> It would be like never having heard of Y Combinator or Richard Stallman.

I work in the tech sector. At one big company I worked for several years, 90% of the times I've mentioned Y Combinator to a colleague, I've had to explain who they are. And not one person I mentioned HN to had heard of it.

Likewise, no one knew levels.fyi. Not many knew Stallman, but why should they?

This isn't strange to me. That it's strange to you is evidence that you do live in a bubble and are likely susceptible to some groupthink. (I'm sure I am too, but for different bubbles from yours.)

I've read LessWrong stuff occasionally over the last decade. It rarely resonated with me. It's not bad, but it's not that great. I do tend to question someone's analytical skills when they go all in on that site. And I will say that even in the first few years of occasionally reading it, the group think was apparent.

Me too. I worked in two enterprise tech companies that definitely everybody here knows and I had the same experience with YC and HN. The two colleagues that knew about it, one went to found his own startup and went through YC, the other left the big co to work for a startup after about a year.

A while back I saw LessWrong recommended on HN in a list of similar communities that included lobsters.rs, etc. I thought the design of the site looked really nice so browsed with a open mind (I didn't make the rationalism/LW/Eliezer connection).

At the time, one of the recommended posts that was soft-stickied at the top for 1 week + was:

"How to Make Superbabies"

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DfrSZaf3JC8vJdbZL/how-to-mak...

Which, when I finally ended up clicking, was pretty much exactly what if sounds like from the title:

A long, meandering, manifesto full of selectively chosen charts and research findings with 38 mentions of "IQ", from a guy who has been unsuccessfully pitching investors on genetically modifying a grab bag of (dubiously) intelligence-associated genes in human babies.

Apart from the overall unhingedness, the part I found most striking while reading it was the off-the-chart level of self-confidence that flipping a bunch of genes on/off with CRISPR would have more or less zero risk of complications or unpredictable interactions. In his view, all that was holding back humanity's inevitable next step up the evolutionary ladder were the narrow-minded gatekeepers in the scientific establishment clinging to their so-called "ethics" and regressive "precautionary principle".

Without anything resembling experimentation to test his plan in animal models, yet alone early stage clinical trials for safety, he was willing to roll the dice on some unlucky baby dying in childbirth or living a life of agony from chronic disease based on some cherry picked papers he found on PubMed.

Because of the baffling hubris and my overall low impression of his intellectual honesty/rigor in the write up (clearly coming from a place of seeking to justify his own pre-existing beliefs), I opened the comments section expecting/hoping this was just some local nut who would be torn apart in the comment section.

But lo and behold, the very first comment at the top:

  Eliezer Yudkowsky

  One of the most important projects in the world.  Somebody should fund it.