That deflates that criticism. For the object-level social dynamics problem, I think that people will not actually care about those problems unless they are incentivised to care about those problems, and it's not clear to me that is possible to do.

Is epistemology the real failing, here? This may just be the communism analogy, but I'm not seeing how the incentive structure of EA is lined up with actually getting things done rather than pretending to actually get things done. Do you have a good model of the incentive structure of EA?

I don't think EA has to worry about incentive structure in the same way that communism does, because EA doesn't want to take over countries (well, if it does, that's a different issue). Fundamentally we rely on people deciding to do EA on their own, and thus having at least some sort of motivation (or, like, coherent extrapolated motivation) to actually try. (Unless you're arguing that EA is primarily people who are doing it entirely for the social feedback from people and not at all out of a desire to actually implement utilitarianism. This may be true; if it is, it's a separate problem from incentives.)

The problem is more that this motivation gets co-opted by social-reward-seeking systems and we aren't aware of that when it happens. One way to fix this is to fix incentives, it's true, but another way is to fix the underlying problem of responding to social incentives when you intended to actually implement utilitarianism. Since the reason EA started was to fix the latter problem (e.g. people responding to social incentives by donating to the Charity for Rare Diseases in Cute Puppies), I think that that route is likely to be a better solution, and involve fewer epicycles (of the form where we have to consciously fix incentives again whenever we discover other problems).

I'm also not entirely sure this makes sense, though, because as I mentioned, social dynamics isn't a comparative advantage of mine :P

(Responding to the meta-point separately because yay threading.)