Yeah, to be clear I'm happy for EA and EA-adjacent orgs to publish news they're excited about on the Forum, and this certainly qualifies.

Something about the phrasing does bug me, but I'm not sure exactly what. This could be explained by WAI copying phrasing from another source (e.g. promotional material) to make this post, which would be understandable as a time-saver.

I feel a bit bad about my other comment being the first and only comment here, because while I stand by what I said there I also think this coverage is great news and WAI is totally justified in being really excited about it. So, congratulations!

I'd be interested in getting others' takes here, but as currently phrased this post feels a bit too much like marketing / propaganda for me to be comfortable with it as a post on this Forum.

(I continue to be very supportive of WAI's mission, methods, and staff.)

Thanks, Jakub. Good to get the perspective of someone more closely involved in this.

[T]he first email Anima International received about issues with CARE was information that ACE had chosen to freeze Anima International’s funds from the Recommended Charity Fund with the stated reasons being what they believed to be racist behaviour of our staff members and the lack of appropriate response to this from Anima International's leadership.

Are you able to give an indication of how long Anima's funding was frozen? Are we talking hours? Days? Weeks?

The embedded claim being objected to is that the group is "explicitly aligned with one side" (of this dispute).

NB: I didn't downvote this comment and would be interested to know why people did.

(I'm not sure how much the group admins want the group description waved around on the Forum, given that nobody has linked to it so far. I've tried to strike the right balance here but am open to cutting stuff if a group admin tells me they'd prefer something different.)

The group describes itself as a "group for EAs into getting on with conservatives and liberals alike, and who want EA itself to be more welcoming to people of all different political stripes", and links to resources that are clearly in support of open discussion and against censoring true beliefs for the sake of avoiding offence. It even explicitly says controversial topics "are welcome", as long as you "use stricter epistemic standards in proportion to how offensive [your claim] is".

Even though it does not make any angry claims about cancel culture, I defend my claim that this group is clearly oriented towards the free-speech end of EA and away from the censor-opposing-views-to-protect-vulnerable-groups end.

I'm not saying the group is bad! Merely that I think, based on evidence, that my claim is reasonable. I also still don't understand why joining this group would address these problems; I think explaining the model for the last thing might be a more effective way to change my mind, but it also might be too much of a tangent for this comment thread.

Perhaps. However, this post makes specific claims about ACE. And even though these claims have been discussed somewhat informally on Facebook, this post provides a far more solid writeup. So it does seem to be making a signficantly new contribution to the discussion and not just rewarming leftovers.

My claim was not that this post didn't contain new information, or that it was badly written – merely that it is part of a pattern that concerns me, and that more effort could be being made to mitigate the bad effects of this pattern.

One could imagine, for example, a post that contains similar content but is written with far more sympathy for what ACE and co. are trying to do here, even if the author disagrees (strongly) with its implementation. I think this post actually does better on this than many past posts on this topic, but taken as a whole we are still a long way from where I would like to be.

On the contrary, now that this has been written up on the forum it gives people something to link to. So forum posts aren't just read by people who regularly read the forum.

I wasn't saying they wouldn't see it, I was saying they wouldn't engage with it – that they will disagree with it silently, feel more alienated from the Forum, and move a little further away from the other side of EA than they were before. I think the anonymous comment below is quite strong evidence that I'm on the right track here.

If you want to avoid a split in the movement, I'd like to encourage you to join the Effective Altruists for Political Tolerance Facebook group and contribute there.

I'm honestly a bit flummoxed here. Why would contributing to a Facebook group explicitly aligned with one side of this dispute help avoid a split?

Thanks, this comment was a pretty big update for me towards Hypatia's interpretation (I'd previously been much closer to Ben's).

Footnote 50 from that blockquote is also relevant:

In addition to lengthy email correspondence, our impression here was informed by evidence we cannot publish, including calls with Anima International’s leadership and correspondence in a public Facebook group (“Effective Animal Advocacy – Discussion”). Even though Anima and the ACE staff members who are discussed in the email thread encouraged us to publish the email correspondence, members of the evaluations committee decided against this to protect the privacy of the third parties mentioned, and to assure charities that we keep our private correspondence confidential. 

I think private discussions are very important, but I don't feel good about a world where they entirely substitute for this kind of public disagreement. I think past Forum controversies of this kind have often been quite valuable.