> More out-of-distribution ways to think of things.

Openly admitting that it only caught fire once the Plagiarism-as-a-Service took hold is a good first step. It's the part that everyone knows and few will openly acknowledge.

Talking to the incredible talent in the Chinese Labs is likely a good way to do that.

You have to be quite unaware of your bubble if you think knowing about a niche Harry Potter fanfic is "standard" for people on the Internet.

maybe its standard for someone who ends up on hackernews, but I'm a 30 something and all of my friends are online people around my age and none of them have ever heard of the HPMoR. The internet is a huge place.

One question to ask yourself honestly - is what they were predicting 20 years ago that they were right about and you were wrong about? I’ve been following them that long without agreeing with them, but they’ve made better predictions than I have. If you know much about what happened this summer and haven’t updated at all on any of it… I guess you’ve found your religion too.

Me too. I worked in two enterprise tech companies that definitely everybody here knows and I had the same experience with YC and HN. The two colleagues that knew about it, one went to found his own startup and went through YC, the other left the big co to work for a startup after about a year.

A while back I saw LessWrong recommended on HN in a list of similar communities that included lobsters.rs, etc. I thought the design of the site looked really nice so browsed with a open mind (I didn't make the rationalism/LW/Eliezer connection).

At the time, one of the recommended posts that was soft-stickied at the top for 1 week + was:

"How to Make Superbabies"

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DfrSZaf3JC8vJdbZL/how-to-mak...

Which, when I finally ended up clicking, was pretty much exactly what if sounds like from the title:

A long, meandering, manifesto full of selectively chosen charts and research findings with 38 mentions of "IQ", from a guy who has been unsuccessfully pitching investors on genetically modifying a grab bag of (dubiously) intelligence-associated genes in human babies.

Apart from the overall unhingedness, the part I found most striking while reading it was the off-the-chart level of self-confidence that flipping a bunch of genes on/off with CRISPR would have more or less zero risk of complications or unpredictable interactions. In his view, all that was holding back humanity's inevitable next step up the evolutionary ladder were the narrow-minded gatekeepers in the scientific establishment clinging to their so-called "ethics" and regressive "precautionary principle".

Without anything resembling experimentation to test his plan in animal models, yet alone early stage clinical trials for safety, he was willing to roll the dice on some unlucky baby dying in childbirth or living a life of agony from chronic disease based on some cherry picked papers he found on PubMed.

Because of the baffling hubris and my overall low impression of his intellectual honesty/rigor in the write up (clearly coming from a place of seeking to justify his own pre-existing beliefs), I opened the comments section expecting/hoping this was just some local nut who would be torn apart in the comment section.

But lo and behold, the very first comment at the top:

  Eliezer Yudkowsky

  One of the most important projects in the world.  Somebody should fund it.

Exactly. And companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are disproportionately populated by people deeply connected to Effective Altruism or the Bay Area rationalist movement.

Yeah. Just a few years ago, LessWrong was derided as the home of conceited, low-quality opinion pieces. Now there's a bizarre marketing push to launder their credibility and force them into the spotlight.

I imagine that thousands of talented AI researchers around the world have never read a line of Yudkowsky's work. They're probably not any worse-off for ignoring him, I'd say.