In 2024, I did some analysis of changes over time in the LessWrong community. What I didn't do was compare the Rationalist community to the general population. I also historically haven't had enough charts to satisfy Ben Pace. Lets change that.
I've run the Unofficial LessWrong Community Census for a couple years, and for various reasons the Astral Codex Ten survey is unusually relevant to my interests. I'm going to largely use the ACX survey here since it has a much sample size. One can reasonably ask whether there are population differences between people on LessWrong and people on ACX; I'm mostly going to shrug and consider either a reasonable approximation of "the rationalist community" unless curiosity and hunch compels me to go looking.
Also, I was working on this as part of a practicum led by David Gros on vibecoding datasets. This means it's not only largely vibecoded, but it's vibecoded by a relative vibecoding novice. You should be appropriately suspicious.
Comparisons
Age
ACX 2025: mean 37.6 (median 40)
GSS 2024: mean 50.0 (median 49).
We skew younger. That's not especially surprising for a movement that took off in the late 2000s and has a strong showing among college students.
Sex
ACX 2025: Male 87.8%, Female 12.1%, Other 0.1%
GSS 2024: Female 55.4%, Male 44.6%, Other not reported
Yeah, from eyeballing a lot of in-person meetups, a nine out of ten or four out of five rate of men sounds about right. What's surprising me is the GSS data. 5~10% isn't a ton, but is that a normal difference in general population?
Race
ACX 2025: White 86.8%, Other 9.2%, Asian (East Asian) 3.4%, Black 0.6%
GSS 2024: White 70.3%, Black 17.6%, Other 12.1%
The GSS data just has White, Black, and Other, so I mapped the ACX Asian responses to Other. I'll flag that GSS just asks White, while ACX asks White (Non-Hispanic). Turns out, that makes it really easy to see what's demographically going on here.
Relationship status
ACX: 44% married, 33% single, 24% in a relationship.
We don't have Divorced, Separated, or Widowed in the ACX dataset. Fair enough. But unlike with race where I can make a pretty confident guess where a change went, I would be surprised if people who would say "relationship" on the ACX survey would say "Divorced" on the GSS survey. What gives?
Obviously the ACX people who got divorced now answer Single or Relationship or (re)Married. But it's surprising that this would result in almost exactly the same rates of saying Single or Married?
Overall I'm still confused here, but it looks like either I'm making a data processing error or ACX readers have basically the same luck in love as general population.
We have more students and fewer retirees. Seems to basically follow from our age range.
Degree
ACX: 10.2% high school or less, 2.1% associate, 37.1% bachelor’s, 50.6% graduate/professional
GSS 2024: 54.8% high school or less, 9.0% associate, 21.8% bachelor’s, 14.3% graduate/professional
Okay, so GSS doesn't pick up Masters specifically. Once we've accepted that, this looks pretty sensible. We almost always have at least high school, and when we don't it's because we're still in college or we're too busy founding the field of AI Safety research. Me, I wanted to be on a cool sports team so I went to college[1] but different strokes for different folks.
Income
Fun fact, one of the GSS fields for income topped out at 25k because it was designed for the 1970s. I'm a little suspicious of the GSS field I'm using saying there's nobody over 200k. Am I overestimating the prevalence of doctors and programmers in the general populati- oh, yeah, probably.
Political spectrum
Some compression had to happen since ACX uses 1-10 ranges and GSS uses 1-7.
After messing with it a bit, I took an LLM suggestion to do the statistically unsound thing. It said:
I reworked the ideology mapping with a percentile-based transformation: first compute each ACX respondent’s percentile rank within the ACX 1–10 scale, then project that percentile onto the GSS 1–7 range using 1 + 6·percentile, finally rounding and clipping to [1, 7]. This way the median ACX score now lands near 4 (the moderate midpoint), while the tails still align with the GSS endpoints.
Yeah that looks like a chart that's had terrible LLM clipping things happen to it.
Political affiliation
ACX 2025: 65 % Democratic, 10 % Republican, 3 % Independent, 22 % in Other (which includes libertarians, socialists, neoreactionaries, etc.)
Wait, 44% of the GSS answers are Independent? I think this is mostly down to having less formal party affiliations. If not, I'm confused.
Current Religion
ACX 2025: 77 % identify as nonreligious (atheist/agnostic); ~20 % describe themselves as some variety of theist; ~3 % fall into other religious labels.
GSS 2024: about 73 % theist (Protestant/Catholic/other faiths) versus 27 % reporting no religion.
Yep, that seems about as expected.
Religious background
ACX 2025: Christian (39% Protestant, 27% Catholic), 33% report non-Christian or no religious background (11% Jewish, 23% none/other).
Note that the age sixteen part is less precise for the ACX group.
AI worry
ACX 2025: 13 % “not at all worried,” 22 % “not very,” 22 % neutral, 26 % “somewhat,” and 17 % “extremely” worried.
