I agree, and I think your point applies equally well to the original Eliezer Zombie discussion, as to this very post. In both cases, trying to extrapolate from “I totally disagree with this person on [some metaphysical philosophical questions]” to “these people are idiots who are wrong all the time, even on more practical questions”, seems pretty tenuous.
To be fair to the OP, I don’t think that he was saying you should not consider the views of Yudkowsky- in fact he admits that Yudkowsky has some great thoughts and that he is an innovator.
OP observes that he himself for a long time reflexively deferred to Yudkowksy. I think his objective with his post was to point out some questions on which he thought Yudkowsky was pretty clearly wrong (although it is not clear that he accomplished this). His goal was not to urge people not to read or consider Yudkowsky, but rather to urge people not to reflexively defer to him.
Well put! Though one nitpick: I didn’t defer to Eliezer much. Instead, I concluded that he was honestly summarizing the position. So I assumed physicalism was true because I assumed, wrongly, that he was correctly summarizing the zombie argument.
I agree, and I think your point applies equally well to the original Eliezer Zombie discussion, as to this very post. In both cases, trying to extrapolate from “I totally disagree with this person on [some metaphysical philosophical questions]” to “these people are idiots who are wrong all the time, even on more practical questions”, seems pretty tenuous.
To be fair to the OP, I don’t think that he was saying you should not consider the views of Yudkowsky- in fact he admits that Yudkowsky has some great thoughts and that he is an innovator.
OP observes that he himself for a long time reflexively deferred to Yudkowksy. I think his objective with his post was to point out some questions on which he thought Yudkowsky was pretty clearly wrong (although it is not clear that he accomplished this). His goal was not to urge people not to read or consider Yudkowsky, but rather to urge people not to reflexively defer to him.
Well put! Though one nitpick: I didn’t defer to Eliezer much. Instead, I concluded that he was honestly summarizing the position. So I assumed physicalism was true because I assumed, wrongly, that he was correctly summarizing the zombie argument.