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.
Looking at Flare made me lower my estimation of Eliezer's technical skill, not raise it. I'm sure he's leveled up quite a bit since, but the basic premise of the Flare project (an XML-based language) is a bad technical decision made due to a fad. Also, it never went anywhere.
I haven't looked much at Flare myself, might you explain a little more why it's negatively impressive? I noticed I was a little confused by your judgment, probed that confusion, and remembered that someone I'm acquainted with who I'd heard knows a lot about language design had said he was at least somewhat impressed with some aspects of Flare. Are there clever ideas in Flare that might explain that person's positive impression but that are overall outweighed by other aspects of Flare that are negatively impressive? I'm willing to dig through Flare's specif... (read more)