I’m not going to comment on the emotional/anger/PR side, but here are some numbers for the discussion to be somewhat connected with Oxford conference accommodation reality; speaking just in my personal capacity as someone who did run events in Oxford.
According to the first public price list in my google results, conference accommodation in a college in Oxford in 2020 was >£70 (standard room) + >$45 on meals + >~$1000 for 4 lecture rooms, per day. With a 30 person event, it’s >£4500 per day. With 40 ppl and more lecture rooms, it would be more like >£6k/day, just for space and food.
Multiplying it with days per year, it’s >£2.2M/y. To get realistic comparisons, you would need to adjust for many other factors sometimes of order 0.3-3x, like occupancy, costs of adjusting venues to your needs, costs of the staff,… In impact calculation, you would also need to adjust for counterfactual loses such as “not able to run an event because everything good is either booked a year in advance, or even more expensive than the college price list” where having a friendly venue can cause the event to counterfactually happen at all.
As someone who has experience with this, what do you (or others doing coet calculations in this thread) think about the cost/benefit of having this type of dedicated venue in a less expensive location and moving these types of events out of Oxford, which seems to be a particularly expensive area? Your calculation seems to imply that the events would be frequent enough that the staff would be working on them full time, and room and board being a major factor implies that the expectation is that most people would be traveling for them anyway. In this case, why is Oxford the basis for cost calculations?
For people not familiar with the UK, the London metropolitan area houses 20% of the UK’s population, and a disproportionate share of the economic and research activity. The London-Cambridge-Oxford triangle in particular is by far the research powerhouse of the country, although there are of course some good universities elsewhere (e.g. Durham, St Andrews in the north). Unfortunately, anywhere within an hour’s travel of London is going to be expensive. Although I’m sure you can find somewhat cheaper options than Oxford, I expect the cost savings will be modest (noting Oxford is already cheaper than central London), and you’ll likely lose something else (e.g. location is harder to get to, or is some grungy commuter town).
I would like to hear if CEA considered non-Oxford locations (as there’s an obvious natural bias given CEA is headquartered in Oxford), but it wouldn’t surprise me if the benefit of CEA staff (who will often be running the events) having easy access to the venue genuinely outweighed any likely modest cost savings from locating elsewhere.
You can get to Luton, Milton Keynes, Stevenage or a number of other small London satellite towns in less than 2 hours from Oxford, and less than 1 from central London. These are all pretty banal collections of concrete buildings, but would allow you to buy a venue for a fraction of the cost. It seems hard to escape the conclusion that this decision was mainly made based on a Manor house in Oxford being more aesthetically appealing than a concrete office building on an industrial estate or small town centre.
The lack of a 2 hour commute is nothing to sneeze at though. CFAR has (had? I haven’t checked in on it lately) a venue a couple of hours away from Berkeley that they’ve used for organizing workshops and events, and the tribulations of organizing getting everyone to and from the venue pretty much ensured it was only used for running 4-5 day events. It made it significantly more difficult for folks at CFAR or MIRI to pop up to make “guest appearances” at workshops and the like significantly reducing value to participants.
Speaking from personal experience, that distance rather complicated the value proposition for me, for whether it was worth showing up for a day at the end of an event to get to know some of the participants.
At the end of the day, the optics seem poor, but the actual cost for the space seems to be what I’d expect for a space that can sleep that many people, zoned so you can use them as actual bedrooms and have people stay on site. By the time it is kitted out in proper group-house density with beds in every nook and cranny you can find, you’d be able to fit a rather large number of attendees into the space.
You can go grab some concrete office space in an industrial park somewhere, but at the end of the day you generally can’t legally have people sleep in that office space—no matter what Elon is trying to do with Twitter HQ this month, so you’d wind up needing to sublet nearby apartments and the like for attendees, assuming you can find ones that legally allow you to do so, or pay premiums for hotel stays.
Part of why the CFAR venue wound up as far outside of Berkeley as it did, was they literally couldn’t find any place closer that would legally let them treat it like a bed and breakfast for hosting attendees.
Habryka and the rest of the Lightcone Infrastructure team seem to be wrangling the same sort of considerations as they try to provide gathering space for EA and rationalist folks in the bay area, today, except there a roughly equivalent amount of funding doesn’t buy anything like a fancy-looking but run-down historical abbey.
Is Wytham Abbey being used 365 days a year, though? A couple thousand a day is a perfectly reasonable cost for a conference. But why would you need to own a space that large permanently? I’d be just as shocked at the idea of renting out Oxford College’s conference hall 365 days a year. Nobody is having that many conferences.
I noted the same in the following sentence: To get realistic comparisons, you would need to adjust for many other factors sometimes of order 0.3-3x, like occupancy, costs of adjusting venues to your needs, costs of the staff,...
For example, if you use your venue 65% of time, you should multiply the mentioned figure by 0.65.
What’s pushing in the opposite direction is for example this: if you use a rented venue, and often spend 1-2 days before and 1 day after the event on setting it up according to your needs / returning to original state, you need to account for that. For e.g. 5 days event, it can increase the rented venue cost by 20-40%.
How various considerations add up is hard to say in the abstract.
