Just to play devil’s advocate for a moment, aren’t personal interviews and hits-based giving essentially the process used by other EA funders? I believe it was OpenPhil who coined the term hits-based giving. It sounds like maybe your issue is with the way funding works in EA broadly speaking, not this project in particular.
The same seems to apply to vollmer’s point about adverse selection effects. Over time, the project pool will increasingly be made up of projects everyone has rejected. So this could almost be considered a fully general counterargument against funding any project. (Note that this thinking directly opposes replaceability: replaceability encourages you to fund projects no other funder is willing to fund; this line of reasoning says just the opposite.) Anyway, I think the EA Hotel could easily be less vulnerable to adverse selection effects, if it appeals to a different crowd. I’m the first long-term resident of the hotel, and I’ve never applied for funding from any other source. (I’m self-studying machine learning at the hotel, which I don’t think I would ever get a grant for.)
Sounds like you really want a broader rule like “no irreversible projects without community consensus” or something. In general, mitigating downside risk seems like an issue that’s fairly orthogonal to establishing low cost of living EA hubs.
Just to play devil’s advocate for a moment, aren’t personal interviews and hits-based giving essentially the process used by other EA funders? I believe it was OpenPhil who coined the term hits-based giving. It sounds like maybe your issue is with the way funding works in EA broadly speaking, not this project in particular.
The same seems to apply to vollmer’s point about adverse selection effects. Over time, the project pool will increasingly be made up of projects everyone has rejected. So this could almost be considered a fully general counterargument against funding any project. (Note that this thinking directly opposes replaceability: replaceability encourages you to fund projects no other funder is willing to fund; this line of reasoning says just the opposite.) Anyway, I think the EA Hotel could easily be less vulnerable to adverse selection effects, if it appeals to a different crowd. I’m the first long-term resident of the hotel, and I’ve never applied for funding from any other source. (I’m self-studying machine learning at the hotel, which I don’t think I would ever get a grant for.)
Sounds like you really want a broader rule like “no irreversible projects without community consensus” or something. In general, mitigating downside risk seems like an issue that’s fairly orthogonal to establishing low cost of living EA hubs.