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.
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.