Removing Claire from the EVF Board because she approved the Wytham Abbey purchase seems tremendously silly to me. FTX is a serious scandal that impacted millions of people; EA projects buying conference venues or offices isn’t.
Edward Kmett’s take on that topic seems correct to me:
I look at the building, a building I give myself even odds never to step into, as actually a plausibly solid investment from the standpoint of the cost of running events. I say that as someone who is not paid to care on this front.
[… A]s someone who has had to organize many conferences in the past, and who watched the utilization of the CFAR space in Bodega Bay, and what Lightcone has been up to, this doesn’t seem anywhere near as beyond the pale to me as it seems to to some.
What do I mean by that? Well. Lightcone gets something like 75% utilization out of the Hubinger house as an event space today. It also spends a comparable amount of money on an annual basis on the office space they offer in Berkeley where we first met to the cost of a prime rate loan for this property, which happens to match up with the cost of a loan for the Rose Garden Inn, almost to a tee. Looking at the Rose Garden Inn, it is a hot mess in downtown Berkeley, run down, and will need $3.5m worth of repairs or so. When they finish they expect to get about twice the space for about the same operating capital as the WeWork space they have today, and they’d be able to shed the apartments they offer for folks visiting the area, etc. because it’d actually be zoned for people to lay their head down and sleep, so it’s just better than their office space, and it’s suitable as an event location.
The Abbey is about the same price point as Rose Garden, somewhat fewer rooms, comparable distance to the center of Oxford where there are a bunch of EA orgs running around, somewhat less rundown, they are outsourcing the repair rather than running it in house, but apples to apples it’s pretty damn close. The optics are terrible, but try to find a building in or around Oxford that isn’t 300+ years old and historical in some way.
Folks say you could buy some big box concrete office, but if you did that you still wouldn’t be able to sleep your attendees. So you’d be subsidizing the hotel industry. Rent out conference halls at hotels? Sure, but now your 40 person event costs $80k. Run 15 of them and you are damn near break even for the year for the “castle”. Relocate the event out into the boonies so you can run a 40 person event for $40k? Now you need to get them there, and it costs $80k again.
When you rent a hotel’s conference rooms you typically burn $80-$160/hour in a location like oxford or a populous center like SF or Berkeley. 3 of them is typical for breakouts. That eats up budget fast. But so much of the community building stuff happens in all those little conversations at night, over tea, while walking. It’s not virtual events that get people to change their mind. It’s those in person sessions where you get to hold someone’s attention for 4-5 days at a time, to break them out of their ruts and give them a chance to imagine what could be, and to baste in a sense of community. So yeah, virtual events are way cheaper, but you only convince those who are already convinced, you tend to get surface thoughts, even though you may get them out of more people. I think they are useful, but as an AND not an OR.
The hotel is going to kick you out of your event space at 5pm, so you aren’t getting your evenings and midnight chats. The virtual venue is going to be f’ing terrible to socialize, you get no feedback when someone turns off their mic and camera and checks out. You lose them and you don’t know why.
There’s something to be said for a venue you can customize to the needs of your organization, adding more breakout spaces, comfy backjacks for circling, or whatever else fits the vibe of the community you are trying to build, and not having to spend days setting it back up and tearing it back down between events.
Is it necessary to relitigate Wytham Abbey in this thread? The OP suggests that Claire’s position is unusual because:
While it is common for funders to serve on boards, it is not necessarily best practice.
Not because Wytham Abbey was a poor purchase. I understand that the community is very split on this, and the take you’ve shared is a good representation of the ‘pro’ side, but it seems to me that you’ve used this to re-open the WA discussion here rather than discuss whether EVF should consider changing the composition/structure of its boards, and what the merits of that would be, which I think is the charitable object-level discussion that the OP wants to have here imo.
I interpreted “some of which have come under fire” as a polite way of saying they thought the purchase was clearly wrong and reflected poorly on Zabel’s judgement. If they weren’t trying to bring the wisdom of the decision into their argument I think they would have just left it at her being an example of a funder having a board seat?
