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The author of that post is a prominent Bay Area "rationalist," who have had a quasi-theistic relationship with the concept of all-powerful AIs for a couple decades now.

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So are they right or wrong about the sigmoids?

All of the point of that article is that most people that think something is a sigmoid think it'll bend just as they are publishing their analysis. And the article says, don't do that, assume it'll be related to how long we've been on the "goes up" part.

Nothing in that article says it's not a sigmoid.

I dunno. They've been saying this for decades, including in a very well read Harry Potter fanfic, and I'd always dismissed them as kooks, but maybe they're right in the end.

You are confusing Scott Alexander with Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Scott Alexander is a follower of Yudkowski and comes out of that general LessWrong space.

This is the plural they, not the singular they.

Saying the same thing for decades, when things progress over those decades along the general trend line that you were worried it would, is decent evidence of a prescient prediction. Climate scientists also seemed pretty kooky in the 80s when they sketched out their trendlines, but now their concerns are all over the headlines as reality caught up, and the same is becoming true of the AI safety people.

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