People connected to LessWrong and the Bay Area surveillance industry often cite David Chapman's "Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths in Subculture Evolution" to understand why their subcultures keep getting taken over by jerks. Chapman is a Buddhist mystic who seems rationalist-curious. Some people use the term postrationalist.
Have you noticed that Chapman presents the founders of nerdy subcultures as innocent nerds being pushed around by the mean suits? But today we know that the founders of Longtermism and LessWrong all had ulterior motives: Scott Alexander and Nick Bostrom were into race pseudoscience, and Yudkowsky had his kinks (and was also into eugenics and Libertarianism). HPMOR teaches that intelligence is the measure of human worth, and the use of intelligence is to manipulate people. Mollie Gleiberman makes a strong argument that "bednet" effective altruism with short-term measurable goals was always meant as an outer doctrine to prepare people to hear the inner doctrine about how building God and expanding across the Universe would be the most effective altruism of all. And there were all the issues within LessWrong and Effective Altruism around substance use, abuse of underpaid employees, and bosses who felt entitled to hit on subordinates. A '60s rocker might have been cheated by his record label, but that does not get him off the hook for crashing a car while high on nose candy and deep inside a groupie.
I don't know whether Chapman was naive or creating a smokescreen. Had he ever met the thinkers he admired in person?
It's kind of ridiculous on its face. Yudkowsky was never some guy making money off writing code or any other "nerdy" activity (even though people doing that can be as sociopathic as anyone else). Pre-HPMoR part of his career is just "does sociopathy for a living". After, too, but like with a bit of branching out into book writing.
Trying to make money is not what makes you a sociopath in this model. Geeks almost always try to make money from the thing so they can devote more time to it, and until recently Yud kept turning away from chances to make more money (eg. selling his books rather than give them away for free, or learning more programming in the nineties and oughties and talking himself into a software job). Its that you care more about money and sex and social power than the thing itself. I don't think Yud is a fake but I think he can't accept that he is an entertainer and popularizer not a genius researcher.
One problem with Chapman's model is that it does not have room for people who like the thing, but find they enjoy exercising social power more than the thing itself (figures like Michael Shermer, or aging rockers who stop innovating but release just enough music to keep women squealing at them and the royalties coming in). It divides people into archtypes, but most are in between.