People won't specifically know about Manifund, but I put a high probability that half the reference class that knew about FTX (which happens to correlate, for me, with influential elites) will say something such as "Oh I heard you hired back SBF's criminal girlfriend or something", often from a line read half-attentively in a newspaper or seen online. I've had rumors of this shape around this aplenty in my time, the worse part being that some of those people did not want to talk to us or discuss any of this afterwards (which makes showing this post and subsequent reactions quite hard). The shadowban is the worst part. And this is setting aside pre-existing quarrels where people within the university tried to attack us.

To give you an idea, some of my surroundings were asked in private if SBF were their "boss". I had people enjoy our philosophical discussions, only to walk back and leave as soon as we told them we were from the EA club. It's hard to just live this on repeat mode.

The first time I saw SBF in a newsletter from 80k and felt skeptical, I self-censored. Even as things unfolded, I talked very sycophantically and did not manage to speak out my doubts. 

I don't want this to happen again, and I'm afraid it's happening again, with people playing mind games similar to the ones that convinced them that SBF was living frugally and definitely trustworthy.

In doubt, I'll leave this comment for the record, and will happilly look at it full of shame if need be: 
1-I do not trust Caroline and reading the post and the discussion so far does not give me enough signal to trust her more. No hard feelings, but that's just how things are for me and part of my surroundings. If you think she is trustworthy, it means there is probably a way to make me update? It'd probably need to be a very hard-to-fake signal. Trust has to correlate to evidence.

2-Hoo boy, my friends at the EA table in university already had a hard time. It's gonna get even harder for them.

3-I'm afraid this will feed even more of the absolutely pointless EA vs LW war. Will not expand on that.

Thank you for sharing my old-age frustration !

More seriously, I agree that this is a recurring problem, and I'm not sure where people want to put the gradient between not fearing to oppose consensus and lacking pedagogy.

A thing I recommend now is to ask your best accessible version of Claude to train you on Street Epistemology, Smart Politics and Deep Canvassing for those specific scenarios in a 3 weeks program based on deliberate practice. It already gives excellent foundations for these situations.

I'll give it a try !

Open question: would it be useful to frame this an "impact insurance" for people in impactful careers? 

As in:

-I expect this goal to be good for the world (say ~100 WELLBYs in expectation)

-If I don't achieve this goal, then I definitely owe something that's a least comparably good for the world (say ~$200 to PureEarth (since I've chosen WELLBYs))

(or maybe at least half as good)

I think using it this way could help people who have a real hesitation between impactful work and impactful donations.

"Goes well for humans" (i.e for a very long time) worlds are mostly worlds where AGI is fully theoretically and empirically aligned with a CEV-shaped alignment target, which for me logically requires animal welfare. (I also currently believe those worlds to be implausible because no company seems focused on this)

I struggle to imagine any deliberative or reflective-preference oriented process that does not give the right answer to the animal welfare question. If it doesn't care about non-human animals, then it means animals are not sentient, or that the CEV is misaligned with human interests and some humans will die because they don't check the right boxes (and sentience isn't a box), or that morality is weird and it's actually fine to torture sentient beings (possible but implausible).

There are other worlds where "goes well for humans" means corrigible and aligned on some unaltered human values. In those worlds, I expect animals to take a blow on the short term, and possibly on the very long if the principal does not care about animal suffering. I also expect humanity to do other morally wrong things that they don't suspect to be wrong, and die counterfactually way sooner.

Hopefully americans will take this as a strong signal that their administration is in complete support of mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. I could scarcely think of a clearer signal.

Edit : After reading different sides of the story, I'm actually less certain about that. But I'm still updating towards more probability that "unfettered access" meant "occasionally unlawful use" rather than "lawful use but there's drama between us" given this reaction. I would certainly not have lended more probability if the administration hadn't reacted so abruptly.

New Edit: after reading more, I'm pretty convinced that both issues (or any action that I'd personally consider falling into both categories) are pretty much legal in the US.

Exciting! I hope we'll hear the same from AIM - Incubated Founding to Give initiatives in the coming years!

Strong upvoted.

I find this refreshing and going back to what EA is about, and would definitely point at it as "the sort of experience I expect an EA org to allow for". I also appreciate the moral character that you're showing up. I want more testimonies like this on the forum to help people get [back] in touch with this spirit.

I sometimes feel like I had partially lost my initial ambition, and your post corrected for some value drift. Thank you.

Note: You're focusing on the English speaking sphere, yet e.g. the French EA community owes its existence in no insignificant part to two non-EA YouTubers. A third (very popular) one is soon adding himself to the list. 

Sorry, I understand this is a bit confusing. 
I was hesitant to spell it out, because I'm afraid of building a strawman:
 
My interpretation is that some people have an issue with non-self-oriented wishes or desires, because they can feel like virtue-signalling or guilt-tripping. Expressing things such as "I really want a world without malaria" can be interpreted as condoning the use of suffering as a negotiation tool.

I.e : 
Step 1: People are suffering from malaria
Step 2: This prompts me to fight malaria
Step 3: Someone concludes that suffering causes me to help them
Step 4: They self-inflict suffering to them
Step 5: This prompts me to help them regardless
Step 6: The world is now made up of people who self-inflict suffering as a way to manipulate others, which suck.

I'm not sure this is an accurate reconstruction, but this is what I can do to the best of my abilities.

I'd rather not encourage arguing with this version of the argument, since I'm not a genuine proponent.