I agree with Brendon that the Hotel should charge the tenants, and the tenants should seek their own funding.
If I was contemplating donating to the Hotel, the decision would hinge almost entirely on who is at the hotel and what they are working on. Moreover, I expect I would almost certainly want to tie my donation to a specific tenant/group of tenants, because I wouldn’t a priori expect all of them to be good donation targets.
At this point, why would I not just fund the specific person directly? Better yet, why would I not donate to the EA Funds/CEA and let professional grant-makers sift through the tenants’ personal applications?
When I look at the current guest list, it’s just very short, general introductory paragraphs. Surely you wouldn’t expect a grant-maker to make a funding decision based on these.
The Hotel itself is a cool idea which makes sense: create a transient EA hub somewhere where land is cheap. I love it. I am in fact one of those people who were excited about the project when it was first announced.
But in the current model, you cannot separate funding the Hotel from funding the specific people who stay there, and potential donors just don’t have enough information about those people to confidently fund them.
I think this gets to the big flaw in the current appeal from a design perspective -
the idea of the hotel is too new and cannot demonstrate impact on an aggregate scale (unlike say cash transfers) in an easy to understand way.
Therefore people look for specific examples of what people are doing at the hotel to reassure them of the impact
But as there are numerically few residents so far and the first residents had little competition to be accepted, many are not seen as competitive to what funders would independently decide to fund so they don’t make the hotel look good. (At least as they have been presented)
4)therefore the pitch is either that the hotel will continue to attract stronger applicants and/or get better at selecting good funding opportunities in the future so that they are doing some valuable intermediate role for the ultimate funders but a) no evidence has been given as to why the hotel staff are likely to be good at that role and b)trust has already been destroyed by the fact that funders now are looking at the first “lowest quality” residents and not finding them attractive.
The best thing by far imo the hotel could do is present the current and past residents in a way which explains why they have done valuable things at the hotel and why they could not have done them without the hotel. I don’t think they have done this well at all but my knowledge of a few of the residents suggests that there are good stories to tell here. Hopefully the planned post on this will give the hotel an injection of new interest from funders.
For more on our residents to date, and how the hotel has helped them, here are some case studies. See also: outputs.
funders now are looking at the first “lowest quality” residents and not finding them attractive
I think this is unfair. I have not had any potential funders specifically say this. I actually think that the quality of residents is already pretty high (and this is under-appreciated from the outside). I also disagree with the notion of the first residents necessarily being of low quality just by way of not having strong competition to be accepted; there might even be a “debut album effect” in that there is a glut of good people (“songs”) ready for the initial release. I know I’ve personally been pleasantly surprised more than once with guests who I were a bit unsure of originally but was happy to take a chance on. There is also the consideration that it takes a certain amount of pioneer spirit to join a new project and community early in its life, and that this is positively correlated with agency and via that, value creation.
selecting good funding opportunities… no evidence has been given as to why the hotel staff are likely to be good at that role
See our pitch doc (that we’ve recently circulated to interested people) for more detail on our Staff/Trustees. Ultimately, most of the grant makers in charge of the EA Funds have gained their experience through being actively involved in EA and making funding decisions (donations) over many years. We are not that different. See my record of EA donations here*. Also, as Vipul says, we have skin in the game here.
*”EA Hotel” is the money I’ve put in as of 29th March 2019, not including purchasing the building. Meta note: would be good if it was possible to make pages on app.effectivealtruism.org/dashboard/pledge/donations publicly viewable. Is this feature planned?
I think this view as presented has an overly narrow focus. In terms of thinking of the expected value of the hotel and whether it’s worth funding on the margin, it’s useful to also consider:
The benefits of the in-person community in terms of support, feedback, motivation, productivity, collaboration, networking.
All the potential future value from future guests and iterating, expanding and franchising the model.
The effect it failing from a lack of funding would have on the likelihood of similar initiatives being started in future.
Also note that the counterfactuals—EA Grants and EA Meta Fund—have not had assessments of their outputs performed, or at least made public (apart from the larger more established projects they have funded). Indeed—someone correct me if I’m wrong—we don’t even know who the recipients are of any of the EA Grants made after Fall 2017 (but then again, EA Grants in and of itself does not publicly accept donations, so does not need to be so transparent). Also: our costs per person are significantly lower than those of the average EA Grants or Meta Fund grantee. You need to factor this multiplier in when judging the relative merits of them vs. the EA Hotel.
In terms of picking and choosing people to fund, this is not readily possible without some kind of aggregation of applicants. Such aggregation projects have been proposed here and here, but not without controversy (see comments on those posts). The hotel has the effect of aggregating a selection of people and projects starting out in EA, and in principle would-be funders can offer to pay for the costs of individual people or projects hosted at the hotel (or even offer to further fund them at higher rates to expand their projects elsewhere). But this does require the hotel to continue to exist (or some other kind of aggregator to take its place). Another way of looking at it would be by way of analogy to venture capital. By funding the EA hotel you are buying the portfolio of a VC firm (that is taking a hits-based giving approach); by picking individual projects you are doing the work of an Angel Investor. The latter takes significantly more time and work. (NB this is different to ordinary investing in that we need to be concerned about anti-unicorns whilst on the look out for unicorns).
The controversy around aggregators revolves around increasing the risk from considerations relating to the “unilateralists curse” i.e. potentially net negative projects would have more of a chance of being funded if given a wider audience of potential funders. I think this is one reason why EA Grants don’t widely share their applications. The hotel guards against this somewhat by having a committee of trustees (and soon to add—external advisors) involved with overseeing the vetting process. Also there is the filter for commitment that is having people physically move to Blackpool, rather than just taking the money. And the on hand in-person community to get advice and feedback from.
