In the race for global AI dominance—economically, militarily, and so forth—some people view any attempts to slow down AI development as problematic, whether for ethical reasons, like ensuring that large language models aren’t racist, or for existential ones, like the danger of superintelligence. The premise is a winner-takes-all mentality that assumes whichever nation gets to superintelligent AI first gains global dominance.

Viewed from this mentality, one can make sense of these surreal X posts. If you see the issue as one big race between China and the United States that will determine the fate of this planet, you can make some sense of these tweets. But that’s quite a radical position to hold. Then again, politicians and the general public are prone to think of world problems as zero-sum games, where there can only be one winner and everyone else is a loser.

The Winner-Take-All Mindset

X has seen thousands of tweets over the last week about effective altruism, much of it hostile and focused on its alleged “AI doomerism.” Many effective altruists are worried that AI might have catastrophic effects, all the way from human extinction to milder ones like enabling terrorists to create bioweapons. That is true. But I’ve been puzzled by the repeated assertions by prominent people that effective altruists are an “AI doomer cult.”

I agree with many critics that it’s extremely speculative to try to evaluate the risks of AI. And different people in the AI risk debates, whether or not they are affiliated with the effective altruism movement, will have very different estimates that will appear absurd to others. We face radical uncertainty.

Personally, I do not spend much time at all thinking about the risk of human extinction due to AI, except for how AI might impact animal welfare, especially on farms. I have better things to do and leave that question to the experts. But it’s incredibly puzzling to see public intellectuals make confident assertions about the absurdity of some views when they have virtually no background in the topic. It reminds me a bit of the satirical movie, Don’t Look Up.

People who know little to nothing about AI try to smear others as idiots or cultists. If I tried to rationalize this, I think the best answer is something along the lines of: It doesn’t matter if humanity goes extinct, because it’s not worth living in a world where China wins the AI race. It’s reminiscent of the totalist view of the Nazis that asserted it didn’t matter if all Germans died in a world war, since there was only one world worth living in: a world in which Germans won. And yet, I don’t think this is what we should call the most “pro-Germany” policy.

The zero-sum mindset is a cognitive bias we all share, and it is a dangerous one, for it stifles cooperation, “even in situations where cooperation is a matter of life or death.”¹ If you want good political decision-making, you should make sure that actors do not suffer from a zero-sum mindset.

Risk Assessment and Human Psychology

Another distinguishing feature of effective altruists, in their attempts to counter cognitive biases, is a deliberate emphasis on countering our human psychology, which tends to disregard tiny risks or treat them as almost certain. In general, humans are pretty awful at probabilistic reasoning.² So it’s good to try and study these risks in whatever way we can to turn uncertainty into manageable risk.

Another criticism of effective altruists is that they’ve gone all-in on “crazy” longtermism, thinking only about the long-term future and AI risk while neglecting the present. That’s far from the truth.

Luke Moore, Senior Partnerships Manager at Giving What We Can, broke down the effective altruism funding environment in a post on the Effective Altruism Forum for 2026:

~50% to global health

~30% to global catastrophic risk reduction (up from ~20% in 2024)

~10% to animal welfare

~5% to climate change mitigation

(The rest is unknown or a bit harder to categorise: ~5%)

Longtermism as a Necessary Counterweight

I, for one, think it’s great that someone is concerned with global catastrophic risks. If it wasn’t for effective altruists, there would be very little funding available to actually do serious research in this area. But my attitude is really a risk-balancing one here. You might think that longtermism—roughly, the view that we should not discriminate against future humans (or animals) just because they will live in the future—is a crazy philosophical view. If there are billions of humans who could live in the future and we ought to take them into account, our political decisions might look radically different. But humans, as a species, and our institutions along with them, are so ridiculously short-termist that it hardly matters if longtermism as a philosophy is mistaken or ridiculous. They offer a good counterweight.

However, in the AI space, you might think that this is not true. Perhaps, as critics lament, longtermists/effective altruists (the latter does not imply the former) dominate this discourse. I am skeptical. Effective altruists share visible platforms and counterarguments, and are prominent in the space. But let’s grant they are actually overrepresented.

Still, effective altruists are generally not AI doomers. They are just trying to estimate what the actual risks are. Likely, many are overconfident in their own assessments. (So is everyone.) Some will no doubt appear like the “crazy” performance Leonardo DiCaprio gave in Don’t Look Up, when others sought to downplay these risks entirely. But so what?

Individual Assessment vs. Collective Ignorance

I think some of the estimates given by researchers are blatantly outrageous in their confidence. But so what? None of that is a reason to ignore low-probability risks. People confuse individual assessments with communities of epistemic peers trying to get at the truth.

Overconfidence in these estimates by individuals is not worse (however ludicrous they may be) than collective ignorance towards unknown risks altogether.