This doesn't answer the question for people who live in high-income countries and don't feel envy. Should they abstain? Should they answer about whether they would envy someone in their own position if they were less advantaged?

If you're someone with an impressive background, you can answer this by asking yourself if you feel that you would be valued even without that background. Using myself as an example, I...

1. went to a not so well-known public college
2. worked an unimpressive job
3. started participating in EA
4. quit the unimpressive job, studied at fancy university
5. worked at high-status ingroup organizations
6. posted on the forum and got upvotes

Was I warmly accepted into EA back when my resume was much weaker than it is now? Do I think I would have gotten the same upvotes if I had posted anonymously? Yes and yes. So on the question of whether I'm valued within EA regardless of my background, I voted agree.

EA Forum posts have been pretty effective in changing community direction in the past, so the downside risk seems low

But giving more voting power to people with lots of karma entrenches the position/influence of people who are already high in the community based on its current direction, so it would be an obstacle to the possibility of influencing the community through forum posts.

If you think it's important for forum posts to be able to change community direction, you should be against vote power scaling with karma.

Vote power should scale with karma

@Ben Kuhn has a great presentation on this topic. Relatedly, nonprofits have worse names: see org name bingo

Hey! You might be interested in applying to the CTO opening at my org:

https://careers.epoch.ai/en/postings/f5f583f5-3b93-4de2-bf59-c471a6869a81

(For what it's worth, I don't think you're irrational, you're just mistaken about Scott being racist and what happened with the Cade Metz article. If someone in EA is really racist, and you complain to EA leadership and they don't do anything about it, you could reasonably be angry with them. If the person in question is not in fact racist, and you complain about them to CEA and they don't do anything about it, they made the right call and you'd be upset due to the mistaken beliefs, but conditional on those beliefs, it wasn't irrational to be upset.)

Thanks, that's a great reason to downvote my comment and I appreciate you explaining why you did it (though it has gotten some upvotes so I wouldn't have noticed anyone downvoted except that you mentioned it). And yes, I misread whom your paragraph was referring to; thanks for the clarification.

However, you're incorrect that those factual errors aren't relevant. Your feelings toward EA leadership are based on a false factual premise, and we shouldn't be making decisions about branding with the goal of appealing to people who are offended based on their own misunderstanding.

Leadership betrayal: My reasoning is anecdotal, because I went through EA adjacency before it was cool. Personally, I became "EA Adjacent" when Scott Alexander's followers attacked a journalist for daring to scare him a little -- that prompted me to look into him a bit, at which point I found a lot of weird race IQ, Nazis-on-reddit, and neo-reactionary BS that went against my values.

1. Scott Alexander isn't in EA leadership
2. This is also extremely factually inaccurate - every clause in the part of your comment I've italicized is at least half false.

This is actually disputed. While so-called "bird watchers" and other pro-bird factions may tell you there are many birds, the rival scientific theory contends that birds aren't real.