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Comment by troydavis | Hacker News Reader

Before commenting, I recommend reading this thread as well: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xof7iFB3uh8Kc53bG/...

Particularly the top reply: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xof7iFB3uh8Kc53bG/...

Of course, not everyone will agree with their decision, but it wasn’t done haphazardly. Here’s an excerpt:

> We had various calculations about costings, which made it look somewhere between “moderately money-saving” and “mildly money-spending” vs renting venues for events that would happen anyway, depending on various assumptions e.g. about usage that we couldn’t get great data on before running the experiment. The main case for the project was not a cost-saving one, but that if it was a success it could generate many more valuable workshops than would otherwise exist. Note that this is a much less expensive experiment than it may look on face value, since we retain the underlying asset of the building.

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I read the top reply. What, exactly, about it do you find persuasive? To me, it seems like a pretty great illustration of one of the major critiques of EA: it introduces a set of vague axioms that are then used to build arguments for all sorts of silly, compromised arguments, like "we should buy a ￡15MM estate" or "we should divert money from the poor to AI research".

If effective altruism is the best philosophy then anything that supports effective altruism must also be good. And anything that supports that, etc.

So make sure to buy comfy plush pillows and foot massagers for the effective altruists so they can do their effective altruism more effectively!

I mean, we're joking, but we're joking on a story where they managed to justify an $18MM estate to hold events at.

And if you can make money to fund EA by starting a billion-dollar crypto Ponzi scheme, well, the ends justify the means.

It's very effective, especially if you maintain the altruistic intent.

I first thought this a joke and then I remembered FTX

There's certainly a lot of silly stuff going on in EA, but as far as I know, FTXs methods have been universally condemned within EA.

I don't think so.

At least not while the money was rolling in.

If FTX had been doing what they were widely believed to be doing, providing a place where people could trade cryptocurrencies and taking a cut on the trades, I wouldn't have any problem with that: there wouldn't have been harmful means that needed justifying. Which is why all the condemnation is coming out after we learned that they were actually doing something much much worse.

Running a crypto exchange is a grey hat. It is a place for crims, money launderers, gamblers and of course there is the environmental impact of crypto to consider.

I see it a little bit like a dodgy party donor, which is very much appreciated by the party profiting from the filthy lucre being sent in their general direction.

Then suddenly scandal engulfs the donor and the honchos in the profiting party are shocked! SHOCKED! I tell you.

I think that's a quite good analogy to what happened here. While the money was rolling nobody asked questions from where it's actually coming from. Only when that whole house of cards, built within other houses of cards collapsed did the "condemnation" start.

Nobody is really interested in details how the sausage is made as long the money is rolling. Thus, any condemnation or distancing from Mr. Bankman-Fried and his business rings very, very hollow to me.

> nobody asked questions from where it's actually coming from

What do you mean? The public story around FTX, and what they said when you asked them, was that the money was coming from charging fees on trading, which was plausible given the level of trading and the size of their fees. That the condemnation didn't start until it turned out that SBF and FTX were actually doing other things and lying to everyone is not surprising?

FTX had a pretty solid reputation and plenty of legitimate investors like the Ontario Teachers Pension Fund. Plenty of positive reputation signals.

It's not like it was some obviously shady businessman making political donations or something.

EA is shady in a lot of ways but this seems like an unrealistic guilt by association.

Like a lot of other organizations and leaders, EA has egg on its face from SBF/FTX, no doubt. You can see it roiling the community. But while I'm in no way an expert on their funding, I think it's an open question whether SBF funding is part of a pattern of "filthy lucre" as you put it, or one--or maybe one of a few--instance of an unknown criminal funding source doing some reputation washing. My sense is it's the latter.

I'd also go further to say that it's pretty hard to track down the sources of all your funding. Even government organizations (the FEC, the IRS, the FBI) have a super hard time doing this. Nonprofits generally just go by reputation, as they have essentially zero investigative power.

After he blew up and stopped paying for everything.

The time to condemn was when he was running a Ponzi scheme and handing out millions.

