Hi - Thanks so much for writing this. I'm on holiday at the moment so have only have been able to  quickly  skim your post and paper.  But, having got the gist, I just wanted to say:
(i) It really pains me to hear that you lost time and energy as a result of people discouraging you from publishing the paper, or that you had to worry over funding on the basis of this. I'm sorry you had to go through that. 
(ii) Personally, I'm  excited to fund or otherwise encourage engaged and in-depth "red team" critical work on either (a) the ideas of EA, longtermism or strong longtermism, or (b) what practical implications have been taken to follow from EA, longtermism, or strong longtermism.  If anyone reading this comment  would like funding (or other ways of making their life easier) to do (a) or (b)-type work, or if you know of people in that position, please let me know at [email protected].  I'll try to consider any suggestions, or put the suggestions in front of others to consider, by the end of  January. 

Hi Carla and Luke, I was sad to hear that you and others were concerned that funders would be angry with you or your institutions for publishing this paper. For what it's worth, raising these criticisms wouldn't count as a black mark against you or your institutions in any funding decisions that I make. I'm saying this here publicly in case it makes others feel less concerned that funders would retaliate against people raising similar critiques. I disagree with the idea that publishing critiques like this is dangerous / should be discouraged.

I thought the paper itself was poorly argued, largely as a function of biting off too much at once. Several times the case against the TUA was not actually argued, merely asserted to exist along with one or two citations for which it is hard to evaluate if they represent a consensus. Then, while I thought the original description of TUA was accurate, the TUA response to criticisms was entirely ignored. Statements like "it is unclear why a precise slowing and speeding up of different technologies...across the world is more feasible or effective than the simpler approach of outright bans and moratoriums" were egregious, and made it seem like you did not do your research. You spoke to 20+ reviewers, half of which were sought out to disagree with you, and not a single one could provide a case for differential technology? Not a single mention of the difficulty of incorporating future generations into the democratic process?

Ultimately, I think the paper would have been better served by focusing on a single section, leaving the rest to future work. The style of assertions rather than argument and skipping over potential responses comes across as more polemical than evidence-seeking. I believe that was the major contributor to blowback you have received.

I agree that more diversity in funders would be beneficial. It is harmful to all researchers if access to future funding is dependent on the results of their work. Overall, it is unclear from your post the actual extent of the blowback. What does "tried to prevent the paper being published" mean? Is the threat of withdrawn funding real or imagined? Were the authors whose work was criticized angry, and did they take any actions to retaliate?

Finally, I would like to abstract away from this specific paper. Criticisms of the dominant paradigm  limiting future funding and career opportunities is a sign of terrible epistemics in a field. However, poor criticisms of the dominant paradigm limiting future funding and career opportunities is completely valid. The one line you wrote that I think all EAs would agree with is "This is not a game. Fucking it up could end really badly". If the wrong arguments being made would cause harm when believed, it is not only the right but the responsibility of funders to reduce their reach. Of course, the difficulty is in differentiating wrong criticisms from criticisms against the current paradigm, while within the current paradigm. The responsibility of the researcher is to make their case as bulletproofed as possible, and designed to convince believers in the current paradigm. Otherwise, even if their claims are correct, they won't make an impact. The "Effective" part of EA includes making the right arguments to convince the right people, rather than the argument that is cathartic to unleash.

I share the surprise and dismay other commenters have expressed about the experience you report around drafting this preprint. While I disagree with many claims and framings in the paper, I agreed with others, and the paper as a whole certainly doesn't seem beyond the usual pale of academic dissent. I'm not sure what those who advised you not to publish were thinking.

In this comment, I'd like to turn attention to the recommendations you make at the end of this Forum post (rather than the preprint itself). Since these recommendations are somewhat more radical than those you make in the preprint, I think it would be worth discussing them specifically, particularly since in many cases it's not clear to me exactly what is being proposed.

