I’m the EA Grants evaluator. We don’t usually comment publicly on reasons for not granting to something, but Greg gave us permission and encouragement in this case given the community interest. At this point I’m not excited to fund the EA Hotel’s general costs. My concerns are:
- Hotel management generally (including selection of guests/projects) - Potential for community health issues, and concern about handling of a staffing issue - Some concern about the handling of past PR situations; I think these were very difficult situations, but I think an excellent version of the hotel would have handled these better
I’m still happy to help with finding an excellent Project and Community Manager, and to consider topping up/extending funding for the right candidate, should the EA Hotel find general operating funding elsewhere.
Some concern about the handling of past PR situations; I think these were very difficult situations, but I think an excellent version of the hotel would have handled these better
I think this is a little unfair. It would be good to know exactly what we (or an excellent version of the hotel) could’ve (would’ve) done better regarding the PR situations (I assume this is referring to the Economist and Times articles). Oliver Habryka says here “I still think something in this space went wrong”, but doesn’t say what (see my reply to Habryka for detail on what happened with the media). Jonas Vollmer says in reply to Habryka’s comment:
… “better than many did in the early stages (including myself in the early stages of EAF) but (due to lack of experience or training) considerably worse than most EA orgs would do these days.” There are many counterintuitive lessons to be learnt, many of which I still don’t fully understand, either.
but doesn’t elaborate. I have also talked to someone at CEA at length about media, including what happened with the hotel, and they didn’t suggest anything that we could’ve done better given the situation (of the media outlets publishing whether we liked it or not). So I’m genuinely curious here. Although, ok, I guess maybe we could’ve removed the flipboard sheet from the wall before the journalist came in, even though it was a surprise visit.
Hi Greg—from my perspective, CEA did discuss all of these points with you. For example, last week when you emailed and asked what the Hotel could have done better on media, I replied about something I saw as a mistake and what I thought should have been done differently. We’ve also discussed the staffing issue. I’m happy to discuss more by email or call if you’d like.
I understand we may view these situations differently and that you may disagree with CEA’s recommendations for improvements. We might also have different views about how much explicit direction (versus just advice) it’s appropriate for us to give an external org. I don’t think it’s accurate, though, to indicate that we haven’t provided feedback or suggestions.
Hi Julia, ok but to me the point you raised about media was tangential, i.e. it was not directly related to the PR situations themselves. For those curious—I missed a meeting with a professional communications advisor at EAG London last year, on account of missing an email (in which the meeting was arranged for me) sent the day before whilst I was driving to London. I was overwhelmed at the time with interest in the hotel, and that wasn’t the only email (or meeting) I missed.
The point I raised was not about the round of media stories from Sept 2018, but was about preparing for future media inquiries. So you’re right that it’s not about past media situations, but about how further situations might be handled.
Regarding explicit direction vs advice—for me it was the fact that something I thought had been dealt with acceptably seems to have—unbeknownst to me—remained a live issue in terms of it effecting funding decisions. More explicit direction at the time in terms of “if you want to get funding from CEA you need to do this” seems like it would’ve been better in hindsight.
From my perspective, I repeatedly gave you information about a situation that I saw as a problem. How you decided to handle the problem as the manager of the project was up to you. We don’t see it as a good idea for funders to make ultimatums about the staffing decisions of potential grantees. But as Nicole said, this was one of the things among many she considered when looking back at the history of the project.
After talking more with Greg, I realized I should clarify that I don’t mean I think something went badly wrong at the Hotel.
As Nicole said above, CEA would be happy to help the Hotel with finding an excellent Project and Community Manager, and to consider helping to fund these roles if there’s another source of general funding.
I have no objections to other donors supporting the Hotel. The default is that projects don’t get EA Grants, and this situation should be seen as “the default happened” rather than “the Hotel did something unusually bad to disqualify itself from funding it would otherwise have gotten.”
As Nicole said above, CEA would be happy to help the Hotel with finding an excellent Project and Community Manager, and to consider helping to fund these roles if there’s another source of general funding.
We now have general funding for the next few months and are hiring for both a Community & Projects Manager and an Operations Manager, with input from Nicole and others at CEA. Unfortunately with the winding down of EA Grants the possibility of funding for the Community & Projects Manager salary has gone. If anyone would like to top up the salaries for either the Community & Projects Manager or Operations Manager (currently ~£21.5k/yr pro rata including free accommodation and food), please get in touch!
