The campaign team flew EA community organisers from across the world to knock on doors, and ended up paying over a thousand dollars per vote. This happened in the USA, which has a political system tailored to facilitate the purchasing of elections. It was bad.

How would you prefer people to react when someone acts in bad faith?

What aspects of this comment fall outside those bounds?

That's good to know, but I wonder how much change you personally can make. It'll be significant, for sure, but I think a lot of this is cultural: a sort of EA-accelerated chunk of the class-coded aspects of the Hidden Curriculum.

Doubtful if you look at Gideon's first comment and remember it was downvoted through the floor almost immediately.

Questioning orthodoxy is ok within some bounds (often technical/narrow disagreements), or when expressed in suitable terms, e.g. 

• (Significant) underconfidence, regardless of expertise and/or lack of expertise among those criticised
• Unreasonable assumptions of good faith, even in the face of hostility or malpractice (double standards, perhaps a lesser form of the expectation of a 'perfect victim')
• Extensive use of EA buzzwords
• Huge amounts of extra work/detail  that would not be deemed necessary for non-critical writing
• Essentially making oneself as small as possible so as not to set off the Bad Tone hair-trigger
  • This is difficult because knowing what you are talking about and being lazily dismissed by people you know for a fact know far less than you about a given subject matter makes one somewhat frustrated

As several EAs have noted, e.g. weeatquince, this is time-consuming and (emotionally) exhausting, and often results in dismissal anyway.

This is even harder to pull off when questioning sensitive issues like politics, funding ethics, foundational intellectual issues (e.g. the ways in which the TUA uses utterly unsuitable tools for its subject matter due to a lack of outside reading), competence of prominent figures, etc.

I actually think this forms a sort of positive feedback loop, where EAs become increasingly orthodox (and confident in that orthodoxy) due to perceived lack of substantive critiques, which makes making those critiques so frustrating, time-consuming, and low-impact that people just don't bother. I've certainly done it.