Having written what follows, I realise it's quite repetitive, so if in responding you wanted to pick a few points that are particularly important to you and focus on those, I wouldn't blame you!

You claim that EA needs to...

diversify funding sources by breaking up big funding bodies 

Can you explain what this would mean in practice? Most of the big funding bodies are private foundations. How would we go about breaking these up? Who even is "we" in this instance?

[diversify funding sources] by reducing each orgs’ reliance on EA funding and tech billionaire funding

What sorts of funding sources do you think EA orgs should be seeking, other than EA orgs and individual philanthropists (noting that EA-adjacent academic researchers already have access to the government research funding apparatus)?

produce academically credible work

Speaking as a researcher who has spent a lot of time in academia, I think how much I care about work being "academically credible" depends a lot on the field. In many cases, I think post-publication review in places like the Forum is more robust and useful than pre-publication academic review.

Many academic fields (especially in the humanities) seem to have quite bad epistemic and political cultures, and even those that don't often have very particular ideas of what sorts of problems & approaches are suitable for peer-reviewed articles (e.g. requiring that work be "interesting" or "novel" in particular ways). And the current peer-review system is well-known to be painfully inadequate in many ways.

I don't want to overstate this – I think there are many cases where the academic publication route is a good option, for many reasons. But I've read a lot of pretty bad academic papers in my time, sometimes in prestigious journals, and it's not all that rare for a Forum report to significantly exceed the quality of the academic literature. I don't think academic credibility per se is something we should be aiming for for epistemic reasons. But perhaps you had other benefits in mind?

set up whistle-blower protection

Can you elaborate on what sorts of concrete systems you think would be useful here? Whistle-blower protection is usually intra-organisational – is this what you have in mind here, or are you imagining something more pan-community?

actively fund critical work

This sounds great, but I think is probably quite hard to implement in practice in a way that seems appealing. A lot depends on the details. Can you elaborate on what sorts of concrete proposals you would endorse here?

For example, do you think OpenPhil should deliberately fund "red-team" work they disagree with, solely for the sake of community epistemics? If so, how should they go about doing that?

allow for bottom-up control over how funding is distributed

I think having ways to aggregate small-donor preferences regarding EA grantees is valuable. I don't think it should replace large philanthropic donors with concentrated expertise. But I think I'd have a better opinion if I had a better idea of what you were advocating.

diversify academic fields represented in EA

This isn't something you can just change by fiat. You could modify the core messages of EA to deliberately appeal to a wider variety of backgrounds, but that seems like it has a lot of important downsides. Again, I think I would need a better idea of what exactly you have in mind as interventions to really evaluate this.

, make the leaders' forum and funding decisions transparent

These seem like two different cases. I'm generally pro public reporting of grants, but I don't really know what you have in mind for the leaders' forum (or other similar meetings).

stop glorifying individual thought-leaders

I'm guessing for more detail on this we should refer to the section on intelligence from your earlier post? I'm torn between sympathy and scepticism here, and don't feel like I have much to add, so let's move on to...

stop classifying everything as info hazards

OK, but how do you handle actual serious information hazards?

I'm on record in various places (e.g. here) saying that I think secrecy has lots of really serious downsides, and I still think these downsides are frequently underrated by many EAs. I certainly think that there is substantial progress still to be made in improving how we think about and deal with these problems. But that doesn't make the core problem go away – sometimes information really is hazardous, in a fairly direct (though rarely straightforward) way.

The discussion of Bostrom's Vulnerable World Hypothesis seems very uncharitable. Bostrom argues that on the assumption that technological development makes the devastation of civilisation extremely likely, extreme policing and surveillance would be one of the few ways out. You give the impression that he is arguing for this now in our world ("There is little evidence that the push for more intrusive and draconian policies to stop existential risk is either necessary or effective"). But this is obviously not what he is proposing - the vulnerable world hypothesis is put forward as a hypothesis and he says he is not sure whether it is true. 

