User:Vipul/LessWrong

LessWrong, also written as Less Wrong, describes itself as a “community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality.” The website is maintained by Trike Apps, a consultancy based on Melbourne, Australia, and its administrative costs are suppported by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Center for Applied Rationality, and Future of Humanity Institute, but none of them exercise editorial control over LessWrong content.

Creation from blog posts for Overcoming Bias
The Less Wrong FAQ describes the site's history as follows. Starting November 2006, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote many blog posts about rationality as part of Overcoming Bias, then a group blog with economist and futurist Robin Hanson. In February 2009, Yudkowsky's posts were used as the seed material to create Less Wrong, the community website.

Nexus with effective altruism community
Although Less Wrong has been focused on the art of human rationality rather than on promoting altruism, its founder and early members have been interested in doing good for the world, and Less Wrong has been closely associated with the effective altruism movement. Effective altruism-focused charity evaluator GiveWell has benefited from outreach to LessWrong. Effective altruist Ryan Carey wrote: "I think of LessWrong as an effective altruist group too. It’s nominally a group for rationality, but almost everyone is altruistic when you get down far enough. LessWrong shares EAs’ affinity for the scientific method and for evaluating consequences. In turn, EAs frequently share LW-esque views about biases and epistemology. They’re sister groups in Melbourne, and I think everywhere, so I think all of these communities are tremendously important for encouraging people to do good." The interest of LessWrongers in effective altruism has been attributed to a combination of founder effects and an intrinsic connection between rationality and effective altruism.

Differences with other rationality communities
LessWrong differentiates itself from other rationalist and skeptic communities and websites in that LessWrong often supports ideas that seem weird or kooky, such as transhumanism, cryonics, and the importance of developing friendly artificial intelligence.

People in the LessWrong community have been critical of RationalWiki, another major website and community that identifies itself as rationalist. RationalWiki itself has extensive coverage of LessWrong, and LessWrong in turn has discussed some of this coverage.

Media coverage
LessWrong has been covered in depth in Business Insider. Core concepts from LessWrong have been referenced in columns in The Guardian.

LessWron has been mentioned briefly in articles related to the technological singularity and the work of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (formerly called the Singularity Institute). It has also been mentioned in articles about online monarchists and neo-reactionaries.