This confused me at first until I looked at the comments. The EA Forum post you linked to doesn’t specifically say this. The Good Ventures blog post that forum post links to doesn’t specifically say this either. I think you must be referring to the comments on that forum post, particularly between Dustin Moskovitz (who is now shown as “[anonymous]”) and Oliver Habryka.
There are three relevant comments from Dustin Moskovitz, here, here, and here. These comments are oblique and confusing (and he seems to say somewhere else he’s being vague on purpose). But I think Dustin is saying that he’s now wary of funding things related to “the rationalist community” (defined below).
Edit (2025-05-03 at 12:59 UTC): To make it easier to see which comments on that post are Dustin Moskovitz’s, you can use the Wayback Machine.
Dustin seems to indicate there are multiple reasons he doesn’t want to fund things related to “the rationalist community” anymore, but he doesn’t fully get into these reasons. From his comments, these reasons seem to include both a long history of problems (again, kept vague) and the then-recent Manifest 2024 conference that was hosted at Lighthaven (the venue owned by Lightcone Infrastructure, the organization that runs the LessWrong forum, which is the online home of “the rationalist community”). Manifest 2024 attracted negative attention due to the extreme racist views of many of the attendees.
We need to differentiate between ‘capital R’ Rationality and ‘small r’ rationality. By ‘capital R’ Rationality, I mean the actual Rationalist community, centered around Berkeley...
On the other hand, ‘small r’ rationality is a more general concept. It encompasses the idea of using reason and evidence to form conclusions, scout mindset, and empiricism. It also includes a quest to avoid getting stuck with beliefs resistant to evidence, techniques for reflecting on and improving mental processes, and, yes, many of the core ideas of Rationality, like understanding Bayesian reasoning.
I think the way you tried to make this distinction is not helpful and actually adds to the confusion. We need to distinguish two very different things:
The concept of rationality as it has historically been used for centuries and which is what the vast majority of people on Earth still associate the word “rationality” with today. This older and more universal concept of rationality is discussed in places like the Wikipedia article for rationality and in academic philosophy. Rationality in this sense is usually considered synonymous with “reason”, as in “reasoning”. You could also try to define rationality as “good thinking” or, as Steven Pinker defines it in an article for Encyclopedia Britannica, as “the use of knowledge to attain goals.”
The specific worldview, philosophy, lifestyle, or subculture that people on LessWrong and a small number of people in the San Francisco Bay Area call “rationalism”. (Wikipedia calls this “the rationalist community”.)
The online and Bay Area-based “rationalist community” (2) tends to believe it has especially good insight into older, more universal concept of rationality (1) and that self-identified “rationalists” (2) are especially good at being rational or practicing rationality in that older, more universal sense (1). Are they?
No.
Calling yourselves “rationalists” and your movement or community “rationalism” is just a PR move, and a pretty annoying one at that. It’s annoying for a few reasons, partly because it’s arrogant and partly because it leads to confusion like the confusion in this post, where the centuries-old and widely-known concept of rationality (1) gets conflated with an eccentric, niche community (2). It makes ancient, universal terms like “rational” and “rationality” contested ground, with this small group of people with unusual views — many of them irrational — staking a claim on these words.
By analogy, this community could have called itself “the intelligence movement” or “the intelligence community”. Its members could have self-identified as something like “intelligent people” or “aspirationally intelligent people”. That would have been a little bit more transparently annoying and arrogant.
So, is Good Ventures or effective altruism ever going to disavow or distance itself from the ancient, universal concept of rationality (1)? No. Absolutely not. Never. That would be absurd.
Has Good Ventures disavowed or distanced itself from LessWrong/Bay Area “rationalism” or “the rationalist community” (2)? I don’t know, but those comments from Dustin that I linked to above suggest that maybe this is this case.
Will effective altruism disavow or distance itself from LessWrong/Bay Area “rationalism” or “the rationalist community” (2)? I don’t know. I want this to happen because I think “the rationalist community” (2) decreases the rationality (1) of effective altruism. The more influence the LessWrong/Bay Area “rationalist” subculture (2) has over effective altruism, the less I like effective altruism and the less I want to be a part of it.
If Dustin and Good Ventures are truly done with “the rationalist community” (2), that sounds like good news for Dustin, for Good Ventures, and probably for effective altruism. It’s a small victory for rationality (1).
