I might quantify the value of the talent pool around another $10bn, so again, you only need a ~10% increase here to be worth a billion, and over centralisation seems like one of the bigger problems.

I find it plausible that a strong fix to the funder-diversity problem could increase the value of the talent pool by 10% or even more. However, having a new independent funder with $1B in assets (spending much less than that per year) feels more like an incremental improvement.

$1bn is only 5% of the capital that OP has, so you'd only need to find a 1 grant for every 20 that OP makes that they've missed with only 2x the effectiveness of marginal OP grants in order to get 2x the value.

You'd need to do that consistently (no misses, unless counteracted by >2x grants) and efficiently (as incurring similar overhead as OP with $1B of assets would consume much of the available cash flow). That seems like a tall order. 

Moreover, I'm not sure if a model in which the new major funder always gets to act "last" would track reality very well. It's likely that OP would change its decisions, at least to some extent, based on what it expected the other funder to do. In this case, the new funder would end up funding a significant amount of stuff that OP would have counterfactually funded.

This is a tricky situation, because “Fuentes” is not an openly anonymous account, but a fake name account started with a fake bio.

Depending on the claimed identity of "Fuentes," the strength of the evidence for that proposition, and whether Torres can show any portion of the Fuentes post was made in objective bad faith, the mods should consider allowing "Fuentes" to be named. Pseudonymity is a shield to protect the writer from blowback, not a sword to allow people to make up details of a fake identity to bolster their attacks on others. If "Fuentes" flatly lied about being an outsider, but clearly is not, then I think their true identity is likely fair game in assessing the validity of the "Fuentes" post. 

I'm biased now, but I think people miss how most of our team's efforts go to scalable support, which doesn't necessarily target top universities (and includes universities like mine). 

Is the portion of efforts that currently do not go to top universities quantifiable, or at least subject to reasonable estimation? I would guess that people who were adversely affected by changes would be more vocal, which could lead to others overestimating the magnitude of those changes on non-top university support.

Partially depends on the nature of the claim, methinks. Generally, I do not think you have any obligation to delve into collateral matters -- just enough to put the reader on notice of the possible bias.

There are, I believe, fifteen people with +9 strongvotes (the fifteen with 10K+ karma). You can search the People directory by karma to see the list. 

As of one those people, I wish there was a smallish chance our strongvotes would count as +8 and a small chance the +8 people's votes would count as +9 to make attempted identification of a voter more difficult.

Perhaps that it doesn't seem to clearly relate to the context of Jessica's comment, which I understand to be about prioritizing support for EA student groups at "top" universities. That decision seemingly has to be made on a university level, and -- unless the university is particularly strong in a priority area -- overall rating is probably the best measure.

Whether field-specific rating is a better measure in other contexts, and whether it is reasonably practical to use it in those contexts, is likely a case-by-case determination. I'd also note that in US undergraduate programs, admission is generally to the university as a whole allowing the student to select any major. I suspect your position is stronger where admission is to a specific program/department and thus the specific program's reputation is relevant to the applicant characteristics needed to get in.

On the one hand, I am generally sympathetic to the broader concern. 

On the other hand, a suggestion that EA should attempt to change certain deep-rooted truths about the way the world works to "create a more equal world" in addition to its object-level workloads wouldn't score well with me. As a general matter, the development of non-elite American college students is not neglected or cost-effective, so it is not a viable object-level initiative. It's only viable as a meta project to the extent that it indirectly contributes to object-level success.

I don't think focusing CEA resources on elite universities is inherently inconsistent with your second point. Maybe I'm showing my age, but back when I was an undergraduate, most student organizations had access to funding through student government, but little in the way of external subsidy or support. Except for modest sums given to newspaper editors and such, students didn't get paid for leadership. When trips/retreats were subsidized, the subsidies were partial and the trips were generally within a few hours' driving distance and on a modest budget. In most cases, there were no external organizations helping student leadership out. (I recognize that this setup makes it more difficult for student of modest means. That was my experience as well -- my family was low-income enough that even the school concluded my parents could contribute almost nothing to educational expenses.) 

Although there was a shift toward concentrating resources on top universities, it seems from a glance at the UGAP program that the resources that are out there for non-top university EA groups still exceed what student groups generally get in the broader world. To be clear, I'm sure the pulling back of support for non-top university groups was difficult for their organizers who had previously received more support, and that the existence of more supported groups at top universities is discouraging for organizers elsewhere. But the existence of more recruiting-focused programs at top universities does not somehow makes EA inaccessible everywhere else. Thus, it is not inconsistent in my view with working toward "a diverse community that could think more robustly about how to change the world for better."

I basically agree with @JWS' response. Generally, one should respond to poor-quality criticism when there is a risk that it will actually interfere with mission accomplishment. (This is in contrast to quality criticism, engagement with which will hopefully make EA better).

In general, the default rule for dealing with bad-faith, delusional, wildly inaccurate, etc. criticism on X and in similar places should be to ignore it. Consider the flat-earther movement. Many people have viewed debunkings of the flat-earther beliefs, which were doubtless produced merely for entertainment value because lots of people think it's fun to sneer at people with such beliefs. The problem is that now many, many more people know there is a flat-earther movement. The debunkers have given their ideas reach and may have even given them a smidgen of legitimacy by implying they are worth debunking. 

If Émile were a random person on X, this would likely be the correct approach. However, their ideas have reach and perceived legitimacy due to all the quotations in major media sources. Repeated appearances in such sources (that are not as a target of the piece) is a strong signal to most people that the individual is unlikely to be seriously dishonest from an intellectual perspective, is worth taking at least somewhat seriously, etc. 

Unless the reader is doing a lot of their own investigation, the media imprimatur will still carry some weight. Ignoring someone with such a media imprimatur is ordinarily unwise, as it makes it harder for readers inclined to do so independent research to find out what the critical flaws with that person's views are. Silence also makes it harder for future editors to detect that there are serious problems with the person and/or their views, and they are likely to defer to their colleagues' prior assessments that the person's reactions are worth covering in an EA-related story.

Ultimately, voting is an exercise in judgment by voters applying their own standards. I will say that I've seen very short text posts (as opposed to quick takes) get the same treatment.

Where the linkpost is to a video, I think it's usually low value unless there's enough information to enable the reader to make their own decision about whether to use their time to view it. I'm a little more forgiving with linkposted text, which can be quickly skimmed.

(Again, I did not vote and can only speculate on why others did)