My beef with Yudikowsky is he's only got a hammer, so all the world's a nail. It's not that he doesn't know other tools exist. It's not that he hasn't seen screwdrivers on the shelves of others. It's that he's a zealous proselytizer of the Church of Hammers and all other tools are sacrilegious at best and witchcraft at worst. More than that, he uses rhetorical sleight-of-hand in order to make the casual observer think the screwdriver in his hand is actually a hammer, therefore all tasks can be accomplished with hammers. And should you call him on it, you're a heathen.

No, I will not tell you how I did it. Learn to respect the unknown unknowns.

And take it from a studied and practiced vomiter of word salad: SSC is a vomit of word salad. If you have a bright enough blizzard of bullshit you can hide false equivalency, groundless assertions and appeal-to-authority fallacies well enough to confuse the casual reader into believing they're ingesting facts and well-reasoned arguments.

This is the basic problem of the whole LessWrong microcosm: "It's not my opinion that women are irrational, it's a scientific fact. Here, let me snow you." "The world is really simple, it's just that everyone else is doing it completely fucking wrong." It all boils down to variations of "things will be different when I'm in charge" and the fact that uncredentialed sci fi nerds are bloviating about human nature and sociology is A-OK with other uncredentialed sci fid nerds but FOR FUCK'S SAKE this shit?

This is NEVER going to help you:

- win an argument

- convince anyone of anything

- figure out what your girlfriend is thinking

- help you understand why poor white men voted Trump

- get you laid

- help you buy a car

- teach you how to poach an egg

...or anything else useful. The phrase "deep research by Wikipedians far and wide" should scare the fucking socks off of you, not convince you you're imbibing from the font of wisdom.