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Rationalist Community
The rationalist community is a 21st century movement that formed around a group of internet blogs, primarily LessWrong and Astral Codex Ten (formerly known as Slate Star Codex). The movement initially gained prominence in the San Francisco Bay Area. Its members seek to use rationality to avoid cognitive biases. Common interests include transhumanism, statistics, effective altruism, and mitigating existential risk from artificial general intelligence. Beliefs The community began with a simple idea: "Each day, we aim to be less wrong about the world than the day before." They refer to rationality as the art of thinking in ways that result in accurate beliefs and good decisions. Public perception and media coverage focus on the group's use of Bayesian inference, which some adherents claim is the "least imperfect" way to think. Tara Burton wrote in ''The New Atlantis (journal), The New Atlantis'': "Central to the rationalist worldview was the idea that nothing — not social niceti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
LessWrong
''LessWrong'' (also written ''Less Wrong'') is a community blog and Internet forum, forum focused on discussion of cognitive biases, philosophy, psychology, economics, rationality, and artificial intelligence, among other topics. It is associated with the rationalist community. Purpose LessWrong describes itself as an online forum and community aimed at improving human reasoning, rationality, and decision-making, with the goal of helping its users hold more accurate beliefs and achieve their personal objectives. The best known posts of ''LessWrong'' are "The Sequences", a series of essays which aim to describe how to avoid the typical failure modes of human reasoning with the goal of improving decision-making and the evaluation of evidence. One suggestion is the use of Bayes' theorem as a decision-making tool. There is also a focus on psychological barriers that prevent good decision-making, including fear conditioning and List of cognitive biases, cognitive biases that have be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scientific Racism
Scientific racism, sometimes termed biological racism, is the pseudoscience, pseudoscientific belief that the Human, human species is divided into biologically distinct taxa called "race (human categorization), races", and that empirical evidence exists to support or justify racial discrimination, racial inferiority, or racial superiority.. "Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within". Before the mid-20th century, scientific racism was accepted throughout the scientific community, but it is no longer considered scientific. The division of humankind into biologically separate groups, along with the assignment of particular physical and mental characteristics to these groups through constructing and applying corresponding Scientific modelling, explanatory models, is referred to as racialism, racial realism ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Elon Musk
Elon Reeve Musk ( ; born June 28, 1971) is a businessman. He is known for his leadership of Tesla, SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter), and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk has been considered the wealthiest person in the world since 2021; ''Forbes'' estimates his net worth to be . Born to a wealthy family in Pretoria, South Africa, Musk emigrated in 1989 to Canada. He received bachelor's degrees from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997 before moving to California, United States, to pursue business ventures. In 1995, Musk co-founded the software company Zip2. Following its sale in 1999, he co-founded X.com, an online payment company that later merged to form PayPal, which was acquired by eBay in 2002. That year, Musk also became an American citizen. In 2002, Musk founded the space technology company SpaceX, becoming its CEO and chief engineer; the company has since led innovations in reusable rockets and commercial spaceflight. Musk joined ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Center For Applied Rationality
The Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) is a nonprofit organization based in Berkeley, California, that hosts workshops on rationality and cognitive bias. It was founded in 2012 by Julia Galef, Anna Salamon, Michael Smith and Andrew Critch, to improve participants' rationality using "a set of techniques from math and decision theory for forming your beliefs about the world as accurately as possible". Its president since 2021 is Anna Salamon. CFAR's training draws upon fields such as psychology and behavioral economics in an effort to improve people's mental habits. Jennifer Kahn visited the group and described its strengths and flaws in the ''New York Times''. CFAR has conducted a survey of participants which indicates that workshops reduce neuroticism and increase perceived efficacy. CFAR is part of the rationality movement surrounding Eliezer Yudkowsky's web site ''LessWrong'', from which CFAR originated. Paul Slovic and Keith Stanovich have served as advisors. The group ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
404 Media
''404 Media'' is an online publication that focuses on technology and internet reporting. It covers topics such as hacking, sex work, niche online communities, and the right-to-repair movement. It is worker-owned by its reporters. History ''404 Media'' was founded in 2023 by former staff members of Vice Media's ''Motherboard'' after it filed for bankruptcy. Its founding members were former editor-in-chief Jason Koebler, former senior editors Emanuel Maiberg and Samantha Cole, and former writer Joseph Cox. ''Fast Company'' summarized the outlet's creation as "a spartan setup consisting of a Stripe account and the Ghost web-hosting platform". In November 2024, ''404 Media'' entered an agreement with ''Wired'' to co-publish two articles a month on the magazine's website. Business model ''404 Media'' is reporter-owned, a model that was inspired by organizations such as ''Defector Media'' and ''Hell Gate''. The company offers two paid subscription plans: $100 and $1,000 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vice (magazine)
