Yeah, to compare Yudkowsky to Hubbard I've read accounts of people who read Dianetics or Science of Survival and thought "this is genius!" and I'm scratching my head and it's like they never read Freud or Horney or Beck or Berne or Burns or Rogers or Kohut, really any clinical psychology at all, even anything in the better 70% of pop psychology. Like Hubbard, Yudkowsky is unreadable, rambling [1] and inarticulate -- how anybody falls for it boggles my mind [2], but hey, people fell for Carlos Castenada who never used a word of the Yaqui language or mentioned any plant that grows in the desert in Mexico but has Don Juan give lectures about Kant's Critique of Pure Reason [3] that Castenada would have heard in school and you would have heard in school too if you went to school or would have read if you read a lot.

I can see how it appeals to people like Aella who wash into San Francisco without exposure to education [4] or philosophy or computer science or any topics germane to the content of Sequences -- not like it means you are stupid but, like Dianetics, Sequences wouldn't be appealing if you were at all well read. How is people at frickin' Oxford or Stanford fall for it is beyond me, however.

[1] some might even say a hypnotic communication pattern inspired by Milton Erickson

[2] you think people would dismiss Sequences because it's a frickin' Harry Potter fanfic, but I think it's like the 419 scam email which is riddled by typos which is meant to drive the critical thinker away and, ironically in the case of Sequences, keep the person who wants to cosplay as a critical thinker.

[3] minus any direct mention of Kant

[4] thus many of the marginalized, neurodivergent, transgender who left Bumfuck, AK because they couldn't live at home and went to San Francisco to escape persecution as opposed to seek opportunity