I didn't mean to imply you did, though I see how "human organizations wanting to dictate the terms on which they can be criticized" might sound that way. My sense that it's bad if posts on the Forum that are critical of AMF get met with this kind of argument doesn't hinge on whether the person making the argument is involved with AMF or not.

I really think you ought to consider renaming this post... Probably about 1000 people will see the title. There's some chance you could convince someone to stop donating to AMF just from the title - that tends to be how brains work, even though it isn't very rational.

I think it's not a good idea to respond to criticism in this way. I imagine myself as an outsider, skeptical of some project, and having supporters of the project tell me, "It's morally wrong to say we're not doing good without following our things-to-do-before-critiquing-us checklist, because critiques of us (if improperly done) might cause us to lose support, which is tantamount to causing harm."

I think this would (and should) make skeptic-me take a dimmer view of the project in question. It's unconvincing on the object level; to the extent that I already don't think what you're doing is valuable, I shouldn't be moved by arguments about how critiquing it might destroy value. And it pattern-matches to the many other instances of humans organizations wanting to dictate the terms on which they can be criticized, and leveraging the force of moral arguments to do so. Organizations that do this kind of thing are often not truth-seeking and genuinely open to criticism (even when it's done "properly" by their lights).

Re: not being selective about what startups to work at -- oh that's interesting, makes me more think I got lucky (in startup selection or in some other way).

By fast-growing startup, I mean a company that seems decently likely to be one of the top ~20 highest valued startups founded in a given 5 year period.

This sounds more like "top startup" than "fast-growing"? Not trying to nitpick, the terms just seem pretty different to me.

I think the bar need not be that high for some of the benefits you mention. I had an experience that jibes with this:

About 6 months after joining, I started leading a team of ~5 engineers on a high priority engineering project. That was mostly due to the company needing leaders to keep up with our growth, and my hustle and generalist skills making me well-suited for the role. That experience taught me a lot about leadership, management, and long-term engineering projects, and it seems like this type of experience is much more common in fast-growing startups.

from joining a startup that was certainly not one of the top ~20 in a five-year period -- it was "just a TechStars company." I found this really valuable. Probably I got fewer of the other benefits you mention around working with the top people in a given industry (this was a "random webapp" startup, not an ML startup, so that didn't really apply.)

Ah, glad this seems valuable! : )

Sorry, I neglected to say thank you for this previously!

This idea sounds really cool. Brainstorming: a variant could be several people red teaming the same paper and not conferring until the end.

Viewership as in YouTube viewers? Where are you getting that stat from?

Looks like this already happened, in March 2020: https://lexfridman.com/william-macaskill/

It looks like Sam Harris interviewed Will MacAskill this year. He also interviewed Will in 2016. How might we tell if the previous interview created a similar number of new EA-survey-takers, or if this year's was particularly successful? The data from that year https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Cyuq6Yyp5bcpPfRuN/ea-survey-2017-series-how-do-people-get-into-ea doesn't seem to include a "podcast" option.