I'm not advocating for that, I'm just saying the whole thing is performative and gets taken at face value in a way that it should not be.

If you wanted to be a contrarian concerned about x-risks go try to find $1B to pay Embraer or another minor aviation vendor to make a plane to do stratospheric aerosol injection or something.

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If you want my diagnosis it is, in a time of lower social inequality cults frequently tried to steal labor and money from a broad base of people.

For instance in the L. Ron Hubbard age Scientology would treat you as a "public" if you had money to take and if you didn't or after you'd been bled dry you would be be recruited as "staff". Hubbard thought it was immoral to take donations without giving something in return so it was centered around getting people to spend on "auditing". Between 1950 Dianetics and the current Miscavige age, income and wealth has gotten concentrated and he changed that single element of the Hubbard doctrine and now it is all about recruiting money from "whales" who donated to the International Association of Scientologists (IAS)

https://tonyortega.substack.com/p/scientologys-ias-trophy-wi...

(A good backgrounder on pernicious cults is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapping:_America%27s_Epidemic...)

In the case of the Yudkowsky thing the mass just doesn't have a lot of money to steal after paying the rent and turning the labor of the unskilled and ignorant (even if they think otherwise) is a case of the juice not being worth the squeeze, so the point is to build a Potempkin village that looks like a social movement that creates a frame where you can get money from sources such as "SBF steals it and gives it to the movement" as well as "rich kids who inherited a lot of money but don't have a lot of sense"