* 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
So make sure to buy comfy plush pillows and foot massagers for the effective altruists so they can do their effective altruism more effectively!
At least not while the money was rolling in.
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.
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.
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?
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.
The time to condemn was when he was running a Ponzi scheme and handing out millions.