Let's not attack people through their looks.
Consider Shrek. The story is made to subvert the trope that the ugly person is the villain, as it was in Disney movies.
But the real point isn’t some Platonic view of Beauty. It is about expectations. Like how advertisers use people wearing lab coats to subliminally feed credibility into the words of actors.
You may wish to be free of such bias, and you may even work to raise your own awareness and strive to critically examine the message of people. And let us all work towards such a world. But we should not pretend such a world exists today, despite our desires. It is a world that may exist in the future once we mature as a species.
Until that day arrives, advertisers and political movements will use our biases against us.
My claim isn’t that yudkowski is ugly, it is that he represents a trope that is being used to bias his message.
He appears to make an effort to look good just like most everyone else. If he was trying to look a certain way he might have tattoos or have died his hair. He doesn't, that I know of.
You seem to be policing a small recent decision he made to wear a hat.
Just like I didn’t create the trope of a scientist wearing a white lab coat. But if someone is doing a 2 min video sketch of a scientist, it is a good visual aid to include a white lab coat to communicate to an audience the role of a character.
And in the same way, a top hat would communicate a certain kind of character in a movie.
In the same way, there is a communication of a particular kind of character with other hat choices.
But why should he not be allowed to wear one? Again, you're policing. It's a discriminatory dick move.
He can wear anything he wants. So can you. So can anyone.
If he wants to, and for all I care, he can dress up like a clown. Or dress up like a jester. Or he could wear Gucci or Prada. Or wear steampunk leather outfits like he is in the world of mad max. Or he could go clean cut preppy. He can wear a fedora and a trilby on top of one another.
But, by personal choice and temperament, he wants to dress as he dresses. It just so happens that his personal preference aligns with a particular trope. A particularly uncool trope in popular culture.
I’m pointing out that alignment. I am not making him dress that way and I am not forcing culture to judge him.
It takes a lot less effort to generate your superficial criticism than it takes the GP to reply.
Fortunately, he did reply in a sibling post, but he didn't have to.
I'm not buying this alternative reality where I'm trolling by pushing back on mocking someone's choice of a hat that is one of a limited number of common hat styles.
And yet he doesn't think it is worth the effort to take off his trilby hat in order to come across as marginally more respectable to the average person? When the way he is choosing to present himself is undermining his own message then yes, it is worth bringing up.
It's sort of unfixable because the taste-makers at NYT and WaPo sorted themselves into the conformist camp so early in their lives that anyone outside that camp is trivially portrayable as "weird" to them.