Just to set some context: 15 million pounds may sound like a lot of money to young academics and researchers, or to buyers of residential real estate (e.g. typical single family homes). It may look like ‘lavish spending’.
But it’s really not a lot compared to typical buildings for academic departments on and around university campuses.
I’ve worked in a dozen universities over the last 35+ years, and we frequently see announcements of new buildings being constructed for 10-50 million dollars—even in state universities with relatively limited budgets.
This 2016 review of building costs in higher education is slightly outdated now (given high inflation rates since then), but it reports a typical cost of $800/square feet for new academic buildings.
Consider a modest building for a medium-sized department like mine (e.g. 25 faculty, 70 grad students, 15 staff, etc.). The building (Logan Hall, UNM) is 55,000 gross square feet, so its build cost new would be about $44 million.
Costs for new building in the Oxford area are probably even higher, and greatly complicated by British zoning and building regulations within the Oxford Green Belt.
Long story short, 15 million pounds might sound like a lot for Wytham Abbey, but it’s not out of line for an academic research/conference center, and it’s arguably fairly cheap, given the extremely high complexity and cost of building in south-east England.
I appreciate the context, thank you. However, two points came to mind:
It seems like the purpose is quite different from the medium-sized university department you described, running workshops and retreats vs what standard academic departments do (offices, lecture halls, labs). So I’m not sure how good the comparison is
You point out that in the context of university buildings, it’s not a lot of money. But in the context of CEA’s other spending, it does seem like a lot. CEA received $14 million in funding from FTX[1], which has been discussed a lot. So it’s understandable that spending a supposedly similar amount of money on a single venue without much public explanation will raise some eyebrows.
Either way, I don’t think anyone can really judge whether the investment was a good decision based on the currently availabe information. Which is why I’d appreciate a more detailed explanation from CEA.
number taken from the wiki entry on CEA. I chose to use this comparison because I couldn’t immediately find recent numbers for how much money CEA is spending in total, but I assume that 15 million is a significant portion of it.
CEA received $14 million in funding from FTX, which has been discussed a lot.
Discussed because it was received from FTX, or discussed because $14 million is a ton of money for EA and EA-writ-large should always debate spending and investments at that scale?
Agree. The absolute value seems much less important than the relative value to CEA, since it gives us some evidence of how they might spend a scaled-up budget.
I’m not sure how to compare Wytham Abbey, in terms of building size, form, functions, square footage, renovation costs, grounds, upkeep, etc to a standard university building. But of course, a standard university building at a regional state university in the US is quite different from a Grade 1 listed manor house built in 1480.
It’s not just about the money. The money calculations can make complete sense and everyone still feel uncomfortable going there and people are turned off from EA.
It’s the fact that it’s a mansion which has had a bunch of rich people live in it.
If it were a modern conference center which cost 30 million pounds, it wouldn’t get as much bad headlines. Consider these two headlines:
”EA group buys a big conference center”
″EA group buys a mansion, the previous residents have included Oliver Cromwell, Elizabeth I, etc.”
which looks worse?
edited: I replaced “castle” with “mansion” and replaced “owners” with “residents”.
Just for clarity’s sake: it is not a castle and it was never owned by Oliver Cromwell or Elizabeth I.
On the first point, castles and manor houses are quite different things.
On the second point, Cromwell and Elizabeth were both visitors to the building. They never owned it.
Relatedly, there’s a common joke told in UK manor houses: “And this, this is the one bed in England that Elizabeth I never slept in”. The point is that Elizabeth did yearly tours where she would travel the country and stay in lots of manor houses (it meant she didn’t have to pay for her own upkeep but could instead make the lords host her). For this reason, quite a lot of manor houses have a room that Elizabeth I slept in. I’m not claiming it’s not a big deal at all, but I am noting that I think without context it’s easy to misstate how big a deal it is.
edit: I spoke with my American friends and they also referred to it as “a castle or whatever”, so I guess it’s normal for Americans to think in those words.
The average person reading this news in the US on Twitter or a newspaper isn’t going to think, “oh well, it’s only a manor house, not a castle”.
Your point could be totally accurate but I don’t think you’re addressing the point of how the public will perceive it, which is what I am concerned about. And yeah it’s totally unfair that people will form knee jerk reactions and everyone should really investigate claims that they read, but that’s not the reality we live in.
(Will Bradshaw made a good point about how perception of this purchase could be different in the UK vs the US. In the US we don’t know what a manor house is, but y’all might in the UK or Europe in general.)
