Effective altruist now seems synonymous with AI doomer, but it wasn’t always that way. My own experience & why I think a lot of it is bullshit AI doomerism now: I was an active member - went to multiple of their global summits and still mostly donate to causes that they recommend. I love a bargain, and EA was about evidence-based ways to reduce global poverty & suffering. You donate to deworming, vaccines, malaria nets - they save lives and it's quantifiable. Don't donate to a university, give money to save lives today. But then it shifted to being more about about tail risks, mainly AI. I first saw it in 2015 at the global summit on Google's campus - the most high-profile person talking about it there was @elonmusk. He read Nick Bostrom's book Superintelligence and donated $10M to the Future of Life Institute to study existential risks from AI, and made a convincing argument to the EA crowd about AI risk. A lot of folks were donating to such causes at the time - Peter Thiel was the top donor to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a similar research institute to manage existential risk. The conversations became super weird to me but they were "justified" with math- global poverty is a rounding error compared to the lives that can be destroyed by AI... The math is: if humanity lasts another 50M years, & current trends hold, the total number of humans who will ever live is 3 quadrillion. The number of future humans who will never exist if humans go extinct is so great that reducing the risk of extinction by 0.00000000000000001% can be expected to save 100 billion more lives than, preventing the genocide of 1 billion people. With this math, any tail risk extinction level event trumps anything actually happening in the world today. One problem with this argument, of course, is that you can defend anything with an X risk that would wipe out the planet, but we actually have no idea if the destruction percentage is anywhere near accurate. We have no idea if the odds of AI doom are 0.00000000000000001% or 0.00000000000000000000000000000000001% but the argument always had some random precision that made no sense. It's like the folks who tell you they'll have a $10B business if they get 1% of the market. The other big problem is that they also DID NOT have a discount rate. They live in a ZIRP world for real lives. They thought that people who might exist in the future should be counted equally to people who do exist today, which I took major issue with. These X-risk obsessives kind of took over & I realized that the thing I'd signed up for - quantitative measurement of effectiveness - isn't actually possible because it's all in measurement and outcomes, and there are a bunch of random unprecise beliefs thrown in. FWIW - I don't know enough to have a strong view on whether AI can take over and make humans extinct. I do think that slowing down AI research at OAI is not the solution.