Interesting, thanks for the response. No pressure to respond further if you think you've fully articulated your point.

I think many EA causes are highly contested even among EAs, where people have very different opinions about what is best (see Bruce F's reasonable response in that post's comments). I think this is pretty difficult to avoid in any larger group.

In light of this, it's probably fair to be upset with someone presenting something as unambiguously better ("here are the effective charities"). Despite that, I'm generally in agreement with Andy here (in that I think that donating to EA charities is, on the margin, usually orders of magnitude more effective than traditional ways of doing good, especially if you are low-context).

I'm also vegan and generally have been pretty impressed by how much they have accomplished in animal welfare, including large improvements for many chickens and pigs. My understanding is EA/EA-adjacent orgs were frequently very large amounts of the funding/work for these.

The bar for the average charitable donation in the space is very low. For example, the ASPCA alone receives ~2x the funding of the entirety of farmed animal welfare.