Comment by dwaltrip
8 years ago
Eliezer Yudkowsky is quite smart with some deep understandings of the world (along with some less good ideas), as best I can tell. I've definitely learned interesting things or been sent down interesting paths from articles of his that I've read.
However, he would be served very well to work on eliminating the moderate pomposity that permeates much of his writing. He is also overly verbose sometimes. Fixing those two issues would reduce a lot of the beef he gets, I think.
It was my impression that he intentionally cultivates those aspects of his public persona. That is, if I can't deal with those particular points of personal obnoxiousness, I probably also won't hang credulously on his every word. In that case why would he want to interact with me at all? He's not the only person to employ this strategy. Personally I'm more willing to endure the idiosyncrasies of e.g. RMS.
Didn't he promise some AI stuff and never delivered?
You might try looking here: https://intelligence.org/all-publications/