I am starting to think the thing these people hate is attempting to be effective.
Channeling my inner Robin Hanson, I think the thing they actually hate is the transparency of the altruism.
Our monkey brains are designed for a society where good deeds are attributed to high-status people of our tribe (and bad things are attributed to low-status people or strangers). In a parallel reality where e.g. Greta Thundberg collected money to cure thousands of people, the same action would be applauded by the same journalists, as a heroic action of a brave young woman, defying American capitalism and providing a role model for teenagers across the entire planet, or something like that.
The problem with effective altruism is precisely that people who are not high-status members of our tribe can do it, too. (And the high-status members of our tribe could be called out if they pretended to do the same, without actually doing it.) Therefore, obviously, effective altruism cannot be a force of good. It is too measurable to become a political tool that our tribe could use against the enemy tribes. Altruism that our political opponents can also participate in, is not the true altruism.
(On a smaller scale, I find it amusing how the narrative about effective altruism evolves at RationalWiki and Wikipedia. At the beginning, EA was “one of those stupid nerdy things that rationalists do, don’t pay attention to it”. Then it became “a respectable thing, by the way completely unrelated to rationalists”; e.g. removing all mentions of effective altruism from the Wikipedia page about LessWrong. The rule is the same; if an idea is associated with someone outside our tribe, it obviously cannot be good; if it is good, it obviously must be unrelated to people outside our tribe.)
Channeling my inner Robin Hanson, I think the thing they actually hate is the transparency of the altruism.
Our monkey brains are designed for a society where good deeds are attributed to high-status people of our tribe (and bad things are attributed to low-status people or strangers). In a parallel reality where e.g. Greta Thundberg collected money to cure thousands of people, the same action would be applauded by the same journalists, as a heroic action of a brave young woman, defying American capitalism and providing a role model for teenagers across the entire planet, or something like that.
The problem with effective altruism is precisely that people who are not high-status members of our tribe can do it, too. (And the high-status members of our tribe could be called out if they pretended to do the same, without actually doing it.) Therefore, obviously, effective altruism cannot be a force of good. It is too measurable to become a political tool that our tribe could use against the enemy tribes. Altruism that our political opponents can also participate in, is not the true altruism.
(On a smaller scale, I find it amusing how the narrative about effective altruism evolves at RationalWiki and Wikipedia. At the beginning, EA was “one of those stupid nerdy things that rationalists do, don’t pay attention to it”. Then it became “a respectable thing, by the way completely unrelated to rationalists”; e.g. removing all mentions of effective altruism from the Wikipedia page about LessWrong. The rule is the same; if an idea is associated with someone outside our tribe, it obviously cannot be good; if it is good, it obviously must be unrelated to people outside our tribe.)