>> The notion that you need to know as much as a creator to critic their works is childish and immature.

Schmidhuber is not a "creator" in the sense that Pekinpah, or Coppola, are "creators" and his works are not works of art that can be experienced and criticised by anyone based on aesthetics alone (even though aesthetics also can take a lot of honing).

In any case my comment was that, to propose a better interpretation of the work described by Schmidhuber (not "to point out their biases and fallacies", as you say), you need to know that work at least as well as him. Otherwise, you find yourself criticising the work of someone who knows more than you know.

I don't know about you, but I've done that in the past and it made me look and feel like a fool. You may think you are "sufficiently well versed about the topics discussed in this article" but if you so dismiss the need for general knowledge, beyond the contents of one article, then there may easily be any amount of knowledge that you're missing and that makes you think you know all you need, simply because you don't know what you don't know.

Remember what Socrates, the wisest of men, said: "I know one thing, that I know nothing, Jon Snow".

I may have garbled that a bit there. But you get the picture. Arrogance cannot replace knowledge. Never assume that you know more than you need to know to prove wrong an expert in a field of knowledge as deep and with as long a history as AI, just because you have an internet connection.

Finally, nobody "worships" LeCun or Schmidhuber. What people admire is their knowledge and the hard work they put into acquiring that knowledge. And the reason they admire it is because anyone who's ever try to get to grips with a scientific subject understands how much hard work it takes to acquire knowledge.