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.
Yes, populus and vulgus are basically synonims, with vulgus having the worst connotations ("folk" VS "the mob" basically), but semantic sliding and usage have made "popular" and its derivates get a base connotation. People don't as easily link "divulgation" and "vulgar".
It'd be nice to have a word that basically means "spreading elevated knowledge to the untrained" without making it sound like we're abasing it. Every time I hear the term "Popular Science" I think of Dr. Sheldon Cooper deriding and ridiculing any of his colleagues who are trying to do just that.
That sort of elitism just makes me sick*, and I've seen it in Real Life, even among scientists and from scientists towards engineers ("The Oompa Loompas of Science", another Sheldonism)..
If only for self-serving reasons, it is very counterproductive. The more people know about Science, the more likely they are to understand the importance of any given work... and fund it. Also, the more likely they are to show respect to science-folk and freaking listen to them. That means investing time and effort to make this stuff reach the masses, and it's perfectly understandable that a researcher spend their entire career on that: understanding scientific concepts proprely and then managing to grab untrained people's interest and eloquently explain advanced concepts to them so that they grasp even a pale reflection of them is not trivial.