We are still happy to help with hiring and to consider helping to fund the role if there’s enough general funding. We haven’t received new info from Greg about whether there is enough general funding that it’s worth moving forward hiring, so we’re currently on standby.
Potential for community health issues, and concern about handling of a staffing issue
It’s true that there is potential for community health issues whenever you have a group of people living together. I think we have generally faired well in this regard so far though. It has been suggested that there is a significant reputational risk involved with funding a project such as the EA Hotel given the interpersonal dynamics of a large group of people living together, and therefore it might be better for it to be funded by individuals instead of grant-making organisations. However, as a counter-point: most universities provide massively-communal student accommodation.
Regarding the staffing issue, I’m afraid there’s not much I can say publicly. Although it was my understanding at the time that we dealt with it appropriately, after taking advice from prominent community members.
I’m not convinced community health issues are uniquely problematic when you have people living together. I feel like one could argue just as easily that conferences are risky for community health. If something awkward happens at EA Global, you’ll have an entire year to chew on that before running into the person next year. (Pretty sure that past EA Global conferences have arranged shared housing in e.g. dormitories for participants, by the way.) And there is less shared context at a conference because it happens over a brief period of time. One could also argue that having the community be mostly online runs risks for community health (for obvious reasons), and it’s critical for us to spend lots of time in person to build stronger bonds. And one could argue that not having much community at all, neither online nor in person, runs risks for community health due to value drift. Seems like there are risks everywhere.
If people really think there are significant community health risks with EA roommates, then they could start a charity which pays EAs who currently live with EA roommates to live alone. To my knowledge, no one has proposed a charity like that. It doesn’t seem like a very promising charity to me. If you agree, then by the reversal test, it follows that as a community we should want to move a bit further in the direction of EAs saving money by living together.
The reversal test doesn’t mean ‘if you don’t think a charity for X is promising, you should be in favour of more ¬X’. I may not find homeless shelters, education, or climate change charities promising, yet not want to move in the direction of greater homelessness, illiteracy, or pollution.
If (like me) you’d prefer EA to move in the direction of ‘professional association’ rather than ‘social movement’, this attitude’s general recommendation to move away from communal living (generally not a feature of the former, given the emphasis on distinguishing between personal and professional lives) does pass the reversal test, as I’d forecast having the same view even if the status quo was everyone already living in group house (or vice versa).
The reversal test doesn’t mean ‘if you don’t think a charity for X is promising, you should be in favour of more ¬X’. I may not find homeless shelters, education, or climate change charities promising, yet not want to move in the direction of greater homelessness, illiteracy, or pollution.
Suppose you’re the newly appointed director of a large charitable foundation which has allocated its charitable giving in a somewhat random way. If you’re able to resist status quo bias, then usually, you will not find yourself keeping the amount allocated for a particular cause at exactly the level it was at originally. For example, if the foundation is currently giving to education charities, and you don’t think those charities are very effective, then you’ll reduce their funding. If you think those charities are very effective, then you’ll increase their funding.
Now consider “having EAs live alone in apartments in expensive cities” as a cause area. Currently, the amount we’re spending on this area has been set in a somewhat random way. Therefore, if we’re able to resist status quo bias, we should probably either be moving it up or moving it down. We could move it up by creating a charity that pays EAs to live alone, or move it down by encouraging EAs to move to the EA Hotel. (Maybe creating a charity that pays EAs to live alone would be impractical or create perverse incentives or something, this is more of an “in principle” intuition pump sort of an argument.)
Edit: With regard to the professionalism thing, my personal feelings on this are something like the last paragraph in this comment—I think it’d be good for some of us to be more professional in certain respects (e.g. I’m supportive of EAs working to gain institutional legitimacy for EA cause areas), but the Hotel culture I observed feels mostly acceptable to me. Probably some mixture of not seeing much interpersonal drama while I was there, and expecting the Hotel residents will continue to be fairly young people who don’t occupy positions of power (grad student housing comes to mind). FWIW, my personal experience is that the value of professionalism comes up more often in Blackpool EA conversations than Bay Area EA conversations. With the Bay Area, you may very well be paying more rent for a less professional culture. Just my anecdotal impressions.
