This is not true (and incidentally is a pet peeve of mine). I know plenty of EAs who are not utilitarian EAs. Most EAs I know would dispute this (at least in conversation on the EA facebook group there appears to be a consensus that EA ≠ utilitarianism).

Effective altruism is not the same as utilitarianism, but it is certainly based on it. How else would you call trying to maximize a numeric measure of cumulative good?

What do you mean that you do not endorse EA?

I think I've already responded in the parent comment.

I would or recognize as 'EA' actions and organizations that are ethical through ways other than producing welfare/happiness, as long as they apply rationality to doing good.

You're a CEA employee, if I remember correctly? If so, your account of effective altruism seems rather different from Will's: "Maybe you want to do other things effectively, but then it's not effective altruism". This sort of mixed messaging is exactly what I was objecting too.

I would be interested to hear an elaboration of why a promise keeping charity is the best thing to do

I'm far from certain it is. But as far as I'm aware no effort at all is put into it at present, so there could be very low hanging fruit.

A few thoughts (disclaimer: I do NOT endorse effective altruism):

• The main reason most people donate to charities may be to signal status to others, or to "purchase warm fuzzies" (a form of status signalling to one's own ego).
  Effective altruists claim to really care about doing good with their donations, but theirs could be just a form of status signalling targeted at communities where memes such as consequentialism, utilitarianism, and "rationality" are well received, and/or similarly a way to "purchase warm fuzzies" for somebody wishing to maintain a self-image of utilitarian/"rationalist".
  To this end, effective altruism doesn't have to be actually effective, it could just superficially pretend to be.

• Effective altruism is based on a form of total utilitarianism, thus it is subject to the standard problems of this moral philosophy:

• Interpersonal utility comparison: metrics such as QUALY are supposed to be interpersonally comparable proxies for utility, but they are highly debatable.
• The repugnant conclusion: optimizing for cumulative QUALYs may lead to a world where the majority of the population live lives only barely worth living. Note that this isn't merely a theoretical concern: as Carl Shulman pointed out, GiveWell's top-ranked charities might well be already pushing in that direction.

• Difficulties in distinguishing supererogatory actions from morally required actions, as your example of the person questioning their own desire to have kids displays.

• Even if you assume that optimizing cumulative QUALYs is the proper goal of charitable donation, there are still problems of measurement and incentives of all the involved actors, much like the problems that plagued Communism:

• Estimating the expected marginal QUALYs per dollar of a charitable donation is difficult. Any method would have to rely on a number of relatively strong assumptions. Charities have an incentive to find and exploit any loophole in the evaluation methods, as per Campbell's law/Goodhart's law/Lucas critique.
• Individual donors can't plausibly estimate the expected marginal QUALYs/$ of charities, they have to rely on meta-charities like GiveWell. But how you estimate the performance of GiveWell? Given that estimation is costly, GiveWell has no incentive to become any better, it actually has an incentive to become worse. Even if the people currently running GiveWell are honest and competent, they might fall victim to greed or self-serving biases that could make them overestimate their own performance, especially since they lack any independent form of evaluation or model to compare with. Or the honest and competent people could be replaced by less honest and less competent people. Or GiveWell as a whole could be driven out of business and replaced by a competitor that spends less on estimation quality and more on PR. The whole industry has a real possibility of becoming a Market for Lemons.

1) As an EA I strongly resist any attempt to say that EA as utilitarianism as I would see doing so as harmful for the movement and it would exclude many of the non-utilitarian EAs I know.

Ea is not utilitarianism. There is no reason why you cannot apply rationality to doing good and be an EA and believe in Christian ethics / ethical anti-realism / virtue ethics / deontolgical ethics / etc. For example I have an EA friend who would never kill one person to save 5 people, but believes strongly that we should research and give to the very best charities and so on. I see the above point as unequivecal, insofar as I

2. I would or recognize as 'EA' actions and organizations that are ethical through ways other than producing welfare/happiness, as long as they apply rationality to doing good. EG. if someone truly believed in some Rawlesian concept of justice and supported a charity that best lead to that idea. HOWEVER - I have some arbitrarily ill-defined limits on what counts as good. Eg I would never except as an EA someone who believed that killing Jews is the good. - If I meet someone with a very strange view (Eg the best cause is saving snails) I would assume that they are being irrational rather than just had a different understanding of morality.

3. I think it is bad of CEA to push OP away on utilitarian grounds. That said I find it hard to conceive of any form of moral view that would lead someone to believe that the best action they could take would be to create a charity to promote promise-keeping, so I have some sympathy for CEA. (Also I would be interested to hear an elaboration of why a promise keeping charity is the best thing to do.)

Very good article - hopefully it will put me on path to a fulfilling and happy life. Excellent piece of work. :-)

Re: The correlates of happiness - my only quibble I was previously under the impression that health was a big correlate of happiness, at least at the same level as a successful relationships, etc. In both cases I think a sudden changes lead to corresponding unhappiness or happiness and that over time happiness will return to close to the initial levels. Curiously, in the health footnote you specifically claim look at the unhappiness of people with disabling health conditions, rather than the unhappiness of all unhealthy people, yet you talk about the happiness of all married people. It does not appear that you are comparing like with like. Maybe a point for further research.