If the intellectual project is too taxing in an otherwise busy life (work, family, other interests etc), I'm not sure there's a way to meaningfully re-engage the old-hand EAs.

This seems plausible to me. EA should be a community organized around doing the intellectual project, not a random social club.

(On the other hand, I am doing an EA activity, namely giving away money effectively. But there's not much to talk about with that!)

So I think a very relevant question is just: is it actually useful or desirable to "retain" people like me? It depends on what we want the EA community to look like.

I have not - maybe I should!

Yes, I guess I didn't go into this so much in the project post-mortem. But in short:

• The actual work that needed doing was not work that I was very good at or enjoyed. There was a lot of synoptic research and networking.
• There was a very high level of uncertainty about what we were doing. I think I deal fairly well with medium-level uncertainty, but much less well with high-level uncertainty.
• Much of this could have been overcome, but I think I fundamentally lacked the non-instrumental desire to become the kind of person who was good at the project; and the instrumental need wasn't motivating enough. In practice this manifested as a lack of grit - if I had kept at it and pushed harder, maybe the project would have got further... but I don't think I actually wanted to be in that position either!

These are good ideas. I think I wrote this post in a bit of a negative frame of mind, thank you for the positive lens!

Yeah, those are somewhat reasonable. I guess then the question becomes: how to actually deploy those?

I think animal welfare is still very underfunded, and the problem is very bad. My main worry is tractabiilty, and whether we actually have levers to pull on to make a significant difference.

Okay yes, I agree that a driver of bank runs is the knowledge that the bank usually can't cover all deposits, by design. So as long as you keep that fact secret you're much less likely to face a run.

I am now unsure how to reason about the likelihood of a run-like scenario in this case.

The measures you list would have prevented some financial harm to FTXFF grantees, but it seems to me that that is not the harm that people have been most concerned about. I think it's fair for Ben to ask about what would have prevented the bigger harms.

if any charity's rationale for not being at least moderately open and transparent with relevant constituencies and the public is "we are afraid the CC will shut us down," that is a charity most people would run away from fast, and for good reason

I do think a subtext of the reported discussion above is that the CC is not considered to be a necessarily trustworthy or fair arbiter here. "If we do this investigation then the CC may see things and take them the wrong way" means you don't trust the CC to take them the right way. Now, I have no idea whether that is justified in this case, but it's pretty consistent with my impression of government bureaucracies in general. 

So it perhaps comes down to whether you previously considered the charity or the CC more trustworthy. In this case I think I trust EVF more.

He'd need a catastrophic stock/bond market crash, plus almost all depositors wanting out, to be unable to honor withdrawals.

I think this significantly under-estimates the likelihood of "bank run"-type scenarios. It is not uncommon for financial institutions with backing for a substantial fraction of their deposits to still get run out due a simple loss of confidence snowballing.