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I largely agree with your criticisms, but my impression is that most mainstream charities maintain a cultivated ignorance about their actual impact. I don't think much of our ability to define or measure the things we care about achieving, but at least EAs are pushing for a norm of trying to do so.
Yeah, if you're measuring "Did Curtains For The Congo really do any benefit for the people there with their fundraising campaign to send soft furnishings to Kinshasa?" you can certainly set up a norm of defining and measuring.
But AI is now the same kind of "we don't what effect, if any, our efforts will have or if we're even trying the right approach, but we believe passionately in this cause so we are determined to throw money, time and effort at it" case as the traditional charities they twitted for not being very effective. They may be right to be concerned, and what they are doing might be right - or the completely wrong approach and they are looking the wrong way while the real threat is coming from a different direction. We'll only find out in 10-50 years. But never mind that we have no way of defining or measuring if this is effective, think of the risk! Pour all your money and energy into it!
I agree with your framing of the difficulty of measuring progress on AI risk, and I think most EAs would as well. They would say that we should still try to measure such progress, or at least recognize that most of our efforts will probably go to waste because we can't, as you point out.
I think most EAs would say that even though we know we're going to waste most of the time, money, and energy we put into AI risk (because it's so hard to measure) it's still worthwhile. So I don't think this is an instance of hypocrisy, just an instance where plan A doesn't work.
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