When I was younger, I think a thing that bothered me about EA was that I felt like it required me to disregard which organizations just “seemed good” and instead give to whoever had the highest convincing back-of-the-envelope estimate of impact.
Now I feel like I was thinking about it wrong. Over time I’ve come to accept long-termism and “weird” ideas/causes much more than I did when I first heard about EA, but my impressions of the reasonableness and competence of organizations and people have remained surprisingly stable. (Not to say that they haven’t changed at all, but not a ton.)
I still believe in back-of-the-envelope EV estimates–maybe more than I did before; at least, I feel less internal tension about my belief in them. But also I think they’re really hard to get right, and maybe I was trying to do them at the wrong step.