I agree with Brendon that the Hotel should charge the tenants, and the tenants should seek their own funding.
If I was contemplating donating to the Hotel, the decision would hinge almost entirely on who is at the hotel and what they are working on. Moreover, I expect I would almost certainly want to tie my donation to a specific tenant/group of tenants, because I wouldn’t a priori expect all of them to be good donation targets.
At this point, why would I not just fund the specific person directly? Better yet, why would I not donate to the EA Funds/CEA and let professional grant-makers sift through the tenants’ personal applications?
When I look at the current guest list, it’s just very short, general introductory paragraphs. Surely you wouldn’t expect a grant-maker to make a funding decision based on these.
The Hotel itself is a cool idea which makes sense: create a transient EA hub somewhere where land is cheap. I love it. I am in fact one of those people who were excited about the project when it was first announced.
But in the current model, you cannot separate funding the Hotel from funding the specific people who stay there, and potential donors just don’t have enough information about those people to confidently fund them.
I think this gets to the big flaw in the current appeal from a design perspective -
the idea of the hotel is too new and cannot demonstrate impact on an aggregate scale (unlike say cash transfers) in an easy to understand way.
Therefore people look for specific examples of what people are doing at the hotel to reassure them of the impact
But as there are numerically few residents so far and the first residents had little competition to be accepted, many are not seen as competitive to what funders would independently decide to fund so they don’t make the hotel look good. (At least as they have been presented)
4)therefore the pitch is either that the hotel will continue to attract stronger applicants and/or get better at selecting good funding opportunities in the future so that they are doing some valuable intermediate role for the ultimate funders but a) no evidence has been given as to why the hotel staff are likely to be good at that role and b)trust has already been destroyed by the fact that funders now are looking at the first “lowest quality” residents and not finding them attractive.
The best thing by far imo the hotel could do is present the current and past residents in a way which explains why they have done valuable things at the hotel and why they could not have done them without the hotel. I don’t think they have done this well at all but my knowledge of a few of the residents suggests that there are good stories to tell here. Hopefully the planned post on this will give the hotel an injection of new interest from funders.
For more on our residents to date, and how the hotel has helped them, here are some case studies. See also: outputs.
I think this is unfair. I have not had any potential funders specifically say this. I actually think that the quality of residents is already pretty high (and this is under-appreciated from the outside). I also disagree with the notion of the first residents necessarily being of low quality just by way of not having strong competition to be accepted; there might even be a “debut album effect” in that there is a glut of good people (“songs”) ready for the initial release. I know I’ve personally been pleasantly surprised more than once with guests who I were a bit unsure of originally but was happy to take a chance on. There is also the consideration that it takes a certain amount of pioneer spirit to join a new project and community early in its life, and that this is positively correlated with agency and via that, value creation.
See our pitch doc (that we’ve recently circulated to interested people) for more detail on our Staff/Trustees. Ultimately, most of the grant makers in charge of the EA Funds have gained their experience through being actively involved in EA and making funding decisions (donations) over many years. We are not that different. See my record of EA donations here*. Also, as Vipul says, we have skin in the game here.
*”EA Hotel” is the money I’ve put in as of 29th March 2019, not including purchasing the building. Meta note: would be good if it was possible to make pages on app.effectivealtruism.org/dashboard/pledge/donations publicly viewable. Is this feature planned?
I think this view as presented has an overly narrow focus. In terms of thinking of the expected value of the hotel and whether it’s worth funding on the margin, it’s useful to also consider:
The benefits of the in-person community in terms of support, feedback, motivation, productivity, collaboration, networking.
All the potential future value from future guests and iterating, expanding and franchising the model.
The effect it failing from a lack of funding would have on the likelihood of similar initiatives being started in future.
The notion of Hits-based Giving.
Also note that the counterfactuals—EA Grants and EA Meta Fund—have not had assessments of their outputs performed, or at least made public (apart from the larger more established projects they have funded). Indeed—someone correct me if I’m wrong—we don’t even know who the recipients are of any of the EA Grants made after Fall 2017 (but then again, EA Grants in and of itself does not publicly accept donations, so does not need to be so transparent). Also: our costs per person are significantly lower than those of the average EA Grants or Meta Fund grantee. You need to factor this multiplier in when judging the relative merits of them vs. the EA Hotel.
In terms of picking and choosing people to fund, this is not readily possible without some kind of aggregation of applicants. Such aggregation projects have been proposed here and here, but not without controversy (see comments on those posts). The hotel has the effect of aggregating a selection of people and projects starting out in EA, and in principle would-be funders can offer to pay for the costs of individual people or projects hosted at the hotel (or even offer to further fund them at higher rates to expand their projects elsewhere). But this does require the hotel to continue to exist (or some other kind of aggregator to take its place). Another way of looking at it would be by way of analogy to venture capital. By funding the EA hotel you are buying the portfolio of a VC firm (that is taking a hits-based giving approach); by picking individual projects you are doing the work of an Angel Investor. The latter takes significantly more time and work. (NB this is different to ordinary investing in that we need to be concerned about anti-unicorns whilst on the look out for unicorns).
The controversy around aggregators revolves around increasing the risk from considerations relating to the “unilateralists curse” i.e. potentially net negative projects would have more of a chance of being funded if given a wider audience of potential funders. I think this is one reason why EA Grants don’t widely share their applications. The hotel guards against this somewhat by having a committee of trustees (and soon to add—external advisors) involved with overseeing the vetting process. Also there is the filter for commitment that is having people physically move to Blackpool, rather than just taking the money. And the on hand in-person community to get advice and feedback from.