1. We hope to post a list of outputs soon (within the next week).
2. Those on salaries from Rethink Priorities have been paying cost price (£10/day). AFAIK they have not adjusted their salaries downward because staff are staying at the hotel. RAISE has contributed to the Hotel from the limited funding they have received recently.
3. Depends what your counterfactual use of the money is in terms of what the bar of EV to clear is. Given our low costs, the EV bar could be quite low over a number of comparisons. We aim to adjust the entry bar depending on supply.
4. We have a pitch doc we’ve been circulating to potential funders. Will release it publicly soon (within the next week).
5. The rationalist group house in Manchester was most definitely not my project! I just moved into the original rental house with the organiser and a couple of others (and later bought a house and offered it as a shared space, while they continued to organise the project).
6. This doesn’t seem like something most EAs would be that concerned with, but I could be wrong. If you think having more backers for nominal amounts is good, please donate a nominal amount!
A couple of thoughts I’d add (as another trustee):
3. Demand for the hotel has been increasing more or less linearly (until we hit current funding difficulties). As long as that continues, the projects will tend to get better.
This seems like a standard trajectory for meta-charities: for eg I doubt 80k’s early career shifts looked anywhere near as high value as the average one does now. I should know—I *was* one of them, back when their ‘career consultation’ was ‘speculating in a pub about earning to give’ (and I was a far worse prospect than any 80k advisee or hotel resident today!)
Meanwhile it’s easy to scorn such projects as novel-writing, but have we forgotten this? For better or worse, if Eliezer hadn’t written that book the rationality and EA communities would look very different now.
6. This might be true as a psychological explanation, but, ceteris paribus, it’s actually a reason *to* donate, since it (by definition) makes the hotel a more neglected cause.
Thanks for the response Greg—I look forward to reading the list of outputs and that is what I would have led with In the first post months ago. There may have been reasons that you didn’t but that’s what people are “buying” at the end of the day.
Here’s the list of outputs. At the time of the first fundraising post, we’d only been at capacity for a couple of months, and not many people had stayed longer than that (with only approx. half the total person-days spent at the hotel). Back then, I was hoping the appeal of “Hits-based Giving”, and “EA community hub” would be stronger than they have been.
1. We hope to post a list of outputs soon (within the next week).
2. Those on salaries from Rethink Priorities have been paying cost price (£10/day). AFAIK they have not adjusted their salaries downward because staff are staying at the hotel. RAISE has contributed to the Hotel from the limited funding they have received recently.
3. Depends what your counterfactual use of the money is in terms of what the bar of EV to clear is. Given our low costs, the EV bar could be quite low over a number of comparisons. We aim to adjust the entry bar depending on supply.
4. We have a pitch doc we’ve been circulating to potential funders. Will release it publicly soon (within the next week).
5. The rationalist group house in Manchester was most definitely not my project! I just moved into the original rental house with the organiser and a couple of others (and later bought a house and offered it as a shared space, while they continued to organise the project).
6. This doesn’t seem like something most EAs would be that concerned with, but I could be wrong. If you think having more backers for nominal amounts is good, please donate a nominal amount!
A couple of thoughts I’d add (as another trustee):
3. Demand for the hotel has been increasing more or less linearly (until we hit current funding difficulties). As long as that continues, the projects will tend to get better.
This seems like a standard trajectory for meta-charities: for eg I doubt 80k’s early career shifts looked anywhere near as high value as the average one does now. I should know—I *was* one of them, back when their ‘career consultation’ was ‘speculating in a pub about earning to give’ (and I was a far worse prospect than any 80k advisee or hotel resident today!)
Meanwhile it’s easy to scorn such projects as novel-writing, but have we forgotten this? For better or worse, if Eliezer hadn’t written that book the rationality and EA communities would look very different now.
6. This might be true as a psychological explanation, but, ceteris paribus, it’s actually a reason *to* donate, since it (by definition) makes the hotel a more neglected cause.
Thanks for the response Greg—I look forward to reading the list of outputs and that is what I would have led with In the first post months ago. There may have been reasons that you didn’t but that’s what people are “buying” at the end of the day.
Here’s the list of outputs. At the time of the first fundraising post, we’d only been at capacity for a couple of months, and not many people had stayed longer than that (with only approx. half the total person-days spent at the hotel). Back then, I was hoping the appeal of “Hits-based Giving”, and “EA community hub” would be stronger than they have been.