"Ends justify the means, even when the means include significant harm" has never been within mainstream EA. For example, Will MacAskill's post on the FTX collapse includes lots of examples from his book where he said not to do this: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WdeiPrwgqW2wHAxgT/...

We call ourselves the good guy squad. Everything we do is eventually good even if you don't see how it's good now. Any time we do something you think is bad like buying a $15 million mansion that who the heck knows what we're using it for now, it's due to someone making an honest mistake. You wouldn't criticize the good guy squad, because then you'd be part of the bad guy squad!

"I only read one Book because its Good Book don't you know, and I know it's Good because a really Good Book would." (c) somehow reminded me about that song :)

A lot of human ideas can become ridiculous when taken to a logical extreme (typically when all other competing factors at play are ignored).

Taking things to a logical extreme is what self-described rationalists do, almost religiously.

The top comment clarifies:

* The purchase was for an events space, not HQ.

* Why they want to run a particular kind of event.

* Why this building is a good fit for the events they want to run.

* It was funded by a grant from a donor who specifically wanted to support this project.

These are all not things that you would get from the tweet, and are useful in understanding why they made their decision.

That doesn't mean you have to agree that this project meets the high standards EA claims to set for itself, but having the context of what they're doing and why they think it's worth doing helps a lot in targeting critiques (and there are a lot of off-target critiques below from people are missing this context).

I wasn't involved in this project (though when I visited friends in Oxford this April the author of that comment showed me around the building) and it's not how I would personally donate, but I think it's a reasonable choice for a donor who (a) is already intending to invest some of their portfolio in real estate and (b) thinks that progress on improving the world is mostly limited by figuring out what to do and not by the amount of funding for proven things.

When donors want something ineffective, isn't it EA's job to convince them to want something effective instead?

If they are only holding their own events there, it's a waste. If they're renting out the space, it's a distraction and a business masquerading as a charity.

> When donors want something ineffective, isn't it EA's job to convince them to want something effective instead?

To a point, yes. On the other hand, it's good for people to be trying a range of things: it's a hedge against groupthink, opens up new areas that might turn out to be important, what most needs doing might change over time and it's good to be prepared, people don't all have the same beliefs about what matters or the same theories of change, diminishing returns from overinvesting in an area, etc. This means that while it's good to push back on proposals to understand how they're plausibly high impact, "that's not what I'd put my time or donations towards but I don't think it's bad that you're working on it" is a common view for EAs to have of other EAs' work.

> If they are only holding their own events there, it's a waste.

I do think this is what they're doing. How is it a waste?

> It was funded by a grant from a donor who specifically wanted to support this project.

It seems (from what I gather) the venue was a decision from CEA, not the donor (he cites his reasoning behind the choice). It's important to highlight this was not money directed toward donations, but instead money directly for CEA (supposedly they could manage their finances and buy property for meetings).

Still, that's really expensive for a venue -- in the last case, if they had so much money, why not funnel it back to great causes that could really use the money? (sorry, I have to go there: $18M/$5000 == 3600 lives saved from preventable diseases -- is the property that important?)

> (b) thinks that progress on improving the world is mostly limited by figuring out what to do and not by the amount of funding for proven things.

In that case, I think a better investment would be in proper, well thought out, academic infrastructure that would help people research more effective ways of giving. It seems way too easy to "fool ourselves" thinking: we bought a lavish castle, but it's going to make us think better! -- the high standards applied to giving should definitely by applied to our internal decisions as well, and we need to be specially vigilant when it stands to benefit ourselves -- in what appears as a lavish expensive.

My main concern would be the lack of transparency -- why wasn't this decision made publicly and transparently, why didn't they consult for example the effectivealtruism.org forums, or donors?

> It seems (from what I gather) the venue was a decision from CEA, not the donor (he cites his reasoning behind the choice).

This is minor, but my read from the post is that the project was a decision from an EA (Owen) who lined up funding (the donor) and a host organization (CEA, since renamed to EAV).

> that's really expensive for a venue

Is it? This is a building with room to host 30-50 people, meeting space, and (I think) a commercial kitchen. Very roughly, it costs 10 times as much as my house for 10 times the space.

