The context for what I'm discussing is explained in two Reflective Altruism posts: part 1 here and part 2 here.

Warning: This is a polemic that uses harsh language. I still completely, sincerely mean everything I say here and I consciously endorse it.^[1]

It has never stopped shocking and disgusting me that the EA Forum is a place where someone can write a post arguing that Black Africans need Western-funded programs to edit their genomes to increase their intelligence in order to overcome global poverty and can cite overtly racist and white supremacist sources to support this argument (even a source with significant connections to the 1930s and 1940s Nazi Party in Germany and the American Nazi Party, a neo-Nazi party) and that post can receive a significant amount of approval and defense from people in EA, even after the thin disguise over top of the racism is removed by perceptive readers. That is such a bonkers thing and such a morally repugnant thing, I keep struggling to find words to express my exasperation and disbelief. Effective altruism as a movement probably deserves to fail for that, if it can't correct it.^[2] 

My loose, general impression is that people who got involved in EA because of global poverty and animal welfare tend to be broadly liberal or centre-left and tend to be at least sympathetic toward arguments about social justice and anti-racism. Conversely, my impression of LessWrong and the online/Bay Area rationalist community is that they don't like social justice, anti-racism, or socially/culturally progressive views. One of the most bewildering things I ever read on LessWrong was one of the site admins (an employee of Lightcone Infrastructure) arguing that closeted gay people probably tend to have low moral integrity because being closeted is a form of deception. I mean, what?! This is the "rationalist" community?? What are you talking about?! As I recall based on votes, a majority of forum users who voted on the comment agreed.^[3]

Overall, LessWrong users seem broadly sympathetic to racist arguments and views.^[4] Same for sexist or anti-feminist views, and extremely so for anti-LGBT (especially anti-trans) views. Personally, I find it to be the most unpleasant website I've spent more than ten hours reading. When I think of LessWrong, I picture a dark, dingy corner of a house. I truly find it to be awful. 

The more I've thought about it, the more truth I find in the blogger Ozy Brennan's interpretation of the LessWrong and the rationalist community through the concept of the "cultic milieu" and a comparison to new religious movements (not cults in the more usual sense connoting high-control groups). Ozy Brennan self-identifies as a rationalist and is active in the community, which makes this analysis far more believable than if it came from an outsider. The way I'd interpret Ozy's blog post, which Ozy may not agree with, is that rationalists are in some sense fundamentally devoted to being incorrect, since they're fundamentally devoted to being against consensus or majority views on many major topics — regardless of whether those views are correct or incorrect — and inevitably that will lead to having a lot of incorrect views. 

I see very loose, very limited analogies between LessWrong and online communities devoted discussing conspiracy theories like QAnon or to online incel communities. Conspiracy theories because LessWrong has a suspicious, distrustful, at least somewhat paranoid or hypervigilant view on people and the world, this impulse to turn over rocks to find where the bad stuff is. Also, there's the impulse to connect too much. To subsume too much under one theory or worldview. And too much reliance on one's own fringe community to explain the world and interpret everything. Both, in a sense, are communities built around esoteric knowledge. And, indeed, I've seen some typical sort of conspiracy theory-seeming stuff on LessWrong related to American intelligence agencies and so on. 

Incel communities because the atmosphere of LessWrong feels rather bitter, resentful, angry, unhappy, isolated, desperate, arrogant, and hateful, and in its own way is also a sort of self-help or commiseration community for young men who feel left out of the normal social world. But rather than encouraging healthy, adaptive responses to that experience, instead both communities encourage anti-social behaviour, leaning into distorted thinking, resentment, and disdainful views of other people.

I just noticed that Ozy recently published a much longer article in Asterisk Magazine on the topic of actual high-control groups or high-demand groups with some connection to the rationalist community. It will take me a while to properly read the whole thing and to think about it. But at a glance, there are some aspects of the article that are relevant to what I'm discussing here, such as this quote:

Nevertheless, some groups within the community have wound up wildly dysfunctional–a term I’m using to sidestep definitional arguments about what is and isn’t a cult. And some of the blame can be put on the rationalist community’s marketing.

The Sequences make certain implicit promises. There is an art of thinking better, and we’ve figured it out. If you learn it, you can solve all your problems, become brilliant and hardworking and successful and happy, and be one of the small elite shaping not only society but the entire future of humanity. 

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, not true. 

Multiple interviewees remarked that the Sequences create the raw material for a cult. To his credit, their author, Eliezer Yudkowsky, shows little interest in running one.

And this quote:

But people who are drawn to the rationalist community by the Sequences often want to be in a cult. To be sure, no one wants to be exploited or traumatized. But they want some trustworthy authority to change the way they think until they become perfect, and then to assign them to their role in the grand plan to save humanity. They’re disappointed to discover a community made of mere mortals, with no brain tricks you can’t get from Statistics 101 and a good CBT workbook, whose approach to world problems involves a lot fewer grand plans and a lot more muddling through.

And this one:

Jessica Taylor, an AI researcher who knew both Zizians and participants in Leverage Research, put it bluntly. “There’s this belief [among rationalists],” she said, “that society has these really bad behaviors, like developing self-improving AI, or that mainstream epistemology is really bad–not just religion, but also normal ‘trust-the-experts’ science. That can lead to the idea that we should figure it out ourselves. And what can show up is that some people aren't actually smart enough to form very good conclusions once they start thinking for themselves.”

One way that thinking for yourself goes wrong is that you realize your society is wrong about something, don’t realize that you can’t outperform it, and wind up even wronger. But another potential failure is that, knowing both that your society is wrong and that you can’t do better, you start looking for someone even more right. Paradoxically, the desire to ignore the experts can make rationalists more vulnerable to a charismatic leader.  

