I had these results in mind.

The proposition asserted upthread was "[t]he EA community still donates far more to global health causes than animal welfare." If I understood your response correctly, you suggested that this is a function of the largest donors' decisions. That many of us, including myself, favor giving the marginal last dollar to AW is also a function of those big-donor decisions.

As far as survey data, I specifically had the response to Please give a rough indication of how much you think each of these causes should be prioritized by EAs. I took that wording to invite the respondent to divvy up the entire pie of EA resources. I would read them as suggesting that GHD > AW in the community's collective ideal cause prio, but by considerably less than donation numbers would imply. It's of course possible that the 2024 survey will show different outcomes.

There was also this response, although the high SDs make interpretation a bit confusing to me:

But the debate week question and the donation election were about marginal funding, which limits the breadth of the conclusions one can draw from those data. IIRC, many of the discussions -- and at least my own votes trending toward AW -- were heavily influenced by the small percentage of EA funding that is going into AW. Perhaps the EA Survey is the best sense of general community sentiment on the community's relative cause prio here?

Eating meat seems indirect enough that offsetting feels acceptable. When you purchase meat, the harm unfolds as follows: A farm reviews the previous year's demand and decides to expand operations to supply another 1,000 chickens. Of course, this decision typically occurs for every 1,000th chicken sold. This level of indirectness feels similar to the harm caused by emitting CO₂ during a commute. For instance, my emissions might exacerbate a flood by 0.1% twenty years later, leading to one extra death for every 1,000 commutes on average.

One could classify a whole lot of harms as "indirect enough" under this logic. I'm hesitant to trot out examples involving serious mistreatment of human beings on the Forum. However, I submit that consideration of some examples along those lines would suggest that while "indirect enough" (as described in your post) may be a necessary precondition to offsetting being morally acceptable, it is not a sufficient precondition.

The CO2 hypothetical strikes me as meaningfully different. There's a sustainable amount of CO2 emission, and certain forms of offsetting can ensure that your net contribution to CO2 emission does not exceed your fair share of the sustainable amount. In that scenario, you're not violating the side constraint of taking more than your net fair share from the commons at all.

I continue to think many (but not all) offset calculations are too low in ways that may be problematic from a deontological perspective. For instance, some end up shifting much of the cost of one's own morally problematic conduct onto third parties, which doesn't seem to fit within a deontological framework. And standards for crediting impact need to be stricter here because multiple counting is a much more meaningful problem than when an altruistic donor is deciding where to donate. But that is somewhat of a different issue.

David offered Scott an opportunity to comment, and Scott turned it down. You can see that David also offered Julia an opportunity to comment on a short quote included in the blog post, and he ran the four-paragraph statement she provided which included context for the quoted material. Moreover, the leaked e-mail is not new, and Scott has had both the time and the platform to contextualize it if he wished to do so. 

If Scott has made public statements clearly inconsistent with the e-mail that David missed, then it would be much more helpful to show the receipts rather than vaguely assert that he has "actively pushed back against a lot of discussion around HBD on his blog and related spaces." Even accepting that assertion at face value, a history of pushing back against some unspecified elements of HBD discussion isn't inconsistent with the views expressed in the e-mail or otherwise discussed in David's post.

I don't see a viable connection here, unless you make "EA principles" vague enough to cover an extremely wide space (e.g., considering ~consequentialism an "EA principle"). 

I would feel more positively about this if there were a carveout for organizers with financial need, with hourly stipends capped at the wages typically received by students at the university in question. At least at the US undergraduate level, I think it would be plausible to operationalize with financial need in a semi-objective albeit imperfect manner.^[1]

EA faces challenges with socioeconomic and other forms of diversity as it is. Without getting into broader arguments over diversity, at a minimum we want the most qualified people to get jobs in the ecosystem. That doesn't jive with giving a leg up to those who have family or other resources that allow them to build career capital through volunteering for unpaid, part-time work. Given how competitive the EA job market is, making what seems to be a common resume/career-building experience inaccessible to would-be organizers with financial need strikes me as moving in the wrong direction here.

1. ^{^}

   E.g., receiving need-based financial aid, having a FAFSA Expected Family Contribution of no more than $X, having worked at a paid, part-time student job prior to becoming an organizer that the organizer is giving up.

Note that the currently quoted pay for part-time organizers is somewhat lower than the linked comment, which quoted a then-current version of the OP website.

Current version reads:

Part-time/student organizers

Undergraduates organizing part-time typically receive a stipend that generally equates to $21-27/hr in the US and £15-19/hr in the UK. Non-undergraduates organizing part-time typically receive a stipend that generally equates to $25-32/hr in the US and £18-23/hr in the UK.

https://www.openphilanthropy.org/open-philanthropy-university-organizer-fellowship/

It looks like they do, or at least did, allow funding for <10 hr/week:

"Group leaders may ask for funding for organizers working less than 10 hours per week using either form above, rather than having those organizers fill out a separate application."

https://www.openphilanthropy.org/open-philanthropy-university-organizer-fellowship/

My guess is that the downsides of paid organizing would be diminished to the extent that the structure and compensation somewhat closely tracked typical university-student employment. I didn't see anything in the UK report about what typical rates might be, but at least back in my day most students were at fairly low hourly rates. Also, paying people for fewer than (say) 8-10 hours per week would not come across to me as roughly replacement income for foregone typical university-student employment because I don't think such employment is typically available in smaller amounts. [Confidence: low, I am somewhat older by EA standards.]

There's a chart showing it was in the high 60s to mid 70s in previous years, except one year at 91% because that year had virtual acceptances.