I must confess I have a personal vendetta against Yudkowsky and his cult. I studied computer science in college. As an undergrad, I worked as an AI research assistant. I develop software for a living. This is my garden the LessWrong crowd is trampling.

  • UlyssesT [he/him]8•8 months ago

    From what I've seen from Yudkowsky, what stands out to me is his ignorance and lack of curiosity about how anything actually works.

    He's a self-described "autodidact" that claims that actual academics and for that matter experts in actual AI-related research fields are inferior to his autodidactical genius because they don't take him seriously.

    You can make claims that chickens have no sentience or that ChatGPT does, you can make claims that humans are meat computers as long as you don't actually care about the true inner workings of anything, as long as you don't interrogate what any of that actually means.

    Crude reductionism is an easy default take for someone too incurious and arrogant to even consider that something might be too complex for current understanding to fully grasp.

    Yudkowsky's beliefs truly sound like faith, pure religious faith. The less you know, the more you can believe.

    He runs a cult, period. It has all the traits of a cult, from a chosen elect to the damned outsiders to the prophecies of salvation and doom and of course sex predator antics.