And the logical next question... what is the greatest technical accomplishment of anyone in this thriving organization? Ideally in the area of AI. Putting together a team is an accomplishment proportional to what we can anticipate the team to accomplish. If there is anyone on this team that has done good things in the area of AI, some credit would go to EY for convincing that person to work on friendly AI.
Eh, it looks like we're becoming the New Hippies or the New New Age. The "sons of Bayes and 4chan" instead of "the sons of Marx and Coca-Cola". Lots of theorizing, lots of self-improvement and wisdom-generation, some of which is quite genuine, lots of mutual reassuring that it's the rest of the world that's insane and of breaking free of oppressive conventions... but under all the foam surprisingly little is actually getting done, apparently.
However, humanity might look back on us forty years from now and say: "those guys were pr...
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.