[skohan]

I think that's one interpretation, but the perverse interpretation is: "If I am an effective altruist, and I will use my resources to produce the most possible good, then it's a moral imperative to acquire as much money and power as I can, to maximize the results I can achieve"

[lesuorac]

That only works if the money and power you acquire is enough to pay somebody else to do the work instead of you.

If you don't make enough to sustain yourself and others to work on a cause more useful than a cause you could work yourself on then it doesn't make sense. Basically taking a standard 95k non-fang SWE job isn't better than taking a 50K SWE job at say Red Cross.

Also if you can get some 10M job at OpenAI but you also are certain that you could use those same skills to independent develop some drug that will say ~12M in lives/yr then you shouldn't go to OpenAI.

But there's also no true scotsman.

[chronofar]

Well I don't think that's really an interpretation so much as it is a strategy certain people may take, and as you're alluding to a very fallible one at that. It certainly could be a reasonable strategy to amass wealth and power and wield that for altruistic reasons, such a person does indeed stand to be much more effective than most. But of course people are quite corruptible and intentions can be fuzzy, so there's no guarantees that person will follow through, or that whatever they had to do to amass that money/wealth was worth it for the ultimate good.

Again one can look at the underlying tenets of such a creed and evaluate them for their conceptual merit without blasting the entire enterprise because some people abuse them for personal gain.