Ozy Brennan

Carefully, correctly LessWrong

Singularity blues

AI-box experiment Cybernetic revolt Julia Galef Effective altruism Roko's basilisk/Original post Simulated reality Scott Alexander Eliezer Yudkowsky Robin Hanson Aumann's agreement theorem Aella Asterisk Magazine v - t - e

Ozy Brennan (1992-) is a rationalist / Effective Altruist writer and life coach. In the topsy-turvy world of LessWrong, Brennan is not unusual for being a transgender neurodivergent polyamorist who posts like they are paid by the word and dreams of a future where predators never take live prey. Instead, Brennan is unusual for having formal education in gender studies and identifying as feminist.

Early days

In 2011 and 2012, Brennan was an undergraduate student at "a hippy college in the United States" and a founding writer on the feminist group blog No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz?. (At that time they went by Ozy Frantz and Ozymandias). Their first post was "Who Cares About Men’s Rights?" They started a book titled What About The Men? with fellow blogger Noah Brand which seems to have never been published. They contributed to Role/Reboot, an online magazine focused on alternatives to normative gender roles. They also wrote about 480 blog posts in 19 months for The Good Men Project, a digital magazine on masculinity. Despite (or because of) this high rate of posts they mentioned burnout and depression. In December 2012 Brennan announced "Due to recent events at the Good Men Project, I have decided to leave the Good Men Project and No, Seriously What About Teh Menz?" and launched their own blog at https://ozyfrantz.wordpress.com/.

The American blogging and new media world around 2012 had a number of interconnected communities, including the ScienceBlogs diaspora, New Atheism, the feminist blogosphere, sex blogs, and LessWrong. This world was being torn apart for many reasons, including the loss of George W. Bush as a unifying other, the incentives for sharing drama to get attention on a growing Internet, and disagreements about race, gender, and immigration. Changes in revenue from Internet ads, the appearance of crowdfunding and Patreon, and the collapse of organizations like Gawker Media, also challenged anyone trying to make money or build an audience. Figures like Rebecca Watson and Richard Carrier tried to jump from log to log and sometimes fell into the rushing water. After leaving the feminist blogosphere, Brennan became less visible for a time before finding a new community.

Move into the Effective Altruism movement

By 2013, Brennan had met Scott Alexander who endorsed their blog with the wobbly enthusiasm of Sonia Greene endorsing her second husband's skill in bed:

Ozy Frantz introduced zirself to me by saying that “I major in gender studies, but I am not that kind of gender studies student. Promise.” So far this claim has been entirely borne out and Ozy’s blog is actually really good. I still usually avoid reading it, because even a good blog on gender has to be responding to and referencing the bad blogs on gender, and even short little quotes from them make me want to smash something and that something is often someone’s skull. But it really is actually really good.

Brennan contributed a FAQ against the pickup artist Heartiste to Alexander's blog in 2014.

In October 2014, Brennan launched a new blog at https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/ An early post referred to instructions from "Scott" presumably Scott Alexander. The first three months of the blog included posts about trans issues, disability, and sexual ethics, a version of Scott Alexander's argument for epistemic learned helplessness applied to AI doom, and a proposal for an annual holiday for Effective Altruists. Brennan's blogroll contained a mix of sex blogs such as Pervocracy, pop culture such as the Order of the Stick webcomic, rationalist blogs such as Slate Star Codex and Sarah Constantin's Otium, the Effective Altruism forum, and anti-natalist blog The View from Hell. Brennan's intellectual environment was no longer typical for a student at a "hippie college" because Brennan mentioned having briefly been convinced by a friend's argument for eugenics before rethinking.

In 2016, Ozy married another blogger and took his last name. The blogger had distanced himself from the rationalist movement after Scott Alexander tried to convert him to scientific racism, but the couple agreed to disagree about Brennan's friends. It is very common for people in the rationalist and EA subcultures to both date and work for other current and former members of the movement, such as the polycule which ran the FTX cryptocurrency fraud.

Circa 2017 and 2018, Brennan worked for the EA-affiliated charity Wild Animal Suffering https://wildanimalsuffering.org/. They participated in the the 2017 Research Workshop on Effective Animal Advocacy organized by Animal Charity Evaluators and a panel discussion at Effective Altruism Global 2018: San Francisco. One member of the movement claims that Brennan worked for six years in this field. Brennan acknowledged that the movement had weird and wonderful goals:

nobody is going to go out there and genetically engineer lions so that they only eat grass tomorrow, we're going to do lots of research before we do anything. We're going to start with smaller scale projects. There's a lot of uncertainty about ecology and we're totally aware of that and this is something that we're concerned about at Wild Animal Suffering Research and at other organizations.