''Vice'' (stylized in all caps) is a Canadian-American magazine focused on lifestyle, arts, culture, and news/politics. It was founded in 1994 in Montreal as an alternative punk magazine, and its founders later launched the youth media company Vice Media, which consists of divisions including the printed magazine as well as a website, broadcast news unit, a film production company, a record label, and a publishing imprint. As of February 2015, the magazine's editor-in-chief is Ellis Jones. On 15 May 2023, Vice Media formally filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, as part of a possible sale to a consortium of lenders including Fortress Investment Group, which will, alongside Soros Fund Management and Monroe Capital, invest $225 million as a credit bid for nearly all of its assets. In February 2024, CEO Bruce Dixon announced additional layoffs and that the website Vice.com will no longer publish content. The print magazine returned in September 2024. History The precursor to ''Vice ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality
''Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality'' (''HPMOR'') is a work of ''Harry Potter'' fan fiction by Eliezer Yudkowsky published on FanFiction.Net as a serial from February 28, 2010 to March 14, 2015, totaling 122 chapters and over 660,000 words. It adapts the story of ''Harry Potter'' to explain complex concepts in cognitive science, philosophy, and the scientific method. Yudkowsky's reimagining supposes that Harry's aunt Petunia Evans married an Oxford professor and homeschooled Harry in science and rational thinking, allowing Harry to enter the magical world with ideals from the Age of Enlightenment and an experimental spirit. The fan fiction spans one year, covering Harry's first year in Hogwarts. ''HPMOR'' has inspired other works of fan fiction, art, and poetry. HPMOR is connected to the contemporary rationalist community and is popular among rationalists and effective altruists. Plot In this fan fiction's alternate universe to the ''Harry Potter'' series, Lily Pot ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fanfiction
Fan fiction or fanfiction, also known as fan fic, fanfic, fic or FF, is fiction typically written in an amateur capacity by fans as a form of fan labor, unauthorized by, but based on, an existing work of fiction. The author uses copyrighted characters, settings, or other intellectual properties from the original creator(s) as a basis for their writing and can retain the original characters and settings, add their own, or both. Fan fiction ranges in length from a few sentences to novel-length and can be based on fictional and non-fictional media, including novels, movies, comics, television shows, musical groups, cartoons, anime and manga, and video games. Fan fiction is rarely commissioned or authorized by the original work's creator or publisher or professionally published. It may infringe on the original author's copyright, depending on the jurisdiction and on legal questions, such as whether or not it qualifies as "fair use" (see Legal issues with fan fiction). The at ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harry Potter
''Harry Potter'' is a series of seven Fantasy literature, fantasy novels written by British author J. K. Rowling. The novels chronicle the lives of a young Magician (fantasy), wizard, Harry Potter (character), Harry Potter, and his friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, all of whom are students at Hogwarts, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The main story arc concerns Harry's conflict with Lord Voldemort, a Black magic, dark wizard who intends to become immortal, overthrow the wizard governing body known as the Ministry of Magic, and subjugate all wizards and Muggles (non-magical people). The series was originally published in English by Bloomsbury Publishing, Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom and Scholastic Corporation, Scholastic Press in the United States. A series of many genres, including fantasy, drama, Coming-of-age story, coming-of-age fiction, and the British school story (which includes elements of mystery (fiction), mystery, thriller (genre), thrille ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky ( ; born September 11, 1979) is an American artificial intelligence researcher and writer on decision theory and ethics, best known for popularizing ideas related to friendly artificial intelligence. He is the founder of and a research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), a private research nonprofit based in Berkeley, California. His work on the prospect of a runaway intelligence explosion influenced philosopher Nick Bostrom's 2014 book '' Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies''. Work in artificial intelligence safety Goal learning and incentives in software systems Yudkowsky's views on the safety challenges future generations of AI systems pose are discussed in Stuart Russell's and Peter Norvig's undergraduate textbook '' Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach''. Noting the difficulty of formally specifying general-purpose goals by hand, Russell and Norvig cite Yudkowsky's proposal that autonomous and adaptive systems ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Blog
A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronological order so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. In the 2000s, blogs were often the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject or topic. In the 2010s, multi-author blogs (MABs) emerged, featuring the writing of multiple authors and sometimes professionally Editing, edited. MABs from newspapers, other News media, media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog Web traffic, traffic. The rise of Twitter and other "microblogging" systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into the news media. ''Blog'' can also be used as a verb, meaning ''to maintain or add content to a blog ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ziz LaSota
The Zizians are an informal group of rationalists with anarchist and vegan beliefs who also believe the hemispheres of the brain can have conflicting interests and identities. They are allegedly involved in six violent deaths in the United States, three in 2022 and three in 2025. Federal prosecutors say the Zizians are associated with persons of interest in the murders of four people: David Maland in Vermont (a U.S. Border Patrol agent), Curtis Lind in California (a landlord), and Richard and Rita Zajko in Pennsylvania (the parents of one of the group members). In addition, Ophelia Bauckholt (a German citizen) and Emma Borhanian, both associates of the Zizians, were killed during altercations with Maland and Lind. The term ''Zizians'' is derived from the name of Ziz LaSota, who is sometimes characterized as their leader. They themselves do not use this name or consider themselves to have a clearly identified leader, or even to be members of a group. Beliefs The Zizians, a sma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
