EA, being a fallible movement, is wrong about a lot of things. A lot of people that are not aligned with EA have completely valid reasons for not doing so. If you excessively filter for people that already agree with you on everything, you risk creating a groupthink atmosphere where alternative ideas have no real way to enter the discourse. Take this to the extreme and you pretty much end up with a cult. 

Also, EA is not representative of the general public, and thus will have a hard time knowing how ideas and policies are received by or impact broader demographics. Having normal people around to provide sanity checks is a useful byproduct of hiring more generally, rather than finding people already adjacent to this very small and odd subculture. 

What is the best practice for dealing with biased sources? For example, if I'm writing an article critical of EA and cite a claim made by emille torres, would it be misleading to not mention that they have an axe to grind?

In most of the cases you cited, I think being more honest is a good goal.

However, echoing Ulrik's concern here, the potential downsides of "deep honesty" are not just limited to the "deeply honest" person. For example, a boss being "deeply honest" about being sexually attracted to a subordinate is not generally virtuous, it could just make them uncomfortable, and could easily be sexual harassment. This isn't a hypothetical, a high up EA cited the similar concept of "radical openness" as a contributing factor to his sexual harassment. 

White lies exist for a reason, there are plenty of cases where people are not looking for "radical honesty" . Like, say you turn someone down from a date because they have a large disfiguring facial scar that makes them unattractive to you. Some people might want to know that this is the reason, other people might find it depressing to be told that a thing they have no control over makes them ugly. I think this is a clear case where the recipient should be the one asking. Don't be "deeply honest" to someone about potentially sensitive subjects unprompted.  

As another example, you mention being honest when people ask "how are you". Generally, it's a good idea to open up to your friends, and have them open up to you. But if your cashier asks "how are you", they are just being polite, don't trauma dump to them about your struggles. 

Thank you for writing this post, I know how stressful writing something like this can be and I hope you give yourself a break!

I especially agree with your points about the lack of empathy. Empathy is the ability to understand and care about how other people are hurt or upset by your actions, no matter their background. This is an important part of moral reasoning, and is completely compatible with logical reasoning. One should not casually ignore harms in favour of utilitarian pursuits, that's how we got SBF (and like, stalinism). And if you do understand the harms, and realize that you have to do the action anyway, you should at least display to the harmed parties that you understand why they are upset. 

The OP was willing to write up their experience and explain why they left, but I wonder how many more people are leaving, fed up, in silence, not wanting to risk any backlash? How many only went to a few meetings but never went further because they sensed a toxic atmosphere? The costs of this kind of atmosphere are often hidden from view. 

In my experience, this forum seems kinda hostile to attempts at humour (outside of april fools day). This might be a contributing factor to the relatively low population here!

I was referring to the account that told torres to be careful or "someone will break your kneeecaps", the person obsessively tweeting attacks, the people impersonating Torres, tagging his ex-wife, etc. I can't rule out Torres faking some of this, but I think it's more plausible that the attacks are by real people who dislike Torres. 

I would guess you are not behind those, and that Torres is wrongly attributing them to you (they seem different in character to the post here). However since you seem to be a pseudonymous/throwaway account person who has only ever discussed this one topic, I have no way to be sure. 

I am fairly annoyed at the lack of good faith being given here, given the subject matter. 

As someone who is broadly on Torre's side of the fence, I find Torre's antics such as described here to be extremely annoying and unhelpful. I despise Boghossian's et als politics but the behavior here was clearly unjustified, and a lot of the other things here looks like either deliberate dishonesty or a severe lack of reading comprehension. I think this sort of behavior just makes things harder for people who genuinely want to criticize the real flaws and harms in EA thinking.

In fairness, you should probably link Torres response to the article (from part 3 onwards, although it doesn't actually address a lot of the accusations). Torres account of receiving harassment and threats of violence seem plausible to me, although we can never know for sure (another reason not to use sockpuppets and other underhanded tactics). 

Sam also thought that the blockchain could address the content moderation problem. He wrote about this here, and talked about it here, in spring and summer of 2022. If the idea worked, it could make Twitter somewhat better for the world, too.

I think this is an indication that the EA community may have hard a hard time seeing through tech hype. I don't think this this is a good sign now we're dealing with AI companies who are also motivated to hype and spin. 

The linked idea is very obviously unworkable. I am unsurprised that Elon rejected it and that no similar thing has taken off. First, as usual, it could be done cheaper and easier without a blockchain. second, twitter would be giving people a second place to see their content where they don't see twitters ads, thereby shooting themselves in the foot financially for no reason. Third, while facebook and twitter could maybe cooperate here, there is no point in an interchange between other sites like tiktok and twitter as they are fundamentally different formats. Fourth, there's already a way for people to share tweets on other social media sites: it's called "hyperlinks" and "screenshots". Fifth, how do you delete your bad tweets that are ruining your life is they remain permanently on the blockchain? 

I think jailtime counts as social sanction!