Moreover, in the paper, Bostrom discusses at length the obvious risks associated with increasing surveillance and policing:

"It goes without saying that a mechanism that enables unprecedentedly intense forms of surveillance, or a global governance institution capable of imposing its will on any nation, could also have bad consequences. Improved capabilities for social control could help despotic regimes protect themselves from rebellion. Ubiquitous surveillance could enable a hegemonic ideology or an intolerant majority view to impose itself on all aspects of life, preventing individuals with deviant lifestyles or unpopular beliefs from finding refuge in anonymity. And if people believe that everything they say and do is, effectively, ‘on the record’, they might become more guarded and blandly conventional, sticking closely to a standard script of politically correct attitudes and behaviours rather than daring to say or do anything provocative that would risk making them the target of an outrage mob or putting an indelible disqualifying mark on their resume. Global governance, for its part, could reduce beneficial forms of inter-state competition and diversity, creating a world order with single point of failure: if a world government ever gets captured by a sufficiently pernicious ideology or special interest group, it could be game over for political progress, since the incumbent regime might never allow experiments with alternatives that could reveal that there is a better way. Also, being even further removed from individuals and culturally cohesive ‘peoples’ than are typical state governments, such an institution might by some be perceived as less legitimate, and it may be more susceptible to agency problems such as bureaucratic sclerosis or political drift away from the public interest."

Here's a Q&A which answers some of the questions by  reviewers of early drafts. (I planned to post it quickly, but your comments came in so soon! Some of the comments hopefully find a reply here)

"Do you not think we should work on x-risk?"

• Of course we should work on x-risk

"Do you think the authors you critique have prevented alternative frameworks from being applied to Xrisk?"

• No. It’s not really them we’re criticising if at all. Everyone should be allowed to put out their ideas. 
• But not everyone currently gets to do that. We really should have a discussion about what authors and what ideas get funding.

"Do you hate longtermism?"

• No. We are both longtermists (probs just not the techno utopian kind).

"You’re being unfair to Nick Bostrom. In the vulnerable world hypothesis, Bostrom merely speculates that such a surveillance system may, in a hypothetical world in which VWH is true, be the only option"

• It doesn't matter whether Nick Bostrom speculates or wants to implement surveillance globally. In respect to what we talk about (justification of extreme actions) what matters is how readers perceive his work and who the readers are. 
• There’s some hedging in the article but…
• He published in a policy journal, with an opening ‘policy implication’ box 
• He published an outreach article about in Aeon, which also ends with the sentence: ”If you find yourself in a position to influence the macroparameters of preventive policing or global governance, you should consider that fundamental changes in those domains might be the only way to stabilise our civilisation against emerging technological vulnerabilities.”
• In public facing interviews such as with Sam Harris and on TED, the idea of ‘turnkey totalitarianism’ was made the centrepiece. This was not framed as one hypothetical, possible, future solution for a philosophical thought experiment. 
• The VWH was also published as a German book (why I don’t know…)
• Seriously if we’re not allowed to criticise those choices, what are we allowed to criticise?

"Do you think longtermism is by nature techno-utopian?"

• In theory, no. Intergenerational justice is an old idea. Clearly there are versions of longtermism that do not have to rely on the current set of assumptions. Longtermist thinking is a good idea. 
• In practice, most longtermists tend to operate firmly under the TUA. This is seen in the visions they present on the future, the value placed on continued technological and economic growth etc.

"Who is your target audience?"

• Junior researchers who want to do something new and exciting in x-risk and 
• External academics who have thus far felt repelled by the TUA framing of the x-risk and might want to come into the field and bring in their own perspective 
• Anyone who really loves the TUA and wants to expose themselves to a different view 
• Anyone who doubted the existing approaches but could not quite put a finger on why
• Our audience is not: philosophers working on x-risk who are thinking about these issues day and night and who are well aware of some of the problems we raise.

"Do you think we should abandon the TUA entirely?"

