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Notes -
I have the exact opposite intuition about "cheating." To me, regular charities seem like cheating, since all most people do is give money, get warm and fuzzy feelings, decide that that means they did good, and then profusely refuse to actually verify how much good they did. It's essentially stolen valor - getting all the personal benefits of appearing altruistic without doing any of the difficult work of helping anyone out which is normally implied by things like "charity" and "altruism." Which looks a lot like cheating. EA at least seems to make a gesture at having some referee system in place to detect cheaters.
The thing is, as we see in international sports all the time like in FIFA or Olympics, the best way to cheat is to set the entire system of judgment itself as corrupted in your favor, so one could probably make a good argument that EA is performing this "meta-cheating" by claiming to actually be setting up objective standards for effectiveness while actually setting up corrupted standards that lead to [charity I like] being [effective]. The tough thing for EA is, every single person, down to the individual, involved in the EA movement could be perfectly transparent and honest with perfectly good intentions, and overall EA could still be engaging in this "meta-cheating" due to the biases that all people are susceptible to, and so they have some responsibility to set up the structure in such a way as to counter and negate these biases. I think they may be failing to do this properly.
But in terms of their attempt at brute-forcing morality, this seems to me the correct way to counter the massive "cheating" that's happening in basically all realms of altruism in our lives, even down to individual relationships, where most people don't bother checking and just get the beneficial warm and fuzzy feelings through "cheating" without doing any of the work that is supposed to make someone actually deserving of those warm and fuzzy feelings.
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