EDIT: Downvoting this post sort of confirms my point that it's all about signaling tribal affiliations.

If people downvoting you is evidence that you are right then would people upvoting you have been evidence that you were wrong? Or does this kind of 'confirmation' not get conserved the way that evidence does?

There are other reasons why someone could downvote your post. You immediately assuming that it's about tribal affiliations sort of demonstrates the problem with your claim that it's all about tribal affiliations.

They've published papers. Presumably if we didn't donate anything, they couldn't publish papers. They also hand out paychecks to Eliezer. Eliezer is a tribal leader, so we want him to succeed! Between those two, we have proof that they're doing more than just signalling affiliation.

The far better question is whether they're doing something useful with that money, and whether it would be better spent elsewhere. That, I do not feel qualified to answer. I think even Give Well gave up on that one.

And the evidence that donating to SIAI does anything other than signal affiliation is...?

... not required to refute your claim. It's a goal post shift. In fact I explicitly allowed for the SIAI being utterly useless or worse than useless in the comment to which you replied. The claim I rejected is this:

Donating to SIAI is pure display of tribal affiliation

For that to be true it would require that there is nobody who believes that the SIAI does something useful and whose donating behaviour is best modelled as at least somewhat influenced by the desire to achieve the overt goal.

You also require that there are no other causal influences behind the decision including forms of signalling other than tribal affiliation. I have already mentioned "reciprocation" as a non "tribal affiliation" motivating influence. Even if I decided that the SIAI were completely unworthy of my affiliation I would find it difficult to suppress the instinct to pay back at least some of what they gave me.

The SIAI has received anonymous donations. (The relevance should be obvious.)