The New York Times published a piece this week profiling the Berkeley-based Rationalist movement and its arguably cult-y, religious-y ways, and they never once mention the probably actual cult that spun out of their group.

Maybe someone within the Rationalist movement saw that they needed a PR boost and knew someone higher up at the New York Times who could do them a favor. Or, maybe, the Times itself felt it needed to take a deeper, kinder look at the Rationalists after they consistently garnered mentions in some fairly unsavory stories through the early part of 2025.

In either case, we get this piece this week in the Times that delves into the origins and present state of the Rationalists — a fairly geeky but highly influential group of techno-philosphizers bent on saving the world from the evil potential of artificial intelligence, with a fair bit of overlap with the Effective Altruism movement. And, remarkably, the article never once mentions the Zizians, the small group that originated among the Rationalists and socialized with them, but broke off on their own in the last couple of years and, allegedly, started killing people, seemingly without remorse.

To be fair, the Times thoroughly covered the Zizian saga in early July, but it seems strange not to mention it, even as a brief paragraph about the perils of creating a quasi-religious, intellectual space obsessed with gaming out or avoiding a possibly disastrous, AI-tyrannized future.

And the latest piece isn't entirely a glowing portrayal of the Rationalists themselves, who have counted among their flock DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg, Anthropic’s chief executive Dario Amodei, and former OpenAI researcher Paul Christiano, as well as, to some extent, Elon Musk.

"When you think about the billions at stake and the radical transformation of lives across the world because of the eccentric vision of this group, how much more cult-y does it have to be for this to be a cult? Not much," says Harvard chaplain Greg M. Epstein, who wrote a book that touches on the Rationalists called Tech Agnostic, speaking to the Times.

Epstein adds, "What do cultish and fundamentalist religions often do? They get people to ignore their common sense about problems in the here and now in order to focus their attention on some fantastical future."

The Rationalists' online forums and in-person events appeared to give shape and purpose to the lives of Ziz, born Jack LaSota, and her half dozen or so closest followers. Even one of the Rationalist movement's leaders, Anna Salamon, executive director of CFAR (the Center for Applied Rationality), has admitted that the Rationalist meet-ups were, unwittingly, the perfect breeding ground for such a cult to form. And Salamon has said that Ziz gathered around her "a number of smart, mostly autistic-ish transwomen who were extremely vulnerable and isolated" and "manipulated" them through various cult-ish means — including food and sleep deprivation — into doing her bidding and crowning her their spiritual leader, of a sort.

Salamon told the Times last month that she believed Ziz and her friends "came [to the Rationalist sphere] hoping to become one of the main characters in the story, and then found out that they didn’t get to be one of the main characters. And then I think they were like, 'To heck with that — we’re going to be the main characters anyway.'"

Founding thinker Eliezer Yudkowsky gave a good quote to the Times in July about the Zizians, after mostly declining to comment on them, saying, "A lot of the early Rationalists thought it was important to tolerate weird people, a lot of weird people encountered that tolerance and decided they’d found their new home, and some of those weird people turned out to be genuinely crazy and in a contagious way among the susceptible."

The new Times piece also notes the religious overtones of Rationlist practice, which includes recitations of Yudkowsky's The Sequences, and an annual winter solstice gathering that includes group singing.

If nothing else, it seems clear that the Rationalists, whether they like it or not, are likely to keep making news as AI itself keeps making news.

Related: Possible Suicide Cluster Linked to Zizian Group, on Top of Killings