Effective altruism is a growing social movement based around the idea of using evidence and reason to work out how best to make the world a better place. About effective altruism
Some charities are far more effective. As Peter Singer says in his TED presentation, a guide dog costs $40,000, while ensuring someone doesn't become blind because of a preventable disease, as little as $20-50:
This kind of thinking makes people very uncomfortable, which leads to terrible critiques. One doesn't have to be Spock to think it more effective to save 800 to 2000 people from blindness than training a guide dog.
EAs are not above critique, and good ones should actually improve their behaviour: as you would expect with rationalists. Even non-Vulcan ones!
I have some cognitive dissonance with regards to EA. Take the Against Malaria Foundation. I thought it was shown that selling the nets was more cost effective than giving them; but a market-driven approach doesn't feel very altruistic. It also seems as though there's too much emphasis on exploitation over exploration and an over-confidence in their estimates, suggesting a portfolio approach would be more effective.
A lack of emphasis on environmental issues is rather puzzling given how much EAs tend to worry about X-risks.
This suggests that the next frontier for EAs will be building better models. Accepting measures such as disability-adjusted life-years creates a de facto implicit model, one in which an intervention that gave you an extra 10 years with a disability would never be as good as another that extended your healthy life just a single day. Such a ridiculous utility function probably doesn't matter when making a first pass, but we get what we measure; if EAs succeed to shifting people's charitable giving habits, we could quickly be making these kinds of perverse optimizations.
Don't let those critiques deter you from learning more about giving more effectively and researching charities to see which ones do the most good.