Pat and Maude’s arguments seem somewhat more reasonable if they’re essentially saying “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you high-status?” Since nearly everyone (including many people who explicitly claim not to) places a high value on status at least within some social sphere, and status is instrumentally useful for so many goals even if you don’t value it terminally, a human can be assumed to already be trying as hard as they can to increase their status, and thus it’s a decent predictive proxy for a their general ability to achieve their goals. “I hesitate to call anyone a rationalist other than the person smiling down from atop a huge pile of utility.” (Eliezer himself has in fact acquired impressive amounts of status in many of the spheres he seems to care about, so this is quite a weak argument against him, but the same is probably not true for most of the audience of this piece.)
Pat and Maude’s arguments seem somewhat more reasonable if they’re essentially saying “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you high-status?” Since nearly everyone (including many people who explicitly claim not to) places a high value on status at least within some social sphere, and status is instrumentally useful for so many goals even if you don’t value it terminally, a human can be assumed to already be trying as hard as they can to increase their status, and thus it’s a decent predictive proxy for a their general ability to achieve their goals. “I hesitate to call anyone a rationalist other than the person smiling down from atop a huge pile of utility.” (Eliezer himself has in fact acquired impressive amounts of status in many of the spheres he seems to care about, so this is quite a weak argument against him, but the same is probably not true for most of the audience of this piece.)