LessWrong

LessWrong is a community blog and discussion forum originally founded by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky in February 2009. It grew out of Overcoming Bias, an earlier group blog on human rationality that Yudkowsky co-authored with economist Robin Hanson beginning in 2006. Yudkowsky's extensive posts from Overcoming Bias became the seed content for LessWrong, which was conceived as a community dedicated to 'refining the art of human rationality' and applying it to real-world challenges. The platform is best known for 'The Sequences' (later compiled as the book Rationality: A-Z, also known as Rationality: From AI to Zombies), a series of essays covering Bayesian reasoning, cognitive biases, decision theory, and AI alignment. These writings became foundational texts for the rationalist community and significantly influenced the development of the effective altruism movement. After a period of declining activity in the mid-2010s, LessWrong was relaunched as LessWrong 2.0 in late 2017 by Oliver Habryka, Ben Pace, and Matthew Graves, who rebuilt the site on a modern technology stack (React, Apollo GraphQL, MongoDB, TypeScript) and established the first full-time development team behind the platform. This team later rebranded as Lightcone Infrastructure, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in Berkeley, California. Today, LessWrong serves as a central publishing and discussion platform for the rationality and AI safety communities. It hosts the AI Alignment Forum, a curated space specifically for technical AI alignment research and discussion. The platform features a karma-based content ranking system, curated post recommendations, tag-based organization, community events, and annual review cycles. LessWrong attracts approximately 600,000-800,000 monthly visits and maintains an engaged core community. Lightcone Infrastructure, which operates LessWrong, also runs Lighthaven, a 30,000 square foot campus in downtown Berkeley that hosts conferences, research programs, and community events. The organization additionally built grantmaking infrastructure used by the Survival and Flourishing Fund to distribute over $100 million in donations. The team currently consists of eight staff members including Oliver Habryka, Ruby Bloom, Jacob Lagerros, Ben Pace, Raymond Arnold, Rafe Kennedy, Robert Mushkatblat, and Ronny Fernandez.