Thanks for writing this, I found it really interesting.

Thanks so much, awesome that you decided to apply and I’m so happy you enjoy the blog!

If you happened to have read this piece, do you think it's substantive/useful enough for me to post on EA Forum proper (with a few edits) or is it more suitable as a shortform? 

I wrote up a quick FAQ on what the application process is like for Tyler Cowen's Emergent Ventures program. Generally I think more EAs should apply to EV, it's low-cost and a good way to get some money to get a project off the ground, and also a good signal of ability for young EAs. 

https://www.samstack.io/p/emergent-ventures-faq

I think it would be useful to know the percentage of women with depression who we would expect to be depression-free after a six month period without any intervention. 

Thanks for giving the details,  I couldn't quite remember the full story and should've looked it up and quoted directly. I don't quite know what to make of him doing this - on the one hand, a small lie about being vegetarian doesn't seem particularly pernicious or noteworthy, especially given he went vegetarian after lying about it. On the other hand, it does at least strike me as somewhat odd to do this if he had just eaten a cheeseburger a few hours earlier. It does update me ever-so-slightly towards thinking that he's liable to lie if it makes him look good - it might not just be a 'lie without intending to' situation.

It’s possibly worth noting that in his conversation with Tyler Cowen he did mention that he had previously lied (briefly) about being vegetarian.

You might be interested in some pieces I wrote on this recently, which don't explicitly show factual errors but do offer a criticism of the book. See here and here.

This feels like a weird interpretation of Will's comment, which doesn't (in my view) imply that for-profit companies can't do a lot of harm, but rather that if you start a company with the sole goal of making a profit, usually the worst outcome (with regards to your goal of making a profit) is that you go bankrupt. 

Presumably he means because x-risk is short for 'existential risk' and can refer to things other than extinction.