Comment on markup: I saw the first version of your comment, where you were using "(*)" as a textual marker, and I see you're now using "#" because the asterisks were messing with the markup. You should be able to get the "(*)" marker to work by putting a backslash before the asterisk (and I preferred the "(*)" indicator because that's more easily recognized as a footnote-style marker).

Feels weird to post an entire paragraph just to nitpick someone's markup, so here's an actual comment!

From what I've read (several hundred assorted threads), I feel like an elephant in the room is the question of whether the reason that those of you who believe that Less Wrong and SIAI doing things of the highest level of importance is because you're a part of these groups

Let me try and rephrase this in a way that might be more testable/easier to think about. It sounds like the question here is what is causing the correlation between being a member of LW/SIAI and agreeing with LW/SIAI that future AI is one of the most important things to worry about. There are several possible causes:

1. group membership causes group agreement (agreement with the group)
2. group agreement causes group membership
3. group membership and group agreement have a common cause (or, more generally, there's a network of causal factors that connect group membership with group agreement)
4. a mix of the above

And we want to know whether #1 is strong enough that we're drifting towards a cult attractor or some other groupthink attractor.

I'm not instantly sure how to answer this, but I thought it might help to rephrase this more explicitly in terms of causal inference.