• No. Especially those who feel personally compelled to work on the TUA or who have built an expertise in it, are obviously free to work on it. 
• We just shouldn’t pressure everyone else to do that too.

"Why didn’t you cite paper X?"

• Sorry, we probably missed it. We’re covering an enormous amount in this paper. 

"Why didn’t you cite blogpost X? "

• We constrained our lit search to papers that have the ambition to get through academic peer review. We also don’t read as many blog posts. That said, we appreciate that some people have raised similar concerns as we do on Twitter and on Blogs. We don’t think this renders a more formal listing of the concerns useless. 

"You critique we need to solve problem X but Y has already written a paper on X!"

• Great! Then we support Y having written that paper! We invite more people to do what Y did. Do you think this was enough and the problem is now solved? Do you think there are no valuable alternative papers to be written so that it’s ridiculous to have said we need more work on X?

"Why is your language so harsh? Or: Your language should have been more harsh!"

• Believe it or not we got both perspectives - for some people the paper is beating around the bush too much, for others it feels like a hostile attack. We could not please them all. 
• Maybe ask youself what makes you as a reader fall into one of these categories?

The linked article seems to overstate the extent to which EAs support totalitarian policies. While it is true that EAs are generally left-wing and have more frequently proposed increases in the size & scope of government than reductions, Bostrom did commission an entire chapter of his book on the dangers of a global totalitarian government from one of the world's leading libertarian/anarchists, and longtermists have also often been supportive of things that tend to reduce central control, like charter cities, cryptocurrency and decentralised pandemic control.

Indeed, I find it hard to square the article's support for ending technological development with its opposition to global governance. Given the social, economic and military advantages that technological advancement brings, it seems hard to believe that the US, China, Russia etc. would all forgo scientific development, absent global coordination/governance. It is precisely people's skepticism about global government that makes them treat AI progress as inevitable, and hence seek other solutions. 

Emile Torres (formerly Phil) just admitted on their Twitter that they were a co-author of a penultimate version of this paper. It is extremely deceptive not to disclose their contribution this in the paper or in the Forum post. At the point this paper was written, Torres had been banned from the EA Forum and multiple people in the community had accused Torres of harassing them. Do you think that that might have contributed to the (alleged) reception to your paper? 

First of all, I'm sorry to hear you found the paper so emotionally draining. Having rigorous debate on foundational issues in EA is clearly of the utmost importance. For what it's worth when I'm making grant recommendations I'd view criticizing orthodoxy (in EA or other fields) as a strong positive so long as it's well argued. While I do not wholly agree with your paper, it's clearly an important contribution, and has made me question a few implicit assumptions I was carrying around.

The most important updates I got from the paper:

1. Put less weight on technological determinism. In particular, defining existential risk in terms of a society reaching "technological maturity" without falling prey to some catastrophe frames technological development as being largely inevitable. But I'd argue even under the "techno-utopian" view, many technological developments are not needed for "technological maturity", or at least not for a very long time. While I still tend to view development of things like advanced AI systems as hard to stop (lots of economic pressures, geographically dispersed R&D, no expert consensus on whether it's good to slow down/accelerate), I'd certainly like to see more research into how we can affect the development of new technologies, beyond just differential technological advancement.
2. "Existential risk" is ambiguous, so hard to study formally, we might want to replace it with more precise terms like "extinction risk" that are down-stream of some visions of existential risk. I'm not sure how decision relevant this ends up being, I think disagreement about how the world will unfold explains more of the disagreement on x-risk probabilities than definitions of x-risk, but it does seem worth trying to pin down more precisely.
3. "Direct" vs "indirect" x-risk is a crude categorization, as most hazards lead to risks via a variety of pathways. Taking AI: there are some very "direct" risks such as a singleton AI developing some superweapon, but also some more "indirect" risks such as an economy of automated systems gradually losing alignment with collective humanity.