> if they had so much money, why not funnel it back to great causes that could really use the money?

As I wrote above, I think it's probably because they think that the most important work is not bottlenecked on funding but on figuring out what to do. I think bednet distribution is great (and just made my annual donation via GiveWell) but there isn't a clear consensus on how best to improve the world. I do think the donor would bite your bullet and say that they thought that the benefit to humans, over time, of the workshops this space will facilitate is larger than the benefit to humans today of using that money to prevent additional deaths from disease.

> My main concern would be the lack of transparency -- why wasn't this decision made publicly and transparently, why didn't they consult for example the effectivealtruism.org forums, or donors?

I would love it if they had publicly written up their plans at the stage of "we're thinking about buying a building to host residential workshops, here's about what we think it would cost, here's why we think it's worth doing", and I would strongly encourage others to do that. I also think that if you are soliciting donations from the public at large you should be clear about what you intend to spend the money on and why you think it's plausibly one of the most valuable things to do with that money. At the same time, I think a norm where effective altruists should prioritize transparency so highly that a group of them can't spend their own money without making the case publicly would go too far. For example, I know some people who hosted a workshop (elsewhere!) on figuring out what sort of safety studies would be valuable for evaluating UVC light as a disease transmission reducer. I don't believe they wrote anything up publicly justifying the cost of the workshop, instead the cost was between them and their funder, and that's ok! Public communication is a lot of work, and it trades off with other things you could be doing instead.

To be clear, I consider myself an effective altruist.

> Very roughly, it costs 10 times as much as my house for 10 times the space

I highly appreciate the transparency! To be fair, I think your house is expensive (I suppose you live in a very expensive place! around here, you could buy 10 large apartments for that kind of money). Is everywhere in Oxford that expensive?

I do live in a developing country, and have a relatively comfortable lifestyle for my country. Still, I try to be frugal and avoid spending more than I need, even in everyday life. An EA that I want to support is an EA that is radically compassionate, open minded, pragmatic, altruistic and bravely focused on a better world; not one that is self-serving with sprinkles of charitable giving.

I also feel that self-vigilance, self-skepticism (and embracing criticism and improvement with an open heart and mind) is an important component of EA, which is what I'm trying to do here.

> At the same time, I think a norm where effective altruists should prioritize transparency so highly that a group of them can't spend their own money without making the case publicly would go too far.

I agree to an extent (although I plan to make my own giving as transparent as I reasonably can in the future), but that is specifically an EA charity, not private individuals -- as an EA org, I think they show commitment to effective spending and I think it's very reasonable they should embrace transparency.

From wiki: "Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) is an Oxford-based charity that builds and supports the effective altruism community". This makes me less confident than I would like in supporting CEA over effective charities like GiveWell or other EA charities.

Please see this post (from me): Be simple and transparent, a heuristic

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/yww9g6/be_s...

> it's probably because they think that the most important work is not bottlenecked on funding but on figuring out what to do.

Note that this has very much changed in the past few weeks, for reasons I'm not going to get into in this comment. We'll see how EA funding does in this upcoming giving season, but for now the general assumption is that EA is broadly funding-constrained.

Sorry, yes, I should have said that this is a bullet I think the donor would have bitten at the time, not necessarily a bullet they would bite today in the post-FTX lower-funding environment.

> Is it? This is a building with room to host 30-50 people, meeting space, and (I think) a commercial kitchen. Very roughly, it costs 10 times as much as my house for 10 times the space.

That really sounds like a yes. You apparently live somewhere that is extremely expensive, as you seem to be saying you have a 1.5 mil house that can fit 3-5 people. I'm pretty sure I can host 20 if they don't need to sleep here, and definitely 3-5 if they do need to sleep here, and my house was bought for $390k. I'm not in some dump in the middle of nowhere. It's a downtown townhouse with an unobstructed skyline view in the 4th largest metro in the United States. You don't have to buy an event space in one of the world's most expensive places to buy a building. Hell, I'm even in a major transportation hub right in the middle of the country! It would be very easy for people from all over the place to meet here. There has to be some similar part of the UK if they absolutely needed a building in that country.

