It's not just that they are "weirdos"

It's that they're a very insular, incestuous sub-culture whose origins come from early 2000s science fiction message boards and which has been distilled through the cod utilitarianism of the Effective Altruism people.

That doesn't mean the ideas are "bad" because "bad" is some infectious transitive property. But it does mean they are intellectually homogeneous; disdain experts in other fields; treat ethics as mathematical functions with infinite-sized terms; and whose opinions about AI pre-date the development of LLMs themselves.

They also - I will be direct here - have a history of handwaving bad behaviour, conflicts of interest, and recklessness.

When cliques take over something - businesses, technologies, politics - it means intellectual diversity leaves the room and important decisions get made, not due to practical reasons, but increasingly arcane wranglings within the clique itself