Comment

I appreciate the desire to be charitable and only focus on the literal truth or falsity of the criticism (or what it omits) but I fear that in explaining what's going on with this reaction to EA's I think it's necessary to look at the social motivations for why people like to rag on EA.

And, at it's core, I think it's two-fold.

First, people can't help but feel a bit guilty in reaction to EAs. Even if EAs never call anyone out, if you've been donating to the make a wish foundation it's hard not to hear the EA pitch and not start to feel guilty rather than good about your donation. Why didn't you donate to people who needed it much more.

A natural human tendency in response to this is to lash out at the people who made you feel bad. I don't have a good solution to this issue but it's worth keeping in mind.

Secondly, EA challenges a certain way of approaching the world that echoes the tension between STEM folks and humanities individuals (and the analytic continental divide as well).

EA encourages a very quantative, literal truth oriented way of looking at the world. Instead of looking at the social meaning of your donations, what they say about your values and how that comments on society, it asks us to count up the effects. At an aesthetic level this is something that many people find unpleasant and antithetical to how they approach the world. In other words, it's the framework that is what really does most of the offense not the actual outcomes. You could imagine pitching those same things in a different way where it wasn't about biting hard bullets but all stated in terms of increasing the status of things they approved of and I think the reaction would be different.