He got Peter Thiel to donate $1.1 million to the SIAI, which you should take as a sign of EY's potential and achievements.
Innovation in any area is a team effort. In his efforts to create friendly AI, EY has at least one huge accomplishment: creating a thriving organization devoted to creating friendly AI. Realistically, this accomplishment is almost certainly more significant than any set of code he alone could have written.
He got Peter Thiel to donate $1.1 million to the SIAI, which you should take as a sign of EY's potential and achievements.
Isn't that potentially double-counting evidence?
Basically this: "Eliezer Yudkowsky writes and pretends he's an AI researcher but probably hasn't written so much as an Eliza bot."
While the Eliezer S. Yudkowsky site has lots of divulgation articles and his work on rationality is of indisputable value, I find myself at a loss when I want to respond to this. Which frustrates me very much.
So, to avoid this sort of situation in the future, I have to ask: What did the man, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, actually accomplish in his own field?
Please don't downvote the hell out of me, I'm just trying to create a future reference for this sort of annoyance.