Rationality community
The rationality community or rationalist community is a community that was once centered around the group blog LessWrong; the community still exists but is much more spread out across multiple websites (known as the “rationalist diaspora”). This page describes my involvement with the rationality community.
Personal involvement
I discovered LessWrong in 2010 or 2011; the first record I have of mentioning LessWrong dates to October 2011. I remember discovering it twice: the first was when Vaniver on the xkcd forums linked to the site, and the second was when I was searching for textbooks and found Luke Muehlhauser’s post on the subject (however I write this in October 2017, six years after the initial record, and did not record details of my discovery, so I could be making details up).
After discovering LessWrong, I read a bunch of posts in a haphazard order. I mostly did not keep records of which posts I read, so it is hard to say what exactly I read. I think I read a lot of the highly upvoted posts as well as most of the Sequences (but skipping the quantum mechanics sequence). During this period I discovered that there was a Seattle LessWrong meetup group, and considered attending, but ended up never attending due to some combination of being shy and traveling to Seattle being cumbersome (as I was located on the Eastside).
I created my account on LessWrong in July 2012.
On January 1, 2014, I emailed Cognito Mentoring after seeing its post on LessWrong.
Since late 2014, I’ve become more involved with the effective altruism community rather than spending time on LessWrong specifically.
I have neither attended a Center for Applied Rationality workshop nor read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
External links
Here are some related timelines that I have written:
- Timeline of the rationality community
- Timeline of Machine Intelligence Research Institute
- Timeline of Center for Applied Rationality
- Timeline of decision theory
- Timeline of friendly artificial intelligence