Watchers of pop science documentaries, or people in the USA who deal with deer and Australia who deal with rabbits, know that ecosystems go haywire if you remove the predators, and the results are not kind to every herbivore or plant. Brennan also endorsed the EA sophistry that climate change is unlikely to kill all humans, so not an existential risk, whereas SkyNet could kill us all! Scenarios where the climate becomes so hot and unstable that agriculture collapses are speculative, but not nearly so speculative as scenarios where OpenAI builds electric Jesus in a data centre (and the collapse of agriculture, followed by industrial civilization, would put a pin in dreams of conquering the universe).

COVID era

In 2019 and 2020, Brennan ran an advice column on Medium. In March 2025 Brennan opened a side business as a life coach focusing on gender identity, sexuality, excessive self-criticism, life with mental health challenges, and concerns within the Effective Altruism movement.

As a highly involved effective altruist, I have context on whatever weird thing you’re stressed about: imminent AI doom, the scope of animal suffering, the implications of weird thought experiments. I won’t assume your desire for impact is a cognitive distortion.

In June 2021, Brennan moved to Substack. They blamed the new Gutenberg Wordpress editor for driving them away, whereas other writers say that they were offered financial incentives to move to Substack. Brennan's Substack has diverse topics but a strong EA perspective.

In 2022 and 2023, Brennan posted for Faunalytics which tries to reduce animal suffering.

In June 2024, Brennan wrote about the TESCREAL concept for EA-funded Asterisk Magazine. Brennan agreed that it was useful to have one name for these movements, but disagreed with Torres that all these ideas should be rejected:

Republicans and Democrats don’t seem to agree about much. But if you were explaining American politics to a medieval peasant, the peasant would notice a number of commonalities: that citizens should choose their political leaders through voting, that people have a right to criticize those in charge, that the same laws ought to apply to everyone. To explain what was going on, you’d call this “liberal democracy.” Similarly, many people in Silicon Valley share a worldview that is unspoken and, all too often, invisible to them. When you mostly talk to people who share your perspective, it’s easy to not notice the controversial assumptions behind it. ... Torres can dismiss all TESCREALists out of hand because Torres is opposed to economic growth and even the most necessary control of nature. Everyone else has to consider specific ideas.

Brennan helped to organize the 2024 Bay Area secular solstice so was still involved in LessWrong as well as Effective Altruism, and in their days in animal charity Brennan was familiar with transhumanism. They market their counselling to Effective Altruists concerned with AI risk which often means the singularity. Of the seven ideologies in TESCREAL, Brennan therefore linked Transhumanism (T), Singulitarianism (S), Rationalism (R), and Effective Altruism (EA) but not Cosmism (C), Extropianism (E), or Longtermism (L).

Green flags

"Some Writings We Love: The sites below embody the virtues we are celebrating. Each author below has been offered a free ticket to LessOnline." A gathering for weird writers might invite one person really interested in IQ tests from Kenya for novelty, but when it invites five that suggests that the organizers think race thought is a virtue. Brennan was not an organizer but knows several of the guests who advocate race science or eugenics

Ozy does not seem to have advocated that humans should be bred for intelligence, some races have smarter genes than other races, or people with bad genes should stop reproducing, as a number of prominent EAs and rationalists have. Ozy's only visible connection to the far right or neoreaction is LessOnline 2024, a gathering of rationalist bloggers before a networking event for race cranks called Manifest 2024. Fellow LessOnline guests Scott Alexander, Crémieux Recueil, GeneSmith, Aella, and Eliezer Yudkowsky have all said disturbing things about race and IQ or proposed cartoonish programs to breed a better mankind, but Ozy does not appear to have written anything similar. Ozy has no known connections to cryptocurrency. As of 2025 Ozy still criticizes books by pickup artists (but recommends a book by Mark Manson that gives quite specific advice for men to attract women: rationalists and Effective Altruists are fascinated by ways to get people to give you what they want, which they sometimes call 'social dynamics' and are linked to their fear that AI could con them like they believe they can con normies). While many bad ideas spread among rationalists and effective altruists, not every individual EA or rationalist advocates for each idea.

Views on sex and gender

Brennan has written many times that people should treat others as the gender that they say they are, but that biological sex is important and phrases like "people with vaginas" for "people with XX chromosomes who produce eggs" are awkward. On the Internet, expressing these commonplace views would typically summon people who scream TERF, except that Brennan is trans and identifies as a feminist.

See also

• Aella- another rationalist blogger with sex advice and a nurturing tone
• Ava, Bookbear Express- a rationalist matchmaker https://www.avabear.xyz/