> 1. Dogmatic adulation of Yudkowski as a "savior" figure.
They're just copying the man himself, who sees himself that way. But before you dismiss that as cultish, be sure you fully understand the problem he's trying to solve and how instrumental he has been to solving it so far (in terms of raising money, convincing people, building a community, knocking down bad arguments, etc.).
> 2. An almost immune response resistance to "practical" approaches to the Friendly AI problem.
What you have to bear in mind is that there are plenty of "practical" approaches to the Friendly AI that are simple, elegant - and wrong. Have some humility and note that if it was that easy, someone would have published a peer-reviewed solution already and that would be that.
> In light of #2, the community's serious consideration of un-testable scenarios like Roko's Basilisk
The community rejected it (with help of a site I contribute to, RationalWiki), and probably would have rejected it faster and more decisively if Yudkowsky hadn't unsuccessfully tried to censor all discussion of it.
> A flavor of authoritarianism, racism and sexism from former founder as Michael Anissimov.
Anissimov is indeed a straight-out fascist, in my view - but that just shows bad judgement on the part of Yudkowsky, that should not be used to tar the entire community with the same brush.
> Critical lack of diversity in backgrounds and approaches to ML/AI, which keeps the thought process fairly insular. For example you never see these people talking/attending AI conferences, and I'm not sure I have ever seen them at the AGI conference. AFAIK also they only publish in-house with liberal internal reference.
They are starting to publish in mainstream venues but most of their output has been online so far. Also, this stuff is hard, it's not like your typical "add another epicycle, cite self again" stuff of a lot of scientific research. And they are not trying to maximise the number of papers they publish, but rather trying to make progress on a specific research agenda. The former objective is not the same as the latter and could even impede the latter.