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Yes, this is my impression as well, based on recently having booked a day 2 test.

Also, one may want to check the reliability of the providers via rating sites (one cheap one I looked at had a terrible rating).

However, one should also note that the rules are about to change:

From 24 October fully vaccinated passengers and most under 18s arriving in England from countries not on the red list can take a cheaper lateral flow test, on or before day 2 of their arrival into the UK. These can be booked from 22 October.

Just so you know, basically these £10 tests  are not real prices, and part of a bait and switch. See:

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58300897

Basically, the government made a website but management/governance is hard, so the website has been gamed and spammed, to the degree that everything is noise.

As another datapoint, there's no way these prices are economical.

BBC press coverage seems to have improved things but it's not really resolved.

Some people at FHI have had random conversations about this, but I don't think any serious work has been done to address the question.

I agree Alameda seemed like an unusually good opportunity at the time.

I have an anecdote of a time I received feedback for a (non-EA) job I didn't get in a manner I found helpful. Hopefully this helps hiring managers who are brainstorming ways to provide feedback.

I had applied for a consulting position as an undergraduate. I was selected for a second-round interview, where I was asked to discuss how I would advise a client (IIRC, the client was a grocery store considering a merger). A few days later, my interviewer called me and said, "Sorry, you didn't get the job. Would you like some feedback on your interview?" I said yes, and he proceeded, "We were looking for a response that addressed factor ___ and you didn't mention that."

What I liked about this was that (A) I received feedback, which is rare in hiring processes and (B) the feedback was specifically about my interview answer, not about broad qualities I was missing. The latter made the feedback easier to manage emotionally, because I didn't end up thinking "oh no, I'm not creative/thorough/skilled." Instead, my takeaway was "I should talk about more facets of the problem if I do this again."

Mainly EA ingroupiness.

Based on this Choose-a-Provider page, there seem to be a few cheaper day 2 tests (less than £10). This one costs £1.99 but is in Park Royal, which is an hour away by public transport in , or this one is in Battersea, London and is 45 minutes away by public transport. It seems like they get booked up fast though and have less support than the Randox one.

Update: A friend of mine read this as me endorsing doing PhD's and was surprised. I do not generally endorse doing PhDs at this late hour. (However, there are exceptions.) What I meant to say is that skilling up / learning is what you should be doing, for now at least. Maybe a PhD is the best way to do that, but maybe not -- it depends on what you are trying to learn. I think working as a research assistant at an EA org would probably be a better way to learn than doing a PhD, for example.  If you aren't trying to do research, but instead are trying to contribute by e.g. building a movement, maybe you should be out of academia entirely and instead gaining practical experience building movements or running political campaigns. 

Ummm, what?
 

This is an objectively good post, it is an objectively good idea, but the texture and content of some of the comments surprise me.

Like, some thoughts on the negative side:

1. There isn't much signs of models/awareness of the difference it takes to get a 10M valuation and a 10B (or even 1B valuation), and it’s the latter two that drives the post. This is a big deal because the nature/cause of success is probably totally different between these levels and that insanely smart, successful people might be capped at lower valuations. I suspect some comments here (that would update onlookers toward the billionaire idea) lack these models and what their implications are. 
    
2. It's first approximation good if indeed EA had some program that could bring say, 1/1000 of incubatees to this level of success. But the costs would be really high: it would consume 1000 potential leaders in expectation and many of these people would be hurt. The skill set is different, maybe even net negative for non-profits, because of zero sum, sharp elbows sort of work required.
    
3. It's worth considering whether the underlying sentiment which drives posts like “Rejection [EA · GW]” and “Very hard to find a job [EA · GW]” are driven by realities that may not be a defect, but just the other side of the coin to worldviews/models of talent that are common in a “hits based model” (which itself might be an overly generous characterization). People don’t talk about the Chesterton fence: growing talent is hard not because people are snobby but because of things like founder effects and quality/fit is deceptively hard/important and impractical to communicate to people who don’t have it. Yet, this doesn’t even scratch the surface—I’ve seen leaders in plant based foods after an exit describe distrusting/managing out virtuous early employees after raises/growth since they no longer matched the calibre they needed. 
    

This was written really quickly and I stopped writing here because it’s unclear there’s any demand for this comment. But I think this comment is an update toward normal, mainstream thought about this.
 

On the positive side:

1. It seems like there is a capability to build or support EAs in some program or informal process, because of the tech bent, shared worldview and connections. This might be a large legit advantage over other incubators.
2. I really agree EAs tend to be more conscientious and able. (However the pool of EA may change rapidly if it’s cheap to do so, and then you're back to gatekeeping again).
3. Even or especially if you fully agree with a critique of the tech sector that says they are basically reinventing oligopoly and regulatory capture, this seems like a strong positive reason to “give EAs” these companies/slots.
   
    

I think my argument here holds for any other similar organisation. 
 

Gotcha

does it count as an independent, in-depth, expert review?

I mean, how long is a piece of string? :) The way I did my reviewing was to check the major assumptions and calculations and see if those made sense. But where a report, say, took information from academic studies, I wouldn't necessarily delve into those or see if they had been interpreted correctly. 

Re making things public, that's a bit trickier than it sounds. Usually I'd leave a bunch of comments in a google doc as I went, which wouldn't be that easy for a reader to follow. You could ask someone to write a prose evaluation - basically like an academic journal review report - but that's quite a lot more effort and not something I've been asked to do.

In HLI, we have asked external academics to do that for us for a couple of pieces of work, and we recognise it's quite a big ask vs just leaving gdoc comments. The people we asked were gracious enough to do it, but they were basically doing us a favour and it's not something we could keep doing (at least with those individuals). I guess one could make them public - we've offered to share ours with donors, but none have asked to see them - but there's something a bit weird about it: it's like you're sending the message "you shouldn't take our word for it, but there's this academic who we've chosen and paid to evaluate us - take their word for it".