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David Thorstad's readers and funders are effective altruists that want someone to tell them how bad they are. I don't think they care much about the strength of the arguments, and they might even prefer weak arguments to strong ones. He collects things from sneerclub, Torres, and the most downvoted comments and posts to stir drama. People enjoy that enough to read him and fund him.
Hearing Altman talk about safety reminds me of Sam Bankman-Fried testifying in congress that FTX was all about protecting consumers, their main goal was risk management, and they strongly supported regulation.
Worth noting that Sam Altman has a history of hostile power plays e.g. at reddit
Paul Graham has written multiple times about Sam's thirst/skill for power:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-destiny
http://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1726248463355281633
This is wonderfully written, thank you.
I do worry that "further division and tribal warfare" seems the default, unless there's an active effort at reconciliation.
Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) tweets things like:
LessWrong compares OpenAI with Phillip Morris and, in general, seems very critical of OpenAI. "I've seen a lot more public criticism lately".
I doubt that it's actually good to have this strong division, and it might have positive EV to try to move into a more cooperative direction, and try to lower the temperature and divisiveness.