This is unnecessarily hostile. None of what you say is inconsistent with anything in yli's comment. He/she was not saying that Beck let "some ding dong research assistant slip views like this past his editorial control". The claim was that while Beck in all probability agrees with the broad conclusions of the excerpt, it is unlikely that he personally researched or wrote it. In so far as people are impressed by the specific content of the excerpt (as opposed to the broad conclusions) or by the fact that it quotes SI people, the credit is probably not due to Beck.

In any case, it's not all that surprising to me that Beck is interested in and convinced by Singularity stuff. He has demonstrated a particular penchant for big ideas that are outside the mainstream, counter-intuitive, vaguely apocalyptic, and that posit that one can attain significant analytic and predictive purchase by paying close attention to patterns in global history. Most such ideas are sheer crackpottery. The singularity happens not to be. However, the fact that he believes in it is not an indication of his sanity, it is an indication of his particular brand of insanity.