Like the PR teams got together and intentionally conjured semantics that tickle the same biological responses seen in religious true believers.
Consider “religion” as a biological state, not an abstract philosophical framework. Behavioral economics has been leveraged to embed the hallucination that is American Civic Life similarly to embedding religious mind viruses.
Given what we know now in neuroscience, how we brainwave sync with rooms of people just by being there, the leadership class reinforces among themselves hallucinations of their right to reach into all of our lives and claim them for themselves, just like the church.
The longtermism stuff has always struck me oddly alongside those other obviously-beneficial causes. It's a bummer that's all some people think of when they hear EA.
What we chose to donate to are organizations like churches, museum, theaters, makerspaces, and the like. They enrich our lives in the neighborhoods we live in, but they're not exactly urgent as someone on the other side of the world dying to something perfectly preventable like cholera.