Thanks. I’ll think about the idea of doing a post, but, honestly, what I wrote was what I wanted to write. I don’t see the emotion or the intensity of the writing as a failure or an indulgence, but as me saying what I really mean, and saying what needs to be said. What good’s sugar-coating it?

Something that anyone can do (David Thorstad has given permission in comments I’ve seen) is simply repost the Reflective Altruism posts about LessWrong and about the EA Forum here, on the EA Forum. Those posts are extremely dry, extremely factual, and not particularly opinionated. They’re more investigative than argumentative. 

I have thought about what, practically, to do about these problems in EA, but I don’t think I have particularly clear thoughts or good thoughts on that. An option that would feel deeply regrettable and unfortunate to me would be for the subset of the EA movement that shares my discomfort to try to distinguish itself under some label such as effective giving. (Someone could probably come up with a better label if they thought about it for a while.)

I hope that there is a way for people like me to save what they love about this movement. I would be curious to hear ideas about this from people who feel similarly.

Huh? Why not just admit your mistake? Why double down on an error? 

By the way, who do you think saved that post in the Wayback Machine on the exact same date it was moved to drafts? A remarkable coincidence, wouldn’t you say?

Your initial comment insinuated that the incidents I described were made up. But the incidents were not made up. They really happened. And I linked both to extensive documentation on Reflective Altruism and directly to a post on the EA Forum so that anyone could verify that the incidents I described occurred. 

There was one incident I described that I chose not to include a link to out of consideration for your coworker. I wanted to avoid presenting the quick take as a personal attack on them. (That was not the point of what I wrote.) I still think that is the right call. But I can privately provide the link to anyone who requests it if there is any doubt this incident actually occurred.

But, in any case, I very much doubt we are going to have a constructive conversation at this point. Even though I strongly disagree with your views and I still think you owe me an apology, I sincerely wish you happiness. 

I really agreed with you when I was just glancing at the post trying to get a sense of what it was about, but then I looked at the comments and got convinced to try reading it in earnest, from the beginning. Then I flipped, and now I think the thesis is clear, the individual sentences are clear, and the writing is beautiful.

An unfortunate fact about some academic writing, specifically some writing in philosophy, in many of the humanities, and in some of the social sciences, is that there's a lot of time-wasting, inscrutable papers and books. This kind of writing does not reward additional time and effort spent on reading it, or at least does so at such a miserly trickle that it's not worthwhile. The preponderance of inscrutable texts makes it hard to tell, at a glance, what's not worth reading and what's written in sumptuous prose. This essay is sumptuous prose.

The sources are cited in quite literally the first sentence of the quick take.

To my knowledge, every specific factual claim I made is true and none are false. If you want to challenge one specific factual claim, I would be willing to provide sources for that one claim. But I don’t want to be here all day. 

Since I guess you have access to LessWrong’s logs given your bio, are you able to check when and by whom that LessWrong post was moved to drafts, i.e., if it was indeed moved to drafts after your comment and not before, and if it was, whether it was moved to drafts by the user who posted it rather than by a site admin or moderator?