SI/LW sometimes gives the impression of being a doomsday cult,
Because it fits the pattern exactly. If you have top astronomers worrying about meteorite hitting earth, that is astronomy. If you have nonastronomers (with very few astronomers) worrying about meteorite hitting earth, that's doomsday cult. Or at very best, a vague doomsday cult. edit: Just saying, that's how I classify, works for me. If you have instances (excluding SIAI) where this method of classification fails in damaging way, I am very interested to hear of them, to update my classification method. I might be misclassifying something. I might just go through the list of things that i classified as cults, and classify some items on that list as non-cult, if the classification method fails.
It's worth discussing an issue as important as cultishness every so often, but as you might expect, this isn't the first time Less Wrong has discussed the meme of "SIAI agrees on ideas that most people don't take seriously? They must be a cult!"
ETA: That is, I'm not dismissing your impression, just saying that the last time this was discussed is relevant.
Why does SI/LW focus so much on AI-FOOM disaster, with apparently much less concern for things like
Why, for example, is lukeprog's strategy sequence titled "AI Risk and Opportunity", instead of "The Singularity, Risks and Opportunities"? Doesn't it seem strange to assume that both the risks and opportunities must be AI related, before the analysis even begins? Given our current state of knowledge, I don't see how we can make such conclusions with any confidence even after a thorough analysis.
SI/LW sometimes gives the impression of being a doomsday cult, and it would help if we didn't concentrate so much on a particular doomsday scenario. (Are there any doomsday cults that say "doom is probably coming, we're not sure how but here are some likely possibilities"?)