> Why is Yudkowsky taken seriously?

  Trivialities    Annoyances    Immediate harm     X-Risk
  |------------------------------------------------------|
         \----stuff you mention-------/
                                 \---stuff Eliezer------/
                                      wrote about

> The crackpot "hard takeoff" hysteria only distracts from reasonable discourse about these risks and how to mitigate them.

IDK, I feel endless hand-wringing about copyright and deepfakes distract from risks of actual, significant harm at scale, some of which you also mentioned.