I see this issue as:

1. you're trying to gain traction among EAs
2. EAs have a norm of reaching out to groups for comment before publishing criticism of them
3. By not following that norm, you are alienating yourself from the community you're trying to woo

As to whether this norm is good or not, that ultimately boils down to the assumption of good faith. EAs tend to make that assumption about people who talk the talk, sometimes to our discredit.  I'd be interested in more discussion of this assumption, which I think is part of the "implicit curriculum" of joining the community. But adopting a more adversarial perspective, and expecting the community to get onboard without actually litigating the underlying point, seems unlikely to succeed and therefore inconsistent with your goals.

Another thought: I also object to the maximalist marketing that nonprofits often adopt when they solicit donations. But from their POV, it's a total prisoners' dilemma: everyone else is pushing the boundaries, so if you don't, you get left behind. I don't see how criticizing one group, or even a handful of them, is going to change that dynamic. It would require culture change, which is a big hard problem.

I think for the purposes of this comparison, non-profit and charity are probably not interchangeable, in the sense that a marginal donor with 5K to spend is almost certainly not going to donate that to Kaiser Permanente (although $1M does get you naming rights at a smaller chain!). So I guess whatever we're defining the average charity as, the distribution should probably exclude these big institutions that are nonprofit for a bunch of tax code reasons but in reality are just providing goods and services to clients in exchange for money. 

(colleges are an edge case here)

What is the average charity? I don't have a good intuition for what it looks like, is, how big it is, what it works on etc.^[1] I think pinning this down will help make the comparison clearer. Will, how do you think about this? 

1. ^{^}

   Sidenote: At least in the US, I would be open to the argument that the average charity -- defined as being the midpoint of some multidimensional array of size, cause area, staffing, location, etc. -- produces literally zero charitable benefit on net, and might even be doing harm. You might not share this intuition, but we have a long list of mostly null effects for pro-social interventions once they're evaluated rigorously (enterprise zones in California, medicaid enrollment in oregon, head start, etc. -- any of which you might take issue with but I think the broader point is defensible that on average, interventions don't work.) If the average social utility gain of a given nonprofit America is zero, then I don't know how we're going to say some other cause is X or Y times "better" than that. The seeing eye dog vs curing blindness comparison is a lot more coherent, I think.

    

Anyone else get a pig butchering scam attempt lately via DM on the forun? 

I just got the following message 

> Happy day to you, I am [X] i saw your profile today and i like it very much,which makes me to write to you to let you know that i am interested in you,therefore i will like you to write me back so that i will tell you further about myself and send you also my picture for you to know me physically. 

[EMAIL]

I reported the user on their profile and opened a support request but just FYI

I think that's a good idea -- or just post as yourself (?)

(Ofc I think I and others understand that things are in flux and this is all NBD)

👋 Looks interesting! What do you think about having the title reflect its origins, e.g. "linkpost: Climate Change Is Worse Than Factory Farming", or "suggested reading: [X]" or something like that?

At a glance right now, the UX here looks like the EA Forum Team is itself endorsing this pretty radical position. (FWIW I appreciate the drive to cross-post interesting material/the broader drive to improve the forum experience, I have been thinking about your other post a bit lately and hope to respond soon)

Hi Ruben, I am not expert on that strand of research, but here a few papers that may be of interest (lead author/year/title):

My implicit  knowledge on the topic of knowledge production (rather than of veganuary) is that rosy results like the one you are citing often do not stand up to scrutiny. Maya raised one very salient objection to a gap between the headline interpretation and the data of a past iteration of this work here.

I believe that if I dig into it, I’ll find other, similar issues. 

Sorry for such a meta answer…

No meaningful relationship! (see code below.) However, big caveat here that we had to guess on some of the samples because many studies do not report how many subjects or meals were treated (e.g. they report how many restaurants or days were assigned to treatment and control but didn't count how many people participated)

> summary(lm(d ~ total_sample, data = dat))

Call:
lm(formula = d ~ total_sample, data = dat)

Residuals:
     Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max 
-0.59897 -0.13702 -0.01868  0.12322  0.75767 

Coefficients:
                Estimate  Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)  
(Intercept)   0.06330835  0.02664964   2.376   0.0193 *
total_sample -0.00002876  0.00004690  -0.613   0.5410  
---
Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 0.2474 on 110 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared:  0.003407,	Adjusted R-squared:  -0.005653 
F-statistic: 0.376 on 1 and 110 DF,  p-value: 0.541

Delay indicates the number of days that have elapsed between the beginning of treatment and the final outcome measure. How outcomes are measured varies from study to study, so in some cases it's a 24 hour food recall X number of days after treatment is administered (the last part of it), in others it's a continuous outcome measurement in a cafeteria (the entire period of delay).