About

A lot of people keep asking me what the author names mean. The author names are part persona part epistemic status that fall out of the history of my blogging activity. They're each meant to represent a particular blog I used to maintain separately from TLR:

• The Last Rationalist - The persona I created circa 2018 to (then) anonymously publish the various rants I'd been making to friends for years about why the rationalist community is broken. The general thrust of a TLR post is to take some common misconception or pathology in the rationalist memeplex and dissect/critique it. I'm not saying I'll use it strictly for that, but that's the center of the category a TLR post will typically fall into. It's important to note that I never intended the TLR persona to protect me from retaliation, it was always anonymity as persona so that the ideas in my posts would be the center of discussion rather than myself. I eventually decided that this created more problems than it solved, and went off anon starting with the post "Memento Mori", Said The Confessor.

• namespace - My ordinary ratsphere community and blogging persona that I've used for years. Posts by namespace are the kind of thing I might post to LessWrong as 'namespace'. For a good idea of what these look like you can read Guided Mental Change Requires High Trust.

• Extropian Zealot - DreamWidth (LiveJournal) persona I made because I wanted to be able to discuss the 'occult' reading I was doing into subjects like alchemy and hypnosis without spoiling my namespace persona. At some point I realized a few things: 1. None of what I was reading was actually causing me to believe in any woo or supernatural phenomena. 2. A lot of this stuff was just plain part of the history of transhumanism, and in light of that I don't care if people think I'm weird for talking about it. Original blog is here, I was in an edgy mood when I wrote the first post.

This blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

My suggested attribution is a link to https://www.thelastrationalist.com and retaining the original authorship indications. A post by 'namespace' should be attributed to namespace, a post by 'The Last Rationalist' should be attributed to The Last Rationalist.

A zip archive of this site is available for offline reading and mirroring. Also includes original .md files to make it more convenient for readers who want to remix and edit my posts.