Stereotyping EA's as "weird"

Yet another mainstream media article maligning EA, Rationalism and promoting the absurd notion that fear of AI is all hype by people who subscribe to a weird philosophy. From the New York Times, which normally is more on the liberal side - I dread to imagine what the right-wing press writes about EA's.  

As usual, no attempt is made to engage with the facts or the arguments, it's all about stereotyping engineers, EA's and Rationalists. (see some representative quotes below, boldface is mine).

If we've learned anything in the past few years it's that repetitive communication can beat logic, facts, science and truth in the battle for public opinion. We think our arguments are better, but they're not playing by the same rules.

Ironically, I don't believe the author has any particular axe to grind with EA, or that he has more skin in the game than he suggests. But I'm just sick of seeing well-though-out EA arguments being dismissed based on nothing more than a stereotype of the people stating these ideas. 

If we want to improve the world, we need to help our ideas become mainstream, and not viewed as the bizarre rantings of some crazy cult.

Does anyone have ideas of how to fight back against these stereotypes?

"The more I study these figures, however, the more convinced I’ve become that something else helps explain this passive dismay: They’re weirder than we realize."

"For a certain subset of young engineering types in Silicon Valley, these ideas (Rationalism) were immensely attractive. This makes sense, given that they cast young engineering types as the literal saviors of humanity."

"Rationalists began living in group houses in the Bay Area, where earnest conversations about A.I. safety and reducing cognitive biases mixed freely with polyamory and psychedelics."

"Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), which would go on to attract many millions of dollars in donations, largely from individuals and groups connected to the technology industry who presumably appreciated being cast as heroic figures in a cosmic drama."

"the Amodei siblings were motivated in part by their concern that OpenAI “didn’t take the alignment problem seriously enough,” a reference to the early Rationalist obsession with aligning superpowerful A.I. to serve human interests." Presented as if this was an absurd idea ...

"In these circles, it’s taken for granted that A.I. capabilities will rapidly accelerate and completely transform the world, and to talk about it in any other way would be considered uninformed. For a Rationalist, the only open question is to what degree their heroic brains, carefully trained in the style glamorized by Mr. Yudkowsky’s “Sequences,” can prevent these transformations from devolving into extinction events."

"The observation that the most alarmist claims about A.I.’s impact seem to come from the individuals most connected to Rationalism should anger us."

Opinion | How Scared Should We Be of A.I. Right Now? - The New York Times