Thanks for your thoughtful comment.

To make this story short, the whole reason I became interested in this topic in the first place was because I was impressed by EY -- specifically his writings on rationality on OB (now known as the Sequences here on LW). Now of course most of those ideas were hardly original with him (indeed many times I had the feeling he was stating the obvious, albeit in a refreshing, enjoyable way) but the fact that he was able to write them down in such a clear, systematic, and readable fashion showed that he understood them thoroughly. This was clearly somebody who knew how to think.

I know some people who have had this sort of experience. My claim is not that Eliezer has uniformly repelled people from thinking about existential risk. My claim is that on average Eliezer's outlandish claims repel people from thinking about existential risk.

Do I simply have an unusual personality that makes me willing to listen to strange-sounding claims?

My guess would be that this is it. I'm the same way.

(But why wouldn't they as well, if they're "smart"?)

It's not clear that willingness to listen to strange-sounding claims exhibits correlation with instrumental rationality, or what the sign of that correlation is. People who are willing to listen to strange-sounding claims statistically end up hanging out with UFO conspiracy theorists, New Age people, etc. more often than usual. Statistically, people who make strange-sounding claims are not worth listening to. Too much willingness to listen to strange-sounding claims can easily result in one wasting large portions of one's life.

Why can't they just read the darn sequences and pick up on the fact that these people are worth listening to?

See my remarks above.