I definitely agree. But I think we're far from it being practically useful for dedicated EAs to do this themselves.

Do most charitable organizations have in-house people to examine donors? I'm not saying we shouldn't check, but rather that there shouldn't be people in EA organizations whose job is to do this - rather than organizations just hiring auditors or whomever to do it for them.

I'd argue that "checking whether businesses are run responsibly" is out of scope for EA in general.

forcing people to trust me not to have inserted a backdoor into the executable binary

Were you prohibited from also open sourcing it?

Dissenting view: like everywhere else on the internet, when you encounter something really crazy you sometimes have to look at the publication date. I trust readers can do that.

I disagree, and in this case I don't think the forum team should have a say in the matter. Each user has their own interpretation of the upvote/downvote button and that's ok. Personally I don't use it as "I disagree" but rather as "this comment shouldn't have been written", but there's certainly a correlation. For instance, I both disagree-voted and downvoted your comment (since I dislike the attempt to police this).

Right? Also you can have a person turn on the scandal machine, which then creates more than one scandal associated with them.

Is it definitely established that a living person is required for every scandal?

Toometa, tomato

Scandals don't just happen in the vacuum

Has anyone tested this? Because if we could create them in a vacuum, that might save a lot of energy usually lost to air resistance, and thus be more effective