I agree that titotal should probably not have used the word "bad" but disagree with the reasoning.  The problem is that "bad" is extremely nonspecific; it doesn't tell the reader what titotal thinks is wrong with their models, even at a very low resolution.  They're just "bad".  There are other words that might have been informative, if used instead.

Of course, if he had multiple different kinds of issues with their models, he might have decided to omit adjectives from the title for brevity's sake and simply explained the issues in the post.  But if he thought the main issue was (for the sake of argument) that the models were misleading, then I think it would be fine for him to say that in the title.

If I'm understanding your question correctly, that part of my expectation is almost entirely conditional on being in a post-ASI world.  Before then, if interest in (effectively) reducing animal suffering stays roughly the size of "EA", then I don't particularly expect it to be become cheap enough to subsize people farming animals to raise them in humane conditions.  (This expectation becomes weaker with longer AI timelines, but I haven't though that hard about what the world looks like in 20+ years without strong AI, and how that affects the marginal cost of various farmed animal welfare interventions.)

So my timelines on that are pretty much just my AI timelines, conditioned on "we don't all die" (which are shifted a bit longer than my overall AI timelines, but not by that much).

Yudkowsky explicitly repudiates his writing from 2001 or earlier:

You should regard anything from 2001 or earlier as having been written by a different person who also happens to be named “Eliezer Yudkowsky”. I do not share his opinions.

that is crying wolf today

This is assuming the conclusion, of course.

and ask them if they are trying to get loans in order to increase their donations to projects decreasing AI risk, which makes sense if they do not expect to pay the interest in full due to high risk of extinction.

Fraud is bad.

In any case, people already don't have enough worthwhile targets for donating money to, even under short timelines, so it's not clear what good taking out loans would do.  If it's a question of putting one's money where one's mouth is, I personally took a 6-figure paycut in 2022 to work on reducing AI x-risk, and also increased my consumption/spending.

Post-singularity worlds where people have the freedom to cause enormous animal suffering as a byproduct of legacy food production methods, despite having the option to not do so fully subsidized by third parties, seem like they probably overlap substantially with worlds where people have the freedom to spin up large quantities of digital entities capable of suffering and torture them forever.  If you think such outcomes are likely, I claim that this is even more worthy of intervention.  I personally don't expect to have either option in most post-singularity worlds where we're around, though I guess I would be slightly less surprised to have the option to torture animals than the option to torture ems (though I haven't thought about it too hard yet).

But, as I said above, if you think it's plausible that we'll have the option to continue torturing animals post-singularity, this seems like a much more important outcome to try to avert than anything happening today.

I think you misunderstood my framing; I should have been more clear.

We can bracket the case where we all die to misaligned AI, since that leads to all animals dying as well.

If we achieve transformative AI and then don't all die (because we solved alignment), then I don't think the world will continue to have an "agricultural industry" in any meaningful sense (or, really, any other traditional industry; strong nanotech seems like it ought to let you solve for nearly everything else).  Even if the economics and sociology work out such that some people will want to continue farming real animals instead of enjoying the much cheaper cultured meat of vastly superior quality, there will be approximately nobody interested in ensuring those animals are suffering, and the cost for ensuring that they don't suffer will be trivial.

Of course, this assumes we solve alignment and also end up pointed in the right direction.  For a variety of reasons it seems pretty unlikely to me that we manage to robustly solve alignment of superintelligent AIs while pointed in "wrong"^[1] directions; that sort of philosophical unsophistication is why I'm pessimistic on our odds of success.  But other people disagree, and if you think it's at all plausible that we achieve TAI in a way that locks in reflectively-unendorsed values which lead to huge quantities of animal suffering, that seems like it ought to dominate effectively all other considerations in terms of interventions w.r.t. future animal welfare.

1. ^{^}

   Like those that lead to enormous quantities of trivially preventable animal suffering for basically dumb contingent reasons, i.e. "the people doing the pointing weren't really thinking about it at the time, and most people don't actually care about animal suffering at all in most possible reflective equilibria".

Is this post conditioning on AI hitting a wall ~tomorrow, for the next few decades?  The analysis seems mostly reasonable, if so, but I think the interventions for ensuring that animal welfare is good after we hit transformative AI probably look very different from interventions in the pretty small slice of worlds where the world looks very boring in a few decades.

This is a bit of a sidenote, but while it's true that "LWers" (on average) have a different threshold for how valuable criticism needs to be to justify its costs, it's not true that "we" treat it as a deontic good.  Observe, as evidence, the many hundreds of hours that various community members (including admins) have spent arguing with users like Said about whether their style of engagement and criticism was either effective at achieving its stated aims, or even worth the cost if it was^[1].  "We" may have different thresholds, but "we" do not think that all criticism is necessarily good or worth the attentional cost.

The appropriate threshold is an empirical question whose answer will vary based on social context, people, optimization targets, etc.

Object-level, I probably agree that EA spends too much of its attention on bad criticism, but I also think it doesn't allocate enough attention to good criticism, and this isn't exactly the kind of thing that "nets out".  It's more of a failure of taste/caring about the right things, which is hard to fix by adjusting the "quantity" dial.

1. ^{^}

   He has even been subjected to moderation action more than once, so the earlier claim re: gadflies doesn't stand up either.

No easily summarizable comment on the rest of it, but as a LessWrong dev I do think the addition of Quick Takes to the front page of LW was very good - my sense is that it's counterfactually responsible for a pretty substantial amount of high quality discussion.  (I haven't done any checking of ground-truth metrics, this is just my gestalt impression as a user of the site.)

My claim is something closer to "experts in the field will correctly recognize them as obviously much smarter than +2 SD", rather than "they have impressive credentials" (which is missing the critically important part where the person is actually much smarter than +2 SD).

I don't think reputation has anything to do with titotal's original claim and wasn't trying to make any arguments in that direction.

Also... putting that aside, that is one bullet point from my list, and everyone else except Qiaochu has a wikipedia entry, which is not a criteria I was tracking when I wrote the list but think decisively refutes the claim that the list includes many people who are not publicly-legible intellectual powerhouses.  (And, sure, I could list Dan Hendryks.  I could probably come up with another twenty such names, even though I think they'd be worse at supporting the point I was trying to make.)