OK, good points. There is a spectrum here… if you live in a place where there’s a civil war every few years, then prepping for civil war makes a lot of sense. If you live in a place where the last civil war was 150 years ago, not so much.
CHAZ took place in a context where the most likely outcome was the failure of CHAZ, not the collapse of the larger society. CHAZ failed to prep for the obvious, if not the almost inevitable.
An Einstein runs on pretty much the same hardware as the rest of us. If genetic engineering can get us to a planet full of Einsteins without running into hardware limitations, that may not qualify as an “intelligence explosion”, but it’s still a singularity in that we can’t extrapolate to the future on the other side.
Another thought… genetic engineering may be what will make us smart enough to build a safe AGI.