I agree that in many cases, when bad-faith critics say “EA should not do X” and we stop doing X, the world would actually become worse off.
But making SBF the face of the EA movement was a really bad decision. Especially given that he was unilaterally gambling with the whole EA movement’s credibility.
There are robust lessons to be learned in this saga, which will allow us EAs to course-correct and prevent future catastrophic outcomes (to our movement and in general).
Strongly agree with all of these points.
On point 2: The EA movement urgently needs more earners-to-give, especially now. One lesson that I think is correct, however, is that we should be wary of making any one billionaire donor the face of the EA movement. The downside risk—a loss of credibility for the whole movement due to unknown information about the billionaire donor—is generally too high.