EA has done a great job bringing attention and resources to causes that are clear wins - it's just obvious that global poverty interventions like Against Malaria and GiveDirectly are highly beneficial.

But effectiveness doesn't always doing the most obviously effective thing. It means doing the highest expected value thing. Sometimes that means trying things with low expectation of success, but a high potential payoff.

There's a trade off between exploring the space of potential interventions, and exploiting known good ones. EA needs to keep its healthy focus on exploration, or risk getting stuck in a local minimum. Suppose the X-risk people are right - if we get that wrong there won't be any more people left to help. Certainly EA was sounding the alarm about lack of pandemic preparedness ages ago, and while that wasn't existential, it was the right direction to be looking in. Imagine if we'd had a bit better foresight, been a bit better prepared, and been able to prevent 6 million people dying of COVID.

Something sounding "weird" isn't sufficient reason to discard it. There needs to be an actual convincing argument. And let me tell you, the weird ideas have survived some pretty rigorous debate.