I find this thought experiment really weird because I don’t think EAs living together should be centrally managed. It seems really obvious to me that EA as a movement faces less risks when a few friends who met through EA decide to move in together, rather than when people apply to an ‘EA house’ with social programmes where they don’t know anyone.
Like, if a couple living in the EA Hotel break up, there’s a good chance they’ll both continue to living there and it’ll be very awkward. If you’re in a flatshare, I’d expect one of them to move out ASAP. The social norms are just so different.
I agree it would surprise if EA happened upon the optimal cohabitation level (although perhaps not that surprising, given individuals can act by the lights of their best interest which may reasonably approximate the global optimum), yet I maintain the charitable intervention hypothetical is a poor intuition pump as most people would be dissuaded from ‘intervening’ to push towards the ‘optimal cohabitation level’ for ‘in practice’ reasons—e.g. much larger potential side-effects of trying to twiddle this dial, preserving the norm of leaving people to manage their personal lives as they see best, etc.
I’d probably want to suggest the optimal cohabitation level is below what we currently observe (e.g. besides the issue Khorton mentions, cohabitation with your employees/bosses/colleagues or funder/fundee seems to run predictable risks), yet be reluctant to ‘intervene’ any further up the coercion hierarchy than expressing my reasons for caution.
Thanks for commenting Nicole. To address your points (will post a separate comment for each):
Hotel management generally (including selection of guests/projects)
In terms of general management, I agree that there is always room for improvement, but I don’t think things have been too bad so far.
Regarding the selection of guests/projects, I have a lot to say about this, which I hope to cover in EA Hotel Fundraiser 10: Estimating the relative Expected Value of the EA Hotel (Part 2), and possibly also a separate post focusing more on my personal opinions. For now I will say that I think there might be some philosophical disagreement between us, although I can’t be certain as I don’t know the specifics of which guests/projects you are referring to in particular.
The Project and Community Manager (or Community & Projects Manager) is a role that largely involves overseeing the EA-focused work being done at the Hotel, facilitating productivity and offering practical and strategic advice to guests, in order to help maximise the value of their work to the world.
Other tasks for this role include: answering email enquiries; video calls with applicants; coordinating with Trustees and Advisors to vet applicants; helping maintain community morale at a high level, and resolving conflict if it arises, in coordination with the Operations Manager; developing overall strategy for the EA Hotel, in coordination with Trustees.
We hope to do a hiring round for the role as and when we get back to 6 months runway of general operating costs, and appreciate Nicole’s interest in potentially funding the role. Denisa Pop is currently in the role in the interim.
Hey all,
I’m the EA Grants evaluator. We don’t usually comment publicly on reasons for not granting to something, but Greg gave us permission and encouragement in this case given the community interest. At this point I’m not excited to fund the EA Hotel’s general costs. My concerns are:
- Hotel management generally (including selection of guests/projects)
- Potential for community health issues, and concern about handling of a staffing issue
- Some concern about the handling of past PR situations; I think these were very difficult situations, but I think an excellent version of the hotel would have handled these better
I’m still happy to help with finding an excellent Project and Community Manager, and to consider topping up/extending funding for the right candidate, should the EA Hotel find general operating funding elsewhere.
I think this is a little unfair. It would be good to know exactly what we (or an excellent version of the hotel) could’ve (would’ve) done better regarding the PR situations (I assume this is referring to the Economist and Times articles). Oliver Habryka says here “I still think something in this space went wrong”, but doesn’t say what (see my reply to Habryka for detail on what happened with the media). Jonas Vollmer says in reply to Habryka’s comment:
but doesn’t elaborate. I have also talked to someone at CEA at length about media, including what happened with the hotel, and they didn’t suggest anything that we could’ve done better given the situation (of the media outlets publishing whether we liked it or not). So I’m genuinely curious here. Although, ok, I guess maybe we could’ve removed the flipboard sheet from the wall before the journalist came in, even though it was a surprise visit.
Hi Greg—from my perspective, CEA did discuss all of these points with you. For example, last week when you emailed and asked what the Hotel could have done better on media, I replied about something I saw as a mistake and what I thought should have been done differently. We’ve also discussed the staffing issue. I’m happy to discuss more by email or call if you’d like.
I understand we may view these situations differently and that you may disagree with CEA’s recommendations for improvements. We might also have different views about how much explicit direction (versus just advice) it’s appropriate for us to give an external org. I don’t think it’s accurate, though, to indicate that we haven’t provided feedback or suggestions.
