I like the general idea of EA. But it's a human movement, and thus vulnerable to mismanagement and corruption that's characteristic of distributed organizations that manage large sums of money. To that end I've observed three worrying trends in the EA movement over past couple of years. They are (in no particular order):

1. To focus EA efforts on donations from high-net-worth individuals, often at the cost of giving these individuals massive influence over organizational priorities.

2. To shift (more) towards a longtermist philosophy, wherein "effectiveness" is determined by the wellness of hypothetical future beings, rather than measurable near-term impacts like "lives saved, bed nets distributed." This measurability was supposed to be the bedrock of EA, what kept it from becoming like other wasteful organizations.

3. As a consequence of (1) and (2), to shift the balance of internal priorities away from practical and measurable efforts, towards work like "AI alignment"; spending millions on book tours to promote EA/longtermist ideas; and spending on charities that provide facilities to help EA organizations "come up with ideas about the future."

4. To close ranks against outside criticism of EA's priorities, and to refuse any efforts for a community-wide re-evaluation of these new priorities, or to pose tough internal questions about donors or spending.

In this new regime, spending on luxurious meeting facilities ("castles") sits on equal footing with malaria nets. Because perhaps the ideas developed therein will save billions of future lives, or the facilities will encourage big new donations, and that's an organizational priority now. In any case, there's no way you can prove this won't happen, because nothing is empirically measurable. Also: castles are awesome.

None of these priorities represent the entirety of EA, but it's obvious that the opinionated people who control these (huge!) purse-strings are gradually gaining organizational control of the movement, to the (I suspect) long-term detriment of the "let's spend effectively on Malaria nets" wing. It's quite sad, but it's also exactly what I'd expect of an organization that is insufficiently defended against this kind of drift.

Far from "everything is great but SBF couldn't have been predicted," you see evidence of all these mismanagement in the events that I mention. First, there's the well-funded McCaskill book, which attempted to mainstream EA/longtermist priorities. This would not have been possible without (1) [and quite possibly, without stolen FTX deposits.] Then there's the presence of obvious grifters like SBF within the inner-circles of the community, and the fact that nobody with power was asking the obvious question about whether these people should be such an important part of the movement. (It did not take a lot of looking, apparently.)

And finally, you see it in the orgy of undisciplined, poorly-justified spending by EA organizations that occurred right at a time when they were deliberately courting increased prominence, including two different castles. All of this would be perfectly normal in a cult like Scientology, but has no place whatsoever in a mass-scale effective altruist movement.