Sorry, when I said "host" I should have clarified I'm including sleeping.

I live in Somerville MA, where $1M will buy you a 3-4br.

There are definitely cheaper areas than Somerville or Oxford. For example, https://ceealar.org bought a 17br former hotel in Blackpool (Northern England) which cost 1% as much (£140k). [1] My understanding from talking to people in the UK, though, is that for the kind of events they're looking to host proximity to London and Oxford is pretty important, and that's expensive.

[1] https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/58714915

You give no data on why those arguments are silly, it’s only your opinion, very far from being factual. The whole EA premise is that we shouldn’t think like that. I agree.

I didn't and don't have an opinion about it. Like everyone else here, I don't have enough information to reach a conclusion, let alone a high-confidence one.

The comment I linked to was a reminder that none of us have anywhere near enough information to evaluate this decision. We'd need at least some idea how frequently they expect to use it, the alternatives, the predicted benefits of a high-end venue, and so on.

A productive comment would ask questions ("I wonder how they estimated…", "I hope they share more information about…"), not try to turn relatively little information into an opinion.

> I didn't and don't have an opinion about it. Like everyone else here, I don't have enough information to reach a conclusion, let alone a high-confidence one.

This seems to be a few (shaky, IMO) premises.

1. EA the organization (not the philosophy) are made of people who are adept at doing risk-reward calculation. This is the premise I find most suspicious given their recent record of blowing wild axioms out of proportion and blowing up their own face by suckering up too much to the FTX money without realizing the risk.

2. The people in the org are in it for actually doing good instead self aggrandization, a sin they blame most charities for. I find it more suspicious that somehow the world gathered a few angels in human form in one place, and more plausible that it's the classic "oh that guy is shady, listen to me" variant of the scam. Am I cynical? Maybe. But the evidence here supports me.

Which leads me to the final point, circumstantial evidence. In a third world country where I grew up, if my region had a large flood that brought in a lot of charitable donations, and the next week the local politician showed up in a new SUV, we didn't debate all that you're arguing. If it quacks like corruption and walks like corruption, it's probably corruption and not some 357-dimensional chess by the most brilliant minds of our generation.

If you have calculations about costings, it seems absolutely nonsensical to go for 'stately country estates' owned by British royalty, 'one of the loveliest houses in England')[1]. The gardening costs alone will be astronomical, and what does that have to do with workshops?

Any university building laid out for workshops/teaching will suffice.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wytham_Abbey

Thinking about this more, I'm so baffled by this decision.

EA touts itself as the best strategy for giving as they present themselves as a rational force evaluating all approaches, then going for the 'best' one.

Buying a multimillion pound stately country estate for your HQ is clearly not the 'best' use of money. Yet, EA argues that it is the best use of money with their usual vocabulary. That means I now cannot trust any of their decisions as they clearly bend the outcomes to whatever they want them to be.

I.e., there's nothing 'effective' about the entire organisation, it's just your run-of-the-mill moneypit for rich people to feel better.

> I.e., there's nothing 'effective' about the entire organisation, it's just your run-of-the-mill moneypit for rich people to feel better.

Same scam, different copy. The good that SBF did for the world was exposing this particular underbelly. The world will move on, to the same scam with new window dressing.

Note that CEA is specifically a community-building organization,

> Our mission is to build and nurture a global community of people who are thinking carefully about the world’s biggest problems and taking impactful action to solve them. We hope that this community can help to build a radically better world.

> To foster this community, we run conferences, support hundreds of local groups, and provide online resources and forums for discussion.

You shouldn't imagine that people are donating to generic maximal impact causes and the money is ending up in surprise luxury real estate. (Or, at least, if it is then that's news to me.)

When CEA says (paraphrasing) ‘this is a reasonable way to spend the money we have on hosting a ton of conferences,’ the ‘host a ton of conferences’ part is an inherited assumption from this being CEA money (a specific grant for this purpose, in this case), not a broader claim about the value of lots of conferences vs. global health charities.

