---
title: Rationality community
author: Issa Rice
created: 2017-10-17
date: 2017-10-17
---

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](http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gu/the_best_textbooks_on_every_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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastside_(King_County,_Washington))).

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](https://timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Timeline_of_the_rationality_community)
- [Timeline of Machine Intelligence Research Institute](https://timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Timeline_of_Machine_Intelligence_Research_Institute)
- [Timeline of Center for Applied Rationality](https://timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Timeline_of_Center_for_Applied_Rationality)
- [Timeline of decision theory](https://timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Timeline_of_decision_theory)
- [Timeline of friendly artificial intelligence](https://timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Timeline_of_friendly_artificial_intelligence)