Thanks for writing this up!

Alas, and very relevantly to population ethics, I fear this is no longer true:

Much like how the average family has 2.5 kids

It took the Catholics 2000 years to get to the point where they could systematically protect and enable paedophiles and still survive the blowback.

This seems both irrelevant and false to me.

If you find yourself "sadly nodding my head in agreement with so much of the article" until you get to the section that concerns an area you have first-hand experience of, whereupon you find the author to be grossly misrepresenting the subject matter, you should probably reduce your credence in the rest also.

The EA Summits were the first effective altruism conferences of any kind.

The GWWC weekends away in Wales were effectively the first EA conferences and they preceded EAG.

Nobody ever talks about this, but a cult infiltrated and took over EA.

People do talk about Leverage - that is how you know about them - but they did not take over EA, and nor does the comment you cite from Habryka claim this.

Why did the EA organizations find it disappointing? I’m afraid you’re going to say they didn’t like that peer reviewers didn’t agree with them

Nope. There have been a variety of issues. One is speed, and another is the difficulty of finding relevant experts. Thinking back to MIRI's experience with the Damascus paper, my recollection (possibly incorrect) is their final conclusion was the getting published in a good journal took a lot of time, didn't really improve the fundamental quality of the work much, and also didn't yield a lot of prestige/outreach benefits. 

Very few people outside of EA consider EA’s idiosyncratic ideas to be serious and credible. What is the strategy for gaining credibility outside the EA echo chamber? Right now, it seems to be a media strategy that counts on people not fact checking EA’s messaging.

Come on, I understand you have objections to METR's methodology - though to my knowledge you have not published those objections in a peer-reviewed journal - but blithely accusing them of a deliberate strategy of misinformation seems low.

A number of EA orgs have invested considerable time and effort into the conventional peer review process and found it disappointing for a number of reasons.  If you think it would be an effective method of persuasion it would be good to hear some evidence of this. My impression is that this is not the case; the power of institutional gatekeepers has fallen dramatically over time, and what matters is producing high quality work. (And the fact that your recommended provider appears to be a scam seems like evidence against as well!)

I'm curious as to your reasoning behind this example:

Let’s assume we take a talented Malawian worker earning $2000 a year (4x the national average) and help them to move to Germany:

Not only does their personal income increase by 25x, but if they send 10% of their income home in remittances ($5,500), they can double the incomes of ten of their family members.

My understanding is the sub-Saharan immigrants to Germany typically earn well below average German incomes; is your plan that you will be much more selective?

It seems like a significant part of the motivation here is you want to change the voting system to prevent a party you dislike from coming to power; this seems pretty anti-democratic to me. In general I think we should disapprove of efforts from incumbent governments to replace the rules they benefited from with a new set just in time to undermine their would-be successors.

The situation would be pretty different if Reform approved of this change, but I don't get the impression they do?