Quick summary: "Hidden rationalists" are what I call authors who espouse rationalist principles, and probably think of themselves as rational people, but don't always write on "traditional" Less Wrong-ish topics and probably haven't heard of Less Wrong.

I've noticed that a lot of my rationalist friends seem to read the same ten blogs, and while it's great to have a core set of favorite authors, it's also nice to stretch out a bit and see how everyday rationalists are doing cool stuff in their own fields of expertise. I've found many people who push my rationalist buttons in fields of interest to me (journalism, fitness, etc.), and I'm sure other LWers have their own people in their own fields.

So I'm setting up this post as a place to link to/summarize the work of your favorite hidden rationalists. Be liberal with your suggestions!

Another way to phrase this: Who are the people/sources who give you the same feelings you get when you read your favorite LW posts, but who many of us probably haven't heard of?

Here's my list, to kick things off:

• Peter Sandman, professional risk communication consultant. Often writes alongside Jody Lanard. Specialties: Effective communication, dealing with irrational people in a kind and efficient way, carefully weighing risks and benefits. My favorite recent post of his deals with empathy for Ebola victims and is a major, Slate Star Codex-esque tour de force. His "guestbook comments" page is better than his collection of web articles, but both are quite good.
• Doug McGuff, MD, fitness guru and author of the exercise book with the highest citation-to-page ratio of any I've seen. His big thing is "superslow training", where you perform short and extremely intense workouts (video here). I've been moving in this direction for about 18 months now, and I've been able to cut my workout time approximately in half without losing strength. May not work for everyone, but reminds me of Leverage Research's sleep experiments; if it happens to work for you, you gain a heck of a lot of time. I also love the way he emphasizes the utility of strength training for all ages/genders -- very different from what you'd see on a lot of weightlifting sites.
• Philosophers' Mail. A website maintained by applied philosophers at the School of Life, which reminds me of a hippy-dippy European version of CFAR (in a good way). Not much science, but a lot of clever musings on the ways that philosophy can help us live, and some excellent summaries of philosophers who are hard to read in the original. (Their piece on Vermeer is a personal favorite, as is this essay on Simon Cowell.) This recently stopped posting new material, but the School of Life now collects similar work through The Book of Life. 

Hi anglophones, this topic is only for brazilians, so someone may post in portuguese and part of this is in portuguese (We will translate it to english if necessary when the time comes).

Hello Brazilians, I'm creating this topic because some misallocated questions were posed on this one.

First, the numbers.In Less Wrong:

Me, Gust, Paulovsk, zecaurubu, Gracunha, Mexamark, dyokomizo.

From IERFH (Instituto Ética, Racionalidade, e o Futuro da Humanidade)

Leo Arruda, João Fabiano, me, Pierre , Jonatas Muller, Pablo,  Lauro (paralelo), Rafael, plus 3 others.

This makes us at least 17, almost one every 10 million people (not great...)

Some of us are in São Paulo. About 10.

Eventually, this topic may attract some others, and we can create a meeting.

Now, regarding the question a few of you did, IERFH's mission:

Gerar alto impacto positivo no longo prazo, produzindo conhecimentos e reunindo pessoas que contribuam para melhor pensar as questões éticas que irão definir o futuro da humanidade.

About: Somos um time comprometido com fazer o mundo melhor, agora e no futuro. Para isso, estamos reunindo a comunidade brasileira de racionalistas, utilitaristas, transhumanistas, e outros entusiastas e tranformando ideais e teorias em ações. Ao lado de grandes organizações internacionais de caridade, tecnologia e ética, nos propomos a ser o vetor dos esforcos brasileiros nesses campos. O IERFH opera em 3 frentes: o estudo do que é bom e deve ser buscado e preservado: a Ética Pura e Aplicada; as maneiras mais eficientes de raciocínio, tomada de decisões e os seus erros mais comuns: a Racionalidade Epistêmica e Prática; e por fim como aplicar estes campos para garantir a plena realização de todo o potencial humano: o Futuro da Humanidade 

Racionalidade: Ser racional é conseguir conquistar, com pouco dispêndio de recursos, aquele que se deseja, entre todos os cenários possíveis que poderiam ter ocorrido. Racionalidade epistêmica é a capacidade de entender com o mundo atual; Racionalidade prática, a capacidade de guiar o mundo atual em direção ao mundo desejado. Para ser racional, duas capacidades são fundamentais, a capacidade de desviar dos bias cognitivos, falhas sistemáticas da nossa cognição, e permitir que o conhecimento adquirido atinja todos os campos de nosso conhecimento, integrando a informação aprendida e garantindo que ela tenha um efeito proporcional em nossas vidas. Essa comunidade do IERFH pretende nos guiar nesse sentido.

Futuro da Humanidade: Para guiar o futuro da humanidade numa direção desejável, é necessário, antes de tudo, desviar dos grandes riscos catastróficos de origem tecnológica que estamos criando conforme criamos novas tecnologias. Para tal, é também necessário compreender e corrigir os bias cognitivos aos quais nossos cérebros estão propensos. Finalmente, garantidas a segurança de nossos valores fundamentais, e corrigidos os nossos desvios de racionalidade, podemos seguir adiante na realização de todo o potencial futuro humano, através de biotecnologia, nanotecnologia, inteligência artificial e coordenação global.

The missing part "Ética" isn't written yet. But I think you get the general idea.Think Bostrom, think Utilitarianism.

Se acharam interessante a descrição, talvez gostem desse post. Ou, para os familiarizados com Yudkowsky desse, sobre CEV.

We are developing our website, that is why we still don't have one.

Given the broadness of our scope, we are, of course, in need of new people (specially to translate) but we will only post to less wrong about the group in detail (in english) in a few months. If you are interested, contact me in the private message section.  We meet on skype, and rarely in Pinheiros, São Paulo.

I hope we can start to form a Brazilian rationalist community, both of less wrongers general, and within IERFH and thank Gust for the initiative of creating the meeting topic that made me write this one.

I'm going to list some moderately well-known people who strike me as unusually rational. They aren't "rationalists" in the sense that they don't generally explicitly talk about rationality.

Tom and Ray Magliozzi run a web site and talk radio show about car repair. They have a repetitious sense of humor, but if you look past that, you see that they have a very wide body of knowledge (and sometime, we should talk about how much detailed knowledge is worth acquiring so that you have something to be rational with), publicly display the process of testing hypotheses, and get in touch with people they've given advice to later to find out whether the advice worked. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.

Ta Nehisi Coates writes a politics and culture blog for The Atlantic. He's notable for trying to see how everyone is doing what makes sense to them-- rather a difficult thing when you're taking on the mind-killer subjects.

Atul Gawande writes books and articles about the practice of medicine. It was particularly striking in his recent The Checklist Manifesto that when his checklists seemed to produce notable improvements in surgical outcomes, his first reaction was concern that there was something wrong with the experiment rather than delight that he'd been proven correct.

Any other recommendations?