I do agree, though, that relitigating it here isn’t helpful.
The OP suggests that Claire’s position is unusual because:
“While it is common for funders to serve on boards, it is not necessarily best practice.”
Not because Wytham Abbey was a poor purchase.
The OP says: “Claire Zabel oversees significant grant-making to EVF organizations through her role at Open Phil, some of which have come under fire. While it is common for funders to serve on boards, it is not necessarily best practice.”
I interpret this as saying Claire should be removed because ‘funders serving on boards is not necessarily best practice’, and also because the Wytham Abbey purchase was controversial and/or bad.
I think it’s bad to cite the Abbey as a reason for a decision like this, while maintaining ambiguity about whether you think the purchase was a bad idea vs. merely controversial. I also think it would be unhealthy for EA to go down the road of making decisions heavily based on what seems controversial, without saying anything about whether you think the idea was also bad.
Social environments with a lot of “obviously X is suspect, everyone knows that, no need for me to say why I think that” talk tend to fall into a lot of deference cascades and miasma-based bad reputations. (Things that are perceived as bad largely because other people keep reporting that they think others perceive the thing as bad.)
it seems to me that you’ve used this to re-open the WA discussion here rather than discuss whether EVF should consider changing the composition/structure of its boards, and what the merits of that would be
If Wytham Abbey is going to be cited as one of the reasons to remove people from boards (as indeed it has been here), then it needs to be OK for people to say why they agree or disagree with that call.
(Which is also part of why it’s helpful to say specifically what you think we should take away from the abbey case for this decision, rather than just fuzzily saying the decision has “come under fire”. Many good ideas inspire disagreement! If you think this was a bad idea, then just say so, and ideally gesture at why you think so.)
For context: I was already planning to share Edward’s comment somewhere, since I liked the analysis (similar to one he previously posted during the abbey discussion), and it wasn’t available on the public internet. (And he’d given me permission to cross-post it.)
But I’ve been busy and hadn’t gotten around to posting Edward’s thing anywhere, hence me posting it here. If it already existed somewhere linkable, then I’d have just posted a link here instead.
Yeah I can see why it does come across in the way that you interpreted, and I think my original comment was a bit more combative than I intended as well, so please accept my apologies for that. Nevertheless, I think the more productive conversation to be had is still about how the EVF board works, and not the object-level debate around Wytham Abbey—though I did appreciate Edward’s take on it, so thank you for sharing it!
I think the question that’s important to me is this. Assume the community comes to a consensus that some course of action was bad and that the board member responsible should step down. The best information that we have atm is that there wouldn’t be a means to actually put this into effect beside social pressure (which I grant is a very strong force). Or if a board member wanted to step down for some other reason, family or care responsibilities for instance, who gets to decide their replacement? But I totally understand if that’s not the topic you think is most important to discuss, and thank you for engaging with me :)
Removing her for that decision seems excessive. However, regardless of what we think of the purchase decision, it was poorly executed:
they didn’t disclose it publicly announce it so that the community mostly learned about it via Emile Torres’ Twitter account [edited]
it was bought by an umbrella organising purporting to represent the EA brand, with apparently no awareness of the optics
they didn’t give any quantitative justification for it (and, contrary to what Edward Kmett says, there are modern conference centres in Oxford, which would probably have cost substantially less)
it doesn’t sound like they did much or any external consultation, and the board have not shown any indication that they recognise the genuine risk of rationalising high-value decisions like this
That strongly suggests a mere oversight rather than something substantial. There’s also no reason to place such an oversight at the feet of any board member. It’s not their job to monitor execution of that sort of detail.
I’m not convinced that it was poorly executed; I’d need to hear more details first.
they didn’t disclose it publicly, so that the community mostly learned about it via Emile Torres’ Twitter account
Claire said, “(This isn’t my domain but) we typically aim to publish grants within three months of when we make our initial payment, but we’re currently working through a backlog of older grants.”
