If I scream that a vicious beast is going to destroy the world, I don't get credit for being 'directionally right' if a squirrel eats a hazelnut. AI being a big deal is a long, long way from the full beliefs Yudkowksy promotes, and there are many people who predicted AI's significance who didn't also believe it would be an extinction event.

I really think we need to stop giving credence to people who have

1) Been consistently wrong with all their predictions

2) Demonstrated an endless spiteful cynicism

Some of these people are very talented in their fields, sure. But malevolent and incorrect should be disqualifying when they talk outside them. You don't want the society they want, and they things they believe in are unlikely to happen.

It would be far, far better to listen to the people who never fell down every misanthropic rabbit hole, rather than the ones who have noticed it this time, but want you to still believe them on every other topic.

Evil is often very reasonable; pretending otherwise is a 'farcical strawman' of your own.

Your comment is incredibly aggressive, hostile, and rude, of out nowhere. You should review the guidelines [1]. It's deeply disingenuous to either communicate really poorly or to backtrack from your position unannounced and then get aggressive about it when people engage with you.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That's tantamount to "I don't care about the coding itself, or the underlying quality of my systems".

This isn't the problem; the problem is that people incorrectly believe it to be true.

Engagement and learning are definitely separate things; you're right that engagement is required, but that's only part of it. This is a classic case of 'necessary but not sufficient'.

A disengaged child is not learning; an engaged child might be.

The article is interesting, but it doesn't actually sufficiently dismiss this; it's the route cause of it all.