PauseAI is trying to solve a problem, and people like Cal aren't in the business of trying to solve problems.
It's useful to notice here that Cal Newport and Ed Zitron are very similar figures. Cal has expertise in non-AI computer science and can sometimes make a coherent argument, so he's the shiny variant. But realistically, neither of them have a clue about AI, and they both give off an aura of religious zeal that prevents things like "evidence" from having any effect on them.
I believe people like Cal and Ed pretend to be experts and take up contrarian/anti-scientific positions purely for the sake of attention. But I don't think they think that's why they're doing it! Rather, they've incidentally trained themselves to write thinkpieces about technology and the economy and academia, and so now they're just writing more of those thinkpieces. If they think about recent AI news for five seconds and decide that something about it feels like bullshit to them, they will write an angry article or op-ed about how it's definitely bullshit, writing the bottom line first and then tacking on sources that seem to back their points. When that is received well and gets reinforced, they then write more things in that genre, contorting the facts into whatever shape allows the applause to continue.
One thing that would make the applause stop is if the problem went away. So long as the core problem continues to exist, they can continue to capitalize on claiming that it doesn't. That doesn't mean they actually try to make the problem worse, but they wouldn't try to make it better, either.
I think there are people for whom -- as it concerns their public writings and statements -- it is ill advised to model them as anything so complicated as "having beliefs" or "doing reasoning". If you instead model each of them as a machine whose purpose is what it does: produce content in a specific genre, they become more predictable and less confusing.