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Notes -
That one's a bit unfair. I hold no brief for Yudkowsky, and yes it's very enticing to have a laugh about his weight struggles and marriage failure, but that just goes to show that the human heart is unfathomable and being smart is not enough to solve all problems (yes, Rationalists should have known this already, but they tended/tend to be young when they caught the bug, and youth is the time of idealism and overblown ambition and passionate conviction that previous generations knew nothing but this time we all know the secret to success is X and once we implement that, it will all work out!)
So yeah - his marriage broke up, like a lot of ordinary people undergo. You can try to make things work, but in the end if you're incompatible, or you both want different things, or one party feels beyond reason that they've fallen out of love and what remains isn't a good enough reason to stay, then there's not much can be done save to keep the split as amicable as possible.
He's an ordinary guy, after all, it turns out! The philosophy may still be sound, we don't judge the art by the artist in most cases after all, so if we're older and a bit more mature we can go "yeah, emotions are complicated, who knew?" and argue for/against his views on their merits, not on "ha-ha, you're a romantic failure!"
Does he now claim that he acted irrationally with respect to gaining weight? Or does he claim that because of physics and metabolism it's just impossible for him to lose weight? There's a difference between "he recognizes that it's a failure of rationality" and "he uses rationality in a nonsensical way".
An important part of the philosophy here is the claim that you can improve rationality in a domain-general way. That you could learn to avoid e.g. motivated reasoning in a way that would work on all topics simultanuously, so that your preformance in even the weakest field that a critic might adversarially pick will be ok (and that he has done this, obviously). Claiming to have a metabolic defect that would be lethal in the ancestral environment is strong evidence against that.
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