The first step towards effective altruism is: You must ignore any and all suffering in the present, and must solely focus on a hypothetical future.

Famously, the drowning child analogy asks if one should their nice clothing to save a drowning child? If yes, why not spend an equal amount to save children starving far away?

The effective altruism charities haven't been totally incompetent on building institutions. They're notable for GiveDirectly and our world in data and deworming the world.

The article does a good job of mentioning SBF as a point against earning to give (though everyone seems to agree that SBF was just a con-artist).

(A smaller point; Musk isn't mentioned in the article, and doesn't seem particularly oriented towards EA. He's used it before to justify space + tech investment, but I see mostly old articles/quotes when I google this (and he's not spoken of so highly in LessWrong (a reddit alternative run by the EA community) or Aaronson's blog). I think you can better model Musk as a fascist.)

Effective Altruism just feels like rebranded Trickle-down economics.

I can't believe I was dumb enough to believe this was a good idea after watching that Kurzgesagt video.