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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1411 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 12, 2026

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I am somebody who is very much intrigued by 00s vBulletin forums and 90s Usenet newsgroups. I know that the rationalist movement was pioneered by Robin Hanson with the Overcoming Blog and Yudkowsky's Sequences around 2006. Where did the proto-rationalists hang out prior to that?

The immediate precursor to Overcoming Bias was the Shock Level 4 mailing list, and the precursor to that was the Extropians mailing list. Eliezer met Robin on Extropians; he is cited in Hanson's 1999 "Comments on Vinge's Singularity" page.

For those of you that don't know what a mailing list is, it's basically the ancient equivalent of a subreddit; e-mails sent to the group's address would be forwarded to all subscribers. I'm not old enough to have ever used one; I cut my teeth on internet forums similar to Data Secrets Lox.

I remember spending a lot of time in the orbit of Eric S. Raymond (ESR).

ESR traces a lot of pre- and proto-rationalist influences here, but they're mostly works rather than communities: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qc7P2NwfxQMC3hdgm/rationalism-before-the-sequences

https://www.lesswrong.com/w/history-of-less-wrong covers the pre-2016 history, including the SL4 mailing list.

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