Disclosure: I copyedited a draft of this post, and do contract work for CEA more generally
I don’t think that longtermism is a consensus view in the movement.
The 2017 EA Survey results had more people saying poverty was the top priority than AI and non-AI far future work combined. Similarly, AMF and GiveWell got by far the most donations in 2016, according to that same survey. While I agree that someone can be a longtermist and think that practicality concerns prioritize near-term good work for now anyway, I don’t think this is a very compelling explanation for these survey results.
As a first pass heuristic, I think EA leadership would guess correctly about community-held views more often if they held the belief “the modal EA-identifying person cares most about solving suffering that is happening in the world right now.”
My view is that more traditional philanthropic targets make for a much easier sell, so GiveWell style messaging is going to reach/convince way more people than longtermist or x-risk messaging.
So you’ll probably have way, way more people who are interested in EA on the global poverty and health side. I still only donate my pledge money to AMF, plus $100 a month extra to animal welfare, despite being somewhat involved in longtermist/x-risk stuff professionally (and pretty warm on these projects beyond my own involvement).
That being said, for some people EA is their primary social peer group. These people also tend to be highly ambitious. That’s a recipe for people trying really hard to figure out what’s the most prized, and orienting toward that. So there’s lots of buzz around longtermism, despite the absolute numbers in the longtermist direction (people, clicks, eyeballs, money) being lower than those for more traditional, popular interventions.