So, we all know how much of a r/iamverysmart guys the LWers are. But does not it ever annoys you that Yud gets away with things that philosophers have already talked about before Yudkowsky did, straw mans arguments, writes somewhat confusing and long posts, and calls it the groundbreaking work that settles the debate? I just finished his free will series, every single article, every single one being painful to read. Everything from his Taboo game, to his rant about ‘definitions’ is all well known stuff. His Free Will series, I can sum it up in a Paragraph. You can skip it if you want to the third paragraph.

He writes a whole long article just for the sake of saying how stupid philosophy is(well, kind of) and another similar one just to say ‘your brain is a part of the system you stupid’ and to call compatibilism ‘requiredism’, probably just to sound more original. He writes total nonsense in his ‘timeless control’ and ‘timeless causality’ articles, misrepresenting incompatibilism along the way. He writes a long as hell article just to say that, ‘see, you make choices ya dummy’. He straw mans the ‘Ultimate Source’ argument by saying ridiculous things like people actually say that you have to be the ultimate source of all your decisions, and that ‘does this mean your parents made the choice for you?’ thing which I do not even need to explain. His moral responsibility article is quite confusing at best, with him saying things like ‘it does not change moral responsibility within the mind’. The way it is written sounds like saying, “Hey, you had to make a decision about doing something good or bad, were caught in a dilemma and made the bad decision knowing you are doing the evil thing, you jerk!” Or perhaps he is trying to say, “you are free if you are acting out of your own motivation and are not being forced by something or someone to act in a certain way”, well ok, that is nothing new.

Philosophers have been discussing these much before Yudkowsky, while actually dealing with arguments against their view without strawmanning anything, writing clearly and formally, actually engaging with other philosophers that hold both similar or opposing views than theirs. And then comes in Big Yud, strawmanning arguments, the few he even talks about, writing unclearly and badly, and claiming to have settled debates without even introducing anything new to philosophy, saying things that are well known among philosophers since much earlier, or in some cases too dumb to even consider.

And he somehow got this big organization with millions of dollar in funding that has “that has produced fewer papers in a decade and a half than a single graduate student produces in the course of a physics Ph.D”. MIRI has no ongoing or finished projects unlike real AI research organizations either, it is just largely informal theoretical work. Like seriously God? This man goes around thinking he is some sort of a genius, thinking that he is more intelligent than every human being that has ever lived, thinking he could reinvent philosophy on the fly and that the scientific method is flawed and only he knows thhat, and he somehow is actually a pretty successful person! I am sorry, but judging from what MIRI has done so far, it looks like more of the money contributes towards growing Yud’s fat cells rather than their ‘research’.

Yudkowsky seems to be the type of man who eats from other people’s work, and he is lucky enough to have come to he point he is at now, earning so much for doing so little. It annoys me that how many people who work really hard struggle in this world and how someone like Eliezer Yudkowsky who works so little and is an rather arrogant individual who bashes pretty much everyone not agreeing with him is growing fat on money. It seems like hard work is not really important when you have cartloads of luck in your favor.