I disagree. It seems to me that the EA community’s strength, goodness, and power lie almost entirely in our ability to reason well (so as to be actually be “effective”, rather than merely tribal/random). It lies in our ability to trust in the integrity of one anothers’ speech and reasoning, and to talk together to figure out what’s true.
Finding the real leverage points in the world is probably worth orders of magnitude in our impact. Our ability to think honestly and speak accurately and openly with each other seems to me to be a key part of how we access those “orders of magnitude of impact.”
In contrast, our ability to have more money/followers/etc. (via not ending up on the wrong side of a cultural revolution, etc.) seems to me to be worth… something, in expectation, but not as much as our ability to think and speak together is worth.
(There’s a lot to work out here, in terms of trying to either do the estimates in EV terms, or trying to work out the decision theory / virtue ethics of the matter. I would love to try to discuss in detail, back and forth, and see if we can work this out. I do not think this should be super obvious in either direction from the get go, although at this point my opinion is pretty strongly in the direction I am naming. Please do discuss if you’re up for it.)
From accounts I heard later (I was not at the camp, but did hear a lot about it from folks who were), I’m basically certain CFAR would have interfered with the minor going even if the minor had agreed. Multiple CFAR staff members stepped in to attempt to prevent the minor from going (as mentioned in e.g. https://www.rationality.org/resources/updates/2019/cfars-mistakes-regarding-brent, and as I also remember from closer to time) much fuss was correctly made at the time, etc. I agree that many bad mistakes were made, then and previously and afterwards, however.
Also, after we eventually understood what the deal had been with Brent, we gave up running programs for minors. We continue to run programs for adults. My feeling is that adults should indeed not expect that we are vetting a particularly careful or safe environment particularly reliably, but that this is often not the crux for whether an adult wishes to attend a CFAR workshop.