My main critiques:

1. I expect a fairly broad range of worldviews end up with similar conclusions to the "techno-utopian approach" (TUA). The key beliefs seem to be that: (a) substantially more value is present in the future than exists today; (b) we have a moral obligation to safeguard that. The TUA is a very strong version of this, where there is many orders of magnitude more value in the future (transhumanism, total utilitarianism) and moral obligation is equal in the future and present (strong longtermism). But a non-transhumanist who wants 8 billion non-modified, biological humans to continue happily living on Earth for the next 100,000 years and values future generations at 1% of current generations would for many practical purposes make the same decisions.
2. I frequently found myself unsure if there was actually a concrete disagreement between your views and those in the x-risk community, including those you criticize, beyond a choice of framing and emphasis. I understand it can be hard to nail down a disagreement, but this did leave me a little unsatisfied. For example, I'm still unsure what it really means to "democratise research and decision-making in existential risk" (page 26). I think almost all x-risk researchers would welcome more researchers from complementary academic disciplines or philosophical bents, and conversely I expect you would not suggest that random citizen juries should start actively participating in research. One concrete question I had is what axes you'd be most excited for the x-risk research field to become more diverse on at the margin: academic discipline, age, country, ethnicity, gender, religion, philosophical views, ...?
3. Related to the above, it frequently felt like the paper was arguing against uncharitable versions of someone else's views -- VWH is an example others have brought up. On reflection, I think there is value to this, as many people may be holding those versions of the person's views even if the individual themselves had a more nuanced perspective. But it did often make me react "but I subscribe to <view X> and don't believe <supposed consequence Y>"! One angle you could consider taking in future work is to start by explaining your most core disagreements with a particular view, and then go on to elaborate on problems with commonly held adjacent positions.

I'd also suggest that strong longtermism is a meaningfully different assumption to e.g. transhumanism and total utilitarianism. In particular, the case for existential or extinction risk research seems many orders of magnitude weaker under a near-termist than strong longtermist worldview. Provided you think strong longtermism is at least credible, it seems reasonable to assume it when doing x-risk research, even though you should discount the impact of such interventions based on your credence in longtermism when making a final decision on where to allocate resources. If there is a risk that seems very likely to occur (e.g. AI, bio) such that it is plausible under both near-termist and longtermist grounds then perhaps it makes sense to drop this assumption, but even then I suspect it is often easier to just run two different analyses, given the different outcome metrics of concerns (e.g. % x-risk averted vs QALYs saved).

The section on expected value theory seemed unfairly unsympathetic to TUA proponents 

• The question of what we should do with pascal's mugging-type situations just seems like a really hard under-researched problem where there are not yet any satisfying solutions.
• EA research institutes like GPI have put a hugely disproportionate amount of research into this question, relative to the field of decision theorists. Proponents of TUA, like Bostrom were the first to highlight these problems in the academic literature. 
•  Alternatives to expected value have received far less attention in the literature and also have many problems
• eg The solution you propose of having some probability threshold below which we can ignore more speculative risks also has many issues. For instance, this would seem to invalidate many arguments for the rationality of voting or for political advocacy, such as canvassing for Corbyn or Sanders: the expected value of such activities is high even though the payoff is often very low (eg <1 in 10 million in most US states). Advocating for degrowth also seems extremely unlikely to succeed given the aims of governments across the world and the preferences of ordinary voters. 

So, I think framing it as "here is this gaping hole in this worldview" is a bit unfair. Proponents of TUA pointed out the hole and are the main people trying to resolve the problem, and any alternatives also seem to have dire problems.

Thank you for writing and sharing. I think I agree with most of the core claims in the paper, even if I disagree with the framing and some minor details.

One thing must be said: I am sorry you seem to have had a bad experience while writing criticism of the field. I agree that this is worrisome, and makes me more skeptical of the apparent matters of consensus in the community. I do think in this community we can and must do better to vet our own views.

Some highlights:

I am big on the proposal to have more scientific inquiry . Most of the work today on existential risk is married to a particular school of Ethics, and I agree it need not be. 

