I feel that [SI] ought to be able to get more impressive endorsements than it has.

SI seems to have passed up opportunities to test itself and its own rationality by e.g. aiming for objectively impressive accomplishments.

Holden, do you believe that charitable organizations should set out deliberately to impress donors and high-status potential endorsers? I would have thought that a donor like you would try to ignore the results of any attempts at that and to concentrate instead on how much the organization has actually improved the world because to do otherwise is to incentivize organizations whose real goal is to accumulate status and money for their own sake.

For example, Eliezer's attempts to teach rationality or "technical epistemology" or whatever you want to call it through online writings seem to me to have actually improved the world in a non-negligible way and seem to have been designed to do that rather than designed merely to impress.

ADDED. The above is probably not as clear as it should be, so let me say it in different words: I suspect it is a good idea for donors to ignore certain forms of evidence ("impressiveness", affiliation with high-status folk) of a charity's effectiveness to discourage charities from gaming donors in ways that seems to me already too common, and I was a little surprised to see that you do not seem to ignore those forms of evidence.