If you clear away all the noise arising from the fact that this interaction constitutes a clash of tribal factions (here comes Young Upstart Outsider trying to argue that Established Academic Researcher is really a Mad Scientist), you can actually find at least one substantial (implicit) claim by Wang that is worth serious consideration from SI's point of view. And that is that building FAI may require (some) empirical testing prior to "launch".

Testing is common practice. Surely no competent programmer would ever advocate deploying a complex program without testing it.