I think your criticism of bikeshedding somewhat misses the point people are raising. Of course the amount of money spent on WA is tiny compared to other things. The reason it’s worth talking about it is that it tells you something about EA culture and how EA operates.
This is in large parts a discussion about what culture the movement should have, what EA wants to be and how it wants to communicate to the world. The reason you care about how someone builds a bike shed is because that carries information about what kind of person they are, how trustworthy they are and how they might approach building a reactor.
The discussion is 1-2 steps away from the actual decision precisely because a) we don’t have the information necessary to have a discussion on the actual decision (i.e. the numbers) and b) things like decision processes are important.
There is a PR element to my original post—I think CEA/EVF could have communicated smarter and it’s important to point that out. But what is at heart of all this is not at all about PR, spin and appearance. Not about appearing virtuous, but about being virtuous. It’s about processes, what culture EA should foster and the value of transparency.
Agreed. Effective Altruism embodies a set of values. I agree with these values. I was incredibly worried that CEA/EVF was making a big decision (15 million remains a large amount! It’s millions of bednets!) that didn’t embody these values. This is why I made the “Why did CEA purchase Wytham Abbey?” post. We shouldn’t put too much weight on PR, spin and appearance. But we should care a lot about not losing track of what EA is all about. How EVF went about purchasing Wytham Abbey might translate to how they spend money in other areas as well, including high-stakes things like what R&D efforts to support around AI. So I don’t think it’s crazy that it’s a discussion point. Because let’s say we did end up concluding Wytham Abbey was an awful purchase (I don’t think it is, no strong opinion), what would it say about the rest of EVF’s/OpenPhil’s spending decisions?
I will try to paraphrase, please correct me if I’m wrong about this: the argument is, this particular bikeshed is important because it provides important evidence about how EA works, how trustworthy the people are, or what are the levels of transparency. I think this is a fair argument.
At the same time I don’t think it works in this case, because while I think EA has important issues, this purchase does not really illuminate them.
Specifically, object level facts about this bikeshed
do not provide that that much evidence, beyond basic facts like “people involved in this have access to money”
the things they tell you are mostly boring
they provide some weak positive evidence about the people involved being sane and reasonable
it is unclear how much evidence provided by this generalizes to nuclear reactors
Object level, you don’t need precise numbers and long spreadsheets to roughly evaluate it. As I gestured to, in late 2021, the “x-risk-reduction” area had billions of dollars committed to it, less than a thousand people working on it, and good experience with progress made on in person events. Given the ~ low millions pound effective cost of the purchase and the marginal costs of time and money, it seems like a sensible decision. In my view this conclusion does not strongly depend on priors about EA, but you can reach it by doing a quick calculation and a few google searches.
Things about the process seem mostly boring. How it went seems: 1. some people thought an events venue near Oxford is a sensible, even if uncertain, bet 2. they searched for venues 3. selected a candidate 4. got funding 5. EVF decided to fiscally sponsor this 6. the venue was bought 7. this was not announced with a fanfare 8. boring things like reconstructing some things started?
(Disclosure about step 2: I had seen the list of candidate venues, and actually visited one other place on the list. The process was in my view competent and sensible, for example in the aspect it involved talking with potential users of the venue)
What this tells us about the people involved seems …not much, but mostly weakly positive?
1. it seems the decision process involved some willingness to explore and do uncertain things; this is better than EA strawman of comparing every option to bednets 2. it seems based on understanding of real-world events organization 3. the decision to not announce it with fanfare seems sensible 4. my impression is the counterfactual PR impacts, if this was announced with a fanfare, pre-FTX, would have been worse
In contrast, some of the things critiques of the decision ask for seem pretty unreasonable to me. For example 1. discussing property purchases before they are made 2. creating a splash of publicity immediately after it was purchased 3. getting EA forum users somehow involved in the process 4. semi-formal numerical estimates of impact
I do think that what it does illuminate is a tension between
global poverty reduction EA memes, which includes stuff like comparing purchases to lives saved, and moral duty to do something about it
x-risk-reduction EA memes, which includes stuff like willingness to spend a lot of money to influence something important
rationality memes, which emphasize than spending $1000 to save 1h of time in the morning , and spending 1h to save $30 in the afternoon, is perhaps not an optimal decision pattern
And I do think it is something between really PR tricky and PR nightmare to have all of this under one brand. If this is the main point, than yes, Wytham is a piece of evidence, but this seemed clear much sooner.
