There’s an additional argument in favor of the EA Hotel idea which I find very compelling (I’ve read it on this forum in a comment that I can’t find; EDIT: it was this comment by the user Agrippa—the following is not at all a precise description of the original comment and contains extra things that Agrippa might not agree with):
A lot of people are optimizing to get money as an instrumental goal and funders don’t always have a great way to evaluate how much a person that is asking for money is “EA-aligned” (for any reasonable definition of that term).
The willingness to travel and live for a while in a building with people that are excited about EA probably correlates with “being EA-aligned”.
So supporting people via funding their residency in a place like the EA Hotel seems to allow an implicit weak vetting mechanism that doesn’t exist when funding people directly.
There’s an additional argument in favor of the EA Hotel idea which I find very compelling (I’ve read it on this forum in a comment that I can’t find; EDIT: it was this comment by the user Agrippa—the following is not at all a precise description of the original comment and contains extra things that Agrippa might not agree with):
A lot of people are optimizing to get money as an instrumental goal and funders don’t always have a great way to evaluate how much a person that is asking for money is “EA-aligned” (for any reasonable definition of that term).
The willingness to travel and live for a while in a building with people that are excited about EA probably correlates with “being EA-aligned”.
So supporting people via funding their residency in a place like the EA Hotel seems to allow an implicit weak vetting mechanism that doesn’t exist when funding people directly.
I’m guessing it was probably this comment.
Yes, thanks.