I feel like I am one of the most engaged EAs in my local community, but the beliefs Torres ascribes to EA are so far removed from my own

This might have to do with "how local" your local community is. It seems to me that the weirder sides of EA (which I usually consider bad, but others here might not) are common in the EA hubs (Bay Area, Oxbridge, London, and the cluster of large groups in Europe) but not as common in other places (like here in Israel).

You're describing a religious belief that, for some unknown reason, many EAs seem to share. A belief in a mystical state of being never scientifically documented. And you ask why there's no activity around this, in a community supposedly organized around following evidence to find good ways to improve the world. And that's your answer: a shared belief is not evidence. Same as a shared belief in God, even by billions of people, is not evidence.

It's good that nobody's talking about this. It would be no more sane than e.g. trying to make everyone religious because then God would eliminate suffering.

I definitely agree. But I think we're far from it being practically useful for dedicated EAs to do this themselves.

Do most charitable organizations have in-house people to examine donors? I'm not saying we shouldn't check, but rather that there shouldn't be people in EA organizations whose job is to do this - rather than organizations just hiring auditors or whomever to do it for them.

I'd argue that "checking whether businesses are run responsibly" is out of scope for EA in general.

forcing people to trust me not to have inserted a backdoor into the executable binary

Were you prohibited from also open sourcing it?

Dissenting view: like everywhere else on the internet, when you encounter something really crazy you sometimes have to look at the publication date. I trust readers can do that.

I disagree, and in this case I don't think the forum team should have a say in the matter. Each user has their own interpretation of the upvote/downvote button and that's ok. Personally I don't use it as "I disagree" but rather as "this comment shouldn't have been written", but there's certainly a correlation. For instance, I both disagree-voted and downvoted your comment (since I dislike the attempt to police this).

Right? Also you can have a person turn on the scandal machine, which then creates more than one scandal associated with them.