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Notes -
This was never a question - Yudkowsky set up the so-called rationalist community with the explicit purpose of creating a future generation of AI safety researchers. Or rather AI researchers more generally, because at the point when he did it (LessWrong was founded in 2009) AlphaGo was still years away, academic AI (both the GOFAI and neural nets factions) was in a long-term rut, and the state of the art was machine learning algorithms for recommending viral content. As of 2009, Yudkowsky thought that the problem was "build an aligned AI slowly and secretly" because nobody else was doing anything he expected to lead to working AI.
My assumption is that an underrated source of weirdness in the rationalists community is that the first thing Yudkowsky did to promote this community was to write a viral Harry Potter fanfic, meaning that the 2nd generation of rationalists (after the Overcoming Bias readers) were pulled in from Harry Potter fandom, bringing everything wrong with that community into "Rationalism".
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