EA - Eliezer Yudkowsky Is Frequently, Confidently, Egregiously Wrong by Omnizoid

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Eliezer Yudkowsky Is Frequently, Confidently, Egregiously Wrong, published by Omnizoid on August 27, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Introduction"After many years, I came to the conclusion that everything he says is false. . . . "He will lie just for the fun of it. Every one of his arguments was tinged and coded with falseness and pretense. It was like playing chess with extra pieces. It was all fake."Paul Postal (talking about Chomsky) (note, this is not exactly how I feel about Yudkowsky, I don't think he's knowingly dishonest, but I just thought it was a good quote and partially represents my attitude towards Yudkowsky).Crosspost of this on my blog.In the days of my youth, about two years ago, I was a big fan of Eliezer Yudkowsky. I read his many, many writings religiously, and thought that he was right about most things. In my final year of high school debate, I read a case that relied crucially on the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics - and that was largely a consequence of reading through Eliezer's quantum physics sequence. In fact, Eliezer's memorable phrasing that the many worlds interpretation "wins outright given the current state of evidence," was responsible for the title of my 44-part series arguing for utilitarianism titled "Utilitarianism Wins Outright." If you read my early articles, you can find my occasional blathering about reductionism and other features that make it clear that my worldview was at least somewhat influenced by Eliezer.But as I grew older and learned more, I realized it was all bullshit.Eliezer sounds good whenever he's talking about a topic that I don't know anything about. I know nothing about quantum physics, and he sounds persuasive when talking about quantum physics. But every single time he talks about a topic that I know anything about, with perhaps one or two exceptions, what he says is total nonsense, at least, when it's not just banal self-help advice. It is not just that I always end up disagreeing with him, it is that he says with almost total confidence outrageous falsehood after outrageous falsehood, making it completely clear he has no idea what he is talking about. And this happens almost every single time. It seems that, with few exceptions, whenever I know anything about a topic that he talks about, it becomes clear that his view is a house of cards, built entirely on falsehoods and misrepresentations.Why am I writing a hit piece on Yudkowsky? I certainly don't hate him. In fact, I'd guess that I agree with him much more than almost all people on earth. Most people believe lots of outrageous falsehoods. And I think that he has probably done more good than harm for the world by sounding the alarm about AI, which is a genuine risk. And I quite enjoy his scrappy, willing-to-be-contrarian personality. So why him?Part of this is caused by personal irritation. Each time I hear some rationalist blurt out "consciousness is just what an algorithm feels like from the inside," I lose a year of my life and my blood pressure doubles (some have hypothesized that the explanation for the year of lost life involves the doubling of my blood pressure). And I spend much more time listening to Yukowsky's followers spout nonsense than most other people.But a lot of it is that Yudkowsky has the ear of many influential people. He is one of the most influential AI ethicists around. Many people, my younger self included, have had their formative years hugely shaped by Yudkowsky's views - on tons of topics. As Eliezer says:In spite of how large my mistakes were, those two years of blog posting appeared to help a surprising number of people a surprising amount.Quadratic Rationality expresses a common sentiment, that the sequences, written by Eliezer, have significantly shaped the world view of him and others. Elie...