I ended up strong downvoting your comment because I don't want concerns about PR risk to be top comment on this post.

I trust EA as a high quality source of information on charity, mainly because EA presents itself as impartial to causes, objective, and acts with honesty and integrity. This post seemed well researched and made in good faith to me, and your willingness to censor it for making the movement look bad makes me trust the quality of information on this forum seriously.

If you believe something is false, just criticize it for being false.

If you don't like it, just say you don't like it.

Your personal favor towards malaria nets, and your personal distaste for this post is totally okay. I just don't think PR considerations should be primarily what EA forum is about.
It is also counterproductive. To put it rudely, you are not cool enough to care about PR. You are not ready to critique aesthetics, vibes, and taste-making; not without making things worse. The forum is not a good canvas. It is not designed to be. It should not try to be. 

Please continue to do lots of research, math, and compassion. If you must care about appearance, please go about it in a positive, truth-seeking way - clarity in writing, true and rousing depictions of suffering, that kind of thing.

I don't believe in the governments' ability to get above 2.1 TFR but I do believe they have the power to decrease birthrate, like with child car seat requirements, Obama-era fuel efficiency regs which in practice caused increase in automobile weight (which is dangerous to kids walking), housing supply restrictions via badly designed zoning guidelines, funding for academia. sex ed plausibly has a positive or negative effect - condom distribution causes higher rates of teen sex for instance.

The EA question is how much do these things matter. I'm too lazy to look it up but I predict that housing prices swamps everything else birth-wise and decreasing deathrate is way more tractable physically and politically.

Pronatalism seems straightforwardly ideologically correct from a sum-Utilitarian human-centric perspective, so long as marginal human lives are very happy (I think so)

you're right, and there were anyone-created prediction markets before Manifold, like Augur. I misspoke. the real new-unintuitive thing was markets anyone could create and resolve themselves rather than deferring to a central committee or court system. I think this level of self-sovereignty is genuinely hard to think of. It's not enough to be a crypto fan who likes cypherpunk vibes; one has to be the kind of person who thinks about free banking or who gets the antifragile advantages that street merchants on rugs have over shopping malls. 

although it's quite possible that Manifold got popular more because the UX was better than other prediction markets or because a lot of rationalists to joined at the same time which let the social aspect take off

I agree with the caveat that certain kinds of more reasonable discussion can't happen on the forum because the forum is where people are fighting.

For instance, because of the controversy I've been thinking a lot recently about antiracism recently - like what would effective antiracism look like; what lessons can we take from civil rights and what do we have to contribute (cool ideas on how to leapfrog past or fix education gaps? discourse norms that can facilitate hard but productive discussions about racism? advocating for literal reparations?) I have deleted a shortform I was writing on this because I think ppl would not engage with it positively. and I suspect I am missing the point somehow. I suspect people actually just want to fight, and the point is to be angry.

On the meta level, I have been pretty frustrated (with both sides though not equally) on the manner in which some people are arguing, and the types of arguments they use, and the motivations they. I think in some ways it is better to complain about that off the forum. It's worse for feedback, but that's also a good thing because the cycle of righteous rage does not continue on the forum. And you get different perspectives

(i wonder if a crux here is that you have a lot of twitter followers and I don't. If you tweet you are speaking to an audience; if I tweet I am speaking to weird internet friends)

I wouldn't expect super-high correlation between any specific business owner's personal ideology and good business sense for their business.

It's the other way around. Prediction markets that anyone can create are good, but it's such crazy idea that one has to be pretty libertarian to be able to even think of the idea in the first place

Rachel ended up rolling her own timeslot reservation system. I think it was over-all quite good (aside from some UI nitpicks). Keep in mind tho that Manifest is organized only around talks and group activities, but EAG uses swapcard for scheduled 1:1s, a very different use case.

I continue to like discord, though I didn't look at the Manifest discord very much.

Isn't this true for the provision of any public non-excludable good? A faster road network, public science funding, or clean water benefit some people, firms, and industries more than others. And to the degree community-building resources can be discretized, ordinary market mechanics can distribute them, in which case they cease to be cause-general.

On the other side of the argument, consider that any substantial difference in QALY / $ implies that 
a QALY maximizer should favor giving $ to some causes over others, and this logic holds in general for [outcome you care about] / [resource you're able to allocate]. like if that resource is labor, attention, or eventspace-hours you rederive the issue laid out in the original post.

I wonder if GiveDirectly has so good results not (just) because cash transfers are transformative but because digital payments on cellphones are.

- Voluntary human challenge trials
- Run a real money prediction market for US citizens
- Random compliance stuff that startups don't always bother with: GDPR, purchased mailing lists, D&I training in california, ...

Here are some illegal (or gray-legal) things that I'd consider effectively altruistic though I predict no "EA" org will ever do:
- Produce medicine without a patent
- Pill-mill prescription-as-a-service for certain medications
- Embryo selection or human genome editing for intelligence
- Forge college degrees
- Sell organs
- Sex work earn-to-give
- Helping illegal immigration