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I want to be clear that this is coming from somebody who once liked his writings. I didn't worship him. I didn't learn much from him. But he has always had a fun and unique writing style.
But believe me, there's no confusion here. Capital-R Rationality may be something that crystalized around LessWrong and the Sequences, but the concepts of rationality are hardly new; we're building on a legacy of humans struggling to explain the Universe that has been built over thousands of years. Yudkowsky wrote some entertaining essays, some of which are insightful (and some of which are silly, particularly when he veers into fields of science he doesn't know well). You could credit him with collecting and indexing a few good ideas. But he's very bad at practicing what he preaches - Scott, for instance, is far better at actually making and testing predictions than Yudkowsky. I suppose cult leaders don't usually lower themselves to the level of scrubbing the temple floor.
As for AI Safety, no. No, no, no. There's absolutely no defense for his egotistical claim in the April Fool's post. Futurists have been discussing AI safety since at least Asimov's Three Laws. What do you think AI researchers did before him, shrug and go "hmm, I wonder if making this neural net behave is something I should study sometime"? Maybe I can trace one particular flavour of the "edifice" to his writings - superintelligence-goes-FOOM-breaks-out-of-black-box-and-builds-nanotech-in-a-bio-lab - but AI safety as a whole would still exist and look pretty much the same without him. Arguably, it would be healthier, with the many people with different intelligent perspectives not being drowned out by his singular view and stubborn insistence that he knows the unknowable future.
Thank you for clarifying your points, but I think this ultimately falls into a disagreement about what the invention of a concept is. It seems you don't really disagree that Yudkowsky invented Rationality as a subculture, you just don't find it particularly impressive - which is fine, but I doubt most readers are confused reading about the difference between the subculture and the idea of rationality.
On AI Safety, I am very skeptical of your claim that current discussion around AI safety would look the same without Yudkowsky. I'm sure in a counterfactual world that someone like Nick Bostrom or whomever would still come up with many of the ideas, but this is true for most things. Yudkowsky definitely had an outsized influence, and I think if the next AI researcher survey put out a question about major influences, he would definitely perform very well.
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