Hi Julia, ok but to me the point you raised about media was tangential, i.e. it was not directly related to the PR situations themselves. For those curious—I missed a meeting with a professional communications advisor at EAG London last year, on account of missing an email (in which the meeting was arranged for me) sent the day before whilst I was driving to London. I was overwhelmed at the time with interest in the hotel, and that wasn’t the only email (or meeting) I missed.
The point I raised was not about the round of media stories from Sept 2018, but was about preparing for future media inquiries. So you’re right that it’s not about past media situations, but about how further situations might be handled.
Fair point, but Nicole refers to:
Also it’s worth mentioning our actual subsequent track record over the past year (i.e. 0 further PR situations).
Regarding explicit direction vs advice—for me it was the fact that something I thought had been dealt with acceptably seems to have—unbeknownst to me—remained a live issue in terms of it effecting funding decisions. More explicit direction at the time in terms of “if you want to get funding from CEA you need to do this” seems like it would’ve been better in hindsight.
From my perspective, I repeatedly gave you information about a situation that I saw as a problem. How you decided to handle the problem as the manager of the project was up to you. We don’t see it as a good idea for funders to make ultimatums about the staffing decisions of potential grantees. But as Nicole said, this was one of the things among many she considered when looking back at the history of the project.
After talking more with Greg, I realized I should clarify that I don’t mean I think something went badly wrong at the Hotel.
As Nicole said above, CEA would be happy to help the Hotel with finding an excellent Project and Community Manager, and to consider helping to fund these roles if there’s another source of general funding.
I have no objections to other donors supporting the Hotel. The default is that projects don’t get EA Grants, and this situation should be seen as “the default happened” rather than “the Hotel did something unusually bad to disqualify itself from funding it would otherwise have gotten.”
Is CEA helping out with this?
We now have general funding for the next few months and are hiring for both a Community & Projects Manager and an Operations Manager, with input from Nicole and others at CEA. Unfortunately with the winding down of EA Grants the possibility of funding for the Community & Projects Manager salary has gone. If anyone would like to top up the salaries for either the Community & Projects Manager or Operations Manager (currently ~£21.5k/yr pro rata including free accommodation and food), please get in touch!
We are still happy to help with hiring and to consider helping to fund the role if there’s enough general funding. We haven’t received new info from Greg about whether there is enough general funding that it’s worth moving forward hiring, so we’re currently on standby.
It’s true that there is potential for community health issues whenever you have a group of people living together. I think we have generally faired well in this regard so far though. It has been suggested that there is a significant reputational risk involved with funding a project such as the EA Hotel given the interpersonal dynamics of a large group of people living together, and therefore it might be better for it to be funded by individuals instead of grant-making organisations. However, as a counter-point: most universities provide massively-communal student accommodation.
Regarding the staffing issue, I’m afraid there’s not much I can say publicly. Although it was my understanding at the time that we dealt with it appropriately, after taking advice from prominent community members.
I’m not convinced community health issues are uniquely problematic when you have people living together. I feel like one could argue just as easily that conferences are risky for community health. If something awkward happens at EA Global, you’ll have an entire year to chew on that before running into the person next year. (Pretty sure that past EA Global conferences have arranged shared housing in e.g. dormitories for participants, by the way.) And there is less shared context at a conference because it happens over a brief period of time. One could also argue that having the community be mostly online runs risks for community health (for obvious reasons), and it’s critical for us to spend lots of time in person to build stronger bonds. And one could argue that not having much community at all, neither online nor in person, runs risks for community health due to value drift. Seems like there are risks everywhere.
If people really think there are significant community health risks with EA roommates, then they could start a charity which pays EAs who currently live with EA roommates to live alone. To my knowledge, no one has proposed a charity like that. It doesn’t seem like a very promising charity to me. If you agree, then by the reversal test, it follows that as a community we should want to move a bit further in the direction of EAs saving money by living together.
The reversal test doesn’t mean ‘if you don’t think a charity for X is promising, you should be in favour of more ¬X’. I may not find homeless shelters, education, or climate change charities promising, yet not want to move in the direction of greater homelessness, illiteracy, or pollution.
