If you don't know it other than by name, that's not my problem. It was straightforward mathematics.

When did I claim no one at SI held your views on anthropics? And I really don't think anthropics could be called straightforward by anyone.

There are pathological, intuitively confusing cases such as the number example; reading a number is incredibly selective for it being that number, so the update, in fact, does pull the probability up.

Congratulations, you understood the point. Similarly, decent arguments are highly diagnostic of philosophical ability because most people couldn't make an even half-assed argument if they sat down and spent all day at it; by LW standards, most philosophy grads can't find their asses either, and that's a very selective filter as well (philosophy majors are the highest-scoring group on the GRE for both verbal and writing sections, and are around 4 or 5 for the math section below physics & mathematics as one would expect). Making an argument that doesn't instantly fail is sadly so rare that just seeing one moves you a long way towards '1 in a million'.

Yudkowsky is not exactly Ayn Rand level popular, is he? If that's what you're after, pick anyone more famous than Yudkowsky and you're done. Easy.

I never said that fame scaled smoothly with importance. If I had to put the cutoff where fame stops adding additional evidence, I think I'd put it somewhere upwards of a Wikipedia article.

Look back up, Muehlhauser has stated that it is a tough task choosing someone of Yudkowsky's level of philosophical ability.

Sure. You're fishing from a limited pool to begin with: there aren't many professional philosophers these days, their numbers are probably shrinking as humanities programs get pressured. To put some numbers in perspective: the annual East coast meeting of the American Philosophical Association (APA) is the biggest single gathering of philosophers (tenured professors, associates, adjuncts, grad students, etc) in the world as far as I know. It numbers ~2000 attendants. Making things even more difficult, if I were one of them, I doubt I would spend much time on MIRI/FHI-related issues even if I were a true believer: it'd be way too risky for my already extremely precarious career. (Recruiting-wise, it might be best just to try to find computer science people and have them try their hand at philosophy; there's a lot of them, they're almost as smart in general, they have direct familiarity with a lot of the issues, they'll have the right intuitions about things like 'computers really are just machines that do what the programs say', and funding is a lot easier for them.)

By the way there's a pattern, various Ayn Rands and Keith Ranieres and Ron Hubbards and other self improvement gurus slash philosophers slash world saviours are popular philosophers among non-philosophers but not recognized by other philosophers.

I've actually never heard of Keith Raniere despite growing up in NY and visiting RPI; Wikipedia doesn't do a good job of describing what's so bad about it... ("Expensive brainwashing"? Brainwashing doesn't work, that's why cults have annual attrition rates in the double-digits.)

Anyway; yes, I would agree that the previous points also increase the chance EY would fall into that category of frauds. After all, such frauds are also pretty rare, so it's hardly impossible for evidence to increase our beliefs both that EY is a good philosopher and also such a fraud.]

(An example: houses catching on fire are rare. Houses not on fire with red spotlights around them are also rare. If I see in the sky above a house in the woods flickering red light, this is consistent with both the house being on fire and them having set up spotlights for a party; and my beliefs in the possibility of a fire and the possibility of spot spotlights will both increase quite a bit even though they're mutually exclusive scenarios.)