Anyone finding themselves in the awkward position of wondering if he is a child among adults who may or may not be using innuendo? And that you think you understand a few of them, but aren't sure you do? To summarize my current state, Will Newsome is hitting some of my "take him seriously" heuristics pretty hard. At their center lies that he is taken far more seriously than most average posters think he should be taken, by some pretty big names who have been with this Eliezer centred rationality project since its start and have accrued quite a reputation for excellent judgement. He has also been a visiting fellow at the SI, which means obvious crackpottery should have been filtered.

I have several theories on this which I have constructed over the past few months but don't feel comfortable sharing right here, because I've stumbled on several caches of dangerous thinking. I have to keep squishing some ugh fields and bolstering others when exploring these ideas. Yet I also just can't come up and ask the right people to check my reasoning on any of them, their time is valuable and I'm not in their social circles anyway. I find myself blinking in confusion unsure if I'm being played for a fool or not. There is this strange current of, well insight and reasonableness in his comment history and ideas. Yet there is plain craziness as well interwoven into strange cloth. So I am asking the aspiring rationalist. I am asking the crowd. I am asking the uninitiated in whatever fictional or real troubles he often alludes to. I am asking LessWrong.

What is your position on Will Newsome? I wish to emphasise I am NOT asking about his behaviour in this thread in particular.