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That's fair, this is an intellectual space rife with people who have complicated beliefs, so generalizing has to be merely instrumental.
That said I think it is an accurate model of politically relevant doomerism. The revealed preferences of Yuddites is to get paid by the establishment to make sure the tech doesn't rock the boat and respects the right moral fads. If they really wanted to just avoid doom at any cost, they'd be engaging in a lot more terrorism.
It's the same argument Linkola deploys against the NGO environmentalist movement: if you really think that the world is going to end if a given problem isn't solved, and you're not willing to discard bourgeois morality to solve the problem, then you are either a terrible person by your own standards, or actually value bourgeois morality more than you do solving the problem.
I feel like this is unfair. The hardcore Yuddites are not on the Trust & Safety teams at big LLM companies. However, I agree that there are tons of "AI safety" people who've chosen lucrative corporate jobs whose output feeds into the political-correctness machine. But at least they get to know what's going on that way and have at least potentially minor influence. The alternative is... be a full-time protester with little resources, clout, or up-to-date knowledge?
The hardcore Yuddites were pissed at those teams using the word "Safety" for a category that included sometimes-reading-naughty-words risk as a central problem and existential risk as an afterthought at most. Some were pissed enough to rename their own philosophy from "AI Safety" to "AI Notkilleveryoneism" just because being stuck with a stupid-sounding neologism is a cheap price to pay to have a word that can't be so completely hijacked again.
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