I'm not sure about that - most of the charities in the EA sphere have 'community building' as one of their cause areas, although from what I've read, it is the smallest pot of money. On givingwhatwecan.org, EA infrastructure is one of the areas you can donate to. [0]

It seems that in this particular case the purchase was funded by an individual donation though. Would be great to have some more transparency on this issue.

[0] https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/charities/effective-altruism...

> Buying a multimillion pound stately country estate for your HQ

Nit: they bought it as an events space. HQ is rented in a normal office building.

Which, in my book, makes the decision even worse.

Umm.. how?

Because it makes it a pure prestige object, which is not even used for the practical day to day business of the organization (and incurs 10s of thousands of yearly costs just for upkeep and maintenance in the bargain).

As I said: In my book. Your opinion may differ.

The day-to-day business of the project that bought the building is hosting workshops there, though?

I suspect the point is the utilization rate of this particular resource is lower, because workshops are rarely every day.

What will be really interesting is the log of who is living and staying there. I suspect that officers and friends are spending a lot of time there independent of any conferences.

This seems like a sham purchase to buy a nice home for the officers.

> The gardening costs alone will be astronomical

They don't own the land, they own the house.

Really? The listing says it includes 25 acres of land. (~ 15 soccer fields or 400 tennis courts)

OTOH, that's exactly what you'd buy if you wanted to signal to rich, snobbish prospective donors that effective altruism is here to stay; not something overly weird, cultish or otherwise low status, but rather an eminently proper destination for their philanthropic dollars - or pounds, as the case may be. As a marketing expense, it makes total sense as much as we all wish that these dynamics didn't exist.

Actually, a massive country estate is exactly what I'd expect cultish organizations to gravitate towards. I wouldn't be surprised if the Church of Scientology bought up a place like this.

Saint Hill Manor, East Grinstead, Hubbard's headquarters during most of the 1960s.

From a marketing perspective, I can assure you that effective altruism does itself absolutely no favors by blatantly betraying its supposed core principles.

Note: this is just an opinion.

Close to Oxford (aka PhD students, etc.), maintain the value instead of renting, good nature place for thinking.

I don't see the issue here if the space is utilized semi-effectively. They might need to think about how to get like 50% of the 15 million "out of the bricks" in order to utilize their capital better (assuming the house prices won't crash more than 50%).

EA was always Oxford-ish, culture is culture. No form of rationality will prevail from that (I'm looking at you HN! ;-) ). Given their cultural/emotional make up, I think this is an okay rational decision. It could've been way worse.

I don't get the fuss. It's kind of like being upset about the Kardashians or something (by that I specifically mean: it feels trivial and unimportant). It's a 15 million pounds decision that won't even make them lose 15 million pounds but a lot less. So who cares? Let's talk about CRISPR or something actually interesting. Let's live in the future.

Is it really trivial and unimportant? My understanding is that the organisation's goal is figuring out how to spend money effectively and without bias. If they're spending money in an overtly wasteful and selfish way, that feels important.

> My understanding is that the organisation's goal is figuring out how to spend money effectively and without bias.

Sure, but there will always be some bias. It's one of those things: they're wrong if they believe they can do away with all bias. Moreover, they are so wrong, I can't hold them responsible for it, even if they say they will hold themselves responsible for it. It's like a child saying "I will be responsible for building a time machine." You can't hold them responsible. But I get where you're coming from, I used to be more in your camp, but the longer I am out of academia the more I tend to look at the world in "grey terms" (I'm not implying you're still in academia or anything, that's just how my life journey is progressing at the moment).

Oxford is one of their biases that they can't seem to get rid off. It's super clear. Also, it's understandable. When I look at where I'd hire the best CS students, I'd go to students that studied VUSEC courses (a research group at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam).

I've been telling all kinds of people that only top tier CS students can complete their courses. But they haven't seen what I've seen (or they can't convince their managers). It's really a tough bias to get rid of, you understand your own uni intuitively so much more than anyone else's uni. Because does VUSEC really have the best students? Probably not. Is Oxford really the best place to be close to the best intellectual minds? Probably not.

