Effective altruism is based on the core belief that all people count equally. We unequivocally condemn Nick Bostrom’s recklessly flawed and reprehensible words. We reject this unacceptable racist language, and the callous discussion of ideas that can and have harmed Black people. It is fundamentally inconsistent with our mission of building an inclusive and welcoming community.
— The Centre for Effective Altruism
I feel really quite bad about this post. Despite it being only a single paragraph it succeeds at confidently making a wrong claim, pretending to speak on behalf of both an organization and community that it is not accurately representing, communicating ambiguously (probably intentionally in order to avoid being able to be pinned on any specific position), and for some reason omitting crucial context.
Contrary to the OP it is easy to come up with examples where within the Effective Altruism framework two people do not count equally. Indeed most QALY frameworks value young people more than older people, many discussions have been had about hypothetical utility monsters, and about how some people might have more moral patienthood due to being able to experience more happiness or more suffering, and of course the moral patienthood of artificial systems immediately makes it clear that different minds likely matter differently in moral calculus.
Saying "all people count equally" is not a core belief of EA, and indeed I do not remember hearing it seriously argued for a single time in my almost 10 years in this community (which is not surprising, since it indeed doesn't really hold any water after even just a tiny bit of poking, and your only link for this assertion is a random article written by CEA, which doesn't argue for this claim at all and also just blindly asserts it). It is still the case that most EAs believe that the variance in the importance of different people's experience is relatively small, that variance almost certainly does not align with historical conceptions of racism, and that there are at least some decent game-theoretic arguments to ignore a good chunk of this variance, but this does not mean that "all people count equally" is a "core belief" which should clearly only be reserved for an extremely small number of values and claims. It might be a good enough approximation in almost all practical situations, but it is really not a deep philosophical assumption of any of the things that I am working on, and I am confident that if I were to bring it up at an EA meetup, someone would quite convincingly argue against it.
This might seem like a technicality, but in this context the statement is specifically made to claim that EA has a deep philosophical commitment to valuing all people equally, independently of the details about how their mind works (either because of genetics, or development environment, or education). This reassurance does not work. I (and my guess is also almost all extrapolations of the EA philosophy) value people approximately equally in impact estimates because it looks like the relative moral patienthood of different people, and the basic cognitive makeup of people, does not seem to differ much between different populations, not because I have a foundational philosophical commitment to impartiality. If it was the case that different human populations did differ on the relevant dimensions a lot, this would spell a real moral dilemma for the EA community, with no deep philosophical commitments to guard us from coming to uncomfortable conclusions (luckily, as far as I can tell, in this case almost all analyses from an EA perspective lead to the conclusion that it's probably reasonable to weigh people equally in impact estimates, which doesn't conflict with society's taboos, so this is not de-facto a problem).
Moving on, I do not believe that this statement is speaking on behalf of the employees of CEA, many of which I am confident also feel quite badly represented by this statement, and is also not speaking on behalf of Effective Altruism. I don't know what process has produced it, but I don't think it is speaking for me or almost anyone else I know within the EA community. Organizations themselves don't have beliefs, and EA has generally successfully avoided descending into meaningless marketing and PR speech where organizations take positions despite nobody at those organizations actually believing those positions. If you want to make a statement on this matter, speak as an individual. Individuals can meaningfully have beliefs. Organizations pretending to have beliefs is usually primarily a tactic to avoid taking responsibility and creating a diffuse target.
Additionally, it is completely unclear from your statement whether you are referring to Bostrom's original email or whether you are referring to Bostrom's apology. I don't know why you are being ambiguous, but it seems quite plausible that you are doing so in order to not be able to be pinned on either repudiating the statements in Bostrom's apology, which seem quite reasonable to me and many other EAs (and would therefore attract ire from the community), or failing to repudiate those same statements which are attracting a lot of ire publicly due to not being explicitly anti-racist enough. If this is indeed what you are doing, then please stop. This ambiguity is toxic to clear communication. If this is not what you are doing, then please clarify, and also please get better at writing, it seems really extremely obvious that this was going to be a problem with this statement.
Lastly, you are also not linking to either Bostrom's original statement, or his apology. I don't know why. It would both clear up the ambiguity discussed above, and it would provide crucial context for anyone trying to understand what is going on, and who might have not seen Bostrom's apology. My guess is you are doing this with some other PR reason in mind. Maybe so that when people Google this topic later on this doesn't show up in search? Maybe so that the lack of context makes it less likely that other people outside of the community will understand what this statement is about? In any case, either please get better at communicating, or stop the weird PR games that you are seemingly trying to play here.
Overall, despite this only being a single paragraph, I think there has been little produced by CEA that has made me feel as badly represented, and that has made me feel as alienated from the EA community as this statement. Please stop on whatever course you are setting out where this is how you communicate with both the public and the community.
I would also like to add to the other comments that EA Intro Fellowship has included a book section titled "All Animals Are Equal" for quite some time.