With nuclear reactors, I don’t see a strong case how this evidence generalizes, in either direction.
(Disclosure about step 2: I had seen the list of candidate venues, and actually visited one other place on the list. The process was in my view competent and sensible, for example in the aspect it involved talking with potential users of the venue)
Was there no less luxurious option available?
In previous discussion, Geoffrey Miller mentioned the benefits of a luxurious venue. In my opinion, the benefits of a non-luxurious venue equal or outweigh those of a luxurious venue—for example, as a method to deter grifters. The fact that a luxurious venue was chosen leaves me concerned that the people involved were falling prey to standard self-serving biases.
Another point: People mentioned that the venue could be resold. But I suspect that the market for less luxurious properties is more liquid, and a luxurious venue has a greater risk of finding no buyer at the original purchase price. Additionally, a more expensive venue means the organization’s assets are less diversified.
If someone finds it much easier and more natural to think of reasons in favor of buying their organization a luxurious venue, as opposed to reasons against, I would guess that is probably a result of self-serving bias. So a quick check for self-serving bias would be to recall whether the considerations I mentioned came up during the purchase decision process.
How much extra effort do you think those responsible should have gone to to find a non-luxurious venue, if the luxurious-looking one seemed better along most practical axes (e.g. size, location)?
Let’s see… Wikipedia says Wytham Abbey is 5 km away from Oxford. I feel fairly comfortable claiming that if a 50% cheaper and 50% less luxurious venue of identical or greater size was available within 30 km from Oxford, it should’ve been chosen.
Additional 25km seems very inconvenient if Oxford proximity is important and depending on public transport. Your financial tradeoff still might make sense, I dunno . At 25km though they might as well optimize along other axes like different counties or countries. That’s 12 miles… 10-20 minute drive depending? They could hire a full-time driver (with some temp drivers for events?) to create a world-class drive? I’m getting a bit more convinced. But if anything I would argue for getting a place that’s even more amenitied but way cheaper real estate plus amazing transport. Proximity is just a really important variable for these decisionmakers, though.
I think people are underestimating how much the decision was made out of lazy convenience. Most of the bougie vibes are already there just because they’re at Oxford to begin with vs some other place. With that in mind, one might ask, “why don’t we move the EA hubs from Berkeley and Oxford to a village in India”, which while sounding absurd to some I would be happy to consider the move, it being a question exemplifying a more extreme version of anti-bougieness (anti-aristocracism?) logic. If people aren’t willing to move from first-world countries, that’s also relatively kinda privileged and lazy (in a way that is obviously understandable and doesn’t translate exactly to the venue tradeoff situation, to be clear).
That’s 12 miles… 10-20 minute drive depending? They could hire a full-time driver (with some temp drivers for events?) to create a world-class drive?
Yep, could arrange carpooling for 1-on-1s
With that in mind, one might ask, “why don’t we move the EA hubs from Berkeley and Oxford to a village in India”, which while sounding absurd to some I would be happy to consider the move
BTW, I think the EA decisionmakers involved with Wytham Abbey are basically OK people, who most likely just made a very human mistake here.
Because I have faith in the decisionmakers involved, I’m going to suggest an exercise: leave a line of retreat, take out a piece of paper, and write out a plan for what they can do next, in a hypothetical world where they knew for a fact that this choice of venue was a result of their own self-serving bias.
