They coordinate on fundraisers to avoid unhealthy competition
Perhaps this is just the LW-sphere, but it seems to me that every org I support (and several I don't) is running a fundraiser at the same time. What does healthy vs. unhealthy competition look like? (Perhaps everyone always does end-of-year fundraising for tax reasons.)
If fundraising was well coordinated, there would still be a large number of orgs raising in December. Something like a fifth of all giving in the US occurs during December. In EA the EtGers in finance find out about their bonuses in December.
However, I didn't know how many orgs were planning to raise money this December. If this was more widely known it might have made sense for a few of the CEA orgs to skip fundraising in December and raise a few months into 2016. So, the amount of coordination now is far from optimal.
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FWIW, I am “meh” on EA right now, and I suspect other LW’ers are on the fence as well. After spending some time on the Effective Altruism Forum, here are some worrying trends I’ve seen in the EA movement.
Drifting from rationality (this post), Closed-minded (reaction to this post), Overly-optimistic (this post), Self-congratulatory (this post)
I am especially disappointed that EA seems to be loosening from its rationalist roots so early in its development.
Maybe I am too demanding; any group will occasionally show flaws and the Effective Altruism Forum may not be representative of the entire EA movement. Nevertheless, I am tipping toward pessimism.
I will continue to search for and donate to effective charities, but I am wary to promote myself as part of the current EA movement, or donate to organizations like EAO, due to my concerns. I think other LW’ers have similar reservations.
I agree with the concern about the epistemics of the EA community. I touched on these in a talk I gave at EA Global.
However, I'm not sure linking to isolated posts that are concerning is a good way to get a sense of the degree to which this is a problem in the EA community. You'll want to weight the posts by the actual influence that the poster has over the movement. Of those poster Rob Wiblin is the most influential (he works at CEA). The rest are neither employed at EA orgs nor are large donors.
A community that is both growing and is epistemically strong will probably still have a ton of low-quality posts. This seems normal to me unless we see wider adoption of low-quality ideas. I don't think this is the case so far.