Not all Effective Altruists

Picking up from yesterday, I obviously have to point out that Lewis Bollard and team at Open Philanthropy are doing great work. 

And many people in the EA community are very thoughtful. Kat Woods, as quoted in Losing My Religions:

To be an EA is to find out, again and again and again, that what you thought was the best thing to do was wrong. [Just wait for June 18 post.] You think you know what’s highest impact and you’re almost certainly seriously mistaken.

Every single time I have been so damn certain that this was the time we’d finally found the thing that totally definitely helped in a large way.

And Open Phil's current CEO, Alexander Berger (again, from Losing):

I think it makes you want to just say wow, this is all really complicated and I should bring a lot of uncertainty and modesty to it. ... 

I think the more you keep considering these deeper levels of philosophy, these deeper levels of uncertainty about the nature of the world, the more you just feel like you’re on extremely unstable ground about everything. ... my life could totally turn out to cause great harm to others due to the complicated, chaotic nature of the universe in spite of my best intentions. ... I think it is true that we cannot in any way predict the impacts of our actions. And if you’re a utilitarian, that’s a very odd, scary, complicated thought. … 

I think the EA community probably comes across as wildly overconfident about this stuff a lot of the time, because it’s like we’ve discovered these deep moral truths, then it’s like, “Wow, we have no idea.” I think we are all really very much – including me – naïve and ignorant about what impact we will have in the future. 

I’m going to rely on my everyday moral intuition that saving lives is good ... I think it’s maximizable, I think if everybody followed it, it would be good.

...

I’m not prepared to wait. The ethos of the Global Health and Wellbeing team is a bias to improving the world in concrete actionable ways as opposed to overthinking it or trying so hard to optimize that it becomes an obstacle to action. We feel deep, profound uncertainty about a lot of things, but we have a commitment to not let that prevent us from acting. 

I think there are a lot of ways in which the world is more chaotic than [we think]. [S]ometimes trying to be clever by one extra step can be worse than just using common sense.

Couldn't have said it better myself.