I think I found the problem!

  The rationalist community was drawn together by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky’s blog post series The Sequences, a set of essays about how to think more rationally

I actually don't mind Yudkowski as an individual - I think he is almost always wrong and undeservedly arrogant, but mostly sincere. Yet treating him as an AI researcher and serious philosopher (as opposed to a sci-fi essayist and self-help writer) is the kind of slippery foundation that less scrupulous people can build cults from. (See also Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and related trends - often it is just a bit of spiritual goofiness as with David Lynch, sometimes you get a Charles Manson.)

▲ fulafel 8 days ago | parent | next [-]

How has he fared in the fields of philosophy and AI research in terms of peer review, is there some kind of roundup or survey around about this?

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plorkyeran 7 days ago | parent [-]

EY and MIRI as a whole have largely failed to produce anything which even reaches the point of being peer reviewable. He does not have any formal education and is uninterested in learning how to navigate academia.

	▲	fulafel 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I see. But should this really preclude review, "peer" or not? Philosophers talk about ideas from non academic thinkers all the time after all.

▲ polytely 8 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Don't forget the biggest scifi guy turned cult leader of all L. Ron Hubbard

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AIPedant 8 days ago | parent [-]

I don't think Yudkowski is at all like L. Ron Hubbard. Hubbard was insane and pure evil. Yudkowski seems like a decent and basically reasonable guy, he's just kind of a blowhard and he's wrong about the science.

L. Ron Hubbard is more like the Zizians.

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pingou 8 days ago | parent [-]

I don't have a horse in the battle but could you provide a few examples where he was wrong?

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bglazer 8 days ago | parent [-]

Here's one: Yudkowsky has been confidently asserting (for years) that AI will extinct humanity because it will learn how to make nanomachines using "strong" covalent bonds rather than the "weak" van der Waals forces used by biological systems like proteins. I'm certain that knowledgeable biologists/physicists have tried to explain to him why this belief is basically nonsense, but he just keeps repeating it. Heck there's even a LessWrong post that lays it out quite well [1]. This points to a general disregard for detailed knowledge of existing things and a preference for "first principles" beliefs, no matter how wrong they are.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8viKzSrYhb6EFk6wg/why-yudkow...

	▲	12_throw_away 7 days ago \| parent [-]
		Dear god. The linked article is a good takedown of this "idea," but I would like to pile on: biological systems are in fact extremely good at covalent chemistry, usually via extraordinarily powerful nanomachines called "enzymes". No, they are (usually) not building totally rigid condensed matter structures, but .. why would they? Why would that be better? I'm reminded of a silly social science article I read, quite a long time ago. It suggested that physicists only like to study condensed matter crystals because physics is a male-dominated field, and crystals are hard rocks, and, um ... men like to think about their rock-hard penises, I guess. Now, this hypothesis obviously does not survive cursory inspection - if we're gendering natural phenomena studied by physicists, are waves male? Are fluid dynamics male? However, Mr. Yudowsky's weird hangups here around rigidity and hardness have me adjusting my priors.