And I get that there's a fundamental point to be made (I'm making one myself that one can't get rid of all bias). But when I read the comments I'm reading too much emotion, not enough reason and empiricism. I don't want drama on HN, I want awesomeness about science and the world, which is what I usually find :)

Sure, I agree that it's impossible even to be aware of the extent of one's own biases, let alone be rid of them. I'm not expecting perfect rationality, and I work hard to consider other perspectives.

Imagine the perspective of someone who's consdering where to donate. They're going to have a certain expectation of responsibility from organisations which claim to make rational, ethical use of their money. Unless there's further justification to this purchase, then I could well believe this falls below that expectation.

I think a lot of people are attracted to EA because they're put off by many traditional charities spending large proportions of their income on bureaucracy and marketing. This incident doesn't help to make EA look any different.

It doesn’t explain why they need to own the venue outright, rather than just rent the space when needed.

I don’t think of EA as a charity whose purpose is to run events 52 weeks a year. And even if they were, having a single space in England, beautiful though it is, doesn’t make sense for a global organization.

It would be a different story if someone donated the property and they wanted to make the best purpose for it (eg, Bellagio Center [0]). Although comically, I would expect EA to do the math and decide to sell such a donation and invest the capital in more productive charity.

I like some of the ideas, but they seem like charlatans and expect that anyone who donates directly to their orgs will regret it as more such fuckups like this are revealed over time.

[0] https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/bellagio-center/

It sounds like it was done completely haphazardly.

1. As soon as effective altruism becomes about glamour and extravagance, you attract the type of people who don’t care about the cause (clearly already true)

2. Obviously buying a castle is not the best investment the EA could be making and using that as the excuse is just weird.

Of course none of this should be surprising as the Effective Altruism is essentially a PR stunt for people who do financial crimes.

What are the workshops though? Admittedly if this was an org with a different mission it seems like something people would critique as inefficient overhead. But because its EA its assumed to be efficient?

I still prefer the EA mindset to most other mindsets on giving but dont have a lot of faith that this org has produced much value. I think a lot of wealthy people (like Bill Gates) have already been doing this type of giving for years so I'm not sure what they have really invented either.

I assume Introduction to EA Fellowships and their subsequent follow-up Fellowships will be the main ones. They do run AI Safety workshops in Cambridge so maybe they'll move those down there? There will be quite a few both directly related to EA and other topics that they're interested in.

I guess my point is what efficacy do any of those programs have - especially the AI safety workshop? It seems extremely unproven to me and frankly I'm a bit cynical about it. Even if you do think that's very important, why not just have video lectures on it for the public?

Video lectures for the public seem like they're trying to do a very different thing than a workshop? In general, the goal in a workshop is to get a group of people together to think about a problem and a collaborative way, while the goal of public lectures is to spread information.

That's fair enough. But I'm still having trouble seeing how this would pass the scrutiny of EA's philosophy on good charity other than for the fact its in house.

Like there are already hundreds of universities with the abilities to do this or hose a workshop on it. And there's also no special reason to think that the assortment of people they will bring in will do good instead of talk in circles or come to the wrong conclusion. Like - it seems similar to the same thinking a large church does by bringing in religious leaders to talk about stuff?

It's expensive in that part of the country. Say I rent a room at an Oxford college for a conference which is subsidized, I'd be looking at 70 or 80 a night. Say it's five nights, that's 350/400 just on accommodation. Have 30 people and that's 12k per week saved, against a non-depreciating asset in an area that is very unlikely to reduce in value. On top of this you can do what you want with the place and have permanent work spaces etc. Seems sensible to me, even if my first instinct was WTF.

Why would you limit yourself to running events only in one of the most expensive places on earth? Do they not intend to have attendees from elsewhere?

CEA is based in Oxford, as is 80,000 hours, the Future of Humanities Institute, and many more orgs. In Cambridge you have similar organizations. At the same time there's transport links to Heathrow. All of this in a property that will appreciate in value due to Oxfordshires zoning laws and the general history of the place. If this was 15m sunk cost I'd agree it's crazy but owning a conference space that's cheaper than you'd find in the cities, close to a lot of the core orgs, and is a nice place that won't depreciate in value (and that was privately funded directly, this isn't using an aggregate of peoples infrastructure funds).

