If Yudkowsky can wow a crowd with science, sell his cure-all, and then skip town before everyone figures out it doesn’t work, that’s fine with me. Or actually, a better analogy would be wowing the crowd with science, promising to develop a cure-all, and then passing around a collection plate to help him do it.
That latter game can go on a long time before people wise up to the fact that he doesn’t have the foggiest idea how to develop a cure-all at all and that all of their money goes into marketing.
I can't quite figure out where Yudkowsky gets his basic allowance, though his name appears often enough in connection with that of billionaire Peter Thiel's that I suspect he has become one of Thiel's clients.
As I've said before, a client differs from a real employee. Thiel hires attorneys, accountants and, say, auto mechanics; but these people have marketable skills in demand elsewhere, and Thiel has to pay competitive wages for their services. They also have an incentive structure which makes them more likely to tell Thiel the facts about his affairs because they deal with observable reality, instead of telling Thiel what he wants to hear just to reinforce his belief system.
By contrast, the market has no demand for theorists of "Friendly AI," an imaginary technology out of science fiction. Moreover, any such "theorist" on a billionaire's payroll has no facts of observable reality to report about such a phantasm, though he can always keep stringing his patron along with bogus "progress" reports. Sounds like a good scam to me, as long as you can keep it going. Thiel can spend his money any way he wants, as long at he doesn't violate the law in doing so; but he might as well have put theologians, astrologers and haruspices on his payroll.
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