For all their talk of Bayesianism, nobody is going to check your bio and say, "Hmm, he's a professor of mathematics with 20 publications in artificial intellgence; maybe I should take his opinion as seriously as that of the high-school dropout who has no experience building AI systems."

Actually, that was the first thing I did, not sure about other people. What I saw was:

• Teaches at what appears to be a small private liberal arts college, not a major school.

• Out of 20 or so publications listed on http://www.richardloosemore.com/papers, a bunch are unrelated to AI, others are posters and interviews, or even "unpublished", which are all low-confidence media.

• Several contributions are entries in conference proceedings (are they peer-reviewed? I don't know) .

• A number are listed as "to appear", and so impossible to evaluate.

• A few are apparently about dyslexia, which is an interesting topic, but not obviously related to AI.

• One relevant paper was in H+ magazine, a place I have never heard of before and apparently not a part of any well-known scientific publishing outlet, like Springer.

• I could not find any external references to RL's work except through links to Ben Goertzel (IEET was one exception).

As a result, I was unable to independently evaluate RL's expertise level, but clearly he is not at the top of the AI field, unlike say, Ben Goertzel. Given his poorly written posts and childish behavior here, indicative of an over-inflated ego, I have decided that whatever he writes can be safely ignored. I did not think of him as a crackpot, more like a noise maker.

Admittedly, I am not sold on Eliezer's ideas, either, since many other AI experts are skeptical of them, and that's the only thing I can go by, not being an expert in the field myself. But at least Eliezer has done several impossible things in the last decade or so, which commands a lot of respect, while Richard appears to be drifting along.