Now I have both the intelligence and attention span of a doorhinge, so forgive me if I’m missing something obvious, but I’m not at all convinced that the counterfactual would be working on their problems in solitude.
What exactly does a hotel in Blackburn provide, that couldn’t be provided much cheaper in other ways?
I assume most EA’s would be living in larger cities if not at the EA hotel. Whichever city they would be living in, would gain a lot of value from having their presence. Why couldn’t they move in together with a other EA’s from the same city and achieve a social situation roughly as good?
All the problems the EA hotel sets out to solve, I don’t understand why we couldn’t solve without the need for a large expensive hotel in blackburn of all places.
It’s Blackpool, and it’s a cheap hotel (£130k for 17 bedrooms; £6k/person/year all inclusive—accommodation, food, bills, cooking, cleaning, stipend, management). It would be more expensive for EAs to live together in other cities. Also harder to have such a large community in such close proximity. And a big part of the EA Hotel project is providing free living for people unable to fund themselves to study/research/work on start-ups.
Relatedly: there already is reasonable infrastructure (and continuing to be more) oriented towards getting EAs to live in a few hub cities.
This is good, but it leaves open an alternate path (living in a cheap place, not optimized for being near silicon-valley money or Oxford respectability), that is currently very underexplored.
I’m not at all convinced that the counterfactual would be working on their problems in solitude.
I wouldn’t be convinced either, but we interviewed our guests and 15 out of 20 were already doing the same work before taking up residence at the hotel. They were either working parttime or burning through runway.
Now I have both the intelligence and attention span of a doorhinge, so forgive me if I’m missing something obvious, but I’m not at all convinced that the counterfactual would be working on their problems in solitude.
What exactly does a hotel in Blackburn provide, that couldn’t be provided much cheaper in other ways?
I assume most EA’s would be living in larger cities if not at the EA hotel. Whichever city they would be living in, would gain a lot of value from having their presence. Why couldn’t they move in together with a other EA’s from the same city and achieve a social situation roughly as good?
All the problems the EA hotel sets out to solve, I don’t understand why we couldn’t solve without the need for a large expensive hotel in blackburn of all places.
It’s Blackpool, and it’s a cheap hotel (£130k for 17 bedrooms; £6k/person/year all inclusive—accommodation, food, bills, cooking, cleaning, stipend, management). It would be more expensive for EAs to live together in other cities. Also harder to have such a large community in such close proximity. And a big part of the EA Hotel project is providing free living for people unable to fund themselves to study/research/work on start-ups.
Relatedly: there already is reasonable infrastructure (and continuing to be more) oriented towards getting EAs to live in a few hub cities.
This is good, but it leaves open an alternate path (living in a cheap place, not optimized for being near silicon-valley money or Oxford respectability), that is currently very underexplored.
I wouldn’t be convinced either, but we interviewed our guests and 15 out of 20 were already doing the same work before taking up residence at the hotel. They were either working parttime or burning through runway.