It seems extremely uncharitable to call this bikeshedding.
It’s just not that small an amount of money, relatively to one-off projects and grants in the EA world. It seems perfectly reasonable to expect that projects above a certain size have increased transparency, and it’s hard to imagine this wouldn’t qualify as big enough.
These things are relative to money in EA space—if a high proportion of the actual money moving around EVF space is going to projects like this, it doesn’t help to observe that billions of dollars are going from other sources to other causes. The question is what EVF does with the slice of the pie they have access to, and what that implies about what they might do with a bigger slice.
The discussion often almost completely misses the direct, object-level
It doesn’t miss it, it focuses on something other than direct object level cost benefit analysis. You can argue that the latter is all that matters, but a) that position seems less popular in the last few months, and b) you need to actually argue it. On the topic...
‘this trade seems to make sense’
Per my response to Owen in the original thread, this is totally unclear from his reply, which is still all we have to go on. All we have is an assurance that in the long run it will be a money saver, with no explanation of what the numbers were. The same argument could have been used verbatim for a £150k or £150million purchase. Indeed, I and others said as much in that thread and no-one replied with further explanation—so the situation so far is the critics want the direct object level analysis and EVF haven’t supplied it.
Repeatedly, the tone of the discussion is a bit like “I’ve read a tweet by Émile Torres, I got upset, and I’m writing on EA forum”
This seems like an unhelpful remark, written in bad faith.
And the discussion comes at a time where people have been given other reasons to question the epistemics of EVF, so to take it out of that context as an example of getting worked up over something irrelevant to the broader picture of EA seems not to recognise the actual concerns it’s playing into (despite the OP directly referring to them).
The same argument could have been used verbatim for a £150k or £150million purchase.
If they could have acquired a conference venue for £150k that would have been an amazing deal (too good to be true!) and if they paid £150m for an equivalent venue they would have been totally ripped off.
I don’t think it makes sense to compare buying real estate to grant funding. Grant money gets spent and goes away. Real estate you can still sell, and of course rent it out in the meantime when you yourself aren’t running event. The super-prime English property market may be very volatile (I don’t actually know) but even in the very worst market conditions I would expect CEA to get at least half their money back if they decided they want to sell.
Note that if they sell, the money stays in EVF, and doesn’t go back to OpenPhil. So you could look at this as OpenPhil making a £15M grant to EVF, earmarked for the purchase but with an unrestricted fallback option. Where’s the justification for the grant in that scenario?
“OpenPhil has a lot of money from one guy and he doesn’t give a shit”
Look EA has always been largely a small cabal of people passing money around in a non-transparent fashion. I don’t think this is a bad thing! Conspiracies are good and they can achieve an awful lot! But somehow it’s news to people on the EA forum???
Half their money is still 8 million pounds. Even if they sold it today at the same price they would be down 2 million pounds in stamp duty.
I would also find it bad if they allocated a 2 million grant to something I found dubious, like highly expensive vacation retreats for CEA members or something. If you take the “$5000 to save a life” figure seriously, that’s money could have saved hundreds of lives. It’s still the kind of money that requires thorough justification, at the very least.
I think it’s more complex than that, but if you want to make that assumption then that consideration can be worked into the calculations—but that still requires we have actual numbers to work with.
It seems extremely uncharitable to call this bikeshedding.
It’s just not that small an amount of money, relatively to one-off projects and grants in the EA world. It seems perfectly reasonable to expect that projects above a certain size have increased transparency, and it’s hard to imagine this wouldn’t qualify as big enough.
These things are relative to money in EA space—if a high proportion of the actual money moving around EVF space is going to projects like this, it doesn’t help to observe that billions of dollars are going from other sources to other causes. The question is what EVF does with the slice of the pie they have access to, and what that implies about what they might do with a bigger slice.
It doesn’t miss it, it focuses on something other than direct object level cost benefit analysis. You can argue that the latter is all that matters, but a) that position seems less popular in the last few months, and b) you need to actually argue it. On the topic...
Per my response to Owen in the original thread, this is totally unclear from his reply, which is still all we have to go on. All we have is an assurance that in the long run it will be a money saver, with no explanation of what the numbers were. The same argument could have been used verbatim for a £150k or £150million purchase. Indeed, I and others said as much in that thread and no-one replied with further explanation—so the situation so far is the critics want the direct object level analysis and EVF haven’t supplied it.
This seems like an unhelpful remark, written in bad faith.
And the discussion comes at a time where people have been given other reasons to question the epistemics of EVF, so to take it out of that context as an example of getting worked up over something irrelevant to the broader picture of EA seems not to recognise the actual concerns it’s playing into (despite the OP directly referring to them).
If they could have acquired a conference venue for £150k that would have been an amazing deal (too good to be true!) and if they paid £150m for an equivalent venue they would have been totally ripped off.
I don’t think it makes sense to compare buying real estate to grant funding. Grant money gets spent and goes away. Real estate you can still sell, and of course rent it out in the meantime when you yourself aren’t running event. The super-prime English property market may be very volatile (I don’t actually know) but even in the very worst market conditions I would expect CEA to get at least half their money back if they decided they want to sell.
Note that if they sell, the money stays in EVF, and doesn’t go back to OpenPhil. So you could look at this as OpenPhil making a £15M grant to EVF, earmarked for the purchase but with an unrestricted fallback option. Where’s the justification for the grant in that scenario?
“OpenPhil has a lot of money from one guy and he doesn’t give a shit”
Look EA has always been largely a small cabal of people passing money around in a non-transparent fashion. I don’t think this is a bad thing! Conspiracies are good and they can achieve an awful lot! But somehow it’s news to people on the EA forum???
Half their money is still 8 million pounds. Even if they sold it today at the same price they would be down 2 million pounds in stamp duty.
I would also find it bad if they allocated a 2 million grant to something I found dubious, like highly expensive vacation retreats for CEA members or something. If you take the “$5000 to save a life” figure seriously, that’s money could have saved hundreds of lives. It’s still the kind of money that requires thorough justification, at the very least.
I think it’s more complex than that, but if you want to make that assumption then that consideration can be worked into the calculations—but that still requires we have actual numbers to work with.