>“We believe a more accurate phrase for this concept is “defective altruism” and will therefore use that term for the remainder of this article.”
Why not use "poo poo altruism" for even better effect?
Not OP, but this passage is representative. The authors' claims here are:
(a) the contrast between patients at Malanje Provincial and St Jude is "absurd". The authors don't explain what in particular is absurd about it. This is basically the style of argument employed in the article, which mostly amounts to "EA is self-evidently wrong" without elaboration.
(b) Friedman presumes that St. Jude donors are "callous". This is clearly unfounded, since the quoted passage is consistent with the idea that St. Jude donors are (say) well-intentioned but culpably ignorant. This is another thread in the authors' arguments - roughly, "EA takes issues with X; X is obviously good; therefore EA is wrong". This is a generic argument that could be employed against any position that isn't a bland endorsement of totally conventional morality, and is another version of "EA is just wrong".
(c) Friedman supports his claim with "nothing other than a decidedly skewed morality." This is overtly false, since Friedman's argument is almost certainly defended via some sort of EA premise, like, "saving more lives/alleviating more suffering (per dollar donated) is better than fewer/less." Not an unassailable argument by any means, but the author's don't assail the argument so much as deny that it exists at all, except as a morality that they flatly assert is "skewed".
Small-scale charity generally functions well. Many different people with good intentions have visibility into the inputs and outputs and can ensure it more or less stays on task.
Large-scale charity is very different. It's too big for ad-hoc accountability, so it needs to use market accountability, but by its very nature market accountability is completely broken in this sector. The people who receive the product are not the people who pay for the product. You've seen this dynamic play out before -- enterprise software, kids and toys, government projects -- but charity is even worse on account of having even more separation between the two groups. Employees can complain to management, kids can complain to their parents, local associations can throw a stink about wasteful projects, but are the starving African children going to compare the price of the meals they received to the amount you donated and and give you a phone call when the numbers don't add up? No, they are not.
The market feedback loop is broken in the charity sector, so the optimal strategy for a self-interested pseudo-charity is to plow most of its donations back into marketing and executive compensation (if people complain just put on a TED talk and repeatedly assert that it's fine) and as a distant third priority do a little bit of what they are supposed to be doing. This gets them a photo album for the landing page and forces accountability arguments to use numbers rather than absolutes. Then, if anyone tries to come after them, they can accuse those people of being nerds -- or, when that ceases to be rhetorically effective, accuse them of being technocrats.
Accountability is boring at best and confrontational at worst, but it's extremely important because if we don't do it the parasitic load on the charity ecosystem gobbles up all the money. Accountability doesn't have to mean spreadsheets and numbers, small local charities can absolutely get away with doing it ad-hoc, but it's important to do it one way or another.
The second to fourth sentences read: «It is sadly thus that the very human impulse to help others and the mantra of Charity Navigator since its inception—that people should become informed donors and give with their heads as well as their hearts—have been infused with logic so cold that even Mr. Spock would cringe upon hearing it. One iteration of this tendency is in the idea of “effective altruism.” We believe a more accurate phrase for this concept is “defective altruism” and will therefore use that term for the remainder of this article.»
I restate that: Choosing altruistic action as a result intellectual deliberation instead of on an impulse renders the altruism defective.
The article avoids arguing that core point, and instead just bases a lot of secondary points on its being true. For example, below, it says one effect of effective altruism is that «experts decide where the money goes», and that's bad because… I don't get that part. Because experts do rational deliberation, I think, and because an EA proponent says it's «not necessarily morally superior».
I'd love to hear a thorough argument of why rational deliberation renders the resulting action bad or defective. Partly because IMO people who want to make that argument should try to make a rational argument to support their opinions, and someone has to listen.
Communists have a good term for this: "lifestyleism" i.e. the enjoyment of being a selfless person instead of an effective strategy to actually solve the problems you radiate concern about.