> There has been a great effort over many years to distance AI Safety discussion and policy from its origins and intellectual center, because its center is a sex cult started by a fan fiction author. If you want to be taken seriously you have to hide that.

This may be true, but it means that those readers are using irrelevant ad hominem to allocate respect, meaning that the flaw is in them rather than the author. It's like dismissing Feynman's physics for playing the bongos.

It should make no more difference that an author is in a polycule than that they are gay or straight. And how the heck is a history of writing fan fiction an indicator of their scientific or engineering or judgement?

Would a formal scientific and/or engineering education be an indicator? (Or lack thereof as is the case here)

Happy to fast-forward a bit: I will not take “sat and thought deeply” as a qualification, which would make all other prophets qualified for scientific/engineering judgement.