this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2026
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presented without comment: https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/my-falling-out-with-the-rationalist (via https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/my-falling-out-with-the-rationalist)
there are two things that are obvious in his blog: first, michał is an incredibly privileged dude (who doesn't notice his privilege because, coming from poland, he sees himself as underprivileged), and second, the moment people finally leave the vicinity of the formalized skeptic movement is strictly dependent on how much misogyny and racism they tolerate.
2017, three years post gamergate, is quite much.
I don't think that the Rats are an offshoot of the Skeptics and New Atheists just a space which competed for the same young, male, educated, Autistic Anglo audience. They deliberately removed the parts of the skeptic curriculum which involve introspection and ethnography, because they all wanted to run some grift on their audiences so the audiences needed poor epistemic hygiene.
The overlap between rationalists and the skeptic community was indeed tiny. I say this as someone heavily involved in Usenet skeptic communities since the late eighties. In fact the Bay Area doesn't even register as a locus of the skeptic community at the times he's talking about.
I'm not trying to excuse what much of the skeptic/atheist community later became in the 2010s. It's definitely turned into something nearly unrecognizable since its earlier days. But that had nothing to do with any sort of imagined rationalist adjacency.
That was kind of a nothing post? I think the author is misrepresenting the growth (or at least failing to connect the most important dots) of the lesswrong rationalist by portraying them as a natural evolution of the skeptics movement and not the deliberate cultivation of an audience by Eliezer looking for people to spread his ideology to and by Thiel looking to influence farm and create a cult incubator. And then the post is titled "my falling out with the rationalist", and they write they "wanted to offer a more personal perspective " but they don't actually discuss that much of the personal angle either...
The author tends to cull his own social media posts pretty aggressively if they get too much attention, or the wrong kind of attention, and it’s possible there’s more he wanted to say in the blog post but he chickened out at the last minute and self-censored it.
But yeah, it felt like half a post.
You know, on net, the internet would be a better place if more people did this, but I wonder why the author even bothered posting anything at all?
yeah, subculturally they're unrelated strains
like, just factually in terms of history, they're unrelated strains. LW rats come in a straight line from the Extropians in the '90s. The previous-millennium skeptics have crossover with those guys, but they're not the same as a group at all.
And the Movement Skeptics of the aughts looked at Kurzweil's singulatarianism and asked what he was smoking, while basically ignoring that the Holy Sequences existed. I should know, I was there.
yeah, they mostly thought the lesswrongers were annoying weirdoes when they perceived them at all, e.g. rationalwiki
The biggest crossover between skeptics and rationalists I can think of is Julia Galef, and she podcasted with a philosopher who debated Yud once then decided it was infra dignitatem. She also dropped out of CFAR when it became more open that the rationality workshops were for finding Sarah Connor.
Yes exactly how can you write an entire thing treating rationalism like something you can do an apostasy out of and never mention Yud once.
I assume the personal perspective is him tacitly admitting to being attracted to skepticism for the debate bro culture, especially the parts that bordered on harassment. Even the inciting incident of "leaving rationalism" is framed more as him growing out of the need to long-form debate someone, specifically James Damore, the google engineer who published a manifesto about how women don't belong in tech.
I don't know the author so I don't know if it is important that he was fine with pranking the timecube guy but decided enough is enough when it was time to take a pro-feminist side.
Gene Ray actually came to MIT in person. I knew the people who invited him. They had a history of... performance-art kind of stunts on the boundary of good taste? Like calling attention to an obscure discretionary fund by running for student government on a promise that they would use it to bribe everyone who voted for them. One of them taught me to pick locks during rush week.
how did it not click that lcamtuf was an ex-rat