Their point isn't that it's merely "worthwhile," but that donating to Sudanese refugees is a waste of money because 1 starving child = 80 starving shrimp, or whatever their ghoulish and horrific math says.
Donating to Sudanese refugees sounds like a great use of money. Certainly not a waste.
Suboptimal isn't the same as wasteful. Suppose you sit down to eat a great meal at a restaurant. As you walk out, you realize that you could have gotten an even better meal for the same price at the restaurant next door. That doesn't mean you just wasted your money.
>ghoulish and horrific math
It's not the math that's horrific, it's the world we live in that's horrific. The math just helps us alleviate the horror better.
Researcher: "Here's my study which shows that a new medication reduces the incidence of incredibly painful kidney stones by 50%." Journal editorial board: "We refuse to publish this ghoulish and horrific math."
I agree this is unintuitive, but I submit that's because of speceisism. What about shrimp makes it so that tens of millions of them painfully dying is less bad than a single human death? It doesn't seem like the fact that they aren't smart makes their extreme agony less bad (the badness of a headache doesn't depend on how smart you are).
If it's sophistry anyway, can't you take Eliezer's position and say God doesn't exist, and some CEV like system is better than Bentham style utilitarianism because there's not an objective morality?
I don't think CEV makes much sense, but I think you're scoring far less points that you think you are even relative to something like that.