The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

I'm not familiar with Effective Altruism, but a takeaway as a tech person working in the clinical trial field:

Most drugs go to market with the idea of being effective, e.g. treating as many people / conditions as possible. This leads to a problem that most people deal with a slightly different problem from the next person, so you just end up with large groups of small numbers of people who are essentially overlooked, because they're not profitable enough to make a drug or treatment for. This class is called "orphan drugs"

Yes, this is mostly "how the industry / capitalism" works, but that's the point. By measuring how effective altruism is, and by only doing the things that are most effective, you'll essentially end up with many "orphan" categories at the end.

I mean, I think it was a very explicit dig.

The founding idea is that giving $10,000 to save, y’know, four ailing dogs with bad livers or whatever, or a community theater, as opposed to many human lives, is fundamentally wrong.

“If you’re gonna give, you should maximize the impact as measured in human life” is fundamentally at odds with many common forms of giving, yes.

> if only just to have some sort of open-system for rating charities

While the following examples aren't exactly _open_ systems, some organizations address the niche you highlight. Examples: https://www.givewell.org/, https://animalcharityevaluators.org/

I used to work for one of the largest software vendors in the non-profit space worldwide and it fundamentally changed the way I look at the non-profit world. The big ones have essentially become these weird quasi-think tanks that passively influence policy or actively engage the community to achieve an often political agenda.

For example, a large non-profit can't explicitly lobby congress to ban sex education in schools. But, they can go around and "buy out" small non-profits into fulfilling their agenda. This is usually pretty easy to do because small non-profits are almost always cash-starved, and it can be really hard to say "no" when some outside figure is willing to provide a massive percentage of your operating budget in perpetuity in exchange for avoiding certain topics (like mutual consent) in schools.

This very scenario happened to an acquaintance of mine. She wanted to teach consent in schools after the #metoo scandal, spent 2 years grinding to improve access to consent-based communication for kids and then someone offered her obscene money under the condition that she make tweaks (i.e. "don't talk about consent in school because that will encourage children to have sex", that kind of stuff). She took the money because she saw a way out of needing hustle so hard for cash, but of course she sold her soul at the end and regretted it.

And none of those interactions ever get recorded. Nobody is tracking what big non-profits and charitable funds ask (or demand) others to do, and they get to market themselves as doing good for the world. I'm sure some of them are, and I'm sure there are tons of well-meaning people working for some of them, but that world was so much darker than I ever imagined, at least from the periphery.