It's no secret that Manifold has ties to the "rationalist community", that is, the subculture that started on sites like LessWrong and Astral Codex around ideas like rationality/epistemology, Bayesianism, cognitive biases, effective altruism, AI alignment, refinements of probabilistic reasoning and decision theory, techno-optimism, etc., etc., etc. It's pretty common to hear rationalist jargon on Manifold - for example, I can say that the previous sentence tells you that the ideas and circles that count as part of the rationalist community/movement are a thingspace cluster, and most people here will understand what that means.

I wanted to see just how ubiquitous this subculture is on Manifold, so I asked about it on my survey:

Are you part of the rationalist community?

This refers to the subculture focused on thinking and acting rationally through Bayesian reasoning, decision theory, game theory, being aware of cognitive biases and common fallacies, discussing epistemology, etc. It's commonly associated with ideas like futurism, effective altruism, and AI risk, and the websites LessWrong and Astral Codex.

• Yes, fully

• Pretty much, but I'm not fully associated with it.

• Maybe, I'm interested in their ideas and somewhat adjacent to it.

• No, but I do have a lot of overlapping ideas.

• No, not at all.

• No, and I find the rationalist community to be either annoying or bad in some way.

• No, and I strongly oppose the rationalist movement.

I will use the answers to this question to determine an "alignment index", i.e., a measure of how aligned the respondent is with the rationalist community. The answers correspond to alignment indices of 1, .75, .5, .25, 0, -.5, and -1, respectively, so a positive index means the respondent is either a part of the community or agrees with its ideas and goals in some way, and a negative index represents opposition to the community (with a zero representing neutrality). This question resolves to the average alignment index. If the average is on the boundary of two bins, it resolves to them equally, with the exception of an average of 0, which would resolve completely to 0 - .25.

See Plasma's Manifold Survey for other questions about the survey.

You can take the survey here: https://forms.gle/xZqWVxuY5irgLigu9