Emphasising the fraction of salary (rather than an absolute amount)

• This seems clearly better as it (1) may stimulate high-earners to give more and (2) also allows for people with a lower earning potential to consider earning to give as a career path.

It's not as clear to me that this is better.

• Since pain is not the unit of effort, it would be better for someone to earn $500,000 and give 10% than for someone to earn $50,000 and give 90%
• To motivate higher earners to give more, there could thresholds (you mention $10k and $100k in the post) for different levels of "earning to give", and the framing could be that the more you're donating in absolute amounts the more you're succeeding at Earning to Give. I know a person with a life goal to one day join Farmed Animals Funders, which is only open to people giving $250,000+ annually
• It's not clear to me that (2) is a positive thing, given that EtG would be a less valuable career path for people with a lower earning potential. As far as I know this was a major reason why EtG started being promoted less, at least by some: they were worried that it would cause low-middle-income people to switch to less effective careers, or discourage them from applying to more impactful opportunities

Something that I think is underappreciated about EtG is that it's often a win-win. Besides giving more money to charity; you earn more money for yourself, gain useful skills, and might have or at least try a more interesting job.

Some things in this spirit that I think are under-recommended to people

• Negotiate your salary.
• Move to a wealthier country / region / city, since that alone accounts for a large part of differences in income. This often has many other benefits in terms of future career opportunities and quality of life.
• Try a career in a high-income field for about a year or even less and see how it goes. You might find out that you enjoy it more than your current career, regardless of income. I know a person who switched from a physics PhD to finance and they love it.

Do you still do personal donations? If so, to which charities?

Followup question: in 2017 you used part of your donations to support animal welfare and the long term future, but later stopped doing so, what was the reasoning behind this change?

if there was some sort of option for a user to "hide" votes (maybe on all content, or maybe just on the user's own content)

This already exists via GreaterWrong

Another important caveat is that the criticisms you mention are not common from people evaluating the effective altruism framework from the outside when allocating their donations or orienting their careers.

The criticisms you mention come from people who have spent a lot of time in the community, and usually (but not exclusively) from those of us who have been rejected from job applications, denied funding, or had bad social experiences/cultural fit with the social community.

This doesn't necessarily make them less valid, but seems to be a meaningfully different topic from what this post is about. Someone altruistically deciding how much money to give to which charity is unlikely to be worried about whether they will be seduced into believing that they would be cherished members of a community.

People evaluating effective altruism "from the outside" instead mention things like the paternalism and unintended consequences, that it doesn't care about biodiversity, that quantification is perilous, that socialism is better, or that capitalism is better.

Note that I do agree with many of your criticisms of the community^[1], but I believe it's important to remember that the vast majority of people evaluating effective altruism are not in the EA social community and don't care much about it, and we should probably flag our potential bias when criticizing an organization after being denied funding or rejected from it (while still expressing that useful criticism.)

1. ^{^}

   I would also add Ben Kuhn's "pretending to try" critique from 11 years ago, which I assume shares some points with your unpublished "My experience with a Potemkin Effective Altruism group"

Depending on your goals, I feel like a podcast might not be the most appropriate format for this deep dive on a sensitive topic. One reason is that I would expect many of the most informed people might prefer to only share information anonymously.

It's possible to work at OpenAI and care about safety without being friends with CEA staff though.

It doesn't seem that anyone OpenAI besides the EA community is too worried, which to me is a positive update.

EA folks most often single out to express frustration & disappointment about

I've never seen anyone express frustration or disappointment about Dustin, except for Habryka. However, Habryka seems to be frustrated with most people who fund anything / do anything that's not associated with Lightcone and its affiliates, so I don't know if he should count as expressing frustration at Dustin in particular.

Are you including things like criticizing OP for departing grantees too quickly and for not departing grantees quickly enough, or do you have something else in mind?

I view Dustin and OP as quite separate, especially before Holden's departure, so that might also explain our different experience.

She has a 2-year-old EA forum account https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/gretchen-krueger-1 , has written reports in 2020 and in 2021 where most (all?) co-authors are in the EA community, is mentioned in this post, and is Facebook friends with at least one CEA employee