"Proposed two sentence Yudkowsky explainer: you know how Thiel funds crazy writers like Curtis Yarvin? Well Yudkowsky is a Thiel funded harry potter fanfic writer." - dizecat
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"A high-school dropout who believes he's the cleverest person in the world realised death is bad when his brother died, and decided to fix it. He convinced Peter Thiel to pay him to turn a computer into God, using Java programming (despite having no programming experience.
However, he then scared himself that he might be *too* good at building God, so decided that before he continued he should form a cult to make sure it was safe. To do this, he got Peter Thiel to fund him to write Harry Potter fanfic."
Sounds like the kind of guy that, if I made the mistake of getting into a conversation with him, I would say “uh huh uh huh yeah excuse me” and then spend the rest of the party standing as far away from him as humanly possible.
Oh the LessWrong people are *much* worse than the Wilhelm Reich people. The Reich people are cranks and crackpots (complimentary), the LessWrong people are cranks and crackpots (Nazi).
But you don't understand! Until you've read The Sequences (his multiple millions of words of blog posts trying to reinvent philosophy from the ground up) and his Harry Potter fanfic, and his weird sexual fantasy story, you won't know that the best way to save the world is to give him all you rmoney!
In his defence, the Harry Potter fanfic is quite good as these things go.
In much less of his defence, the cult he formed is largely responsible for the popularity of Bitcoin, Brexit happening, Elon Musk going mad in the particular ways he has, and the remainstreaming of eugenicist ideas.
You know what drives me crazy? I am almost positive that Yud's actual beliefs are bog-standard American Jew liberalism, plus a bit of race science. He doesn't have to pal around with fascists! But it's hard to admit that your life's work has mostly resulted in Nazis.
Yudkowsky has no high school or college education and claims to be self-educated, but it seems mostly philosophical and not hands-on knowledge of AI! So how in the world does he think he’s the smartest person in the room—ego?!
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In much less of his defence, the cult he formed is largely responsible for the popularity of Bitcoin, Brexit happening, Elon Musk going mad in the particular ways he has, and the remainstreaming of eugenicist ideas.