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.
Big Yud is a slavery-fetishizing woman-enslaving predatory monster.
When he isn't dehumanizing human beings to rhetorically uplift his always-around-the-corner god-machines, he goes out of his way to place living beings in hierarchies of worthiness where he's at the very top and everything beneath him exists for his consumption, amusement, or both.
Also, I utterly despise the belief that by denigrating living beings, the implication uplifts the treat-printing machines. I see it everywhere, including on Hexbear sometimes, and I fucking hate it.
This thread, for example, had a lot of examples, many of them now deleted, of "humans are just meat computers" reductionistic bullshit while the same posts elevated chatbots and LLMs into "at least as conscious, if consciousness exists at all" territory.
https://hexbear.net/post/241191
From what I've seen from Yudkowsky, what stands out to me is his ignorance and lack of curiosity about how anything actually works.
If God is our way to explain questions we have no answer to, then you can truly find God in any machine as long as you maintain your own ignorance, as long as you choose not to lift the curtain. 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.
Yudkowsky's beliefs truly sound like faith, pure religious faith. The less you know, the more you can believe.
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.
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.
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.
Removed by mod
Holy shit, this just made something click for me. I finally have a succinct way to describe why Big Yud is so awful. The infantilism, the selfishness, the need for control, the ego, the overestimation of his own abilities. Even the desire to be immortal.
He's a real life Porky Minch.
Considering how he consumed and interpreted fucking Harry Potter and then vomited out "the Methods of Rationality" which was a magical realm of his personal sex slavery fetishes, I can only imagine the horror that would be his interpretation of the Mother/Earthbound series.
"Porky is the good guy who introduced LE SCIENCE AND RATIONALITY to the primitive Tazmily, Lucas and co. stopped him from bringing about the singularity and saving the world"
You cracked the code. That's how deep it would go: "bad guy is good actually because immortality and superpowers."
Also he's getting dumber. His ideas are getting worse with every iteration and he was once a smart but annoying kid who's turnkey parents didn't keep him off usenet before too much damage was done.
He's the shittiest kind of doomer these days, too: he's lamented that the world is doomed (not to climate change or environmental collapse, but techbro "sexy robot goddess decides to kill the gross nerds that financed her construction" doomsday scenarios) and that he's to blame because there's not enough of him to solve the problem.