I've dug into this stuff over the last couple days, because I had previously understood Effective Altruism to be something akin to like a pledge drive for Charity Navigator's best-reviewed charities or something, and it turns out it's nothing of the sort. In fact, if you read some of the commentary from EA insiders about Sam Bankman-Fried (these come up in stories where EA distances itself from SBF, or claims they knew he was up to no good all along), it's hard to shake the comparisons to Scientology: they have their own weird language, there's a hierarchy, and people on the inside operate under a constant threat of ostracism.
To that, add that some of the ideas are clearly dementing. Take Scott Aaronson's recent post on SBF, which is shot through with EA-think; it includes this:
And a traditional investor who made billions on successful gambles, or arbitrage, or creating liquidity, then gave virtually all of it away to effective charities, would seem, on net, way ahead of most of us morally.
This is logic straight out of the 16th century Medici papacy of Leo X. Maybe it's some kind of horrible drug interaction with Rationalism, or maybe EA is fundamentally Rationalist? Either way: when your logic has established that you can obtain moral superiority by literally buying indulgences, it has officially proven too much, and if you can't recognize that, something has gone terribly wrong in your thinking. Over and over I keep coming across EA arguments that could be used to justify almost literally any behavior, so long as you can tell yourself a story about having a long-term positive goal.
Also: tens of millions in donations to "AI safety" organizations. Yes, to answer the Economist; this movement is irretrievable.