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Might be worth adding some EAO funders to the list:
Luke Ding Brian Lonnergan Matt Wage Jaan Tallinn Alex Gordon-Brown Sam Bankman-Fried
This is part of environment in my model.
Should be fixed
Should be fixed now.
You can reframe this to be less sinister. If you surround yourself with people that accept a lot of premises that you accept, it's easier to make intellectual progress. In some sense cutting-edge science is "an extreme opinion," but in a good way.
My guess is that as EAG gets larger we probably gain the advantage of even better economies of scale, so I would expect us to land at a lower ticket price even if the quality of the event this year is the same as last year.
I'm calling him out in a good way though.
I agree with the concern about the epistemics of the EA community. I touched on these in a talk I gave at EA Global.
However, I'm not sure linking to isolated posts that are concerning is a good way to get a sense of the degree to which this is a problem in the EA community. You'll want to weight the posts by the actual influence that the poster has over the movement. Of those poster Rob Wiblin is the most influential (he works at CEA). The rest are neither employed at EA orgs nor are large donors.
A community that is both growing and is epistemically strong will probably still have a ton of low-quality posts. This seems normal to me unless we see wider adoption of low-quality ideas. I don't think this is the case so far.
If fundraising was well coordinated, there would still be a large number of orgs raising in December. Something like a fifth of all giving in the US occurs during December. In EA the EtGers in finance find out about their bonuses in December.
However, I didn't know how many orgs were planning to raise money this December. If this was more widely known it might have made sense for a few of the CEA orgs to skip fundraising in December and raise a few months into 2016. So, the amount of coordination now is far from optimal.