Effective altruism has become a think tank of endless debate—people arguing about which cause deserves the top spot while the world keeps burning.

This seems quite false to me? My impression is most people are busy working on their specific cause areas. Relatively little time is spent arguing for one major cause area over another. (This post, of course, fits into that category).

We need to align on one clear, shared goal—something tangible that unites the major cause areas and shows what coordinated altruism can actually do. Otherwise, this movement will slip into obscurity. 

This also seems false to me. EA has not had one single object-level objective for the previous 15 years and it does not seem to have caused obscurity slippage thus far, and it's not clear why we should expect this to change.

I feel like you switch back and forth a bit here between causal and evidential:

• failure to end factory farming is evidence that future steering efforts will go badly

vs

• failure to end factory farming will cause future steering efforts to go badly

You're right, I had forgotten that retail customer deposits count as stable funding under the liquidity regulations.

It could be the case - but I'm not aware of much evidence to support this. Over the last hundred years we have seen a dramatic increase in the number of people on sinecures and a collapse in the selectiveness - e.g. the rise of state pensions, unemployment insurance, disability insurance. There are a few successes (JK Rowling credits state benefits with allowing her to write Harry Potter, for example) but clearly a much lower rate than under the prior model.

Charles Darwin spent decades at Down House, financially secure from family wealth, meticulously gathering evidence for evolution without any professional obligations. Adam Smith received a pension from the Duke of Buccleuch that let him spend nearly a decade writing The Wealth of Nations. The 1956 Dartmouth workshop that founded the field of AI was enabled by a modest Rockefeller Foundation grant that gave researchers freedom to explore.

Largely, it's people who happen to have financial bandwidth - those with inherited wealth, tech industry windfalls, academic positions with light teaching loads, or partners who can support them. This is a privilege filter that operates invisibly. We don't notice how much of EA's "independent thinking" comes from people who can afford to do it.

It seems a bit strange to me to hold up family wealth and elite patronage as historically very beneficial features for allowing bandwidth for independent innovation and then complain that in EA this bandwidth is only available to those with family wealth or elite patrons.

Presumably customer deposits are typically invested in short term government paper and reverse repos rather than corporates. I would expect this to be similar across all banks.

(Also I disagree with classifying defence companies as immoral. This is the sort of thinking that leads the west to be vulnerable to aggressive dictatorships).

Here are some recent headlines from the La Via Campesina website:

La Via Campesina calls on the governments of the world, and in particular progressive governments and those of the South, to do everything in their power to end apartheid and Israel’s colonization.

Brazil: Why should we fight agribusiness?

The fight for land justice in Zimbabwe, South Africa, and across the Global South is not just a local struggle – it is a global one

International Day of Action against WTO and Free Trade Agreements

Solidarity with Palestine and the Sumud and Freedom Flotillas to break the blockade of Gaza

... among the world’s most diverse and significant gathering of representatives of small-scale food producers, Indigenous Peoples, pastoralists, food chain workers, daily wage and migrant laborers in urban and rural areas, feminist and climate justice movements, advocates for social and solidarity economies and health for all, consumer groups, other service and manufacturing sector workers – is set to bring the agenda of a ‘systemic transformation’ back on the table in an emphatic way.

I really don't see how this is not a leftist group.

However, this often occurred at the expense of the environment—effectively borrowing from the future to pay for the present, a strategy that is inherently unsustainable.  

...

For instance, the World Bank’s 2016 report, *The Cost of Air Pollution*, found that the welfare losses due to air pollution exceed 6% of global GDP.

This sounds pretty sustainable to me! 6% of current GDP of total cost in order to unlock roughly 10,000% growth since the start of the industrial revolution is a great deal. 

This line of reasoning seems very shortsighted to me. Historically intellectual innovation, popularization and outreach have sometimes yielded extremely high returns; it can be prudent to invest rather than consuming all your seed corn immediately. It could be a bad investment, but the mere counterfactual possibility of donating to AMF doesn't automatically discredit anything upstream.