On the fringes of the rationalist community, there are obviously questionable figures who may be playing an evil game (Bankman Fried) or have lost their way intellectually and morally. My impression from occasional visits to astral codex ten, however, is that the vast majority of people are reasonable and sometimes succeed to make the world a better place. Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
The rationalist bloggers are very good at optics and carefully distance themselves from the fringes at the surface. They have a somewhat circular definition of rationalism that defines rationalists as being reasonable, which makes it easy to create post facto rationalizations that anyone who ends up on the wrong side of public opinion was actually not part of their tribe, rewriting any history.
The more uncomfortable topics are generally masked in coded language or carefully split off into isolated subforums for plausible deniability. Slate Star Codex (Astral Codex Ten’s precursor) had a “culture war thread” for years that was well known to contain a lot of very toxic positions dressed up in rationalist style language. Around 2019 they realized how much of a problem it was and split it into a separate forum (“The Motte”) for distance and plausible deniability. The Motte was a wild place where you could find people pushing things like holocaust denial or stolen election theories but wrapped up in rationalist language (I remember phrases “questions about orthodox holocaust narratives” instead of outright denial)
There’s also a long history of Slate Star Codex engaging with neoreactionary content over and over again and flirting with neoreactionary ideas in a classic rationalist “what if they’re actually right” context for plausible deniability. There have been some leaked emails from Scott revealing his engagement with the topic and it’s been an ongoing point of confusion for followers for years (See https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9xm2p8/why_... )
The history of rationalist blogs and communities is largely lost on people who only occasionally visit the blogs and enjoy the writing style. There is a long history of some very unsavory topics not only being discussed, but given the benefit of the doubt or even upvotes. These are harder to associate with the main blogs since the 2019 split of contentious topics into “The Motte” side forum, but anyone around the community long enough remembers the ever-present weirdness of things like this Reddit thread on /r/SlateStarCodex preaches white nationalism and gets nearly 50 upvotes (in 2014): https://web.archive.org/web/20180912215243/https://www.reddi...