I disagree. I think that if a government causes great harm by accident or great harm intentionally, either is evidence that it will cause great harm by accident or intentionally in future respectively and I just care about the great harm part

This is quite different from the case I would make for donor lotteries. The argument I would make is just that figuring out what to do with my money takes a bunch of time and effort. If I had 10 times the amount of money I could just scale up all of my donations by 10 times and the marginal utility would probably be about the same. So I would happily take a 10% chance to 10x my money and a 90% chance to be zero and otherwise follow the same strategy because in expectation the total good done is the same but the effort invested has 10% the cost, as I won't bother doing it if I lose.

Further, it now makes more sense to invest way more effort, but that's just a fun bonus. I can still just give the money to EA funds or whatever if that beats my personal judgement, but I can take a bit more time to look into this, maybe make some other grants if I prefer etc. And so likewise, being 100 or 1000x leveraged is helpful and justifies even more efforts in the world where I win.

Notably this argument works regardless of who else is participating in the lottery. if I just went to Vegas and bet a bunch of my money on roulette that gets a similar effect. Donor lotteries are just a useful way of doing this where everyone gets this benefit of a small chance of massively increasing their money and a high chance of losing it all, and it's zero expected value unlike roulette

If people said all these things without the word marginal, would you be happy?

This feels less like a disagreement over what the word marginal means and more that you just disagree with people's theory of impact and what they think the expected value of different actions are?

To me, it seems like it would be much more valuable to have a fully virtual event rather than one where all the in-person people want to prioritise other in-person people. I don't know how the costs of organising an additional virtual event could compare to hybridizing an in-person event that would happen anyway would be, however

Seems pretty clear that he meant your second statement

There is publicly available and sufficient evidence indicating Charity X did not provide 10K meals to homeless individuals.

Yeah thi. In particular anytime you criticise an organisation and they are only able to respond a few weeks later, many readers will see your criticism but will not see the organization's response. This inherently will give a misleading impression, so you must be incredibly confident that there is no mitigating context that this organisation would give lest you do their reputation undue damage empirically. I think it is obviously the case empirically that when an organisation gets critiqued including your two previous examples that there is valuable additional context they're able to provide when given notice

I think the typical member of the EA community has more than enough technical skill to understand evidence that a web page has been edited to be different from an archived page, if pointed to both copies from a reliable source

Quoting your post:

It is not acceptable for charities to make public and important claims (such as claims intended to convince people to donate), but not provide sufficient and publicly stated evidence that justifies their important claims.

If a charity has done this, they should not be given the benefit of the doubt, because it is their own fault that there is not sufficient publicly stated evidence to justify their important claims; they had the opportunity to state this evidence but did not. Additionally, giving a charity the benefit of the doubt in this situation incentivizes not publicly stating evidence in situations where sufficient evidence does not exist, since the charity will simply be given the benefit of the doubt.

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Note that I interpret this standard as "provide sufficient evidence to support their claims in the eyes of any skeptical outside observer", as that's the role you're placing yourself in here