A point I’d personally want to add to Habryka’s list: I’m currently unsure whether there is sufficiently good vetting of guests. Since the EA Hotel provides valuable services (almost) for free, it kind of acts as a de facto grantmaker, and runs the risk of funding people who are accidentally doing harm. There are reasons to think that harmful projects will be overrepresented in the application pool (Habryka also made some similar points). As I understand it, the EA Hotel is currently improving their vetting, which I think will be a step in the right direction, and could potentially resolve this issue.
I am hesitant about this. I think to serve as a functional social safety net that allows people to take high-risk actions (including in the social domain, in the form of criticisms of high-status people or institutions), I think a high barrier to entry for the EA-Hotel might drastically reduce the psychological safety it could provide to many people.
I think if we had a vetting process that people could trust would reliably cause you to identify good people, even if they made a bunch of recent critical statements of high-status institutions or something in that reference class (or had their most recent project fail dramatically, etc.), then I think that might be fine.
But I think having such a vetting process and having that vetting process have a very low false negative rate and having it be transparent that that vetting process is that good are difficult enough to make it too costly.
There already is a basic vetting process; I’d mostly welcome fairly gradual improvements to lower downside risk. (I think my initial comment sounded more like the bar should be fairly high, similar to that of, e.g., the LTFF. This is not what I intended to say; I think it should still be considerably lower.)
I think even just explicitly saying something like “we welcome criticism of high-status people or institutions” would go a long way for both shaping people’s perception of the vetting process and shaping the vetters’ approach.
That said, your arguments did update me in the direction “small changes to the vetting process seem better than large changes.”
A point I’d personally want to add to Habryka’s list: I’m currently unsure whether there is sufficiently good vetting of guests. Since the EA Hotel provides valuable services (almost) for free, it kind of acts as a de facto grantmaker, and runs the risk of funding people who are accidentally doing harm. There are reasons to think that harmful projects will be overrepresented in the application pool (Habryka also made some similar points). As I understand it, the EA Hotel is currently improving their vetting, which I think will be a step in the right direction, and could potentially resolve this issue.
I am hesitant about this. I think to serve as a functional social safety net that allows people to take high-risk actions (including in the social domain, in the form of criticisms of high-status people or institutions), I think a high barrier to entry for the EA-Hotel might drastically reduce the psychological safety it could provide to many people.
Interesting! I agree with the points you make, but I was hoping that good vetting wouldn’t suffer from these problems.
I think if we had a vetting process that people could trust would reliably cause you to identify good people, even if they made a bunch of recent critical statements of high-status institutions or something in that reference class (or had their most recent project fail dramatically, etc.), then I think that might be fine.
But I think having such a vetting process and having that vetting process have a very low false negative rate and having it be transparent that that vetting process is that good are difficult enough to make it too costly.
There already is a basic vetting process; I’d mostly welcome fairly gradual improvements to lower downside risk. (I think my initial comment sounded more like the bar should be fairly high, similar to that of, e.g., the LTFF. This is not what I intended to say; I think it should still be considerably lower.)
I think even just explicitly saying something like “we welcome criticism of high-status people or institutions” would go a long way for both shaping people’s perception of the vetting process and shaping the vetters’ approach.
That said, your arguments did update me in the direction “small changes to the vetting process seem better than large changes.”