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Notes -
I'm on net pretty neutral with respect to EA, but I don't think this line of criticism makes sense. To some extent, it's true that everyone who engages in charity do so out of belief that they're effective and that they're altruistic. But believing that you are those things doesn't tell us anything about if you/your charity actually are those things. And where I think EA at the least makes gestures at doing (and they might do nothing more than those gestures, let's be clear) is checking if they really are effective (they do seem to have a big blind spot in checking if they really are altruistic - believing that you're altruistic is, at best, a neutral signal and most likely a negative signal of one's altruism, and I don't think I've seen EA engage with this).
I think there's a strong argument to be made that, in their attempts to check if their (self-perceived) altruism is effective, all they're doing is adding on more epicycles to come to the conclusion that [charity they like] also happens to be [the most effective]. I honestly don't know enough about the logistics of what EA does, but certainly that should be the default presumption, sans clear indication that they're doing the hard work needed to check all that, such as giving oppositional people full access to all the tools to make the strongest argument possible against whatever charities they like (or for charities they dislike). And the more popular/decentralized EA is/becomes, the more that EA people will follow this default pattern of convincing themselves that [charity I like] is [the most effective] because memes like this always get implemented in the laziest, most intellectually dishonest way when spread out among a wide/decentralized populace.
I would also say, given that we know this pattern about the populace, EA has, in some real sense, the responsibility to craft their memes such that if they get out to the wider populace and actually become popular, that the people who lazily implement these memes in dishonest ways don't fall into this extremely common trap of matching [thing I like] with [good] while building up a whole facade of pseudoscience/pseudomath in order to justify it. I'm not sure EA is very concerned with this at all, and I'll admit that the defensiveness I see from EA when they're criticized both about their core mission and about their more superficial PR aspects doesn't make me optimistic.
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