On the science side I would be enthusiastic about seeing more work on eg models of catastrophic biorisk infection, macroeconomic analysis on ways artificial intelligence  might affect society and expansions of IPCC models that include permafrost methane release feedback loops.

On the humanities side I would want to see for example more work on historical, psychological and anthropological evidence for long term effects and successes and failures in managing global problems like the hole in the ozone layer. I would also like to see surveys of how existential risks are perceived, and what the citizens of the world believe we ought to do about them.

An easier initial step here may be to specify dystopias that most value theories would say we should avoid, rather 

I like this practical approach. I think this is probably enough to pin down bad outcomes we can use to guide policy, and I would be enthusiastic about seeing more perspectives in the field.

Furthermore, EV and decision theories more widely are affected by Pascal’s Mugging as well as what has been called fanaticism. We know of no pragmatic and consistent response to those challenges yet.

I do not either. One key thing that is brought forward to the paper and is one of my takeaway lessons is that the study of existential risks and longtermism ought to focus on issues which are "ethically robust" - that is, that are plausible priorities under many worldviews.

Now, I do believe that most of the current focus areas of these fields (including AI risk, biorisk, nuclear war, climate change and others) pass this litmus test. But it is something to be mindful of when engaging with work in the area. For example, I believe that arguments in favour of destroying the Earth to prevent S-risks would currently fail this test.

Do those who study the future of humanity have good grounds to ignore the visions, desires, and values of the very people whose future they are trying to protect? Choosing which risks to take must be a democratic endeavour.

I do broadly agree. We need to ensure that longtermist policy making, with its consequences, are properly explained to the electorate, and that they are empowered to collectively decide which risks to take and which ones to ignore.

EA needs to diversify funding sources by breaking up big funding bodies and by reducing each orgs’ reliance on EA funding and tech billionaire funding, it needs to produce academically credible work, set up whistle-blower protection, actively fund critical work, allow for bottom-up control over how funding is distributed, diversify academic fields represented in EA, make the leaders forum and funding decisions transparent, stop glorifying individual thought-leaders, stop classifying everything as info hazards…amongst other structural changes. 

These suggestions stands to me as reasonable. I've bolded the ones that currently seem most actionable to me. 

There are some issues with this paper which made me a bit uneasy.

I am going to highlight some examples.

First, the focus on "techno-utopian approach", space expansionism, total utilitarism, etc seems undue. I do agree that most authors nowadays seem to endorse versions of this cluster of beliefs. This is no doubt a symptom of lack of diversity. Yet for the most part I think that most modern work on longtermism does not rely on these assumptions. 

You have identified as a key example of a consequence of the TUA that proposals to stop AI development are scarce, while eg there are some proposals to stop biorisks. For what is worth, I have regularly seen proposals in the community to stop and regulate AI development.

I think making a case against this framing is something that would take a lot of energy to ensure I was correctly representing the authors, so I am afraid I will drop this thread. I think Avital's response to Torres captures a big part of what I would bring up.

Second, it hurts my soul that you make a (good) case against unduly giving importance to info hazards, yet criticize Bostrom for talking about pro tanto reasons in favour of totalitarism (which to be clear, I am, all things considered, against. But that should not prevent us from discussing pro tanto reasons).

Third, I think the paper correctly argues that some foundational terms in the field ("existential risk", "existential hazard", "extinction risk" etc) are insufficiently defined. Indeed, it was in fact hard to follow this very article because of the confused vocabulary the field has come to use. However, I am unconvinced that the pinning down a terminology is critical to solve the key problems in the field. I expect others will disagree with this assessment.

Again, thank you for writing the paper and for engaging. Making it easier and more visible the criticisms of EA is vital for the health of the community. I was pleased to see that your previous criticism was well received, at least in terms of forum upvotes, and I hope this piece will be similarly impactful and change trends in Effective Altruism for the better.

