I kind of agree - since the Bostrom book there is a cottage industry of people with non-technical backgrounds writing papers about singularity thought experiments, and it does seem to be on the spectrum with hard sci-fi writing. A lot of these people are clearly intelligent, and it's not even that I think everything they say is wrong (I made similar assumptions long ago before I'd even heard of Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity, although at the time I would have guessed 2050). It's just that they seem to believe their thought process and Bayesian logic is more rigourous than it actually is.

c'mon man, you don't believe that, let's have a little less disingenuousness on the internet

How would you know what he believes?

There's hype and there's people calling bullshit. If you work from the assumption that the hype people are genuine, but the people calling bullshit can't be for real, that's how you get a bubble.

Because they are not the same in any way. It’s not a bunch of junior academics, it’s literally including someone who worked at OpenAI

I asked you how you know kridsdale3 believes X, and you're reply is basically, "because I believe Y". I hope you don't call yourself a rationalist, given that you're hazy on the meaning of "because" and struggle with theory of mind.

Sure, OpenAI put up with one of these safety larpers for a few years while it was part of their brand. Reasonable people can disagree on how much that counts for.

You're right it's not a bunch of junior academics. It's not even a bunch of junior academics. This stuff would never pass muster in a reputable academic peer-reviewed journal, so from an academic perspective, this is not even the JV stuff. That's why they have to found their own bizarro network of foundations and so on, to give the appearance of seriousness and legitimacy. This might fool people who aren't looking closely, but the trick does not work on real academics, nor does it work on the silent majority of those who are actually building the tech capabilities.