EA claims to be utilitarian by urging giving to the most downtrodden, for example, low-income people in Africa. My definition of utilitarian is very different: "What will end up doing the most good for humankind.? And that would, for example, prioritize donating to SENG, which helps troubled intellectually gifted kids in developed nations to live up to their potential. Those kids are thus more likely to develop cures for diseases, develop helpful yet ethical uses of artificial intelligence, and become wiser, more ethical leaders, which benefits the world's humankind more than EA-touted causes.
Welcome to the EA Forum, Marty. Thanks for posting.
A few thoughts:
Welcome to the forum. I see that this is your first post. As others have mentioned there would still be some fleshing out to do, but thanks either way!
I think one of the reasons why this proposal isn't really part of the EA mainstream is that EAs tend to differentiate into cautious global health and development people and speculative risk-takers which go into domains such as AI, biosecurity, institutional decision-making, etc. There are a few people in the middle, e.g., the work of Charity Entrepreneurship or Innovations for Poverty Action could be categorized as speculative global health, but it's not that common.
Interesting. I agree that second or third-order effects such that as the good done later by people you have helped are an important consideration. Maximising such effects could be an underexplored effective giving strategy, and this organization you refer to looks like a group of people trying to do that. However, to really assess an organization's effectiveness, epecially if it focuses in educational or social interventions, some empirical evidence is needed.
Perhaps this article I've recently written will be helpful. It offers a number of examples of what I believe are more effective altruism than what the EA movement mainly touts: https://medium.com/@mnemko/more-effective-altruism-d05feba47ce3