That is a very good question. We were aware of the planning for the SHELTER Weekend as that was discussed in, and conceived of by people in the Slack channel mentioned in this post and Fønix has an ongoing dialogue with the individuals in that Slack channel. This post has been in the works for several weeks, I think from even before we became aware of the SHELTER Weekend. It should be noted that managing the start of a new project/organization in the non-profit sector in general, and perhaps EA in particular, is not straight forward and I would be happy to hear suggestions on how to manage this and the relationship to others thinking about and working on refuges. I know Charity Entrepreneurship has a lot of experience doing so in a structured manner. Having said all this, we felt that the time was ripe and the resources in place to launch a new, specific project. Then as we learnt about SHELTER Weekend, we saw that as a positive development to both refine thinking around refuges but also to draw more attention to the intervention, broadly speaking. The thinking behind Fønix is that a refuge could cost in the $100s of millions while there is little or no feedback on whether the intervention is working (one cannot test the facility under a GCBR scenario, especially an extinction level one) and therefore it is important to spend time and consult with a broad range of experts up front to “stress test” various solutions as much as possible up front so one both ensures that a solution is viable at all and also that among proposed solutions, one proceeds with the most promising one. We are therefore trying to give clarity as to our proposed plan while leaving open as much as possible to a time when enough funding and talent is in place to think rigorously about how a specific intervention should look, if it should be pursued at all.
I guess a question could be whether Fønix and SHELTER Weekend is in “competition”. For now I would not say so, but it is not impossible and perhaps not even undesirable to have two teams proposing quite different approaches so that grantmakers have a choice between interventions to fund—I know others have suggested more competition is healthy.
Can you explain the relationship between this project and the upcoming SHELTER Weekend?
That is a very good question. We were aware of the planning for the SHELTER Weekend as that was discussed in, and conceived of by people in the Slack channel mentioned in this post and Fønix has an ongoing dialogue with the individuals in that Slack channel. This post has been in the works for several weeks, I think from even before we became aware of the SHELTER Weekend. It should be noted that managing the start of a new project/organization in the non-profit sector in general, and perhaps EA in particular, is not straight forward and I would be happy to hear suggestions on how to manage this and the relationship to others thinking about and working on refuges. I know Charity Entrepreneurship has a lot of experience doing so in a structured manner. Having said all this, we felt that the time was ripe and the resources in place to launch a new, specific project. Then as we learnt about SHELTER Weekend, we saw that as a positive development to both refine thinking around refuges but also to draw more attention to the intervention, broadly speaking. The thinking behind Fønix is that a refuge could cost in the $100s of millions while there is little or no feedback on whether the intervention is working (one cannot test the facility under a GCBR scenario, especially an extinction level one) and therefore it is important to spend time and consult with a broad range of experts up front to “stress test” various solutions as much as possible up front so one both ensures that a solution is viable at all and also that among proposed solutions, one proceeds with the most promising one. We are therefore trying to give clarity as to our proposed plan while leaving open as much as possible to a time when enough funding and talent is in place to think rigorously about how a specific intervention should look, if it should be pursued at all.
I guess a question could be whether Fønix and SHELTER Weekend is in “competition”. For now I would not say so, but it is not impossible and perhaps not even undesirable to have two teams proposing quite different approaches so that grantmakers have a choice between interventions to fund—I know others have suggested more competition is healthy.