-It took some pretty large likelihood ratios to promote the "obvious" explanation
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-"sacrificed all hope of success in favor of maintaining his own sanity by CC'ing you guys (which I think he was correct to do conditional on email happening at all)"
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-But the guy doesn't _market_ himself as being like any other public intellectual in the current year. As Ben put it, Yudkowsky's "claim to legitimacy really did amount to a claim that while nearly everyone else was criminally insane (causing huge amounts of damage due to disconnect from reality, in a way that would be criminal if done knowingly), he almost uniquely was not." Call me a sucker, but ... I _actually believed_ Yudkowsky's marketing story. The Sequences _really were just that good_. That's why it took so much fuss and wasted time to generate a likelihood ratio large enough to falsify that story.
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-Ben compared Yudkowsky to Eliza the spambot therapist in my story ["Blame Me for Trying"](/2018/Jan/blame-me-for-trying/). Scrupulous rationalists were paying rent to something claiming moral authority, which had no concrete specific plan to do anything other than run out the clock. Minds like mine don't surive long-run in this ecosystem. If we wanted minds that do "naïve" inquiry instead of playing savvy Kolmogorov games to survive, we needed an interior that justified that level of trust.
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-[TODO: weave in "set in motion a machine" 19 Apr?]
+Ben explained that Yudkowsky wasn't a private person who might plausibly have the right to be wrong on the internet in peace. Yudkowsky was a public figure whose claim to legitimacy really did amount to a claim that while nearly everyone else was criminally insane (causing huge amounts of damage due to disconnect from reality, in a way that would be criminal if done knowingly), he almost uniquely was not—and he had he had set in motion a machine (the "rationalist community") that was continuing to raise funds and demand work from people for below-market rates based on that claim—"work for me or the world ends badly", basically.