Thanks for correcting my mistaken impression Jakub! I've updated my comment to link to yours.

I guess I don't know OP's goals but yeah if their goal is to publicly shame ACE then publicly shaming ACE is a good way to accomplish that goal.

My point was a) sending a quick emails to someone about concerns you have with their work often has a very high benefit to cost ratio, and b) despite this, I still regularly talk to people who have concerns about some organization but have not sent them an email.

I think those claims are relatively uncontroversial, but I can say more if you disagree.

Basic statistics question: the GMA predictors research seems to mostly be using the Pearson correlation coefficient, which I understand to measure linear correlation between variables.

But a linear correlation would imply that billionaires have an IQ of 10,000 or something which is clearly implausible. Are these correlations actually measuring something which could plausibly be linearly related (e.g. Z score for both IQ and income)?

I read through a few of the papers cited and didn't see any mention of this. I expect this to be especially significant at the tails, which is what you are looking at here.

Yep, definitely don't want people to swing too far in the opposite direction. Just commenting that "talk to people about your concerns with them" is a surprisingly underutilized approach, in my experience.

Thanks! I had interpreted "We are yet to see how successful the leadership transition turns out" as a pretty strong statement, but I agree that the review doesn't specify how the different factors they list are weighted and your interpretation could be correct. I hope someone from ACE can clarify.

I do wish we could be having this discussion in a more productive and conciliatory way, which has less of a chance of ending in an acrimonious split.

At the risk of stating the obvious: emailing organizations (anonymously, if you want) is a pretty good way of raising concerns with them.

I've emailed a number of EA organizations (including ACE) with question/concerns, and generally find they are responsive.

And I've been on the receiving side of emails as well, and usually am appreciative; I often didn't even consider that there could be some confusion or misinterpretation of what I said, and am appreciative of people who point it out.

Edit: Jakub says that ACE's evaluation was based on the Facebook comments, not leadership transition. The below is kept for historical purposes. Also, I should have noted in this post my appreciation for Anima's transparency – it wouldn't have been possible for me to post something like this with most organizations, because they would state that their CEO stepped down "spend more time with her family" or something similar.

Nevertheless, given the overall positive assessment, it's strange that Anima was awarded a "weak" rating in this category, and I think it's likely that Anima is being heavily punished for the public comments made by staff members.

Last year, Anima fired their CEO. The public statement said:

However, no matter how much we value her merits, there are issues in regards to everyday behaviour towards employees that we as an organization cannot accept. In Anima International we have to be a team that strongly supports each other.

I think ACE's rating about poor leadership and culture was based on that rather than Facebook comments made by staff members.

Good point

Thanks for sharing this! 

Feels like all the top people in EA would have gotten into EA anyway?

Possibly you don't endorse this statement and were just using it as an intro, but I think your interlocutor's response (1) is understated: I can't think of any products which don't benefit from having a marketing department. If EA doesn't benefit from marketing (broadly defined), it would be an exceptionally unusual product.

I imagine taking my best guess at the "current plan of meta-EA" and giving it to Paul Graham and him not funding my startup because the plan isn't specific/concrete enough to even check if it's good and this vagueness is a sign that the key assumptions that need to be true for the plan to even work haven't been identified.

For what it's worth, CEA's plans seem more concrete than mine were when I interviewed at YC. CLR's thoughts on creating disruptive research teams are another thing which comes to mind as having key assumptions which could be falsified.

I'm glad I could help. Feel free to quote me in the annual Rethink Priorities impact analysis.