But if you've spent the past decade arguing precisely the opposite - that instead of spreading philanthropic dollars over broad portfolios because true efficacy is unmeasurable, they should be directed to causes which provide hard evidence that they're among the most efficient use of a marginal dollar, and that charities that aren't conducting RCTs to prove how much better off people are after being fed aren't really evidence-based enough to recommend - it's going to raise eyebrows when you pivot to recommending people also give their money to opaque organisations with vague goals and zero evidence they can achieve them, whose only thing in common with the highly evidence-focused aid agencies is that their pitch is nerdier than the average nonprofit. I mean, there's nothing particularly wrong with "I give to causes because their pitch speaks to me" as a heuristic for philanthropy - it's how most altruists think - but it's not how EA pitched itself as being different from that and caring about efficacy and evidence.
The Wells analogy is awkward for the AI safety crowd for another reason too. Wells' central thesis that an atomic super weapon would guarantee a peaceful, utopian world turned out to be horribly wrong. We got actually used bombs, arms races, proxy wars and very nearly used bombs instead, and that's without Nazi atomic scientists getting a heads up. To the extent his writings on the subject of atomic weapon safety had any effect at all on atomic weapons, they made them more imminent and more likely to be used. If marginal dollars spent on promoting the distribution of The World Set Free would have had any effect at all on the probability of armageddon, they would probably have increased it.