I think if they go through with this exercise, they will realize that their options in this hypothetical are actually quite good—e.g. offering a public apology and selling the venue would probably result in a very good outcome for multiple reasons. And once they’ve internalized that, it will be easier to think clearly about whether the hypothetical is, in fact, true.
In previous discussion, Geoffrey Miller mentioned the benefits of a luxurious venue. In my opinion, the benefits of a non-luxurious venue equal or outweigh those of a luxurious venue—for example, as a method to deter grifters.
It’s notoriously hard to place a value on aesthetics, which is one problem here: it’s a disagreement over what that value should be. You seem to be placing that value near-zero?
A much smaller example and anecdote springs to my mind, from college. For logistical reasons, two adjacent dorms were administratively treated as one staff, but the buildings weren’t very similar. One had been built in the late 1800s, beautiful brick building, nice hallways, etc etc. The other was built as an Army training barracks in the… 1930s, as I recall. It was supposed to be temporary but then sold to the university, renovated a couple times, and somehow (barely) still stood 80 years later. Want to take a guess which one students spent more time in, which one had the nice lounges always full, and which one students avoided as much as they could?
I’ve sort of come around on Wytham after my initial, reflexive revulsion. I’m still baffled that (supposedly) smart people can make what is to me such an obvious disaster in communication,but I do think aesthetics are an underrated (and perhaps deliberately ignored) aspect of a healthy movement that EA might finally be coming around on a bit. A non-luxurious venue could, in theory, be cheaper and maybe because it’s plain as dry toast everyone focuses on work instead- or perhaps no one wants to go there because it’s the aesthetic equivalent of an overgrown cubicle.
A much smaller example and anecdote springs to my mind, from college. For logistical reasons, two adjacent dorms were administratively treated as one staff, but the buildings weren’t very similar. One had been built in the late 1800s, beautiful brick building, nice hallways, etc etc. The other was built as an Army training barracks in the… 1930s, as I recall. It was supposed to be temporary but then sold to the university, renovated a couple times, and somehow (barely) still stood 80 years later. Want to take a guess which one students spent more time in, which one had the nice lounges always full, and which one students avoided as much as they could?
There’s actually a famous story about a building at MIT, “Building 20”, a building similar to your training barracks which was known for generating breakthroughs in part due to its freewheeling nature.
It’s not that I think aesthetics have zero value. It’s that I think the low-budget aesthetic is superior.
It’s that I think the low-budget aesthetic is superior.
Despite, or because? Culture has an immense effect, and MIT is pulling from a very different crowd than the state school I’m referring to. Sometimes, as with Building 20, the ramshackle nature of the building gives room for experiments not allowed elsewhere; other times, like the crumbling edifice next door to my dorm, it’s just depressing, because MIT geniuses didn’t go there. The kind of EA activities presumably planned for Wytham aren’t going to be drilling through walls to run wire for some quirky experiment.
And they replaced Building 20 with a Gehry eyesore. Sad!
MIT has had lots of buildings, but Building 20 is probably the most famous. Building 20 suggests that if you hold the “MIT crowd” factor constant, the low-budget aesthetic wins.
The kind of EA activities presumably planned for Wytham aren’t going to be drilling through walls to run wire for some quirky experiment.
I suspect that a place like Wytham will have the opposite effect of Building 20, making attendees feel stuffy and self-important, and that is harmful.
I believe that the role of Building 20 as a incubator is really the right word, because people got together and shared ideas and words without really worrying about who you were or where you came from. And I think that’s the secret.
My basis for the fame claim was (a) as someone outside MIT, it was the MIT building I was most familiar with and (b) a Google search for famous buildings at MIT had Building 20 coming up more as a dedicated search result than any other building.
It could be that Building 20 was not famous before the nostalgia burst. But I think the nostalgia burst shows that Building 20′s fame is causally downstream of it being an innovation hothouse. How many other decommissioned university buildings receive a nostalgia burst of similar magnitude & character?
