I'm glad to see more of this criticism as I think it's important for reflection and moving things forward. However, I'm not really sure who you're critiquing or why. My response would be that your critique (a) appears to misrepresent what the "EA mainstream" is, (b) ignores comparative advantage, or (c) says things I just outright disagree with.

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The EA Mainstream

Perhaps the biggest example of this is the prevalence of “earning to give”. While this is certainly an admirable option, it should be considered as a baseline to improve upon, not a definitive answer.

I imagine we know different people, even within the effective altruist community. So I'll believe you if you say you know a decent amount of people who think "earning to give" is the best instead of a baseline.

However, 80,000 Hours, the career advice organization that basically started earning to give have themselves written an article called "Why Earning to Give is Often Not the Best Option" and say "A common misconception is that 80,000 Hours thinks Earning to Give is typically the way to have the most impact. We’ve never said that in any of our materials.".

Additionally, the earning-to-give people I know (including myself) all agree with the baseline argument but believe earning to give either as best for them relative to other opportunities (e.g., using comparative advantage arguments) and/or believe earning to give to actually be best overall even when considering these arguments (e.g., by being skeptical of EA organizations).

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Contrast this with, for instance, working at a start-up. Most start-ups are low-impact, but it is undeniable that at least some have been extraordinarily high-impact, so this seems like an area that effective altruists should be considering strongly. Why aren't there more of us at 23&me, or Coursera, or Quora, or Stripe?

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this:

If you're asking "why don't more people work in start-ups?", I don't think EAs are avoiding start-ups in any noticeable way. I'll be working in one, I know several EAs who are working in them, and it doesn't seem to be all that different from software engineers / web developers in non-startups, except as would be predicted by non start-ups providing even better hiring opportunities.

If you're asking "why don't more people start start-ups themselves?", I think you already answered your own question with regard to people being unwilling to take on high personal risk. 80,000 Hours advises people to do start-ups in essays like "Should More Altruists Consider Entreprenuership?" and "Salary or Start-up: How Do Gooders Can Gain More From Risky Careers". Also, I can think of a few EAs who have started their own start-ups on these considerations. So perhaps people are irrationally risk-averse -- that is a valid critique -- but I don't think it's unique to the EA movement or we can do much about it.

If you're asking "why don't more people go into start-ups because these start-ups are doing high impact things themselves and therefore are good opportunities to have direct impact?", then I think you've hit on a valid critique that many people don't take seriously enough. I've heard some EAs mention it, but it is outside the EA mainstream.

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We want to know what the best thing to do is, and we want a numerical value. This causes us to rely on scientific studies, economic reports, and Fermi estimates. It can cause us to underweight things like the competence of a particular organization, the strength of the people involved, and other “intangibles” (which are often not actually intangible but simply difficult to assign a number to).

I think the EA mainstream would agree with you on this one as well -- GiveWell, for example, has explicitly distanced themselves from numerical calculations (albeit recently) and several EAs have called into question the usefulness of cost-effectiveness estimates, a charge that was largely lead by GiveWell.

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Comparative Advantage

And beyond the “obvious” alternatives of start-ups and academia, what of the paths that haven't been created yet? GiveWell was revolutionary when it came about. Who will be the next GiveWell? And by this I don't mean the next charity evaluator, but the next set of people who fundamentally alter how we view altruism.

I definitely agree that fundamentally altering how people view altruism would be very high impact (if shifted in a beneficial way, of course). But I don't think everyone has the time, skills, or willingness to do this -- or that they even should. I think this ignores the benefits of some specialization of trade.

Likewise, instead of EAs taking classes on global security for themselves, many defer to GiveWell and expect GiveWell to perform higher-quality research on these giving opportunities. After all, if you have broad trust in GiveWell, it's hard to beat several full-time saavy analysts with your spare time. GiveWell has more comparative advantage here.

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It also can cause us to over-focus on money as a unit of altruism, while often-times “it isn't about the money”: it's about doing the groundwork that no one is doing, or finding the opportunity that no one has found yet.

Right. But not everyone has the time or talents to do this groundwork. So it seems best if we set up some orgs to do this kind of groundwork (e.g., CEA, MIRI, etc.) and give money to them to let them specialize in these kinds of breakthroughs. And then the people who have the free time can start projects like Effective Fundraising or .impact.

If you're already raising a family and working a full-time job and donating 10%, I think in many cases it's not worth quitting your job or using your free time to look for more opportunities. We don't need absolutely everyone doing this search -- there's comparative advantage considerations here too.

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Outright Disagreement

How many would have pointed out that saying that charities vary by a factor of 1,000 in effectiveness is by itself not very helpful, and is more a statement about how bad the bottom end is than how good the top end is?

I think this has been very helpful from a PR point of view. And even if you think flow-through effects even things out more so that charities only differ by 10x or 100x (which I currently don't), that's still significant.

And whether that's condemnation of the bad end or praise for the top end depends on your perspective and standards for what makes an org good or bad. At least, the slope of the curve suggests that a lot of the difference is coming from the best organizations being a lot better than the merely good ones as opposed to the very bad ones being exceptionally bad (i.e., the curve is skewed toward the top, not toward the bottom).

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Quantitative estimates often also tend to ignore flow-through effects: [...] These effects are difficult to quantify but human and cultural intuition can do a reasonable job of taking them into account.

But can it? How do you know? I think you should take your own "research over speculation" advice here. I don't think we understand flow through effects well enough yet to know if they can be reliably intuited.

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Outright Agreement

an effective altruist makes a bold claim, then when pressed on it offers a heuristic justification together with the claim that “estimation is the best we have”. [...] It can appear to an outside observer as though people are opting for the fun, easy activity (speculation) rather than the harder and more worthwhile activity (research).

I agree this is an unfortunate problem.

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Conclusion

Lest this essay give a mistaken impression to the casual reader, I should note that there are many exemplary effective altruists who I feel are mostly immune to the issues above

This is where I get to the question of who your intended audience is. It seems like the EA mainstream either agrees with many of your critiques already (and therefore you're just trying to convince EAs to adopt the mainstream) or you're placing too much burden on EAs to ignore comparative advantage and have everyone become an EA trailblazer.