Well, mark my words. 

EAs out of the board

Let's please try to avoid phrasing things in ways as tribal as this. We have no idea what happened. Putting an identity of the board members this central feels like it frames the discussion in a bad way.

EV US has made a court motion to settle with the FTX estate for 100% of the funds received in 2022 for a total of $22.5M. See this public docket for the details:  https://restructuring.ra.kroll.com/FTX/Home-DocketInfo (Memo number 3745). 

My guess is Open Phil is covering this amount. Seems very relevant to anyone who is exposed to FTX clawback risk, or wants to understand what is going on with FTX things.

Huh, this feels like a somewhat weird post without mentioning the FTX settlement for $22.5M that EV just signed: https://restructuring.ra.kroll.com/FTX/Home-DocketInfo (Memo number 3745). 

My guess is Open Phil is covering this, but my guess is there is a bunch of additional risk that funds you receive right now would become part of this settlement that donors should be able to model.

My guess is you can't talk about this for legal reasons in a post like this (though that does seem sad and my guess is you've been too risk-averse in the domain of sharing any information in this space publicly), but seems important for people to know when someone is assessing what is going on with EV and CEA.

I don't know what "nothing to do" means. I do now believe that it had nothing legally to do with the firing, but it still seems like the thing that "brought things to a head".

I was told this dozens of times by many different employees. None of them were board members, but they all seemed to agree it was the thing that caused the conflict to escalate.

IIRC the official reason (or at least the thing that caused stuff to come to a head) was that Larissa and Kerry had been dating for multiple months but had never told the rest of leadership or the board about it.

We'll see. I am currently feeling a sense of doom around how this decision will play out. Substantial probability this will have been a really major blunder and cause an enormous amount of harm (and also non-negligible probability that it will be one of the best decisions made of all time).

As an academic and researcher, I don't agree with this. I will use regular google or wikipedia if I want the basics of a subject, or am researching something that has no related academic field.

Yep, agree that if you are writing things that could straightforwardly fit into an academic field, publication is often pretty decent (though I still expect that people will find the average engagement their paper gets to be highly disappointing, given the levels of effort involved).

My sense is only a very small minority of work on the EA Forum or LessWrong would straightforwardly fit into an existing scientific field.

The counterfactual case here is not "write an academic paper and don't tell anyone about it", it's "write an academic paper, then link it on lesswrong/EAforum". In the latter case, you get both general public reads and academic searchability. 

I agree this helps a bit, though also beware that link posts, especially to long pdfs with bad readability on mobile also tend to lose about 80% of their readership on LW and the EA Forum. 

Your research is in all likelihood built upon decades, or perhaps centuries of academic research. Researchers actively browse the academic literature in the areas that they are interested in. If you do not publish your research in a fashion that is noticed by academic databases such as Google Scholar, you will lose a lot of readers. Furthermore, these researchers might have used your research as a building block for their research. In other words, you are actively slowing down future academic research.

The vast majority of academic contributions get read by approximately no one. The average high-effort LessWrong post or EA Forum post likely gets an order of magnitude more readers than they would if the same effort were put into an academic paper. 

Almost nobody searches academic databases, even academics and researchers mostly use normal Google search when researching things.

Academia has benefits, but reaching a larger audience is not one of them, as far as I can tell (there are of course exceptions and some publications are much better suited for being published in a journal than a blogpost, but by and large academia does not have a good way of actually driving readership).