each other, when they interact. And I do think Ziz picked up a few beliefs from the Vassarite cluster.
I can dig up cases in Ziz's writing where Ziz has interacted with Vassar before, or may have indirectly learned things from him through Alice.
Doesn't make Vassar directly responsible for Ziz's actions. I think Vassar is not directly responsible for Ziz.
I do want to spell this out, because I'm reading a subtle implication here, that I want to push back against.
For example, many abusive partners reinvent half of the cult techniques on their own. If you are the right kind of personality, it is probably enough to carefully observe your victim, and gradually remove everything that empowers them. (Their parents disapprove of you? No more contact with the parents. An article about abusive relations that actually explains a lot? No more reading that specific website or a book. Ideas encountered in free time that you don't like? Invent lots of busywork, no more free time. Thinking too much? Create emotional drama, so that the victim thinks about made up problems instead.)
Cults are simply groups that stumbled upon the right combination of techniques, efficient enough to either keep their members trapped reliably, or to recruit new members faster than the old ones leave. It helps if you can copy some techniques from your previous cult, but it is not necessary. You can also copy from abusive parents, or if you are an abusive person yourself (and Ziz seems to be) simply learn from your previous experience.
It sure sounds like you think outsiders would typically have the "common sense" to avoid Ziz. What do you think such an outsider would make of this comment?
I recognize that there are privacy considerations that (probably) prevent it, but I would like to see more of a public accounting of the evidence that caused Scott Alexander to withdraw those critiques, along with what critiques remain, and what he thinks caused his & the community's initial view.
My impression was that Scott previously thought the hypothesis 'interacting with Michael Vassar can cause psychosis' was worth taking seriously (in this comment), but then later decided this was mostly correlation not causation and apologized to both Michael and Jessica (in this comment).
Insofar as this is a case of the community reflexively scapegoating, it seems like we ought to examine it more carefully; insofar as there are still possible cult-like/bizarre negative effects, it seems like we should investigate those too.
I think Vassar is alarming and unpredictable in a way that causes people to be afraid of a sudden physical altercation. For example, I have felt scared of physical altercations with him. If I recall correctly, he raised his voice while telling a friend of mine that he thought they were worse than the Nazis during a conversation in a hotel lobby, which freaked out other people who were in the lobby (I don't remember how my friend felt).