#Rationalism
16 entries tagged Rationalism.
People (7)
- Eliezer Yudkowsky Eliezer Yudkowsky is an American writer and self-taught artificial-intelligence theorist who founded the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, wrote the foundational texts of the LessWrong rationalist movement, was funded for a decade by Peter Thiel, and in 2025 was named by Thiel as an example of the technology-stopping 'Antichrist.'
- Felix Bauckholt Felix 'Ophelia' Bauckholt was a German national and elite quantitative trader, a former informatics-olympiad gold medalist and Tower Research Capital trader, who became part of the Zizian group and was shot dead in the January 2025 Vermont shootout that killed Border Patrol agent David Maland.
- 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.
- 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.
- Scott Alexander Scott Alexander is the pen name of psychiatrist Scott Siskind, whose blog Slate Star Codex became the central forum of the rationalist movement after LessWrong, who deleted it in 2020 over a New York Times piece that named him, and whose privately expressed openness to 'human biodiversity' and neoreactionary ideas was exposed by a leaked 2014 email.
- Teresa Youngblut Teresa Youngblut is a member of the Zizian group charged in federal court with the January 2025 murder of U.S. Border Patrol agent David Maland during a Vermont traffic stop, in a case in which the Department of Justice has filed notice that it will seek the death penalty.
- Wei Dai Wei Dai is a computer engineer who proposed the b-money digital-cash scheme cited in the Bitcoin white paper, created the Crypto++ library, and posts in the rationalist community.
Organizations (4)
- Center for Applied Rationality The Center for Applied Rationality is a Berkeley nonprofit spun off from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in 2012 to teach rationality techniques through residential workshops, which served as a recruitment funnel for AI-safety work and whose 2019 alumni reunion was protested by the group that became the Zizians.
- 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.
- Machine Intelligence Research Institute The Machine Intelligence Research Institute is a Berkeley artificial-intelligence-risk nonprofit founded in 2000 as the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence by Eliezer Yudkowsky, funded from 2005 by Peter Thiel, that incubated the LessWrong rationalist community and the social network from which the Leverage Research, Vassarite, and Zizian cult formations later emerged.
- 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.
Events (1)
- Singularity Summit The Singularity Summit was an annual conference on artificial intelligence and human enhancement cofounded in 2006 by Peter Thiel, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Ray Kurzweil, that ran through 2012 as the public-facing platform of the Singularity Institute before the brand was sold to Singularity University in 2013.
Concepts (4)
- Effective Altruism Effective Altruism is a movement that emerged around 2011 from Oxford philosophy and the LessWrong rationalist community, advancing evidence-based giving and a 'longtermist' concern with the far future and artificial-intelligence risk, whose 2013 summit Peter Thiel keynoted and whose largest funder, Sam Bankman-Fried, collapsed in the 2022 FTX fraud.
- Extropianism Extropianism is the libertarian transhumanist movement founded by Max More in the late 1980s around the Extropy Institute and its 1990s mailing list, the seedbed from which Nick Bostrom's longtermism, the rationalist community, and parts of the cypherpunk and cryptocurrency worlds emerged.
- Human Biodiversity Human biodiversity (HBD) is a euphemism for hereditarian race science, popularized by Steve Sailer in the late 1990s, asserting genetically rooted differences in intelligence and behavior between racial groups, that became a connective doctrine linking the rationalist community, neoreaction, and the alt-right.
- Rationalist Community The Rationalist Community is the Bay Area subculture that formed around Eliezer Yudkowsky's LessWrong writings and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in the late 2000s, organized around probability-based reasoning and artificial-intelligence existential risk, and from whose social network the Effective Altruism movement and the Leverage Research, Vassarite, and Zizian cult formations all emerged.