[sashachapin]

Gwern, this seems like mind-reading. The real purpose of this essay was to muse about a set of character traits I find interesting, not participate in an AI debate. Most of the people I was thinking of are not involved in AI. (I'm much more a part of the meditation world than the AI world, and there's a LOT more cultiness there; and a more thorough survey of my twitter would have revealed that I think about meditation more than AI.)

Yudkowsky was definitely a case I thought of, but not the specific target of this article. AND, Yud is actually an example of one of these personalities that I think is probably net positive! Even if I have a lot of objections to the way he's presented himself and his specific arguments, I think he's doing a good job with moving the Overton window of taking AI seriously.

I grant that I probably do not fully understand Pascal's Mugging. But this tweet was a subtweet of someone who said that she was working on AI because an aligned AI would definitely end factory farming; whether or not this is true, this seems like the kind of thinking that will drive people crazy (all concerns must be suborned to the One Great Cause.)