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I feel like this understates it, if only a little. Hanson's blog, Overcoming Bias, was originally a group blog by him and Yudkowsky, and the posts that seeded LessWrong came from there. Slate Star Codex was where Scott Alexander put those of his posts that didn't seem appropriate for LessWrong. Then we got /r/slatestarcodex for the users who preferred Reddit as a discussion platform, then /r/themotte when Scott wanted further distance from culture war arguments (or, less charitably to us, from many of our arguers), and finally TheMotte when our mods worried about the subreddit possibly becoming too censored or even banned. "Great-great-great-blog-grandpa" isn't really a close relation, but it's interesting trivia that it's a direct relation.
Hanson's always been the sort of person who will put out half-baked taboo ideas for discussion, for a number of reasons, but I think one of the stronger reasons is that he's got a streak of high-decoupling contrarianism that's both a direct and a close relation to the culture here. There's a certain kind of mind, still probably very over-represented here, who sees "here's why your idea is stupid" as a potentially-friendly-and-helpful source of hopefully-new thoughts but also sees "here's why you can't talk about your idea" the way a bull sees a waving red cape.
I didn’t know Yudkowsky blogged there. So then it’s more of a direct seeding. I never see Hanson talked about here but was aware the marginal revolution blog was basically the right leaning pathway into the community.
Most of the Sequences were originally posted on the old Overcoming Bias blog (the one that was Typepad powered), then later exported to LessWrong (back when it was a reddit clone), and now live on LessWrong 2.0.
For example, here's "When None Dare Urge Restraint" on Overcoming Bias, LessWrong, and LessWrong 2.0.
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