Your use of hyperlinks is very amusing to me.

You can't save the world without working with people at least as annoying as John. 

This is a great quote, and one that I should keep in mind myself.

My coworkers are pretty amazing in how not annoying they are (they're low ego, interested in changing their mind when they're wrong, smart, interested in getting better over time) and I still sometimes feel an urge to quit in a huff.

I think all the stories and adventures and loves and lives that people in the world have lived are worth quite a lot of torture, and it's not naively the case that if the torturous experiences are larger than the other experiences, that this means they're more important.

For you, is this a quantitative question, or an "in principle" question? Like could there exist some amount of extreme suffering, for which you would judge them to be outweighing the meaningful and worthwhile experiences?

Or is the sentiment more like "if there exists a single moment of meaning, that redeems all the pain and suffering of all of history"?

I agree. But that doesn't necessitate that any particular person is going to lose in absolute terms.

I agree this dynamic seems fishy, and I'm suspicious that on a detailed analysis, it will turn out that an agreement like this is useful at all to exactly the extent that it involves misleading others.

That said...

There might be lots of people who you respect, but you'll make a special point to promote the reputation of people who you expect will reciprocate the favor to you.

Small business owners (in different industries) sometimes form associations in which they explicitly direct clients to each other. eg The therapist directs customers to the mechanic (if it seems like they need a mechanic) and vis versa. This can be beneficial to the customer, because if they have a profesional that they like in one domain, they might trust that person's recommendations in other domains, and prefer that to trying to evaluate marketing and third-party reviews (which are out to get them).

If the profesional association has some basic standards for who they let in, such that their recommendations are good (or at least good enough to outweigh the cost of needing to identify skilled/trustworthy professionals for yourself) there's a mutually beneficial trade to be had.

As one example of where this kind of vulnerability can come in but is often hard to spot: Mutual reputation protection alliances are one of the most common ways in which creditworthiness ends up for sale: "A powerful potential ally with many resources approaches you with an offer: I say good things about you, you say good things about me, everyone is happy". 

Of course, what you are doing when agreeing to this deal is to fuck over everyone who was using your word to determine who is creditworthy.

This is not necessarily true? You could maintain a strict standard of only taking this implicit deal with people who you actually respect, and who you are honestly talking up. Much like an "influencer", who only promotes products that they actually like and use.

Don't trust young organizations that hire PR agencies. PR agencies are the obvious mechanism by which you can translate money into reputation. As such, spending on PR agencies is a pretty huge flag! Not everyone who works with PR agencies is doing illegitimate things, but especially if an organization has not yet done anything else legible that isn't traceable to their PR agency or other splashy PR efforts, it should be an obvious red flag. 

In The Submarine, Paul Graham talks about his startup ViaWeb hiring a PR firm back during the dotcom bubble:

PR is not dishonest. Not quite. In fact, the reason the best PR firms are so effective is precisely that they aren't dishonest. They give reporters genuinely valuable information. A good PR firm won't bug reporters just because the client tells them to; they've worked hard to build their credibility with reporters, and they don't want to destroy it by feeding them mere propaganda.

If anyone is dishonest, it's the reporters. The main reason PR firms exist is that reporters are lazy. Or, to put it more nicely, overworked. Really they ought to be out there digging up stories for themselves. But it's so tempting to sit in their offices and let PR firms bring the stories to them. After all, they know good PR firms won't lie to them.

A good flatterer doesn't lie, but tells his victim selective truths (what a nice color your eyes are). Good PR firms use the same strategy: they give reporters stories that are true, but whose truth favors their clients.

For example, our PR firm often pitched stories about how the Web let small merchants compete with big ones. This was perfectly true. But the reason reporters ended up writing stories about this particular truth, rather than some other one, was that small merchants were our target market, and we were paying the piper.

Our greatest PR coup was a two-part one. We estimated, based on some fairly informal math, that there were about 5000 stores on the Web. We got one paper to print this number, which seemed neutral enough. But once this "fact" was out there in print, we could quote it to other publications, and claim that with 1000 users we had 20% of the online store market.

This was roughly true. We really did have the biggest share of the online store market, and 5000 was our best guess at its size. But the way the story appeared in the press sounded a lot more definite.

Well what I've seen personally bears on frequently with which this happens. 

I think FTX and Leverage are regarded to be particularly bad and outlier-y cases, along several dimensions, including deceptiveness and willingness to cause harm. 

If our examples are limited to those two groups, I don't think that alone justifies saying that it is "routine" in the EA community to "regularly sit down and make extensive plans about how to optimize other people's beliefs". 

I think you're making a broader claim that this is common even beyond those particularly extreme examples. 

Leverage people used to talk as if they were doing this kind of thing, though it's not like they let me in on their "optimize other people" planning meetings. I'm not counting chat transcripts that I read of meetings that I wasn't present for.