I was being very generous in my post. Less Wrong has many people that have megalomaniac tendencies. This would be almost impossible to argue against. I gave a wide margin and said many great people, but to pretend that there aren't illegitimate people who hide and are many in number is something else entirely.
Elon Musk is certainly trustworthy. You can calculate trustworthiness via amount of accumulated capital because the effect trust has on said serial accumulation.
You have referenced relatively elementary mistakes that do not apply in this situation. Your examples are extremely off base
Dan Quayle as a good speller is irrelevant and unbelievable that is not even in the same ballpark of what I was saying
Satoshi Nakamoto being good looking because of his invention is ridiculous
Just Bieber example is worse.
Social approximation is far more robust than peoples assumed identities and online persona's. I am not foolishly judging people randomly. Most of the "effective altruists" you meet are complete pushovers and if they wish to justify their megalomaniac tendencies constantly going on and on about how effective they are, they should be able to put their foot down and stop bad people and set boundaries, or cut the effective act until they are able to.
They use their "effective altruism" to make up for the fact of the huge ethical opportunity costs they miss by what they DO NOT do. They then engage in extremely obscurant arguments as cover.
As an example see the lack of ethics that many people complain about in mathematics ie Grothendieck or Perelman.
Mathematicians trends towards passivity and probably are "good people" but they do not stop their peers in engaging unethical behavior and thus that is the sordid state of mathematics. Stopping bad people is primary, doing good things is second. Effective altruism is incomplete until they admit that it is not doing good things, but stopping bad things, and you need a robust personality structure to do so.
We are delighted to report that technology inventor Elon Musk, creator of Tesla and SpaceX, has decided to donate $10M to the Future of Life Institute to run a global research program aimed at keeping AI beneficial to humanity.
There is now a broad consensus that AI research is progressing steadily, and that its impact on society is likely to increase. A long list of leading AI-researchers have signed an open letter calling for research aimed at ensuring that AI systems are robust and beneficial, doing what we want them to do. Musk's donation aims to support precisely this type of research: "Here are all these leading AI researchers saying that AI safety is important", says Elon Musk. "I agree with them, so I'm today committing $10M to support research aimed at keeping AI beneficial for humanity."
[...] The $10M program will be administered by the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit organization whose scientific advisory board includes AI-researchers Stuart Russell and Francesca Rossi. [...]
The research supported by the program will be carried out around the globe via an open grants competition, through an application portal at http://futureoflife.org that will open by Thursday January 22. The plan is to award the majority of the grant funds to AI researchers, and the remainder to AI-related research involving other fields such as economics, law, ethics and policy (a detailed list of examples can be found here [PDF]). "Anybody can send in a grant proposal, and the best ideas will win regardless of whether they come from academia, industry or elsewhere", says FLI co-founder Viktoriya Krakovna.
[...] Along with research grants, the program will also include meetings and outreach programs aimed at bringing together academic AI researchers, industry AI developers and other key constituents to continue exploring how to maximize the societal benefits of AI; one such meeting was held in Puerto Rico last week with many of the open-letter signatories.
Elon Musk donates $10M to keep AI beneficial, Future of Life Institute, Thursday January 15, 2015