AI safety and "longtermism" (I feel slightly more stupid just by writing this) is an escape route for the group's realization that (a) they cannot really make a

AI safety and "longtermism" (I feel slightly more stupid just by writing this) is an escape route for the group's realization that (a) they cannot really make a difference and (b) even if they could, it would require a lot of actual work. The person who goes out in the middle of a cold night and cooks soup for homeless people can quite easily count how many mouths he fed; sounds quite effective and quantitative to me. Or maybe the volunteer who is helping fight malaria in a desert somewhere outside of America/Europe; actually, they don't need to count, their exhaustion at the end of a hard day is proof enough of their altruism. But since the real goals of the EAs are not to do any of that (it's just a bunch of socially-awkward geeks looking to feel accepted in some kind of community and find sexual partners; in other words, trying to feel like normal humans), they fooled themselves into believing that such short term actions are "ineffective"; actually, any actual measurable hard work has to necessarily be ineffective, or else it would actually have to be done. So they keep pushing their agenda to longer and longer term issues, more abstract and less well-defined as possible, which cannot be actually measured, so they can continue to build this weird, meaningless, ridiculous fantasy that they live in (and which supports their social hierarchy) without having to actually do anything concrete.