I’ve had related feelings as well but not as extreme. I won’t use any of the words that you used to describe how I felt. I want to give a rough approximation of what I mean by not as extreme. I don’t know how helpful or accurate this will be but if I think it might give some perspective so I’ll put a number to not that extreme. If your feelings are as strong as X then I would say mine are 0.2 to 0.4 of X.
I’ll bring up something related to this. This discussion was on basecamp but I think it got deleted. I might be misrepresenting or misremembering somethings but I think I remember the right gist. I have a bad attitude in life. I generally try to find reasons to declare people as bad or waste in the sense that what they are doing isn’t worth much or they are actually causing harm. In that discussion I asked Elliot about Musk and how his achievement rank compared to all humans in who have ever lived. Elliot is critical of Musk. One one hand I want to believe that Musk isn’t actually accomplishing something great or is causing harm in some ways (because of my bias) on the other hand I think that Elliot doesn’t like Musk because Elliot is jealous of Musk. I think Elliot is jealous of Musk because so many people think Elon is the most important person alive and is solving most important problems facing humanity but Elliot doesn’t get as much appreciation even though he is the greatest philosopher alive. This is an unsettled debate in my mind and this stuff makes me considerably emotional which makes me think that I’m very likely wrong here.
In that same discussion I brought up Eliezer Yudkowsky in context of an article that Elliot wrote on him Curiosity – Eliezer Yudkowsky Is a Fraud. I haven’t read the article, I haven’t read anything by EY. I just used the title of the article to help me with my bias of wanting to reject people and discard them as waste or bad. I don’t remember how the conversation went on but I remember that Elliot said he liked EY’s book and found some things useful. The book is on philosophy which was even more surprising to me. How can Elliot find value in someone on whom he wrote an article titled that someone is a fraud. That further strengthened my realization that Elliot thinks much more in depth than I was assuming. I was projecting my negativity bias onto Elliot.
This is my input on the negativity point. When Elliot points out how irrationality is pervasive and reason for so many problems, it can be hard to know how that makes Elliot feel. I think that if most people were to write an article titled person X is fraud they would have negative feelings towards them and won’t find anything of value in them. Elliot is not like most people.