7 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
Scott Alexander's Substack — successor to Slate Star Codex — combining rigorous statistical reasoning, psychiatric expertise, and intellectual humility to produce the most influential writing in the rationalist/EA community.
Christian Wolff was an 18th-century German rationalist philosopher who systematized Leibniz's ideas and dominated German academic philosophy before Kant's critical revolution.
American AI safety researcher — co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) — creator of LessWrong — author of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and the Sequences — who has been arguing since 2000 that AI poses an existential risk and has produced the foundational framework for AI safety thinking.
Anonymous American writer and researcher — gwern.net — who writes long-form research essays on AI, genetics, psychology, and technology with an unusual combination of statistical rigor and breadth — one of the most influential independent researchers in the rationalist and AI communities.
Leibniz's 1714 metaphysical treatise articulating his monad theory — that the universe consists of infinite simple, indivisible substances (monads) that have no windows to each other but mirror the universe from their unique perspective — presented in 90 numbered paragraphs.
American psychiatrist and blogger — author of Slate Star Codex (2013–2020) and Astral Codex Ten (2021–) — the most influential blogger in the rationalist community — whose writing on medicine, psychology, AI, and epistemology has shaped a generation of tech and AI thinking.
Scott Alexander's blog (predecessor to Astral Codex Ten) — the defining intellectual publication of the rationalist community, known for its exhaustive steelmanning, epistemic standards, and synthetic intelligence.