weird bunch of people, or at least, the one time i interacted with them they were. i went to a talk by the effective altruism guysb in oxford more than a decade ago. one of the nice things about oxford as a town is that if you dug into the university webpages you could find a very extensive programme of talks about all kinds of things, and although it was clear that they didn't really plan on attracting people from outside of the university, no-one was going to stop you if you just turned up, so you could quite regularly find yourself in some lecture on a tuesday lunchtime or whatever. obviously oxford is one of those places which is important for elite formation and i feel like its blindingly obvious that all kinds of people recognise that its a place where you can change the minds of powerful people while they're very young, so for someone like the effective altrusist guys its a natural target. after all you basically need to be pretty well off to start thinking about giving 10% of your income to 'good causes'. or alternatively very altruistic i suppose, but most of the people involve are probably the former.