Unimportant note: I made some edits to this comment for clarity on 2025-05-03 at 09:37 UTC, specifically the part about Dustin Moskovitz. I was a bit confused trying to read my own comment nine days later, so I figured I could improve the clarity. The edits don’t change the substance of this comment. You can see the previous version of the comment in the Wayback Machine, but don’t bother, there’s really no point.
This confused me at first until I looked at the comments. The EA Forum post you linked to doesn’t specifically say this. The Good Ventures blog post that forum post links to doesn’t specifically say this either. I think you must be referring to the comments on that forum post, particularly between Dustin Moskovitz (who is now shown as “[anonymous]”) and Oliver Habryka.
There are three relevant comments from Dustin Moskovitz, here, here, and here. These comments are oblique and confusing (and he seems to say somewhere else he’s being vague on purpose). But I think Dustin is saying that he’s now wary of funding things related to “the rationalist community” (defined below).
Edit (2025-05-03 at 12:59 UTC): To make it easier to see which comments on that post are Dustin Moskovitz’s, you can use the Wayback Machine.
Dustin seems to indicate there are multiple reasons he doesn’t want to fund things related to “the rationalist community” anymore, but he doesn’t fully get into these reasons. From his comments, these reasons seem to include both a long history of problems (again, kept vague) and the then-recent Manifest 2024 conference that was hosted at Lighthaven (the venue owned by Lightcone Infrastructure, the organization that runs the LessWrong forum, which is the online home of “the rationalist community”). Manifest 2024 attracted negative attention due to the extreme racist views of many of the attendees.
I think the way you tried to make this distinction is not helpful and actually adds to the confusion. We need to distinguish two very different things:
The concept of rationality as it has historically been used for centuries and which is what the vast majority of people on Earth still associate the word “rationality” with today. This older and more universal concept of rationality is discussed in places like the Wikipedia article for rationality and in academic philosophy. Rationality in this sense is usually considered synonymous with “reason”, as in “reasoning”. You could also try to define rationality as “good thinking” or, as Steven Pinker defines it in an article for Encyclopedia Britannica, as “the use of knowledge to attain goals.”
The specific worldview, philosophy, lifestyle, or subculture that people on LessWrong and a small number of people in the San Francisco Bay Area call “rationalism”. (Wikipedia calls this “the rationalist community”.)
The online and Bay Area-based “rationalist community” (2) tends to believe it has especially good insight into older, more universal concept of rationality (1) and that self-identified “rationalists” (2) are especially good at being rational or practicing rationality in that older, more universal sense (1). Are they?
No.
Calling yourselves “rationalists” and your movement or community “rationalism” is just a PR move, and a pretty annoying one at that. It’s annoying for a few reasons, partly because it’s arrogant and partly because it leads to confusion like the confusion in this post, where the centuries-old and widely-known concept of rationality (1) gets conflated with an eccentric, niche community (2). It makes ancient, universal terms like “rational” and “rationality” contested ground, with this small group of people with unusual views — many of them irrational — staking a claim on these words.
By analogy, this community could have called itself “the intelligence movement” or “the intelligence community”. Its members could have self-identified as something like “intelligent people” or “aspirationally intelligent people”. That would have been a little bit more transparently annoying and arrogant.
So, is Good Ventures or effective altruism ever going to disavow or distance itself from the ancient, universal concept of rationality (1)? No. Absolutely not. Never. That would be absurd.
Has Good Ventures disavowed or distanced itself from LessWrong/Bay Area “rationalism” or “the rationalist community” (2)? I don’t know, but those comments from Dustin that I linked to above suggest that maybe this is this case.
Will effective altruism disavow or distance itself from LessWrong/Bay Area “rationalism” or “the rationalist community” (2)? I don’t know. I want this to happen because I think “the rationalist community” (2) decreases the rationality (1) of effective altruism. The more influence the LessWrong/Bay Area “rationalist” subculture (2) has over effective altruism, the less I like effective altruism and the less I want to be a part of it.
If Dustin and Good Ventures are truly done with “the rationalist community” (2), that sounds like good news for Dustin, for Good Ventures, and probably for effective altruism. It’s a small victory for rationality (1).
Unimportant note: I made some edits to this comment for clarity on 2025-05-03 at 09:37 UTC, specifically the part about Dustin Moskovitz. I was a bit confused trying to read my own comment nine days later, so I figured I could improve the clarity. The edits don’t change the substance of this comment. You can see the previous version of the comment in the Wayback Machine, but don’t bother, there’s really no point.