I agree overall with many points you make, but I am not convinced about the property’s immunity to depreciation. Certainly the land can be expected to appreciate in value, but what is the annual upkeep on a historic castle? A castle can easily depreciate, depending on circumstances and maintenance.

If the property will appreciate in value and they uniquely know about that then: rent out the property to someone else and make even more to spend on malaria bed nets, and have the conference in the cinderblock building or Nissen huts elsewhere. This is the center for effective altruism not center for building nerd Versailles.

Probably the main goal is minting more EAs. If 10% of program participants are convinced to be EAs and 10% of EAs donate 10% of their income[1], every participant is worth 0.1% of the lifetime earnings of the average participant (probably a decently-paid software engineer) in expectation.

[1]: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/pledge

What's the main difference between when breast cancer awareness spends so much money on advertising to raise more money? In both cases it is true that spending on overhead raises total lifetime donations but ultimately it seems to increase the amount of productive hours spent doing administrative work that means nothing on its own.

I wouldn't argue there's a difference except that "EA" taken as a whole probably has way less overhead than Susan G. Komen (for example). If (if!) a breast cancer charity running ads drastically increases the amount of money they get in donations, that's probably a good thing up until the point that the marginal benefit to breast cancer researchers of the charity running more ads outweighs the marginal benefit to breast cancer researchers of just getting the money. If $1 in ads consistently brought in $2 of donations, it'd seem like the right thing to do to run a ton of ads, even if we agree running ads about breast cancer or AI or malaria nets or tickets to the opera for inner city youth is not intrinsically valuable.

I think I can speak for EAs when I say overhead is not the greatest metric by which to judge a charity[1]. I understand why it's an intuitive one, and overhead is probably correlated with measures of effectiveness, but if your targets are concrete enough you can just... actually measure effectiveness.

[1]: https://blog.givewell.org/2009/12/01/the-worst-way-to-pick-a...

All of this sounds, to put it bluntly, like a lot of hemming and hawing to get around the fact that your favorite charity organization just spent $15 million on a castle.

Yeah I can't really defend that. But this was probably how they convinced themselves it was "effective".

Breast cancer charities aren't effective with the money they use to further their goal compared to givewell charities. Focusing on overhead is a mistake, impact matters.

I suppose that's fair. I dont want to conflate EA the org with EA the movement or with Givewell - but still the pitch I usually here is "If you give you know your money is going directly to efficient programs where it will actually save lives". The pitch is not "If you give you know your money is going to an administrative org which will multiply your donations by advertising, workshops, and branding"

If I am trying to do the second (influence behavior of others or multiple givings through sustainable orgs) then I would probably donate to Democratic politicians, not EA.

100% of donations to the givewell fund go to the charities they support. Their operations are wholly funded by dustin moskovitz. I don't think the center for EA has ever acted like money donated there was going to anything other than org building. Some people believe org building is the most effective use for their money, but for those that don't they can go to givewell.

I'm not a huge fan of the org building stuff, and I think the center for EA especially has been wasteful due to SBF abundance, so my donations go to givewell where I know exactly what I'm "buying".

But all of that is a complete waste of time, so why bother?

Depends I guess! I took the intro course in Oxford and enjoyed it, it definitely influenced how I view charity.

To be cynical - how is this meaningfully different than someone running church programs and pointing out that people who attended the church programs state after it influenced how they view giving and charity?

Pretty much all not for profits needs to attract and specifically, retain members, the workshops could be about introducing them to the program and the associated benefits with regards to donating.

But how is that different from the other orgs they criticize?

Isnt the end state of this that they realize they can spend $100 and expect to raise $150 from that investment - and this scales to an administrative staff of hundreds of people who spend millions a year advertising? Essentially Susan Komen but for malaria nets and AI research.

I've read more compelling arguments in theological discussions

Maybe it's time to coin a new term: "altruism washing" whereas people will come up with wishy-washy reasons of why they should buy a 15MGBP castle and make it look like they're doing good with it

> Of course, not everyone will agree with their decision, but it wasn’t done haphazardly.

