Effective altruism is a complicated idea. When an idea is complicated, often people don't understand the full idea but instead some low resolution version of the idea which they get from snippets of conversation, impressions they have from other people, and vague recollection of media articles.
What's the current low resolution version of effective altruism? Is it positive? What would a better low resolution image be?
I think SF, in general, is not representative because a lot more people (non-EAs) are aware of EA, AI risk etc.
Also, the EA community in SF is also different from most other EA communities, including other US EA communities because of the overlap with the SF tech scene and rationality community.
So although I haven't seen that criticism from non-EAs as much, I think it's a reasonable low-res version that someone in SF might get if they just hear about EA.