• 1) Luke Muehlhauser, excutive director of SIAI, listed my attempt to interview AI researchers in his post 'Useful Things Volunteers Can Do Right Now'
• 2) Before writing anyone I asked for feedback and continued to ask for feedback and improved my questions.
• 3) I directly contacted SIAI via email several times asking them about how to answer replies I got from researchers.
• 4) All the interviews got highly upvoted.
• 5) I never claimed to be associated with SIAI.

XiXiDu doesn't understand SIAI's actual object-level claims...

I understand them well enough for the purpose of asking researchers a few questions. My karma score has been 5700+ at some point. Do you think that would have been possible without having a basic understanding of some of the underlying ideas?

...a wacky letter asking their opinions on an array of absurd-sounding claims with no coherent structure to them, which is exactly what he presents them with.

I think this is just unfair. I do not think that my email, or the questions I asked were wrong. There is also no way to ask a lot of researchers about this topic without sounding a bit wacky.

All you could do is 1) tell them to read the Sequences 2) not to ask them at all and just trust Eliezer Yudkowsky. 1) Won't work since they have no reason to suspect that Eliezer Yudkowsky knows some incredible secret knowledge they don't. 2) Is no option for me. He could tell me anything about AI and I would have no way to tell if he knows what he is talking about.