and also an influential figure in the Effective Altruism/ LessWrong communities. Interestingly enough, he also wrote a really enjoyable and clever fiction novel.
im not going to tell you you're wrong for respecting him, but i feel this comment is only telling half the story. He's very well respected in the "rationalist" community, but he and that community are pretty controversial and definitely not universally respected
Well, the point was that he (or at least the community he is in) is actively disrespected by some people as well, so it's a bit more pointed than just "not known about".
Mentioning this only for completeness' sake. I think he's good, on net. But somewhat adjacent to some more dubious and distasteful stuff.
Well, he is trustworthy on psychiatry even if he’s a member of a religion that worships nonexistent AIs and Bayes’ theorem.
But his main posting hobby is that he wants to be friends with weird internet right-wing intellectuals and that you should too. So every time I glance at the comments there someone wants to give their opinions on exactly who is genetically less intelligent than the commenter.
Would you write the same comment about a Catholic psychiatrist who wrote a blog about both Catholicism and psychiatry?
Catholicism is definitely pretty controversial and definitely not universally respected, but I think most people would have pretty strong pushback against a commenter who felt the need to bring up an author's Catholicism regarding a blog post that had little to do with catholicism.
If somebody's interested, I would strongly suggest checking out both sides of the dispute and not only that, as the NYT story caused quite some ruckus at the time.
Or more likely given that your first claim was clearly incorrect you are just trying to paint him in a bad light and your specific accusations have little real basis.