Sheon Han in Asterisk:
The origin of rationalist writing is commonly traced back to the comments section of Overcoming Bias, a group blog about cognitive biases and related topics that is now the personal blog of economist Robin Hanson. Eliezer Yudkowsky, a prominent contributor, spun off an online forum called LessWrong in 2009, dedicated to the practice of “applied rationality.” Within a few years, its top writers — for example, Scott Alexander, Katja Grace, Luke Muehlhauser — had launched their own blogs, forming what became the rationalist blogosphere.
The internet of the early aughts was a warm petri dish for blogging. Compared to its contemporaries, early rationalist writings were like Crooked Timber but more left-brained, Marginal Revolution but more subcultural, and 3 Quarks Daily but weirder. Topically, there was a resemblance to Aaron Swartz’s blog archive Raw Thought — select a random article and you might find anything from a diary entry to a policy memo, a technical specification, or a manifesto.
More here.
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