These are largely anecdotal, and are NOT endorsements of all listed critiques, just an acknowledgement that they exist, and may contribute to negative shifts in EA's public image. This skews towards L) leaning views, and isn't representative of all critiques out there, just a selection of from people I've talked to and commentary I've seen / what's front of mind due to recent conversations.
FTX events are clearly a net negative to EA's reputation from the outside. This probably was a more larger reputational hit to longtermism than animal welfare or GHW (though not necessarily a larger harm : benefit ratio). But even before this, a lot of left leaning folks view EA's ties to crypto with skepticism (often this is usually around views of whether crypto is net positive for humanity, not on the extent to which crypto is a sound investment).
EA generally is subject to critiques around measuring impact through a utilitarian lens by those who deem the value of lives "above" measurement, as well as by those who think EA undervalues non-utilitarian moral views or person-affecting views. There are also general criticisms of it being an insufficiently diverse place (usually something like: too white / too western / too male / too elitist) for a movement that cares about doing the most good it can.
EA global health + wellbeing / development is subject to critiques around top-down Western aid (e.g., Easterly, Deaton), and general critiques around the merits of randomista development. Some conclusions are seen as unintuitive e.g. by those who think donating to local causes or your local community is preferable because of some moral obligation to those closer to them or those responsible for their success in some way.
Within the animal welfare space, there's discussion around whether continued involvement with EA and its principles is a good thing or not for similar reasons (lacking diversity, too top-down, too utilitarian) - these voices largely come from the more left leaning / social justice inclined (e.g. placing value on intersectionality). Accordingly, some within the farmed animal advocacy space also think involvement with EA is contributing to a splintering within the FAAM movement. I'm not sure why this seems more relevant in FAAM than GHW, but some possibilities might be if EA funders are a more important player in the animal space than the GHD space, and if FAAM members are generally more left-leaning and see a larger divide between social justice approaches and EA's utilitarian EV-maximising approaches. Some conclusions are seen as unintuitive e.g. shrimp welfare ("wait you guys actually care about shrimp?"), or wild animal suffering.
Longtermism is subject to critiques from those uncomfortable with valuing the future at the cost of people today, valuing artificial sentience more than humans, a perceived reliance on EV-maximising views, "tech bros" valuing science fiction ideas over real suffering and justifying such spending as "saving the world", and the extent to which the future they are wanting to preserve actually involves all of humanity, or just a version of humanity that a limited subculture cares about. Unintuitive conclusions may involve anything ranging from thinking about the future more than 1000 years from now, outside of the solar system, or artificial sentience. The general critiques around diversity and a lean towards tech fixes instead of systematic approaches are perhaps most pronounced in longtermism, perhaps in part due to AI safety being a large focus of longtermism, and in part due to associations with the Bay Area. The general critiques around utilitarianism are perhaps also most pronounced in longtermism, and the media attention around WWOTF probably made more people engage with longtermism and its critiques. On recent EA involvement in politics as a pushback RE: favouring tech fixes > systemic approaches, the Flynn campaign was seen as a negative update for some left-leaning outsiders in terms of EA's ability to engage in this space.
Outside of cause area considerations, some people get the impression that EA leans young, unprofessional, too skeptical to defer to existing expertise / too eager to defer to a smart generalist to first-principles their way through a complicated problem, that EA is a community that is too closely knit and subject to nepotism, that EA unfairly favours "EA insiders" or "EA alignment". Other people think EA is too fervent with outreach, and consider university and high school messaging or even 80,000 hours akin to cult recruitment. On a similar vein, some think that the EA movement is too morally demanding, and this may lead to burnout, or insufficiently values individuals' flourishing. Some others think that EA lacks direction, isn't well steered, or has an inconsistent theory of change.
As with any social movement, people disagree about the best ways to take action. There are many critiques of EA which you should read to get a better idea of where others are coming from, for example, this post about effective altruism being an ideology, this post about someone leaving EA, this post about EA being inaccessible, or this post about blindspots in EA/rationalism communities.
Even before SBF, many people had legitimate issues with EA from a variety of standpoints. Some people find the culture unwelcoming (eg. too elitist/not enough diversity), some people take issue with longtermism (eg. too much uncertainty), others disagree with consequentialism/utilitarianism, and still others are generally on board but find more specific issues in the way that EA approaches things.
