You'll never find a single prominent EA saying that because it's 100% made up. Maybe they'll remark that from an academic perspective it's a consequence of some interpretations of utilitarianism, a topic some EAs are interested in, but no prominent EA has ever actually endorsed or implied the view you put forward.
To an EA, what you said is as laughable of a strawman as if someone summarized your beliefs as "it makes no difference if you donate to starving children in africa or if you do nothing, because it's your decision and neither is immoral".
The popularity of EA is even more obvious than what you described. Here's why it's popular. A lot of people are interested in doing good, but have limited resources. EAs tried to figure out how to do a lot of good given limited resources.
ou might think this sounds too obvious to be true, but no one before EAs was doing this. The closest thing was charity rankings that just measured what percent of the money was spend on administration. (A charity that spends 100% of its donations on back massages for baby seals would be the #1 charity on that ranking.) Finding ways to do a lot of good given your budget is a pretty intuitively attractive idea.
And they're really all about this too. Go read the EA forum. They're not talking about how their hands are clean now because they donated. They're talking about how to do good. They're arguing about whether malaria nets or malaria chemotreatments are more effective at stopping the spread of the disease. They're arguing about how to best mitigate the suffering of factory farmed animals (or how to convince people to go vegan). And so on. EA is just people trying to do good. Yeah, SBF was a bad actor, but how were EA charities supposed to know that when the investors that gave him millions couldn't even do that?
To an EA, what you said is as laughable of a strawman as if someone summarized your beliefs as "it makes no difference if you donate to starving children in africa or if you do nothing, because it's your decision and neither is immoral".
The popularity of EA is even more obvious than what you described. Here's why it's popular. A lot of people are interested in doing good, but have limited resources. EAs tried to figure out how to do a lot of good given limited resources.
ou might think this sounds too obvious to be true, but no one before EAs was doing this. The closest thing was charity rankings that just measured what percent of the money was spend on administration. (A charity that spends 100% of its donations on back massages for baby seals would be the #1 charity on that ranking.) Finding ways to do a lot of good given your budget is a pretty intuitively attractive idea.
And they're really all about this too. Go read the EA forum. They're not talking about how their hands are clean now because they donated. They're talking about how to do good. They're arguing about whether malaria nets or malaria chemotreatments are more effective at stopping the spread of the disease. They're arguing about how to best mitigate the suffering of factory farmed animals (or how to convince people to go vegan). And so on. EA is just people trying to do good. Yeah, SBF was a bad actor, but how were EA charities supposed to know that when the investors that gave him millions couldn't even do that?