I also thought the Oakland venue was a very good choice, and was glad the events team chose it again in 2024.

No self-interested person is ever going to point this out because it pisses off the mods and CEA, who ultimately decide whose voices can be heard - collectively, they can quietly ban anyone from the forum / EAG without any evidence, oversight, or due process.

I've heard the claim that the EA Forum is too expensive, repeatedly, on the EA Forum, from diverse users including yourself. If CEA is trying to suppress this claim, they're doing a very bad job of it, and I think it's just silly to claim that making that first claim is liable to get you banned.

By supporting Ozy’s post, Rafael agrees that anyone who reads all the words previously written on the issue belongs to an elite group. The definition of ‘elite’ is ‘a select group that is superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society’.

I think it's fairly clear that the use of "elite" in that paragraph was a joke.

"How many people die in road accidents" doesn't tell you much about the badness of speeding without the denominator - which in the US is approximately everybody approximately all the time.

This is an excellent comment.

That link doesn't say anything about the Hamas attacks.

Whatever Hamas' plan was, what actually happened included gunning down hundreds of helpless civilians at a music festival and massive, brutal sexual violence against large numbers of women.

This isn't hard. Hamas' Oct 7 attacks were a brutal massacre of innocent civilian life. It's possible to acknowledge that at the same time as strongly condemning Israel's conduct, either in the current war specifically or in their history with Palestinians in general.

I downvoted this comment, even though I'm pretty sympathetic to many of the factual claims it contains: in particular, I don't believe that Israeli civilian or military leadership are doing everything they can to avoid civilian casualties. Nevertheless, this comment feels quite out-of-place and vaguely inappropriate to me, given the framing and emotional tone of the OP, which feels much more about explaining one person's feelings and thought processes than an actual attempt to make a strong argument for a specific position.

I also think it's needlessly hostile, in a place where compassion and acknowledgement of uncertainty seem particularly important. Calling someone's views "propaganda talking points" seems like a bad way to start any productive dialogue.

The stated reason is the same as Nick's: since the FTX collapse he's been reused from too much board business for staying on the board to make sense:

Since last November, I’ve been recused from the board on all matters associated with FTX and related topics, which has ended up being a large proportion of board business. (This is because the recusal affected not just decisions that were directly related to the collapse of FTX, but also many other decisions for which the way EV UK has been affected by the collapse of FTX was important context.) I know I initially said that I’d wait for there to be more capacity, but trustee recruitment has moved more slowly than I’d anticipated, and with the ongoing recusal I didn’t expect to add much capacity for the foreseeable future, so it felt like a natural time to step down.

TIL!

I think this strengthens my confidence in my original comment re: nearly all EA roles being paid under market rate.