My headcanon was that part of the purpose of Wytham was to appeal to Important People people who already feel stuffy and important, who wouldn’t go to a cubicle venue.
Well, as an attempt to appeal to Important People, Wytham seems like a clear failure, given the public relations fallout.
Also, I think credibility with Important People is enhanced if you can say “We are renting a fancy venue for this particular event, but in general we work in low-budget accommodations because we want to do as much good as we can with our money”.
I think your criticism of bikeshedding somewhat misses the point people are raising. Of course the amount of money spent on WA is tiny compared to other things. The reason it’s worth talking about it is that it tells you something about EA culture and how EA operates.
This is in large parts a discussion about what culture the movement should have, what EA wants to be and how it wants to communicate to the world. The reason you care about how someone builds a bike shed is because that carries information about what kind of person they are, how trustworthy they are and how they might approach building a reactor.
The discussion is 1-2 steps away from the actual decision precisely because
a) we don’t have the information necessary to have a discussion on the actual decision (i.e. the numbers) and
b) things like decision processes are important.
There is a PR element to my original post—I think CEA/EVF could have communicated smarter and it’s important to point that out. But what is at heart of all this is not at all about PR, spin and appearance. Not about appearing virtuous, but about being virtuous. It’s about processes, what culture EA should foster and the value of transparency.
Agreed. Effective Altruism embodies a set of values. I agree with these values. I was incredibly worried that CEA/EVF was making a big decision (15 million remains a large amount! It’s millions of bednets!) that didn’t embody these values. This is why I made the “Why did CEA purchase Wytham Abbey?” post. We shouldn’t put too much weight on PR, spin and appearance. But we should care a lot about not losing track of what EA is all about. How EVF went about purchasing Wytham Abbey might translate to how they spend money in other areas as well, including high-stakes things like what R&D efforts to support around AI. So I don’t think it’s crazy that it’s a discussion point. Because let’s say we did end up concluding Wytham Abbey was an awful purchase (I don’t think it is, no strong opinion), what would it say about the rest of EVF’s/OpenPhil’s spending decisions?
I will try to paraphrase, please correct me if I’m wrong about this: the argument is, this particular bikeshed is important because it provides important evidence about how EA works, how trustworthy the people are, or what are the levels of transparency. I think this is a fair argument.
At the same time I don’t think it works in this case, because while I think EA has important issues, this purchase does not really illuminate them.
Specifically, object level facts about this bikeshed
do not provide that that much evidence, beyond basic facts like “people involved in this have access to money”
the things they tell you are mostly boring
they provide some weak positive evidence about the people involved being sane and reasonable
it is unclear how much evidence provided by this generalizes to nuclear reactors
Object level, you don’t need precise numbers and long spreadsheets to roughly evaluate it. As I gestured to, in late 2021, the “x-risk-reduction” area had billions of dollars committed to it, less than a thousand people working on it, and good experience with progress made on in person events. Given the ~ low millions pound effective cost of the purchase and the marginal costs of time and money, it seems like a sensible decision. In my view this conclusion does not strongly depend on priors about EA, but you can reach it by doing a quick calculation and a few google searches.
Things about the process seem mostly boring. How it went seems:
1. some people thought an events venue near Oxford is a sensible, even if uncertain, bet
2. they searched for venues
3. selected a candidate
4. got funding
5. EVF decided to fiscally sponsor this
6. the venue was bought
7. this was not announced with a fanfare
8. boring things like reconstructing some things started?
(Disclosure about step 2: I had seen the list of candidate venues, and actually visited one other place on the list. The process was in my view competent and sensible, for example in the aspect it involved talking with potential users of the venue)
What this tells us about the people involved seems …not much, but mostly weakly positive?
