I like this. Or more generally, I like having "Advanced Sanity" in the name.

Curse me for presenting myself as someone having interesting secret knowledge. Now I get several PMs asking for details.

In short, this "incident" was about one or two SIAI folks making a couple of obvious errors of judgment, and in the case of the error that sparked the whole thing, getting heatedly defensive about it for a moment. Other SIAI folks however recognized the obvious mistakes as such, so the issue was resolved, even though unprofessional conduct was observed for a moment.

The actual mistakes were rather minor, nothing dramatic. The surprising thing was that heated defensiveness took place on the way to those mistakes getting corrected.

(And since Eliezer is the SIAI guy most often accused of arrogance, I'll additionally state that here that is not the case. Eliezer was very professional in the email exchange in question.)

No, not unusual. I had the same reaction, and assumed it's probably partly a deliberate joke to have such a placeholder name (or alternatively it's actually so that the Scientology connotation didn't occur to folks at SIAI).

I btw commented on this a couple of days ago in a comment to the SIAI blog, and note now that comments there seem to take a rather long time to be moderated for spam, as apparently no comments have appeared for many months. (Ok, sorry for the joke. More likely you've forgotten about the blog comments or something, than it really being about the spam moderation that commenters are told might take some time when they leave a comment.)

So, I have a few questions:

1. What are the most egregious examples of SI's arrogance?

Since you explicitly ask a question phrased thus, I feel obligated to mention that last April I witnessed a certain email incident that I thought was somewhat extremely bad in some ways.

I do believe that lessons have been learned since then, though. Probably there's no need to bring the matter up again, and I only mention it since according to my ethics it's the required thing to do when asked such an explicit question as above.

(Some readers may wonder why I'm not providing details here. That's because after some thought, I for my part decided against making the incident public, since I expect it might subsequently get misrepresented to look worse than what's fair. (There might be value in showing records of the incident to new SIAI employees as an example of how not to do things, though.))

Hmm, I for one don't share the negative reactions that several other commenters seem to feel now. I felt very glad upon reading this "leveling up" post.

I was especially thinking that this is a very cool first LW article for people to bump into (and therefore shared this on some social networks). In this vein, I very much like the criticized-by-some feature that every other word is a link to a previous article. It's useful for those new people who might be inspired to check this stuff out in more detail.

Yeah, I just thought I'd improve on your riff a bit, and add the part that pokes fun at me :)

Damn, my plan is backfiring. I will be remembered as an arrogant schmuck who was slightly funny in an unintended way.

Serves me right.

Yeah, I had similar thoughts actually. But I did end up thinking that this was good enough to link in a somewhat off-handed manner.

Though of course, mostly I just wanted to get myself on the public record, calling this a great success in the making at such a somewhat early stage, so that I look good when future generations look back a few thousand years from now :D

Also, I felt the need to post a link to this post on some social networks and describe it thus:

"And so it begins. The NYC folks have taken a significant step in bringing the LW community to a whole new level of real-world Awesomeness and Win. Expect great things to grow out of such developments."

Me too. Awesome. Thanks.