I'm not advocating a stock HR department with my comment. I used "HR" as a shorthand for "community health agent who is focused on support over evaluation." This is why I didn't refer to HR departments in my post. Corporate HR seems flawed in obvious ways, though I think it's probably usually better than nothing, at least for tail risks.

In my management role, I have to juggle these responsibilities. I think a HR department should generally exist, even if management is really fair and only wants the best for the world, we promise (not bad faith, just humour).

This post is mainly explaining part of what I'm currently thinking about regarding community health in EA and at MATS. If I think of concrete, shareable examples of concerns regarding insufficient air-gapping in EA or AI safety, I'll share them here.

Yeah, I think that EA is far better at encouraging and supporting disclosure to evaluators than, for example, private industry. I also think EAs are more likely to genuinely report their failures (and I take pride in doing this myself, to the extent I'm able). However, I feel that there is still room for more support in the EA community that is decoupled from evaluation, for individuals that might benefit from this.

I think the distinction you make is real. In the language of this post, I consider the first type of evaluation you mention as a form of "support." Whether someone desires comfort or criticism, they might prefer this to be decoupled from evaluation that might disadvantage them.

The official channel for general questions about MATS is the contact form on our website.

Hi Viktoria! I'm sorry; we dropped the ball on emailing all the applicants who had previously submitted. In hindsight, this was an obvious first thing to do. We did post the extension on the EA Forum and LessWrong posts, and a host of Slack workplaces and Facebook groups, but we should also have sent that email.

Application deadlines have been extended to May 22! Feel free message me or Victor if you have any questions.

I wrote a short blog post a little while ago on preventing low back pain with exercise. I think your problem area report might have missed several important meta-analyses on low back pain. In particular, Huang et al., 2018 and Shiri, Coggon and Hassani, 2017 seem to supersede Steffens et al., 2017, and Lin et al., 2018 seems broader and more recent than NICE, 2016. I think your assessment of the quality of evidence in favour of exercise interventions for low back pain might reasonably update with respect to these references.