My biggest takeaways from this paper:

1. We need to work towards an "ethically robust" field of existential risk and longtermism. That is, one that focuses on avoiding dystopias according to most commonly held worldviews.
2. The current state of affairs is that we are nowhere having enough cognitive diversity in the field to cover all mainstream perspectives. This is exacerbated by the lack of feedback loops  between the world at large and scholars working on existential risk.

Everything written in the post above strongly resonates with my own experiences, in particular the following lines:

the creation of this paper has not signalled epistemic health. It has been the most emotionally draining paper we have ever written.

the burden of proof placed on our claims was unbelievably high in comparison to papers which were considered less “political” or simply closer to orthodox views.

The EA community prides itself on being able to invite and process criticism. However, warm welcome of criticism was certainly not our experience in writing this paper.

I think criticism of EA orthodoxy is routinely dismissed. I would like to share a few more stories of being publicly critical of EA in the hope that doing so adds some useful evidence to the discussion:

• Consider systemic change. "Some critics of effective altruism allege that its proponents have failed to engage with systemic change" (source). I have always found the responses (eg here and here) to this critique to be dismissive and miss the point. Why can we not just say: yes we are a new community this area feels difficult and we are not there yet? Why do we have to pretend EA is perfect and does systemic change stuff well?
• My own experience (risk planning). I have some relevant expertise from engaging with professional risk managers, military personnel, counterterrorism staff and so on.  I have really rally struggled to communicate any of this to EA folk, especially where it suggest that EAs are not thinking about risks well. I tend to find I get downvoted or told I am strawmanning EA. If I want to avoid it is is possible if I put huge amounts of time and mental energy.
• Mental health. Consider that Michael Plant has, for 6 years now, been making the case that GiveWell and other neartermist EAs don’t put enough weight on mental health. I believe his experience is mostly one of feeling that people are dismissive rather than engage with him.
• Other. A few years back I remember being unimpressed that EAs response to Iason Gabriel's critique was largely to argue back and ignore it. There was no effort to see if any of the criticisms contained useful grains of truth that could help us improve EA.

Other evidence to note is that the top thing that EAs thinks other EAs get (source) is "Reinventing the wheel" and "Overconfidence and misplaced difference" and many EAs worry that  EA is intellectually stale / stagnant (in answers to this question). On the other hand many EA orgs are very good at recognising their mistakes made (e.g with 'Our mistakes' pages), which is a great cultural thing that we as a community should be proud of.

I think we should also recognise that Both Carla and Luke have full time EA research jobs and they have found it time consuming and for someone without a full time position it can become almost impossibly time consuming and draining to do a half decent job. This essentially closes off a lot of people from critiquing EA.

If there was one change I would make I would like there to be a cultural shift so if someone posts something critical we try to steelman it rather than dismiss it. (Here is an example of steelmanning some of Phil Torres' arguments [edit: although we should of course not knowingly steelman/endorse arguments made in bad faith]). We could also on occasion say "yes we get this wrong and we still have much to learn" and not treat every critique as an attack. 

Hope some extra views help.

A few thoughts on the democracy criticism. Don't a lot of the criticisms here apply to the IPCC? "A homogenous group of experts attempting to directly influence powerful decision-makers is not a fair or safe way of traversing the precipice."  IPCC contributors are disproportionately white very well-educated males in the West who are much more environmentalist than the global median voter, i.e. "unrepresentative of humanity at large and variably homogenous in respect to income, class, ideology, age, ethnicity, gender, nationality, religion, and professional background." So, would you propose replacing the IPCC with something like a citizen's assembly of people with no expertise in climate science or climate economics, that is representative wrt some of the demographic features you mention? 

You say that decisions about which risks to take should be made democratically. The implication of this seems to be that everyone, and not just EAs, who is aiming to do good with their resources should donate only to their own government. Their govt could then decide how to spend the money democratically. Is that implication embraced? This would eg include all climate philanthropy, which is now at $5-9bn per year.