The history of the movement started in the Oxford Uni philosophy department. I could be wrong but having read a couple of the early books, I think the focus started much more on the ideas of:
1: you have an equal moral obligation to do good for all humans as you do for humans around you, having one without the other is not really logically justifiable
2: some charities are orders of magnitude more effective than others.
I agree somewhat with your sentiment with regards to where they are now, with a lot of their focus on far-future risk avoidance. That stuff can't really fit, because it can't be reasoned about very precisely/scientifically. It's gone from a movement with emphasis on measurement and scientific methods to having a lot of emphasis on things that can't be measured. I think part of the problem is literally it started with some of the brightest guys around and as it gets disseminated to general pop, they lose and distort the message.
I agree somewhat with your sentiment with regards to where they are now, with a lot of their focus on far-future risk avoidance. That stuff can't really fit, because it can't be reasoned about very precisely/scientifically. It's gone from a movement with emphasis on measurement and scientific methods to having a lot of emphasis on things that can't be measured. I think part of the problem is literally it started with some of the brightest guys around and as it gets disseminated to general pop, they lose and distort the message.