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