1. it seems the decision process involved some willingness to explore and do uncertain things; this is better than EA strawman of comparing every option to bednets
2. it seems based on understanding of real-world events organization
3. the decision to not announce it with fanfare seems sensible
4. my impression is the counterfactual PR impacts, if this was announced with a fanfare, pre-FTX, would have been worse
In contrast, some of the things critiques of the decision ask for seem pretty unreasonable to me. For example
1. discussing property purchases before they are made
2. creating a splash of publicity immediately after it was purchased
3. getting EA forum users somehow involved in the process
4. semi-formal numerical estimates of impact
I do think that what it does illuminate is a tension between
global poverty reduction EA memes, which includes stuff like comparing purchases to lives saved, and moral duty to do something about it
x-risk-reduction EA memes, which includes stuff like willingness to spend a lot of money to influence something important
rationality memes, which emphasize than spending $1000 to save 1h of time in the morning , and spending 1h to save $30 in the afternoon, is perhaps not an optimal decision pattern
And I do think it is something between really PR tricky and PR nightmare to have all of this under one brand. If this is the main point, than yes, Wytham is a piece of evidence, but this seemed clear much sooner.
With nuclear reactors, I don’t see a strong case how this evidence generalizes, in either direction.
Was there no less luxurious option available?
In previous discussion, Geoffrey Miller mentioned the benefits of a luxurious venue. In my opinion, the benefits of a non-luxurious venue equal or outweigh those of a luxurious venue—for example, as a method to deter grifters. The fact that a luxurious venue was chosen leaves me concerned that the people involved were falling prey to standard self-serving biases.
Another point: People mentioned that the venue could be resold. But I suspect that the market for less luxurious properties is more liquid, and a luxurious venue has a greater risk of finding no buyer at the original purchase price. Additionally, a more expensive venue means the organization’s assets are less diversified.
If someone finds it much easier and more natural to think of reasons in favor of buying their organization a luxurious venue, as opposed to reasons against, I would guess that is probably a result of self-serving bias. So a quick check for self-serving bias would be to recall whether the considerations I mentioned came up during the purchase decision process.
How much extra effort do you think those responsible should have gone to to find a non-luxurious venue, if the luxurious-looking one seemed better along most practical axes (e.g. size, location)?
Let’s see… Wikipedia says Wytham Abbey is 5 km away from Oxford. I feel fairly comfortable claiming that if a 50% cheaper and 50% less luxurious venue of identical or greater size was available within 30 km from Oxford, it should’ve been chosen.
Additional 25km seems very inconvenient if Oxford proximity is important and depending on public transport. Your financial tradeoff still might make sense, I dunno . At 25km though they might as well optimize along other axes like different counties or countries. That’s 12 miles… 10-20 minute drive depending? They could hire a full-time driver (with some temp drivers for events?) to create a world-class drive? I’m getting a bit more convinced. But if anything I would argue for getting a place that’s even more amenitied but way cheaper real estate plus amazing transport. Proximity is just a really important variable for these decisionmakers, though.
I think people are underestimating how much the decision was made out of lazy convenience. Most of the bougie vibes are already there just because they’re at Oxford to begin with vs some other place. With that in mind, one might ask, “why don’t we move the EA hubs from Berkeley and Oxford to a village in India”, which while sounding absurd to some I would be happy to consider the move, it being a question exemplifying a more extreme version of anti-bougieness (anti-aristocracism?) logic. If people aren’t willing to move from first-world countries, that’s also relatively kinda privileged and lazy (in a way that is obviously understandable and doesn’t translate exactly to the venue tradeoff situation, to be clear).
Yep, could arrange carpooling for 1-on-1s
Yep, blog post: https://80000hours.org/2014/09/should-you-move-to-thailand/
Moving to India or Thailand introduces a lot of additional considerations beyond just downgrading from one of the loveliest houses in England, though.
BTW, I think the EA decisionmakers involved with Wytham Abbey are basically OK people, who most likely just made a very human mistake here.
