It is true that he has no academic credentials, but people with academic credentials have been employed on the research program led by him: Andrew Critch for example, who has a PhD in math from UC Berkeley, and Jesse Liptrap who also has a math PhD from a prestigious department although I cannot recall which one.
It's not only that he has no academic credentials, he also has no accomplishments in the field. He has no relevant peer reviewed publications (in mainstream venues; of course he publishes stuff under his own institutions. I don't consider those peer reviewed). Even if you're skeptical about academia and only care about practical achievements... Yudkowsky is also not a businessman/engineer who built something. He doesn't actually work with AI, he hasn't built anything tangible, he just speaks about alignment in the most vague terms possible.
At best -- if one is feeling generous -- you could say he is a "philosopher of AI"... and not a very good one, but that's just my opinion.
Eliezer looks to me like a scifi fan who theorizes a lot, instead of a scientist. So why do (some) people pay any credence to his opinions on AI? He's not a subject matter expert!
Ok, but hundreds of thousands of people have worked for Google without being experts on AI. Anyone who employs one, doesn't automatically become more credible. If you believe that then I want you to know that this comment was written by an ex-Google employee and thus must be authoritative ;)
Good point! If I could write the comment over again, I'd probably leave out the ex-Googlers. But I thought of another math PhD who was happy to work for Eliezer's institute, Scott Garrabrant. I could probably find more if I did a search of the web.
If you believed (like Eliezer has since about 2003) that AI research is a potent danger, you are not going to do anything to help AI researchers. You are for example, not going to publish any insights you may have that might advance the AI state of the art.
Your comment is like dismissing someone who is opposed to human cloning on the grounds that he hasn't published any papers that advance the enterprise of human cloning and hasn't worked in a cloning lab.
> [...] remember the point I was responding to, namely, Eliezer should be ignored because he has no academic credentials.
That's not the full claim you were responding to.
You were responding to me, and I was arguing that Yudkowsky has no academic credentials, but also no background in the field he claims to be an expert on, he self-publishes and is not peer-reviewed by mainstream AI researchers or the scientific community, and he has no practical AI achievements either.
So it's not just lack of academic credentials, there's also no achievements in the field he claims to research. Both facts together present a damning picture of Yudkowsky.
To be honest he seems like a scifi author who took himself too seriously. He writes scifi, he's not a scientist.
OK, but other scientists think he is a scientist or an expert on AI. Stephen Wolfram for example sat down recently for a four-hour-long interview about AI with Eliezer, during which Wolfram refers to a previous (in-person) conversation the 2 had and says he hopes the 2 can have another (in-person) conversation in the future:
His book _Rationality: A-Z_ is widely admired including by people you would concede are machine-learning researchers: https://www.lesswrong.com/rationality
Anyway, this thread began as an answer to a question about the community of tens of thousands of people that has no better name than "the rationalists". I didn't want to get in a long conversation about Eliezer though I'm willing to continue to converse about the rationalists or on the proposition that AI is a potent extinction risk, which proposition is taken seriously by many people besides just Eliezer.
Also, this page lists 3 ex-Googlers as being currently employed by Eliezer's org: https://intelligence.org/team/
Nisan Steinnon who worked for Google also did some research work for the Eliezer's org.