Epistemic Status: 15 years working as a therapist, 6+ of them with rationalist and EA clients. 7 years teaching and directing at rationality camps and workshops, and many more as a member of several of this community's overlapping subcultures.
Disclaimer: I finished my first draft of this article and its two subsequent ones half a year ago and sent them out for feedback to various people before a bunch of stuff happened in my life that derailed me from finishing, and in the meantime, a big ol' brouhaha started around Slutcon 2 and various frictions this article was meant to highlight within the rationalist and EA community surfaced in The Discourse.
All of which is to say, this post is explicitly not about any specific incident, and deliberately avoids litigating any. It's a guide to the structural dynamics that make such situations arise; where I make claims about how things go wrong and why, I'm drawing on a mix of research, observations, and both clinical and non-clinical experiences within these communities and beyond them.
TL;DR: It's helpful to think of the rationality/EA community as a village (social scene, professional network, dating pool, housing market, all tied together by shared [...]
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Outline:
(02:01) Three Villages in a Trenchcoat
(03:53) 1) Multi-role density
(07:57) 2) Three villages in a trenchcoat
(14:09) 3) Status is a local currency
(19:15) 4) Visibility shifts expectations
(24:53) 5) Villages can make it hard to know what you want
(30:48) 6) Every village has this problem
(33:22) First map, then navigate
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First published:
October 29th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dp3D39ztWDWFAN6nu/three-villages-in-a-trenchcoat-post-i
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Images from the article:
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10 mins