It's a rationalist community, IMHO their methodology of thought leads to much more well-reasoned takes on AI than on HN, where the discussion here is often very emotionally charged or led by wishful thinking.
When it comes to AI, LessWrong has been discussing topics for years, that HN has just started to consider, so they are much further along in the philosophical "chain of thought" so to say. LW fully understood and gamed out the risks of LLMs back when most of HN was calling them "stochastic parrots." https://ai-2027.com/
"Rationalist" just sounds like people calling themselves smart.
There's a little AI skepticism on HN, but not a ton. When ChatGPT 3 and 3.5 came out, most of the comments were remarking how well it can write code.
No, it's not just people calling themselves smart, it is a specific philosophy of how to think. Whether you think that philosophy works or not is another matter.
IMO it has its flaws but is far superior to vibes-based hot takes you see on HN.
Well at least HN hasn't (yet?) spawned a murderous death cult.
“Reason is the slave of the passions” - Hume
One could also say that a logical agent needs ultimate goals to do anything and it cannot choose them by logical means.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEUO6pjwFOo
LessWrong has been obsessed with AI. They certainly are much further along, but along a road which has diverged with reality long time ago and they relatively overweight AI risks so much it's not even funny anymore.
oh please... lesswrong was full of idiots already in 2010 when people outside of that community were laughing about "self-taught expert" Yudkowsky's bullshit physics takes.
They are not "further along" the AI discussion, they are a bunch of wackos LARPing as scientists living out their personal sci-fi scenarios.