LessWrong Core Team
Ruben Bloom / Ruby
In the reorganization of 2021, I took lead of the LessWrong project within Lightcone Infastructure. I work to make this site and its community capable of making intellectual progress on important problems, existential risks, and the art of human rationality. I first joined the LessWrong community in 2012, became an organizer for my local community in Australia, mentored at a dozen CFAR workshops, and eventually made my way to the Bay Area. Before joining LessWrong in 2018, I studied electrical engineering and philosophy, and worked as a Data Scientist and Product Manager.
I'd really like our civilization to reach the stars and last billions of years, at least.
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, LessWrong almost 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.
It occurred to me yesterday that maybe LessWrong should be 'formalized' a bit. I'm happy to have found this page (and others) that are strong evidence that some parts of civilization are pretty adequate!
Thank you all for your hard work. I love this site. I think you've done an excellent job keeping it going!
The original context in which I started thinking about this was a discussion of a new site feature. I knew there was a small team of developers, I was pretty sure they weren't being paid full-time developer salaries, and was thinking about rules or systems to decide on things like that.
(I'm a big fan of a loose 'whatever the developers are willing to implement and maintain' as the sole filter on what gets done for non-commercial projects.)
Thinking bigger picture, I realized I didn't know how the LW team was being funded, if (or how much) it's being funded,... (read more)