That is, many (most?) people need a break-in point to move from something like "basically convinced that EA is good, interested in the ideas and consuming content, maybe donating 10%" to anything more ambitious.
I am under the impression that EAGx can be such a break-in point, and has lower admission standards than EAG. In particular, there is EAGxVirtual (Applications are open!).
Has the rejected person you are thinking of applied to any EAGx conference?
A strategy for scaling effective giving that is not mentioned here is earning to give.
Encouraging and helping people who are already bought into the idea of donating effectively to earn more could generate a lot of money and value. I think this strategy should be considered besides encouraging high-earners to donate effectively (I am not making a claim here about which is better).
A concrete step could be to talk to people from 80k about advertising earning to give again.
This feels like misleading advertising to me, particularly "Election interference" and "Loss of social connection". Unless bluedot is doing some very different curriculum now and have a very different understanding of what alignment is. These bait-and-switch tactics might not be a good way to create a "big tent".
This seems false.
Consider three charities A,B,C and three voters X,Y,Z, who can donate $1 each. The matching funds are $3. Voter Z likes charity C and thinks A and B are useless, and gives everything to C. Voter Y likes charity B and thinks A and C are useless, and gives everything to B. Voter X likes charities A and B equally and thinks C is useless.
Then voter X can get more utility by giving everything to charity B, rather than splitting equally between A and B: If voter X gives everything to charity B, the proportions for charities A,B,C are If voter X splits between A and B, the proportions are The latter gives less utility according to voter X.
As far as I remember, the political discussions have been quite civilized on the EA Forum. But I think this is because of the policies and culture the EA Forum has. If political discussions were a lot more frequent, the culture and discussion styles could get worse. For example, it might attract EA-adjacent people or even outsiders to fight their political battles on the EA Forum. Maybe this can be solved by hiring additional moderators though.
Also, politics can get a lot of attention that would be better spend elsewhere. For example this post about Trump generated 60 comments, and I am not sure if it was worth it.