>>5325
Overly edgy, seemingly uninformed, and prone to overgeneralization. I liked the story, I'm disappointed about the quality of the tweets.
>The greatest misunderstanding in the history of morality is that “selfish” motives taint actions with immorality
I agree that selfishness doesn't make actions immoral. My impression is that effective altruists are much more likely than baseline to agree with that. theunitofcaring in particular keeps stressing that causing good things is good because they're good things, not because of your motives.
>Say you see a beggar on the street, and you decide to give him some money. You did a good thing, right? Wrong! You subsidized his failures. Charity begets only more dependence.
This is a factual claim. I don't know if it's true, but I think it could plausibly go either way, and depends on particular details, rather than characteristics of the overall idea of giving money to people who don't have enough money. Money distributed by GiveDirectly seems to do a lot of good and gets used for investments, even though the recipients are free to use it on whatever they want.
>What effective altruists get wrong is that when you can save someone’s life for $5, all you have done is preserve a life that was worth $5. You can easily put a price on human life, we do it every day, and you get what you pay for
I'm fond of markets, but this is just silly. Why would the economic value of something converge on its moral value? Aren't you just saying that everything that happens is good because it's a thing that happens, at that point?
>If you raise up a man who cannot feed himself, and through your subsidies he raises a family who go on to require your largesse, you will destroy yourself and him and his family when you run out of money
Again with the low-quality generalizations. One of the most popular EA charities is the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, which distributes very cheap medicine to prevent schistosomiasis. Schistosomiasis isn't particularly lethal, but it causes all kinds of disabilities, including learning disabilities. Preventing it makes people stronger, not weaker.
Another EA charity is No Lean Season, which gives poor farmers enough money to pay for travel to the city to get a job during the lean season and send money back home, significantly increasing the nutritional intake of the family, and often letting them pay for next year's trip on their own. It's helping people feed themselves.

His more practical concerns are things EAs care a lot about and try to deal with as best as they can, and his more abstract concerns are bizarre and don't seem to be generated from consistently applied principles.
I wouldn't mind his opinions nearly as much if they were at all convincing.