I’m not going to comment on the emotional/anger/PR side, but here are some numbers for the discussion to be somewhat connected with Oxford conference accommodation reality; speaking just in my personal capacity as someone who did run events in Oxford.
According to the first public price list in my google results, conference accommodation in a college in Oxford in 2020 was >£70 (standard room) + >$45 on meals + >~$1000 for 4 lecture rooms, per day. With a 30 person event, it’s >£4500 per day. With 40 ppl and more lecture rooms, it would be more like >£6k/day, just for space and food.
Multiplying it with days per year, it’s >£2.2M/y. To get realistic comparisons, you would need to adjust for many other factors sometimes of order 0.3-3x, like occupancy, costs of adjusting venues to your needs, costs of the staff,… In impact calculation, you would also need to adjust for counterfactual loses such as “not able to run an event because everything good is either booked a year in advance, or even more expensive than the college price list” where having a friendly venue can cause the event to counterfactually happen at all.
As someone who has experience with this, what do you (or others doing coet calculations in this thread) think about the cost/benefit of having this type of dedicated venue in a less expensive location and moving these types of events out of Oxford, which seems to be a particularly expensive area? Your calculation seems to imply that the events would be frequent enough that the staff would be working on them full time, and room and board being a major factor implies that the expectation is that most people would be traveling for them anyway. In this case, why is Oxford the basis for cost calculations?
For people not familiar with the UK, the London metropolitan area houses 20% of the UK’s population, and a disproportionate share of the economic and research activity. The London-Cambridge-Oxford triangle in particular is by far the research powerhouse of the country, although there are of course some good universities elsewhere (e.g. Durham, St Andrews in the north). Unfortunately, anywhere within an hour’s travel of London is going to be expensive. Although I’m sure you can find somewhat cheaper options than Oxford, I expect the cost savings will be modest (noting Oxford is already cheaper than central London), and you’ll likely lose something else (e.g. location is harder to get to, or is some grungy commuter town).
I would like to hear if CEA considered non-Oxford locations (as there’s an obvious natural bias given CEA is headquartered in Oxford), but it wouldn’t surprise me if the benefit of CEA staff (who will often be running the events) having easy access to the venue genuinely outweighed any likely modest cost savings from locating elsewhere.
You can get to Luton, Milton Keynes, Stevenage or a number of other small London satellite towns in less than 2 hours from Oxford, and less than 1 from central London. These are all pretty banal collections of concrete buildings, but would allow you to buy a venue for a fraction of the cost. It seems hard to escape the conclusion that this decision was mainly made based on a Manor house in Oxford being more aesthetically appealing than a concrete office building on an industrial estate or small town centre.
The lack of a 2 hour commute is nothing to sneeze at though. CFAR has (had? I haven’t checked in on it lately) a venue a couple of hours away from Berkeley that they’ve used for organizing workshops and events, and the tribulations of organizing getting everyone to and from the venue pretty much ensured it was only used for running 4-5 day events. It made it significantly more difficult for folks at CFAR or MIRI to pop up to make “guest appearances” at workshops and the like significantly reducing value to participants.
Speaking from personal experience, that distance rather complicated the value proposition for me, for whether it was worth showing up for a day at the end of an event to get to know some of the participants.
At the end of the day, the optics seem poor, but the actual cost for the space seems to be what I’d expect for a space that can sleep that many people, zoned so you can use them as actual bedrooms and have people stay on site. By the time it is kitted out in proper group-house density with beds in every nook and cranny you can find, you’d be able to fit a rather large number of attendees into the space.
You can go grab some concrete office space in an industrial park somewhere, but at the end of the day you generally can’t legally have people sleep in that office space—no matter what Elon is trying to do with Twitter HQ this month, so you’d wind up needing to sublet nearby apartments and the like for attendees, assuming you can find ones that legally allow you to do so, or pay premiums for hotel stays.
Part of why the CFAR venue wound up as far outside of Berkeley as it did, was they literally couldn’t find any place closer that would legally let them treat it like a bed and breakfast for hosting attendees.
https://www.rationality.org/resources/updates/2017/cfar-2017-venue-update is an older post describing the rationale for purchasing the space I mentioned above.
Habryka and the rest of the Lightcone Infrastructure team seem to be wrangling the same sort of considerations as they try to provide gathering space for EA and rationalist folks in the bay area, today, except there a roughly equivalent amount of funding doesn’t buy anything like a fancy-looking but run-down historical abbey.
Thank you, this is a good part of what I wanted to know.
Is Wytham Abbey being used 365 days a year, though? A couple thousand a day is a perfectly reasonable cost for a conference. But why would you need to own a space that large permanently? I’d be just as shocked at the idea of renting out Oxford College’s conference hall 365 days a year. Nobody is having that many conferences.
I noted the same in the following sentence: To get realistic comparisons, you would need to adjust for many other factors sometimes of order 0.3-3x, like occupancy, costs of adjusting venues to your needs, costs of the staff,...
For example, if you use your venue 65% of time, you should multiply the mentioned figure by 0.65.
What’s pushing in the opposite direction is for example this: if you use a rented venue, and often spend 1-2 days before and 1 day after the event on setting it up according to your needs / returning to original state, you need to account for that. For e.g. 5 days event, it can increase the rented venue cost by 20-40%.
How various considerations add up is hard to say in the abstract.