This may reflect that Open Phil made a mistake, or it may reflect that they made the right call and de-prioritized “get announcements out ASAP” in favor of more objectively important tasks. I’d want to know more about why the backlog existed before weighing in.
I don’t think Open Phil should heavily reshape their prioritization on things like this based on what they’re scared Emile Torres will tweet about; that does not sound like the sort of heuristic that I’d expect to result in a functional Open Phil that is keeping its eye on the ball.
But separate from Torres, I can see arguments for it being useful to EAs for us to get faster updates from Open Phil, given what a large funder they are in this space. They of course don’t morally owe EAs even 1% of the details they’ve provided to date, but it’s a genuinely valuable community service that they share so much. So yes, faster may be better, and maybe the slow announcement in this case reflects some upstream process error I’m not aware of.
contrary to what Edward Kmett says, there are modern conference centres in Oxford, which would probably have cost substantially less
I’d be interested to see examples, and I’d be idly curious to know why they didn’t pick one. If there’s a need for more venue space, possibly we should purchase at least one of those too.
it doesn’t sound like they did much or any external consultation, and the board have not shown any indication that they recognise the genuine risk of rationalising high-value decisions like this
I don’t know what you mean by this or why you think it. Who should Claire have talked to who you think she didn’t talk to? Why is this decision at higher risk of rationalizing than any other decision?
Or are you just saying “this decision was important, and it’s not clear to me that Claire realized how important it is, and therefore risky to get wrong”? If so, I have no idea why you think that either. Maybe if you wrote a longer-form thing detailing what you think the evaluation process should have looked like, and how you think that differed from the actual evaluation process for the abbey, it would be clearer where the disagreement is.
Removing Claire from the EVF Board because she approved the Wytham Abbey purchase seems tremendously silly to me. FTX is a serious scandal that impacted millions of people; EA projects buying conference venues or offices isn’t.
Edward Kmett’s take on that topic seems correct to me:
Is it necessary to relitigate Wytham Abbey in this thread? The OP suggests that Claire’s position is unusual because:
Not because Wytham Abbey was a poor purchase. I understand that the community is very split on this, and the take you’ve shared is a good representation of the ‘pro’ side, but it seems to me that you’ve used this to re-open the WA discussion here rather than discuss whether EVF should consider changing the composition/structure of its boards, and what the merits of that would be, which I think is the charitable object-level discussion that the OP wants to have here imo.
I interpreted “some of which have come under fire” as a polite way of saying they thought the purchase was clearly wrong and reflected poorly on Zabel’s judgement. If they weren’t trying to bring the wisdom of the decision into their argument I think they would have just left it at her being an example of a funder having a board seat?
I do agree, though, that relitigating it here isn’t helpful.
The OP says: “Claire Zabel oversees significant grant-making to EVF organizations through her role at Open Phil, some of which have come under fire. While it is common for funders to serve on boards, it is not necessarily best practice.”
I interpret this as saying Claire should be removed because ‘funders serving on boards is not necessarily best practice’, and also because the Wytham Abbey purchase was controversial and/or bad.
I think it’s bad to cite the Abbey as a reason for a decision like this, while maintaining ambiguity about whether you think the purchase was a bad idea vs. merely controversial. I also think it would be unhealthy for EA to go down the road of making decisions heavily based on what seems controversial, without saying anything about whether you think the idea was also bad.
Social environments with a lot of “obviously X is suspect, everyone knows that, no need for me to say why I think that” talk tend to fall into a lot of deference cascades and miasma-based bad reputations. (Things that are perceived as bad largely because other people keep reporting that they think others perceive the thing as bad.)
If Wytham Abbey is going to be cited as one of the reasons to remove people from boards (as indeed it has been here), then it needs to be OK for people to say why they agree or disagree with that call.
(Which is also part of why it’s helpful to say specifically what you think we should take away from the abbey case for this decision, rather than just fuzzily saying the decision has “come under fire”. Many good ideas inspire disagreement! If you think this was a bad idea, then just say so, and ideally gesture at why you think so.)
