system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What exactly is Effective Altruism and why is it controversial?

Looking for a basic rundown of the concept and the controversy around it, not really up to speed in this area. I get it has some relationship with longtermism, which I think I have a reasonable handle the basic concept of, but otherwise I’m out of the loop here.
gpt
Broadly speaking, Effective Altruism is an institutional movement concerned with encouraging people to commit to promoting the good, as the good is understood according to a broadly utilitarian account, and to using considered measures of efficacy -- by this standard -- to determine which charitable ends to commit themselves to.

Partly this is controversial on the grounds that many people think utilitarian accounts are insufficient or just bad accounts of the good.

Mostly, however, Effective Altruism has invited controversy by an increasing proportion of its members directing its aims toward unusual goals that are not normally regarded as meeting the aforementioned criteria as effective goods, but which its members feel intuitively are such important goods that they trump these considerations. For instance, Effective Altruism has often promoted GiveWell as a standard of measuring the efficacy of charities, but where GiveWell recommendations contradict the intuitions of Effective Altruism members, they've not hesitated to argue for simply disregarded these recommendations. This disparity is further underscored by the unusual culture which has become associated with many Effective Altruism members, where their intuitions favor particularly unusual projects as charitable priorities.

For instance, GiveWell, and on this basis Effective Altruism, has traditionally argued for the efficacy of anti-malaria interventions as particularly effective forms of charity. But Effective Altruism, in these cases in opposition to GiveWell recommendations, has increasingly prioritized peculiar projects like concerns that an AI overlord will become the dictator of the human race and exercise near-supernatural powers over them, or concerns that perhaps electrons in the depths of space by sheer coincidence organize themselves into structures that through some currently unknown means experience unprecedented suffering, as being vastly more important than any concern we have with the health and wellbeing of living people. This is controversial in the sense that many people regard such priorities is wildly ill-considered, on the grounds that we have little reason to think that anything like these things are happening, and that even if they are happening none of the charities Effective Altruism supports give any indication of being able to do anything about it.

In objection, proponents of these priorities use arbitrarily chosen figures to promote their decisions: for instance, they ask us to suppose that the unprecedented suffering of spontaneously organized electron systems in the depths of space is a trillion times worse than the worst suffering of all humans we could do anything about; in that case, they reason, even if there's only a one in a million chance that this could ever happen, and even if there's only in a one in a million chance that we could ever do anything about it even if it did happen, that still makes it as much a charitable priority as is addressing that human suffering. And on this basis, the reasoning goes, we have as much reason to give as much money to anyone even considering the problem of suffering electrons, as we have to give to people doing things like combating malaria. And many people regard this kind of reasoning as arbitrary and spurious.