The LessWrong Team

Ruby1 Jun 2019 0:43 UTC
59 points
8 comments3 min readLW link

LessWrong Core Team

Oliver Habryka /​ habryka

Oliver Habryka is the current project lead for LessWrong.com, where he tries to build infrastructure for making intellectual progress on global catastrophic risks, cause prioritization and the art of rationality. He used to work at the Centre for Effective Altruism US as strategic director, ran the EA Global conferences for 2015 and 2016 and is an instructor for the Center for Applied Rationality. He has generally been involved with community organizing for the Effective Altruism and Rationality communities in a large variety of ways. He studied Computer Science and Mathematics at UC Berkeley, and his primary interests are centered around understanding how to develop communities and systems that can make scalable progress on difficult philosophical and scientific problems.

Ruben Bloom /​ Ruby

I found LessWrong in 2012 after googling “singularity” and finding facingthesingularity.com (since renamed). Among the first posts I read was Philosophy: A Diseased Discipline, which pissed me off because I was philosophy major. But then I read it realized I agreed with all of it. Since then, I’ve been deep in the LW community. I became a local organizer in Melbourne, mentored at a dozen CFAR workshops, and eventually made my way to the Bay Area. Before joining the LessWrong team in 2019, I studied electrical engineering and philosophy, and worked as a Data Scientist and Product Manager.

Robert Mushkatblat /​ RobertM

I found LessWrong through HPMOR in 2012, briefly interned at MIRI in 2013 (which didn’t accomplish much except convince me to not enter academia as a post-grad, which was good), and started attending meetups in Los Angeles shortly thereafter. In 2017 I took over running those meetups. In 2022 Eliezer posted MIRI announces new “Death With Dignity” strategy, which was the sharp poke I needed to go do something about the whole x-risk thing.

By trade, I’m a software engineer. I’m responsible for technical leadership at LessWrong.

Raymond Arnold /​ Raemon

I’ve been a LessWrong organizer since 2011, with roughly equal focus on the cultural, practical and intellectual aspects of the community. My first project was creating the Secular Solstice and helping groups across the world run their own version of it. More recently I’ve been interested in improving my own epistemic standards and helping others to do so as well.

I guess also I code? I worked at Spotify. Now I don’t.

The rest of the Lightcone team

Ben Pace /​ Benito

I read The Sequences when I was 14 (in 2011, after the sequences were written) and I’ve read and contributed to LessWrong and the broader rationality community since then. When I was 19 I ran an EA Global conference with jacobjacob. I have a CS degree from Oxford, but I learned more from running the conference. jacobjacob and I do various things on the LessWrong Team – recently we professionally published some cute books of the best new content. If you’re interested in how I think you can read these two LessWrong posts that I wrote (1, 2).

jacobjacob

Deschlepifier. I believe that there’s glory at the end of the struggle, at least temporarily. Also fly tiny planes sometimes.

Rafe Kennedy

Moderators

Kaj Sotala /​ Kaj_Sotala

Elizabeth V /​ Elizabeth

Admin (BDFL)

Matthew Graves /​ Vaniver

Vaniver describing Vaniver:

I’ve had forum-posting as a hobby since I was young, first on a D&D forum, then on the xkcd forums, and then finally on LW, which I found through a link to HPMOR on the xkcd forums. I studied physics, economics, and operations research (which I sometimes describe as ‘industrial rationality’), and worked as a data scientist before moving to the Bay to work for MIRI.

Raemon describing Vaniver:

Once upon a time, LessWrongalmost died. There were numerous half-hearted attempts to revitalize the community. Eventually someone noticed that part of the problem was there was no particular person who actually had the mandate to make sweeping changes. Someone said “I vote for Vaniver” and then a bunch of people said “me too!” and in a highly unsuspect, democratic process, Vaniver became king.

Nowadays Vaniver is the meta-king, and his gentle authority flows through us.

The LessWrong team operates legally as part of the Center for Applied Rationality while retaining full autonomy over both internal decision-making and decisions concerning the LessWrong website. The lesswrong.com domain is owned by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

Ruby1 Jun 2019 0:43 UTC
59 points
8 comments3 min readLW link