Or, as Jessica Taylor said, “They do outsource their thinking to others, but not to the typical authorities.”

In principle, you could have the view that the typical or median person is benefitted by the Sequences or by LessWrong or the rationalist community, and it's just an unfortunate but uncommon side-effect for people to slip into cults or high-control groups. It sounds like that's what Ozy believes. My view is much harsher: by and large, the influence that LessWrong/the rationalist community has on people is bad, and people who take these ideas and this subculture to an extreme are just experiencing a more extreme version of the bad that happens to pretty much everyone who is influenced by these ideas and this subculture. (There might be truly minor exceptions to this, but I still see this as the overall trend.) 

Obviously, there is now a lot of overlap between the EA Forum and LessWrong and between EA and the rationalist community. I think to the extent that LessWrong and the rationalist community have influenced EA, EA has become something much worse. It's become something repelling to me. I don't want any of this cult stuff. I don't want any of this racist stuff. Or conspiracy theory stuff. Or harmful self-help stuff for isolated young men. I'm happy to agree with the consensus view most of the time because I care about being correct much more than I care about being counter-consensus. I am extremely skeptical toward esoteric knowledge and I think it's virtually always either nonsense or prosaic stuff repackaged to look esoteric. I don't buy these promises of unlocking powerful secrets through obscure websites.

There was always a little bit of overlap between EA and the rationalist community, starting very early on, but it wasn't a ruinous amount. And it's not like EA didn't independently have its own problems before the rationalist community's influence increased a lot, but those problems seemed more manageable. The situation now feels like the rationalist community is unloading more and more of its cargo onto the boat that is EA, and EA is just sinking deeper and deeper into the water over time. I feel sour and queasy about this because EA was once something I loved and it's becoming increasingly laden with things I oppose in the strongest possible terms, like racism, interpersonal cruelty, and extremely irrational thinking patterns. How can people who were in EA because of global poverty and animal welfare, who had no previous affiliation with the rationalist community, stand this? Are they all gone already? Have they opted to recede from public arguments and just focus on their own particular niches? What gives?

And to the extent that the racism in EA is independently EA's problem and has nothing to do with the influence of the rationalist community (which obviously has to be more than nothing), then that is 100% EA's problem, but I can't imagine racism in EA could be satisfactorily addressed without significant conflict with and alienation of many people who overlap between the rationalist community and EA and who either endorse or strongly sympathize with racist views. (For example, in January 2023, when the Centre for Effective Altruism published a brief statement that affirmed the equality of Black people in response to the publication of a racist email by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, the most upvoted comment was from a prominent rationalist that started, "I feel really quite bad about this post," and argued at length that universal human equality is not a tenet of effective altruism. This is unbelievably foolish and unbelievably morally wrong. Independently, that person has said and done things that seem to indicate either support or sympathy for racist views, which makes me think it was probably not just a big misunderstanding.)^[5] That's why the diversion from talking about racism on the EA Forum into discussing the rationalist community's influence on EA.

Racism is paradigmatically evil and there is no moral or rational justification for it. Don't lose sight of something so fundamental and clear. Don't let EA drown under the racism and all the other bad stuff people want to bring to it. (Hey, now EA is the drowning child! Talk about irony!)

Incidentally, LessWrong and the rationalist community are dead wrong about near-term AGI as well — specifically, the probability of AGI before January 1, 2033 is significantly less than 0.1% and the MIRI worldview on alignment is most likely either just generally wrong/misguided or at least not applicable to deep learning-based systems — and that poses its own big problem for EA to the extent that EA has been influenced to accept LessWrong/rationalists' views about near-term AGI. So, the influence of the rationalist community on EA has been damaging in multiple respects. (Although, again, EA bears responsibility for its part in all of it, both allowing the influence and for whatever portion of the mistake it would have made without that influence.)

1. ^{^}

   About a day after posting this quick take, I changed the first sentence of this quick take from just italicized to a heading to make the links to the Reflective Altruism post more prominent and harder to miss. The sentence was always there.

2. ^{^}

   Edited on October 25, 2025 at 11:22 PM Eastern to add: If you don't know about the incident I'm referring to here, the context for what I'm discussing is explained in two Reflective Altruism posts: part 1 here and part 2 here. The links to these Reflective Altruism posts were always in the first sentence of this quick take, but I'm adding this footnote to make those links harder to miss.

3. ^{^}

   Edited on October 25, 2025 at 10:52 PM Eastern to add: I purposely omitted a link to this comment because I didn't want to make this quick take a confrontation against the person who wrote it. But if you don't believe me and you want to see the comment for yourself, send me a private message and I'll send you the link.

^{^}

Edited on October 25, 2025 at 11:25 PM Eastern to add: This is extensively documented in a different Reflective Altruism post from the two I have already linked, which you can find here.

^{^}

Edited on October 25, 2025 at 11:19 PM Eastern to add: I'm referring here to the Manifest 2024 conference, which was held at Lighthaven in Berkely, California, a venue owned by Lightcone Infrastructure, the same organization that owns and operates LessWrong. I'm also referring to the discussions that happened after the event. There have been many posts about this event on the EA Forum. One post I found interesting was from a pseudonymous self-described member of the rationalist community that was critical of some aspects of the event and of some aspects of the rationalist community. You can read that post here.

Edited on October 26, 2025 at 11:57 PM Eastern to add: See also the philosopher David Thorstad's post about Manifest 2024 on his blog Reflective Altruism. David's posts are nearly encyclopedic in their thoroughness and have an incredibly high information density.

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