Venkatesh Rao

18. Jk, first I need to talk about community structure. The rationalist community has for over a decade converged around user-submitted content on the site LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/ . Yudkowsky's Sequences were originally posted there.

20. The Rationalist community itself tends to converge in social spaces built around these main points of reference. There is a whole rationalist Tumblr sphere, and the public Slatestarcodex discord was my first point of entry into this world.

21. The result of the major centralization of written material in the rationalist space, combined with directly associated social channels, is that a set of strong common beliefs can form, a general picture of which I gave above.

22. This emergence of consensus on the Rationalist sphere is aided by their conversational norms: these spaces prize dispassionate intellectual conversation, as so to permit consideration of diverse topics that may fall outside the realm of social acceptability.

23. This willingness to avoid consideration of social acceptability has led to attacks on the Rationalist community. Media sources or motivated individuals (/r/sneerclub) love to accuse the discourse of ThoughtCrime. Scott Alexander has written about his suffering as a result.

25. Lacking a canon, a defining set of postrat views is hard to pin down. The typical postrat has negated at least one of the above rationalist qualities (either consciously or not), but which one they choose to negate varies.