Needless to say, the question in context should have been whether it was done "effecitvely". Fine fine, if you want to throw a ton of conferences or whatever owning a forum to do it in might plausibly save you money.

Was throwing a ton of conferences really the best, most effective use of fifteen million pounds at furthering the betterment of mankind? I think we all know the answer to that.

They wanted to throw a ton of parties and raise a ton of money and wanted to spend that money on stuff that made them feel important.

Wouldn't it make more sense to be able to hold workshops all around the world, thereby attracting a global audience instead of just people who can/want to travel to England?

They need a $15 million estate to run workshops?

If you're going to hold a lot of events I can definitely believe it's more efficient to buy space than rent it.

I don't think it's the rent vs. buy that's attracting the attention here.

Do you know how expensive events actually are? An average wedding can easily run into tens of thousands of USD?

What he meant was that everyone can accept buying is better than renting. Most people can’t accept that this was the most efficient purchase possible.

I guess it's a nice place and people want to have events at nice places and if they held it for 200 years it would be a good investment?

Don't forget to factor in maintenance costs. If you own the place, you're on the hook for maintenance, which can be pretty high for old buildings. While the asset may appreciate in value over time, the cost of carry may negate that price appreciation.

Or you can decide not to do maintenance but then the value won't appreciate.

Lots of those costs will still be there. Catering, food, AV, Decorations, etc etc don’t just become free because you bought a palace. Also now you have to take care of a centuries old building, hire gardeners.

All that is besides the point which is that these people are clearly not motivated by the principles they espouse.

If you focus on the essentials, bypass the glitz, and are selective with sourcing, you can run a great wedding for a few thousand. The main costs are land-hire, marquee, catering, and equipment. The rest is free or low-cost. That's what we did, and people still remember it fondly nearly ten years on.

One thing your numbers probably don't consider is the cost of hosting the guests? For a wedding that is usually not considered the responsibility of the hosts, but it is still a cost associated of the event. In this case, one of the reasons why this building seems to be a good fit for the project is that most of it has been carved up into small bedrooms. (I think this happened in the early 20th century when it was used as student housing, if I remember what Owen told me correctly.)

We invited guests to camp over at the field that we hired; it was about £20 per tent which we passed half of to the guests. So that counted a few hundred towards our overall costs (included in my few thousand figure).

Obviously I wouldn't expect CEA to run a campsite, but it was a lot of fun for wedding.

If you’re going to hold a lot of events in royal manors then sure maybe buying a royal manor is cheaper. However, most events don’t need to be held in royal manors, especially if they are about altruism or shit like that.

I did my undergrad in one of the many German universities where the main building was a 'schloss', an aristocrat's huge mansion, similar to OP's manor.

It was the worst building for teaching, as ballrooms are flat so you can't see the speaker past the third row, and acoustics are awful because these rooms are just not made to carry sound from one spot to the rest of the room.

I don't think that's a problem in this case? I've been to the building (I'm friends with the person who started the project and he showed it to me in April when I was visiting) and it doesn't have a ballroom. The rooms it does have do seem like a good size and configuration for the planned use (medium sized residential workshops).

The comment claims it is about an experiment. How about running regular workshops for some years in rented space so that you can judge interest/success first?

Then you can buy a building which is appropriate with some space to grow.

Most SV companies, even the big ones (Google, FB, etc) lease most of their offices, if not all.

Google famously has spent billions of dollars on NYC real estate, including Chelsea Market and the Port Authority building.

I don't think this is all relevant, though, since the trade-offs for a large publicly traded tech company are very different than for a grant funded events project at a charity?

I would have accepted it if they bought a big space that's close to public transport, so that events can be organized often and very efficiently, with high accessibility.

To be fair, it's only a 10 minute bus journey from Oxford's train station (albeit on the ST2 line which only runs once an hour).

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Oxford+Station,+Park+End+St,...

Travel time also matters less the longer you're spending there, and I understanding of the project is that it is for multi-day events.

25 minute walk from public transport. Accessible, but not well.

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