If (like me) you’d prefer EA to move in the direction of ‘professional association’ rather than ‘social movement’, this attitude’s general recommendation to move away from communal living (generally not a feature of the former, given the emphasis on distinguishing between personal and professional lives) does pass the reversal test, as I’d forecast having the same view even if the status quo was everyone already living in group house (or vice versa).
Suppose you’re the newly appointed director of a large charitable foundation which has allocated its charitable giving in a somewhat random way. If you’re able to resist status quo bias, then usually, you will not find yourself keeping the amount allocated for a particular cause at exactly the level it was at originally. For example, if the foundation is currently giving to education charities, and you don’t think those charities are very effective, then you’ll reduce their funding. If you think those charities are very effective, then you’ll increase their funding.
Now consider “having EAs live alone in apartments in expensive cities” as a cause area. Currently, the amount we’re spending on this area has been set in a somewhat random way. Therefore, if we’re able to resist status quo bias, we should probably either be moving it up or moving it down. We could move it up by creating a charity that pays EAs to live alone, or move it down by encouraging EAs to move to the EA Hotel. (Maybe creating a charity that pays EAs to live alone would be impractical or create perverse incentives or something, this is more of an “in principle” intuition pump sort of an argument.)
Edit: With regard to the professionalism thing, my personal feelings on this are something like the last paragraph in this comment—I think it’d be good for some of us to be more professional in certain respects (e.g. I’m supportive of EAs working to gain institutional legitimacy for EA cause areas), but the Hotel culture I observed feels mostly acceptable to me. Probably some mixture of not seeing much interpersonal drama while I was there, and expecting the Hotel residents will continue to be fairly young people who don’t occupy positions of power (grad student housing comes to mind). FWIW, my personal experience is that the value of professionalism comes up more often in Blackpool EA conversations than Bay Area EA conversations. With the Bay Area, you may very well be paying more rent for a less professional culture. Just my anecdotal impressions.
I find this thought experiment really weird because I don’t think EAs living together should be centrally managed. It seems really obvious to me that EA as a movement faces less risks when a few friends who met through EA decide to move in together, rather than when people apply to an ‘EA house’ with social programmes where they don’t know anyone.
Like, if a couple living in the EA Hotel break up, there’s a good chance they’ll both continue to living there and it’ll be very awkward. If you’re in a flatshare, I’d expect one of them to move out ASAP. The social norms are just so different.
I agree it would surprise if EA happened upon the optimal cohabitation level (although perhaps not that surprising, given individuals can act by the lights of their best interest which may reasonably approximate the global optimum), yet I maintain the charitable intervention hypothetical is a poor intuition pump as most people would be dissuaded from ‘intervening’ to push towards the ‘optimal cohabitation level’ for ‘in practice’ reasons—e.g. much larger potential side-effects of trying to twiddle this dial, preserving the norm of leaving people to manage their personal lives as they see best, etc.
I’d probably want to suggest the optimal cohabitation level is below what we currently observe (e.g. besides the issue Khorton mentions, cohabitation with your employees/bosses/colleagues or funder/fundee seems to run predictable risks), yet be reluctant to ‘intervene’ any further up the coercion hierarchy than expressing my reasons for caution.
Thanks for commenting Nicole. To address your points (will post a separate comment for each):
In terms of general management, I agree that there is always room for improvement, but I don’t think things have been too bad so far.
Regarding the selection of guests/projects, I have a lot to say about this, which I hope to cover in EA Hotel Fundraiser 10: Estimating the relative Expected Value of the EA Hotel (Part 2), and possibly also a separate post focusing more on my personal opinions. For now I will say that I think there might be some philosophical disagreement between us, although I can’t be certain as I don’t know the specifics of which guests/projects you are referring to in particular.
The Project and Community Manager (or Community & Projects Manager) is a role that largely involves overseeing the EA-focused work being done at the Hotel, facilitating productivity and offering practical and strategic advice to guests, in order to help maximise the value of their work to the world.
Other tasks for this role include: answering email enquiries; video calls with applicants; coordinating with Trustees and Advisors to vet applicants; helping maintain community morale at a high level, and resolving conflict if it arises, in coordination with the Operations Manager; developing overall strategy for the EA Hotel, in coordination with Trustees.
We hope to do a hiring round for the role as and when we get back to 6 months runway of general operating costs, and appreciate Nicole’s interest in potentially funding the role. Denisa Pop is currently in the role in the interim.