I think narcissistic, delusional autodidacts are always lolcows. And the Affair of Roko's Basilisk was definitely a chimpout.
The Roko's Basilisk affair was an
epic chimpout.
The only difference between Schlomo and other cows is a slight degree of social competence that has allowed him to gather a following.
It even had the classic BALEET EVERYTHING lolcow moment where Yudkowsky threw a tantrum, denounced everyone, and deleted all discussion of the subject, because he was that terrified by the idea.
Here's a particularly hilarious self-justification by Yuddo the Clown after the fact:
If I had to state the basic quality of this situation which I overlooked, it wouldn’t so much be the Streisand Effect as the existence of a large fraction of humanity—thankfully not the whole species—that really really wants to sneer at people, and which will distort the facts as they please if it gives them a chance for a really good sneer. Especially if the targets can be made to look like nice bully-victims. Then the sneering is especially fun. To a large fraction of the Internet, targets who are overly intelleshual, or targets who go around talking using big words when they aren’t official licensed Harvard professors, or targets who seem like they take all that sciunce ficshun stuff seriously, seem like especially nice bully-victims.
Interpreting my deleting the post as uncritical belief in its contents let people get in a really good sneer at the fools who, haha, believed that their devil god would punish the unbelievers by going backward in time.
Tell me that isn't a classic lolcow's lament. The big mean haters bullying someone for being too much of a genius!
And as for other things, having a peer reviewed article rejected by literally every relevant publication for being arrant nonsense, and then, instead of taking the clue and either re-working it or realizing the idea is bullshit, creating a bogus publication to self-publish it, is Kent Hovind levels of denialism.
About the only way he isn't a lolcow is actually having a following of people who take him seriously, but then, Kent Hovind has that, too.
His peer-rejected paper is also better written than Hovind's bogus Ph.D. thesis for a diploma mill, but has about as much academic merit.
