I vividly remember encountering Eliezer Yudkowsky and his Sequences 20 years ago. I remember thinking: even if these people talk and act like crazy cultists, still, let me bend over backwards to be epistemically virtuous, and entertain their ideas on their merits, as very few academics would. Scott Aaronson is an experiment to discover how many timeshares one man can afford on a professor’s salary. He has never in his life not bought the extended warranty.