kadathinthecoldwaste replied to your post “pickmanslovelymodel replied to your post: I act like my interest in…”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I recall there being a time in which you liked Yudkowsky relatively unironically. That would seem to corroborate your suspicion that this relates to the way you come to like people more generally.
You’re right, though that was before I knew about a lot of his weirder characteristics (which also happen to be his worse characteristics), like his request that people donate as much money as possible to his foundation because it’s the best possible way they can help humanity, even though all they seem to do is write blog posts, or his idea that future AIs may be able to effectively resurrect us by simulating us perfectly (which itself seems absurd to me, and is one of the premises of the infamously absurd Roko’s Basilisk). Or the whole AI box experiment, which I don’t think I can sum up in a pithy phrase.
It was also before he started writing his gigantic Harry Potter fanfic, which is one of the weirder things about him when taken in conjunction with everything else about him (e.g., given how much time he seems to spend on it, he’s basically telling people “donate as much money as you can to me so I can write my Harry Potter fanfic, which is crucial to the future of mankind”).
I actually still think he’s a fun, likable writer, and I like his posts on relatively ordinary stuff, like cognitive biases and philosophical zombies. But those are, as I said, ordinary – other people have written equally well about them, and while I think Yudkowsky’s posts on these issues are good, those posts aren’t what he’s famous for, or what he considers to be his most important work. (To some extent I just didn’t know this because I wasn’t paying enough attention, and to some extent it’s actually become more visible over the years, now that he has a blog of his own rather than a group blog with a theme of “biases,” which used to keep him somewhat restrained.)
So, to get to your actual point, I’m really not sure, because I’m not sure how much of the stuff I knew about him when I liked him counts as “weird.” E.g., I knew that he had a really confident, dramatic writing style, and I liked that, but I do think you can have that kind of style without having the kind of almost messianic arrogance that Yudkowsky turns out, in fact, to have.