For context: I was already planning to share Edward’s comment somewhere, since I liked the analysis (similar to one he previously posted during the abbey discussion), and it wasn’t available on the public internet. (And he’d given me permission to cross-post it.)
But I’ve been busy and hadn’t gotten around to posting Edward’s thing anywhere, hence me posting it here. If it already existed somewhere linkable, then I’d have just posted a link here instead.
Yeah I can see why it does come across in the way that you interpreted, and I think my original comment was a bit more combative than I intended as well, so please accept my apologies for that. Nevertheless, I think the more productive conversation to be had is still about how the EVF board works, and not the object-level debate around Wytham Abbey—though I did appreciate Edward’s take on it, so thank you for sharing it!
I think the question that’s important to me is this. Assume the community comes to a consensus that some course of action was bad and that the board member responsible should step down. The best information that we have atm is that there wouldn’t be a means to actually put this into effect beside social pressure (which I grant is a very strong force). Or if a board member wanted to step down for some other reason, family or care responsibilities for instance, who gets to decide their replacement? But I totally understand if that’s not the topic you think is most important to discuss, and thank you for engaging with me :)
Removing her for that decision seems excessive. However, regardless of what we think of the purchase decision, it was poorly executed:
they didn’t
disclose it publiclyannounce it so that the community mostly learned about it via Emile Torres’ Twitter account [edited]it was bought by an umbrella organising purporting to represent the EA brand, with apparently no awareness of the optics
they didn’t give any quantitative justification for it (and, contrary to what Edward Kmett says, there are modern conference centres in Oxford, which would probably have cost substantially less)
it doesn’t sound like they did much or any external consultation, and the board have not shown any indication that they recognise the genuine risk of rationalising high-value decisions like this
It’s not accurate to say that EVF didn’t disclose it publicly. I first learnt about Wytham Abbey a while before Torres’ article, after reading this job ad: https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/careers/office-manager-oxford-ea-hub.
Sorry, I misspoke. They disclosed it, but didn’t publicise it. It shouldn’t have been buried in a job ad.
That strongly suggests a mere oversight rather than something substantial. There’s also no reason to place such an oversight at the feet of any board member. It’s not their job to monitor execution of that sort of detail.
I’m not convinced that it was poorly executed; I’d need to hear more details first.
Claire said, “(This isn’t my domain but) we typically aim to publish grants within three months of when we make our initial payment, but we’re currently working through a backlog of older grants.”
This may reflect that Open Phil made a mistake, or it may reflect that they made the right call and de-prioritized “get announcements out ASAP” in favor of more objectively important tasks. I’d want to know more about why the backlog existed before weighing in.
I don’t think Open Phil should heavily reshape their prioritization on things like this based on what they’re scared Emile Torres will tweet about; that does not sound like the sort of heuristic that I’d expect to result in a functional Open Phil that is keeping its eye on the ball.
But separate from Torres, I can see arguments for it being useful to EAs for us to get faster updates from Open Phil, given what a large funder they are in this space. They of course don’t morally owe EAs even 1% of the details they’ve provided to date, but it’s a genuinely valuable community service that they share so much. So yes, faster may be better, and maybe the slow announcement in this case reflects some upstream process error I’m not aware of.
I’d be interested to see examples, and I’d be idly curious to know why they didn’t pick one. If there’s a need for more venue space, possibly we should purchase at least one of those too.
I don’t know what you mean by this or why you think it. Who should Claire have talked to who you think she didn’t talk to? Why is this decision at higher risk of rationalizing than any other decision?
Or are you just saying “this decision was important, and it’s not clear to me that Claire realized how important it is, and therefore risky to get wrong”? If so, I have no idea why you think that either. Maybe if you wrote a longer-form thing detailing what you think the evaluation process should have looked like, and how you think that differed from the actual evaluation process for the abbey, it would be clearer where the disagreement is.