GSS 2024 (split-ballot, n≈1.5k responses): 40 % “somewhat worried” and 28 % “extremely” worried, while just 15 % fall into the low-worry buckets.
I'm sorry, am I reading that right? The ACX community is less concerned about AI risk than general population?
That's because the GSS question is "Worried that AI will take over many jobs done by humans" while the ACX question was "How would you describe your opinion on existential risk from AI?" Now I'm not confused anymore.
Data Mapping
Limited GSS analysis dataset to survey year `2024` (`year >= 2024`) to match the ACX 2025 survey (which was run in very early 2025.)
" Wait, 44% of the GSS answers are Independent? I think this is mostly down to having less formal party affiliations. If not, I'm confused. "
Yes, do a search on "Nones" meaning no political party. They have been the largest bloc since the 2010s and larger than both Democrats and Republicans combined since 2022-ish. Another term is politically homeless, but I think I see Nones more often. Depending on the poll and methodology it is breaking 50% of the whole USA, but have been over 40% in pretty much every poll since 2016. Still growing too.
But some polls lump Nones with Libertarians and Greens, Etc. so it is not always clean in the data unless you look into the questions. And some polls talk about religious Nones instead of Atheist and Agnostic.
In 2024, I did some analysis of changes over time in the LessWrong community. What I didn't do was compare the Rationalist community to the general population. I also historically haven't had enough charts to satisfy Ben Pace. Lets change that.
I've run the Unofficial LessWrong Community Census for a couple years, and for various reasons the Astral Codex Ten survey is unusually relevant to my interests. I'm going to largely use the ACX survey here since it has a much sample size. One can reasonably ask whether there are population differences between people on LessWrong and people on ACX; I'm mostly going to shrug and consider either a reasonable approximation of "the rationalist community" unless curiosity and hunch compels me to go looking.
GSS data is from the General Social Survey explorer. ACX data is from the most recent ACX Survey. (It's labeled 2025, but was run in very early 2025.)
Also, I was working on this as part of a practicum led by David Gros on vibecoding datasets. This means it's not only largely vibecoded, but it's vibecoded by a relative vibecoding novice. You should be appropriately suspicious.
Comparisons
Age
GSS 2024: mean 50.0 (median 49).
We skew younger. That's not especially surprising for a movement that took off in the late 2000s and has a strong showing among college students.
Sex
Yeah, from eyeballing a lot of in-person meetups, a nine out of ten or four out of five rate of men sounds about right. What's surprising me is the GSS data. 5~10% isn't a ton, but is that a normal difference in general population?
Race
GSS 2024: White 70.3%, Black 17.6%, Other 12.1%
The GSS data just has White, Black, and Other, so I mapped the ACX Asian responses to Other. I'll flag that GSS just asks White, while ACX asks White (Non-Hispanic). Turns out, that makes it really easy to see what's demographically going on here.
Relationship status
Okay, I notice I'm confused.
We don't have Divorced, Separated, or Widowed in the ACX dataset. Fair enough. But unlike with race where I can make a pretty confident guess where a change went, I would be surprised if people who would say "relationship" on the ACX survey would say "Divorced" on the GSS survey. What gives?
Obviously the ACX people who got divorced now answer Single or Relationship or (re)Married. But it's surprising that this would result in almost exactly the same rates of saying Single or Married?
Overall I'm still confused here, but it looks like either I'm making a data processing error or ACX readers have basically the same luck in love as general population.
Work_status
We have more students and fewer retirees. Seems to basically follow from our age range.
Degree
Okay, so GSS doesn't pick up Masters specifically. Once we've accepted that, this looks pretty sensible. We almost always have at least high school, and when we don't it's because we're still in college or we're too busy founding the field of AI Safety research. Me, I wanted to be on a cool sports team so I went to college[1] but different strokes for different folks.
Income
Fun fact, one of the GSS fields for income topped out at 25k because it was designed for the 1970s. I'm a little suspicious of the GSS field I'm using saying there's nobody over 200k. Am I overestimating the prevalence of doctors and programmers in the general populati- oh, yeah, probably.
Political spectrum
Some compression had to happen since ACX uses 1-10 ranges and GSS uses 1-7.
After messing with it a bit, I took an LLM suggestion to do the statistically unsound thing. It said:
Yeah that looks like a chart that's had terrible LLM clipping things happen to it.
Political affiliation
Wait, 44% of the GSS answers are Independent? I think this is mostly down to having less formal party affiliations. If not, I'm confused.
Current Religion
Yep, that seems about as expected.
Religious background
Note that the age sixteen part is less precise for the ACX group.
AI worry
I'm sorry, am I reading that right? The ACX community is less concerned about AI risk than general population?
That's because the GSS question is "Worried that AI will take over many jobs done by humans" while the ACX question was "How would you describe your opinion on existential risk from AI?" Now I'm not confused anymore.
Data Mapping
Everything else got dropped.
Reminder, this analysis relied on some heavy vibecoding. Adjust your confidence accordingly.
and joined Quidditch, obviously