Because I have faith in the decisionmakers involved, I’m going to suggest an exercise: leave a line of retreat, take out a piece of paper, and write out a plan for what they can do next, in a hypothetical world where they knew for a fact that this choice of venue was a result of their own self-serving bias.
I think if they go through with this exercise, they will realize that their options in this hypothetical are actually quite good—e.g. offering a public apology and selling the venue would probably result in a very good outcome for multiple reasons. And once they’ve internalized that, it will be easier to think clearly about whether the hypothetical is, in fact, true.
It’s notoriously hard to place a value on aesthetics, which is one problem here: it’s a disagreement over what that value should be. You seem to be placing that value near-zero?
A much smaller example and anecdote springs to my mind, from college. For logistical reasons, two adjacent dorms were administratively treated as one staff, but the buildings weren’t very similar. One had been built in the late 1800s, beautiful brick building, nice hallways, etc etc. The other was built as an Army training barracks in the… 1930s, as I recall. It was supposed to be temporary but then sold to the university, renovated a couple times, and somehow (barely) still stood 80 years later. Want to take a guess which one students spent more time in, which one had the nice lounges always full, and which one students avoided as much as they could?
I’ve sort of come around on Wytham after my initial, reflexive revulsion. I’m still baffled that (supposedly) smart people can make what is to me such an obvious disaster in communication,but I do think aesthetics are an underrated (and perhaps deliberately ignored) aspect of a healthy movement that EA might finally be coming around on a bit. A non-luxurious venue could, in theory, be cheaper and maybe because it’s plain as dry toast everyone focuses on work instead- or perhaps no one wants to go there because it’s the aesthetic equivalent of an overgrown cubicle.
There’s actually a famous story about a building at MIT, “Building 20”, a building similar to your training barracks which was known for generating breakthroughs in part due to its freewheeling nature.
It’s not that I think aesthetics have zero value. It’s that I think the low-budget aesthetic is superior.
Despite, or because? Culture has an immense effect, and MIT is pulling from a very different crowd than the state school I’m referring to. Sometimes, as with Building 20, the ramshackle nature of the building gives room for experiments not allowed elsewhere; other times, like the crumbling edifice next door to my dorm, it’s just depressing, because MIT geniuses didn’t go there. The kind of EA activities presumably planned for Wytham aren’t going to be drilling through walls to run wire for some quirky experiment.
And they replaced Building 20 with a Gehry eyesore. Sad!
MIT has had lots of buildings, but Building 20 is probably the most famous. Building 20 suggests that if you hold the “MIT crowd” factor constant, the low-budget aesthetic wins.
I suspect that a place like Wytham will have the opposite effect of Building 20, making attendees feel stuffy and self-important, and that is harmful.
https://infinite.mit.edu/video/mits-building-20-magical-incubator
Was it the most famous before the nostalgia burst around its decommissioning?
I’m also not convinced it’s the most famous today. Above it I’d put at least:
The dome / Infinite Corridor
Green Building
Stata (mostly for being ugly)
My basis for the fame claim was (a) as someone outside MIT, it was the MIT building I was most familiar with and (b) a Google search for famous buildings at MIT had Building 20 coming up more as a dedicated search result than any other building.
It could be that Building 20 was not famous before the nostalgia burst. But I think the nostalgia burst shows that Building 20′s fame is causally downstream of it being an innovation hothouse. How many other decommissioned university buildings receive a nostalgia burst of similar magnitude & character?
My headcanon was that part of the purpose of Wytham was to appeal to Important People people who already feel stuffy and important, who wouldn’t go to a cubicle venue.
Well, as an attempt to appeal to Important People, Wytham seems like a clear failure, given the public relations fallout.
Also, I think credibility with Important People is enhanced if you can say “We are renting a fancy venue for this particular event, but in general we work in low-budget accommodations because we want to do as much good as we can with our money”.