Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are unclear between AMF (bed nets) and AI Risk, and you find AI Risk dubious, then donate to AMF. It sounds like you're complaining that your choices have been pared down to two, and you don't like one of them.
I think the pared down bit is important: the whole point behind EA is to increase giving to some types of organization at the expense of giving to other types of organization based on success metrics. So if leading EA initiatives are dissuading (say) giving to electrify Africa because of a lack of efficacy data or wealth of existing funding, they might event be having a quantitative negative impact on those particula…
If you think raising up your city or your country is unboundedly more important than raising up, say, Africa, then EA supports you making the best decision in that framework. But it's still silly that we expect everyone to independently evaluate charity choice in depth on, basically, the basis of their advertisement material. And people will usually either not care, or want to do the most good they can do, period. It's a rare case of a person who wants to do the most good they can for their country, but stops caring at the border.
> So if leading EA initiatives are dissuading (say) giving to electrify Africa because of a lack of efficacy data or wealth of existing funding, they might event be having a quantitative negative impact on those particular causes.
Well, yes, spending is zero sum. On the other hand, this creates an incentive to gather efficacy data, which I enormously welcome. The point isn't to maximize moneyflow to charity, the point is to maximize good things happening.
> an already exceptionally well-funded AI research project their friends work for whose impact on Microsoft's share price is much easier to quantify than their impact on preventing Hypothetical Cyberpunk Future
I don't understand what this means. At any rate, Microsoft share price is not generally seen as a negative. If a project that buys Microsoft compute nodes has positive value for the world, it would be stupid not to fund it just because doing so also happened to be good for Microsoft.
edit: Oh yeah, inasmuch as AI safety as a cause is well-funded now it's because of Effective Altruism raising the alarm to begin with - and AI capability research still outstrips it a hundred times over.
Frankly, what I'm seeing with EA is that ... like, Effective Altruism started out talking about maximizing the amount of good for the world, and the "weird AI people" were the ones who showed up. And it's not like it's a contradiction either, inasmuch as EA now focuses less on earning to give, it's because people like Bill Gates, once-leader of Microsoft, have Malaria handled. Focusing on tech people seems to have been very good for the Malaria cause. So to come in now, years later, and to say that EA shouldn't have focused on the weird AI thing because it might put off some other people who never gave a damn to begin with is almost insulting.