Possibly. That's not a word I trust myself to use correctly. What I meant is that the object-level claims require a lot of time and energy to evaluate, and it's sometimes reasonable to use a heuristic like "sex cults are not trustworthy" to save time, but if you've already read the arguments then the heuristic loses almost all value.

Yudkowsky and friends believe many things, and reasonable people can disagree about many of them, but "at least 10% risk of extinction if we don't slow down" is a relatively straightforward conclusion based on the offensive capabilities of unreleased models and the terrible state of biosecurity and cybersecurity.

Even without AI, the risk of extinction might be above 10% if people with the relevant skills were interested in using them that way. AI adds an alien willingness to achieve poorly specified goals at any cost.

Hm I think in terms of "can I trust a group of people" we're talking about heuristics yes as in: "how can I quickly approximate an answer to the question of trust?"