Thanks for these interesting thoughts, I agree with lots of what you say!

A few comments:

• I think many organisations do use their network and things like the HIP database to find candidates. People are still often hired directly without public hiring rounds, and semi-private hiring rounds (reaching out directly to people identified in these ways and only inviting those to apply) are also quite common, but still can be very elaborate (significant lower number of applicants so lower effort for the hiring organisation, but still a similar effort for applicants.)
• Many organisations believe that hiring the right people is extremely important, and that it is worth the effort to conduct elaborate public hiring rounds, particularly for senior roles, presumably because they think there is a chance of finding a better candidate this way. (Sometimes, even if they have an internal candidate they could promote to the job, they still prefer to do a public hiring round to see if there is someone better out there.) Also, EA orgs have often very high expectations for their roles and sometimes have to readvertise roles even if the first round received lots of applications - so it seems they still feel they are talent-constrained (at least for the level of talent they are looking for).
• If was very confused by the sentence "Once someone has beaten the substantial odds and passed the rigorous testing to get in to the movement..." (as their is really not a very high bar to get 'into the movement), but based on the example you mention, I think you more mean something like "once someone has been hired for a permanent full-time role at a top EA organisation" in which case I agree with the problem you are describing. I don't really see a good solution for this, though. Organisations want to hire the best people they can, whether they are already in the movement or not. However, I think people who are attracted to the movement should be made aware of these cases and that there is no employment guarantee in EA.

I don't really understand the question here: If an organisation contracts someone to do work for them, they usually agree on a specific amount, either a fixed price or an hourly/daily rate. What are the specifics of your scenario here? Should the amount be conditional on how much funding the organisation receives for that specific work? That seems a quite strange approach to me. Or are you expecting that the contractor commits to doing the work but might not get paid if a grant application is unsuccessful? I don't really think anyone would or should agree to that. The right approach should be to wait with actually hiring the contractor until the organisation has the money to pay for them.

I'm not sure whether it's good or not, but the main reason that it should be allowed is that it is impossible to detect. How will you know what someone's real preferences are?

I don't think you can post 'anonymously' in the sense that there is no account related to your post, you'll always have to create an account, but you can of course use a one-off username and even email address if you want to. However, you can delete your account and then apparently all 'your' posts appear as "[anonymous]" whether you intended this or not. (And in this case, it seems the original poster just created this post with their usual, non-anonymous account, but then deleted their account.)

Charitable organisations generally do due diligence on large donors and will most likely do this in-house in most cases (perhaps with some external support) - very large organisations (eg Universities) will usually have a specialised in-house team independent from the rest of the operations to do this. It is also likely that at least the larger EA organisations did do due diligence on donations from Sam/FTX, they just decided on balance that it's fine to take the donation.

While I would say $100mn is probably too high a bar, buying Whytham Abbey wasn't really $20mn expenditure as they'll sell it and get most of this back. So the actual expenditure (cost related to the transaction, running costs, overhead, gain/loss, not including any reputational cost) of the purchase is probably between $1mn and $4mn (depending on what they manage to sell it for).

In the UK, doing this would probably be counted as 'trading' and be subject to corporation tax, there is a common workaround, though, by creating a trading subsidiary that donates to the charity (allowing them to reduce their corporate tax burden). This setup might or might not be suitable for this specific occasion, and there are of course additional efforts involved in creating such a setup that might or might not be worth it.

Yeah, that makes sense. I guess the main conclusion of this is: You can run an event much cheaper of you find an organisation that has a good event space and collaborates with you, so they charge the 'internal' rather than the commercial rate.

Is this just a guess or do you have information on the actual costs of the event? (Just from their website, they seem to have various sponsors who are likely covering a substantial amount of the costs, and yes, their venue costs might be very low (or even close to zero) because Harvard/MIT are likely not charging them commercial rates, but that doesn't give any info of the actual costs and why they would be lower than EAG costs.)