When you buy a conference center you get an asset worth around the cost that you paid it. Please, can people stop saying that “we spent $15 million on a conference center”? If we wanted to sell it today, my best guess is we probably could do that for $13-14 million, so the total cost here is around $1-2 million, which is really not much compared to all the other spending in the ecosystem.
There is a huge difference between buying an asset you can utilize and spending money on services, rent, etc. If you compare them directly you will make crazily wrong decisions. The primary thing to pay attention to is depreciation, interest and counterfactual returns, all of which suggest numbers an order of magnitude lower (and indeed move it out of the space where anyone should really worry much about this).
I’m aware that the conference center can be sold. The point is that there wasn’t an accessible, legible explanation available. To accept that it was a wise purchase, you either have to do all the thinking for yourself, or defer to the person who made the decision to buy it.
That’s a paradigm EA tried to get away from in the past, and what made it popular, I think, was the emphasis on legibility. That’s partly why 80,000 hours is popular—while in theory, anyone could come to the same conclusions about careers by doing their own research, or just blindly accept recommendations to pursue a career in X, it’s very helpful to have a legible, clearly argued explanation.
The EA brand doesn’t have to be about quantification, but I think it is about legibility, and we see the consequences when we don’t achieve that: people can’t make sense of our decisions, they perceive it as insular intuitive decision making, they get mad, they exaggerate downsides and ignore mitigating factors, and they pan us. Because we made an implicit promise, that with EA, you would get good, clear reasons you can understand for why we wanted to spend your donations on X and not Y. We were going to give you access to our thought process and let you participate in it. And clearly, a lot of people don’t feel that EA is consistently following through on that.
EA may be suffering from expert syndrome. It’s actually not obvious to casual observers that buying an old plush-looking country house might be a sensible choice for hosting conferences rather than a status symbol, or that we can always sell it and get most of our money back. If we don’t overcome this and explain our spending on a way where an interested outsider can read it and say “yes, this makes sense and I trust that this summary reflects smart thinking about the details I’m not inspecting,” then I think we’ll continue to generate heated confusion in our ever-growing cohort of casual onlookers.
If we want to be a large movement, then managing this communication gap seems key.
Assuming that it costs around 6000£ to save a life, these 1-2 million come down to around 200-300 lives saved. EAs claim to have a very high standard in evaluating the money spent by charities, this shouldn’t stop at the ‘discretionary spending’ of the evaluators.
When you buy a conference center you get an asset worth around the cost that you paid it. Please, can people stop saying that “we spent $15 million on a conference center”? If we wanted to sell it today, my best guess is we probably could do that for $13-14 million, so the total cost here is around $1-2 million, which is really not much compared to all the other spending in the ecosystem.
There is a huge difference between buying an asset you can utilize and spending money on services, rent, etc. If you compare them directly you will make crazily wrong decisions. The primary thing to pay attention to is depreciation, interest and counterfactual returns, all of which suggest numbers an order of magnitude lower (and indeed move it out of the space where anyone should really worry much about this).
I’m aware that the conference center can be sold. The point is that there wasn’t an accessible, legible explanation available. To accept that it was a wise purchase, you either have to do all the thinking for yourself, or defer to the person who made the decision to buy it.
That’s a paradigm EA tried to get away from in the past, and what made it popular, I think, was the emphasis on legibility. That’s partly why 80,000 hours is popular—while in theory, anyone could come to the same conclusions about careers by doing their own research, or just blindly accept recommendations to pursue a career in X, it’s very helpful to have a legible, clearly argued explanation.
The EA brand doesn’t have to be about quantification, but I think it is about legibility, and we see the consequences when we don’t achieve that: people can’t make sense of our decisions, they perceive it as insular intuitive decision making, they get mad, they exaggerate downsides and ignore mitigating factors, and they pan us. Because we made an implicit promise, that with EA, you would get good, clear reasons you can understand for why we wanted to spend your donations on X and not Y. We were going to give you access to our thought process and let you participate in it. And clearly, a lot of people don’t feel that EA is consistently following through on that.
EA may be suffering from expert syndrome. It’s actually not obvious to casual observers that buying an old plush-looking country house might be a sensible choice for hosting conferences rather than a status symbol, or that we can always sell it and get most of our money back. If we don’t overcome this and explain our spending on a way where an interested outsider can read it and say “yes, this makes sense and I trust that this summary reflects smart thinking about the details I’m not inspecting,” then I think we’ll continue to generate heated confusion in our ever-growing cohort of casual onlookers.
If we want to be a large movement, then managing this communication gap seems key.
Assuming that it costs around 6000£ to save a life, these 1-2 million come down to around 200-300 lives saved. EAs claim to have a very high standard in evaluating the money spent by charities, this shouldn’t stop at the ‘discretionary spending’ of the evaluators.