Post-SBF it's difficult to say what the full effects will be, but I think it's fair to say that SBF represents what many people fear/dislike about EA (eg. elitism, inexperience, ends-justifies-the-means reasoning, tech-bro vibes, etc). I'm not saying these things are necessarily true, but most people won't spend hundreds of hours engaging with EA to find out for themselves. Instead, they'll read an article on the New York Times about how SBF committed fraud and is heavily linked to EA and walk away with a somewhat negative impression. That isn't always fair, but it also happens to other social movements like feminism, Black Lives Matter, veganism, environmentalism, etc. EA is no exception, and FTX/SBF was a big enough deal that a lot of people will choose not to engage with EA going forward.
Should you care? I think to an extent, yes - you should engage with criticisms, think through your own perspective, decide where you agree/disagree, and work on improving things where you think they should be improved going forward. We should all do this. Ignoring criticisms is akin to putting your fingers in your ears and refusing to listen, which isn't a particularly rational approach. Many critics of EA will have meaningful things to say about it and if we truly want to figure out the best ways to improve the world, we need to be willing to change (see: scout mindset). That being said, not all criticisms will be useful or meaningful, and we shouldn't get so caught up in the criticism that we stop standing for something.
well the elitism charge is just true and it should be true! Of course EA is an elitist movement, the whole point is trying to get elites to spend their wealth better, via complicated moral reasoning that you have to be smart to understand (this is IMO a good thing, not a criticism!).
I actually think it would be a disaster if EA became anti-elitist, not just for EA but for the world. The civic foundation of the West is made up of Susan from South Nottingham who volunteers to run the local mother & baby group: if she stops doing that to ETG or whatever then everything falls apart and the economic surplus that EA relies on will disappear within a few generations. For everyone's sakes, the EA message needs to stay very specifically targeted; it would be an extremely dangerous meme if it leaked out to the wider world. Thankfully I think on some level EAs sort of know this, which would probably explain the focus on evangelizing specifically to smart university students but not to anyone else.
I rather liked this comment, and think it really hits the nail on the head. Myself being a person that has only recently come into contact and developed an interest, and therefore having mostly an 'outsider' perspective, I would add that there's a big difference in the perception of 'effective altruism', which almost anybody would find reasonable and morally unobjectionable, and 'Effective Altruism' / Rationalism as a movement with some beliefs and practices that will be felt as weird and rejectable by many people (basically, all those mentioned by S.E. Montgomery like elitism, long-termism, utilitarianism, a general hibristic and nerdy belief that complex issues and affairs are reducible to numbers and optimization models, etc...).
Controversial take: While I agree that EA has big problems, I actually think that elitism was correct for one reason.
One of my largest criticisms with EA is that they don't realize there might be a crucial consideration around moral realism. Now this is a non-special criticism, but moral realism is basically the theory behind where morality is real and mind independent.
Yet there is probably overconfidence on this front, and this matters, because if it isn't true, than EA will have to change drastically. And in general this is way too unquestioned as an assumption being used.
It's possible I've flipped the sign on what you're saying, but if I haven't, I'm pretty sure most EAs are not moral realists, so I don't know where you got the impression that it's an underlying assumption of any serious EA efforts.
If I did flip the sign, then I don't think it's true that moral realism is "too unquestioned". At this point it might be more fair to say that too much time & ink has been spilled on what's frankly a pretty trivial question that only sees as much engagement as it does because people get caught up in arguing about definitions of words (and, of course, because some other people are deeply confused).
I think this might be a crux here: I do think that this question matters a lot, and I will point to implications if moral realism is false. Thankfully more EAs are moral anti-realists than I thought.
EA would need to recognize that their values aren't superior or inferior to other people's values, just different values. In other words it would need to stop believing it's actually objectively right at all to hold (X values).
The moral progress thesis is not correct, that is the changes in the 19th and 20th centuries were mostly not made on moral progress. At the very least moral progress is very much subjective.
Values are points of view, not fundamental truths that humans have to abide by.
Now this isn't the most important question, but it is a question that I think matters, especially for moral movements like EA.