You can trace most of it back to the blog of a GMU libertarian economist named Robin Hanson who publishes on a blog called Overcoming bias. (I mean, you could trace it back even further to the older and quintessentially American school of libertarianism, but I have to start somewhere.) The idea is that a number of biases are obscuring our ability to reason and think rationally, and we should recognize them and steer clear of them in our pursuit of truth. At least in theory. In practice, the idea is that a number of biases are obscuring our ability to reason and think like Robin Hanson, and we should recognize them and steer clear of them in order to agree with him. This is a common pattern in the community that you’ll learn to recognize.

Eliezer Yudkowsky was a former regular in that blog. At some point, and largely due to Yudkowsky being obsessed with AI risk while Hanson didn’t buy much into it, EY split off and made his own website, LessWrong. It basically built upon the very solid foundation laid by Hanson-like people, and refined the art of rationality (aka the art of thinking like a rationalist) to the point that EY got a huge following. Lots of very rational discussions were had there, and the common themes were about reconstructing all of philosophy from first principles, obsessing some more about AI, and basically shunning any kind of discussion or tradition of thought that didn’t involve their precious tenets of rationalism. That involved a peculiar mantra: “Politics is the mindkiller.” A few events of note happened there, such as people getting freaked out by Pascal’s wager, or the emergence a bizarre techno-libertarian cult advocating for things like a CEO-like god-king, race realism and the abolition of modern democracy, aka neoreactionaries (NRx). EY ended up having to tell them to fuck off. At some point the community tapered out and died like most communities as the huge social media websites started centralizing all discussion.

SSC was born from the comments of LessWrong, by a user named Yvain (also known as Scott Alexander - it’s a pseudonym and he doesn’t wish to make his identity public). SA saw that many people were very eager to kill their own mind, and he started a blog that’d incorporate EY’s themes, plus politics. Crucially, although he’s always described himself as “left-liberal”, he didn’t mind the presence of neoreactionaries in the comments section, so they flocked to his blog in droves. A subreddit was created about the blog, and neoractionaries abounded there as well.

At some point there were too many people posting about the IQ of black people even for Scott’s friends to bear it and he was advised to repudiate them as EY did. He wrote a long tear-jerking blogpost about how it was all the fault of people who called him a racist for having racists in his comment section, and implored right-wingers to leave, which they obliged and went on to found their own subreddit called /r/TheMotte. TheMotte is ostensibly about having calm, good-faith and rational discussion about politics but that apparently involves constantly bringing up of the IQ of black people and the evolutionary psychology behind women not being carbon copies of TheMotte for some reason.

So there you have it. Robin Hanson is about how bias prevents you from being rational and thinking like Robin Hanson, LessWrong is Robin Hanson + obsessing about imaginary god computer, SSC is LessWrong plus politics, and TheMotte is SSC plus the IQ of black people. This is what people like to call the libertarian to fascist pipeline.

I did this a while back for academic philosophers

It has a few different pieces of information and perspectives than the /u/wallofsneer

They are all right-wing tech geeks that are up their own arses.