I'm always curious why effective altruists attract so much sneer and disdain when the topic comes up.

At best they are just people trying to donate money to effective charities like mosquito nets in Africa. At worst, some might be wasting their money on animal welfare or AI safety. This doesn't seem like enough to fuel the kind of backlash I see.

I can't speak to anyone else's sneers and disdain, but mine come from all the motivated reasoning surrounding them. One example:

'The Effective Ventures Foundation (EVF), which defines effective altruism as “using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible”, decided £14.9m of its cash would be best spent buying Wytham Abbey, a 15th-century Grade-I listed manor house near Oxford.'

There were a lot of explanations about why that was the most effective use of funds, but every single one reads like motivated reasoning to me.

Examples like this abound.

Anytime someone takes any (supposedly) moral action which is not part of the status quo, they are implicitly claiming the moral high ground. There are 3 possible responses:

1. Take no action -- but if they're right, you cede the moral high ground

2. Imitate them -- which also cedes the moral high ground, since they got there first

3. Undermine their claim; prove they're actually acting in self-interest.

I believe this is why so many people love(d) to hate on vegans.

I think it's got two components - first, people don't actually understand the tenants of mainstream EA. For instance, some people think that one of the core principles of EA is "make as much money as possible at any cost", which is incorrect.

Second, EA is a small movement with an above average amount of crazy people (IE someone who does think you should make as much money as possible at any cost), who then basically monopolize the media attention. This then feeds into the first component.

EA is in a fairly bad spot where nobody seems to be really attempting to understand it or meaningfully engage with it's ideas, instead just parroting the same few talking points (SBF anyone?)

That's how I understand it: a movement encouraging people to donate their wealth to good causes which save and improve lives.

However, there's some who predict an existential future risk such as an AI apocalypse. If that's the case, why save a child's life today when we'll all be killed by AI tomorrow? Critics would call this funding pet projects rather than altruism.

But you can even further down this line of thinking. If you're a billionaire and see yourself as the only hope of saving humanity from extinction, why donate any of your wealth? You should be doing the opposite, gathering as much wealth and power as possible. Taxes and laws that get in your way are impediments to the salvation of humanity.

I'm pretty sure most of the criticism is for folks in the latter groups. I wish there were different words to distinguish them better, because I like the idea of encouraging charity but somehow a handful of billionaires have poisoned the word altruism.

It's because of the gap in what they say and what they do.

It’s one of those things that sounds fantastic on the surface. Then you dig.

In short it is because they have influence. There is a difference between sending $1 to Africa instead of America and sending millions. There is a difference between an AI safety researcher fantasizing about AI hacking everything on the planet and their AI models telling me I can't look for bugs in my code.

Cause they produced Dam Bankman Friedman and people like him.

Cause somehow their idea of best altruism ends up amounting to "earn as much money and power with little regard to how, because so that you can use them for good in the future in a very top down way".

Effectively, it is very swlf serving.

I think a possible explanation is, they support billionaires giving away money. So you get a rare alignment of people who'd rather see poor people die than see support for billionaires, and people who'd rather see poor people die than see billionaires have fewer superyachts. United they're a powerful force.

Edit: Also weird nerds.