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Jiro comments on Effective Altruism from XYZ perspective - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm sad that people still think EAers endorse such a naive and short-time-horizon type of optimizing utility. It would obviously not optimize any reasonable utility function over a reasonable timeframe for you to stop paying for electricity for your computer.
More generally, I think most EAers have a much more sophisticated understanding of their values, and the psychology of optimizing them, than you give them credit for. As far as I know, nobody who identifies with EA routinely makes individual decisions between personal purchases and donating. Instead, most people allocate a "charity budget" periodically and make sure they feel ok about both the charity budget and the amount they spend on themselves. Very few people, if any, cut personal spending to the point where they have to worry about, e.g., electricity bills.
As I said before, it is possible that some of a group doesn't believe the logical consequences of its own positions. That doesn't make them immune from criticism based on those logical consequences.
It's true, of course, that EA proponents don't do this, but that only shows that EA is unworkable even to EA proponents. If you have a charity budget, there's no good principled reason why you should restrict your donation to your charity budget. Arguments I've seen include:
You need to be able to make money to perform EA and going poor would be counterproductive--true, but most of the money you spend on personal entertainment is not being used to help you make money.
You would find it psychologically intolerable to not spend a certain amount of money on personal entertainment. But by this reasoning, the amount you should spend on charity is an amount that makes you uncomfortable, but just as much uncomfortable as you can get without long term effects on your psychological health and your motivation to donate. (It also means that your first priority should be to self-modify to have less psychological need for entertainment.) Also, it could be used to justify almost any level of giving, and in the limit, it's equivalent to "I put a higher value on myself, just for a slightly different reason than everyone else who 'doesn't value people equally' puts a higher value on themselves."
EA states that it is good to spend money on charity, but being good is not the same thing as having a moral obligation to do it; it's okay to not do as much good as you conceivably could. I find this explanation unconvincing because it would then equally justify not doing any good at all.