If it helps at all, people definitely read your updates, and it would be a shame if you stopped posting them here. I've recommended to students trying to "do EA things" that they should start a local PauseAI chapter. Partially that's because people from PauseAI post on here.

So I think the problem (?) is that nobody donates to EA infrastructure for the purpose of cultivating a nice community. They donate to EA infrastructure almost exclusively for the purpose of cultivating impactful actions (that are the actions they want to see)

I mean, I sure would like it if people donated to cultivate a nice community. However, I don't think I'm owed that from an explicitly EA funding pot. Why should EA-aligned donors spend cash on me and not on e.g. malaria prevention? Heck, I'm an EA-aligned donor, and I spend cash on malaria prevention that could have been spent on me.

I think it's also worth saying: one-day conferences usually require two nights of a hotel, that the attendee pays for, unless they're in day travel range. You can thereby quite reasonably ask for a higher entry fee for a retreat, as it would be what would otherwise be spent on a hotel.

I also do recommend working for a while in a "normal job" before going back to uni for a PhD, as I think that's a really great way of sorting out genuine interest in research from inertia about not wanting to leave the university system.

I will plug my CDT here: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/stor-i/

Counterbalance: if you want to do research, do a PhD, if you can get one. It's the easiest research funding source available for someone who doesn't already have a PhD. Much of the rest of it can be solved by being smart and strategic about what you actually research. You can go to fellowships, research programs, events and training while doing a PhD.

I don't think EA should be recommending that its researchers drop out of research school.

(This is not necessarily disagreeing with you - I think a lot of people think they want to do research but actually don't want to do research, they just want to stay in a familiar university environment, and they need to figure this out.)

I'll give a couple of examples:

• EAs (of the longtermism strand) have a trait tendency to take a lot of low-ish effort low-probability bets in the hope that some of them will pay off big.

you'll often see people who think they can outsmart decades of expert study of an issue with a little effort in their spare time

I mean, isn't the idea that they might be able to contribute something meaningful, and doing so is both low-effort and very good if it works, so worth the shot?

• EAs (of all strands) have a trait tendency to morally mistrust authorities outside of their group (EA), deferring either to movement leaders they feel morally align with them or their own personal moral judgement

If EA deferred to the moral consensus, it would cease to exist, because the moral consensus is that altruism should be relational and you have no obligation to do anything else. People who have tendencies to defer to the moral consensus don't join up with EA.

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Again, not that these are optimal, but they basically seem to me to be either pretty stable individual difference things about people or related to a person's age (young adult, usually). It would be great to have more older adults on-board with the core idea of doing the most good possible being a tool of achieving self-actualisation, as well as more acceptance of this core idea among mainstream society. I hope we will get there.

I agree with the main takeaway of this post - settled scientific consensus should generally be deferred to, and would add on that from a community perspective more effort needs to be put into EAs that can do so doing science communication, or science communicators posting on e.g. the EA Forum. I will have a think about if I can do anything here, or in my in-person group organising.

But I think some of this post is just describing personality traits of the kind of people who come to EA, and saying they're bad personality traits. And I'm not really sure what you want to be done about that.

In descending order of amount I have donated to @CEEALAR , the Givewell All Grants Fund (my preferred "default" place to put donations), and the Humane League (something I feel obligated to do as a condition of being vegetarian rather than vegan). The largest donation was basically bankrolling the effective giving organiser retreat I am running at CEEALAR: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/events/HfeSKe7Ekmm9uddLh/effective-giving-organiser-retreat (which still has sign up space, by the way!)

I have also made a few non-effective donations to friends, to organisations I used the services of, or local places I volunteered for and want to see succeed, which are not in my pledge.

See also this post https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vqaK5y5ksiDSfMzqd/the-crisis-ea-cannot-afford-to-ignore from a former USAID lead. It contains some other possibles.