I have a slightly different take to the parent. I think it's nonsense because the ostensible core purpose of this movement is about taking competent, motivated

I have a slightly different take to the parent. I think it's nonsense because the ostensible core purpose of this movement is about taking competent, motivated people and deploying them in such a way that they can make a meaningful change in how the world works. However, the main effect of their recommendation is to go out and participate in the system in a pretty standard way. How will meaningful change happen in a system in which you aren't acting in any way differently to the standard operations of the system? Sure, you donated a significant fraction of your income to some non-profit. But that effect pales in comparison to the economic contribution of your labor in big tech/finance/whatever which are the dominant institutions structuring our society. And most of the non-development problems such as AI risk or nuclear risk come from the same kinds of structure dynamics of society that caused the wealth inequality and environmental degradation. So I believe, for a group supposedly run by very smart people with very noble ideals, they kind of fall pretty short of where they could be and don't go deep enough. They are proposing band-aids to problems rather than true cures. To me it just becomes another part of the non-profit industrial complex, a neoliberal-shaped industry that effectively perpetuates the problems it purports to solve since it relies on the existence of those problems to survive. We've known for a long time how charity and aid can do more harm than good and plenty of strategies formerly championed by 80000 hours have now been found to be more extractive/exploitative than helpful, such as microlending. Fundamentally, they just can't seem to make the necessary leap to criticising capitalism and strategising against it, instead promoting it as the preferred tool to use. But how will capitalist tools solve the problems caused by capitalism? If instead they got all their smart followers to use their privileged positions and training not to reinforce the most powerful institutions of capital but instead build alternatives, I would think they are on the right track, even if it included AI risk initiatives.