Do you think that the perception will be, “meh, no big deal, that’s just a manor house,” and that people will differentiate between a manor house and a castle, or that they will consider the difference between a resident and owner in a significant way? If so, then yeah there may just be a cultural divide here.
To be clear, the distinction isn’t between resident and owner. It’s between owner and guest. I do not believe Elizabeth I resided at Wytham except in the sense that she stayed as a guest. So unless people in the US use “reside” to mean “stayed in the house once as a guest” then I do not think Elizabeth ever resided at Wytham Abbey.
On the more general point, I agree that my comment didn’t address your central claims. It wasn’t intended to. I think the central claim is worth making and discussing, I also just think it’s worth discussing it in accurate terms. My comment was intended to address this issue of accuracy.
It may be true that people won’t generally investigate the claims they make, but I believe that we should care about what the truth actually is in forum discussions. I think as much as possible, forum posts and comments should not misrepresent. Of course, it will happen sometimes and is no big deal, but in such cases I think it is a good thing if someone corrects a misrepresentation.
To the extent that any media backlash is the result of Americans making assumptions about other countries they don’t know much about, I’m a lot less sympathetic to the claim that CEA (a UK-based charity buying a venue in the UK!) should make otherwise-suboptimal purchasing decisions in order to avoid it.
(EDITed to tone down unnecessarily hurtful language.)
As someone who is neither American nor from the UK I think manor vs castle is a distinction without difference. It’s an extremely ostentatious purchase in any case and claiming that not being well versed in the nuances of palatial UK buildings is ignorant or offensive is at best severely off putting.
My point isn’t really whether it’s a castle or not. Sometimes I use words interchangeably, like calling a turkey a chicken. I think my point was about media perception or something… yeah sorry if I’m not super smart.
It’s not really nice to call people ignorant and presumptuous, and doesn’t lead to super great dialogue. I don’t think it really becomes EA to look down on other people, call them ignorant and presumptuous because they didn’t use the right words. A lot of people upvoted your comment, which makes me question whether I want to engage with EA more.
Yeah I might be ignorant. The people who hear about this manor house and are turned off from EA might be ignorant. So *** them right? They suck! But then EA is just sort of doomed to be this irrelevant movement that nobody wants to be part of because it is critical of other people and doesn’t care about what anybody else thinks or feels.
I’m sorry I hurt your feelings. I wrote my comment quickly before leaving my computer and didn’t put enough thought into my phrasing.
I do think there’s something real I’m gesturing at here—something like “Americans should be more humble in judging the offensiveness of things done in other cultures”. But I also think you’re probably pointing at a real dynamic affecting the conversation around this purchase, that is useful to have in our models, and I’m grateful that you did that.
It’s not just you. Before I wrote a reply sort of calling out the insults, your post had way more upvotes than any of my comments. I think there’s something systemic about the EA forum which doesn’t encourage good dialogue (I’m suspicious of the numbers at the top of comments, for starters).
I totally agreed with you when you pointed out that Americans and people from the UK might have different perspectives on this topic. So yeah, there’s something real you’re gesturing at. It’s a cultural difference. People from different economic backgrounds probably also look at this purchase differently.
That said, I don’t think this purchase was particularly frugal in any cultural context. Even Owen Cotton-Barratt, who played a big role in getting the manor house purchased, said (in the comment above) he thought the beautiful surroundings would be inspiring and it wasn’t done as a cost saving sort of thing.
And yeah, I know I was making a useful point about the real dynamic affecting the conversation! What I wrote wasn’t written perfectly, but the fact remains it’s a big fancy mansion. I made the comment that the average person reading a headline isn’t going to think “hey it was actually only $10 million, not $15 million,” they’re just going to think “hey that’s a big fancy mansion where a bunch of rich people stayed, purchased by a charity”—and we’ve already seen this in headlines (so yeah, of course it’s a valid point, however poorly worded) and the fact that my comment was corrected in some ways which largely ignored the main thing I was arguing, and then the comment correcting me was upvoted 27 times compared to my upvote of 7, really says a lot about the lack of this platform for good dialogue and listening to others. I am just saying, it’s not you, you don’t need to feel bad, but I’m kind of venting that this platform isn’t great for dialogue and I wonder who thought that copying reddit (with the upvote, downvote thing) would lead to a good format for intellectual dialogue and an exchange of ideas. Feel free to ignore this paragraph (or whatever you want) but I’m just sort of venting at this point. I mean the counter-argument is that the people who read my comment might have agreed if it had been worded better, but I have a hard time believing that because in addition how much your comment was originally upvoted. I think people just had an opinion, and then read something they agreed with, and then upvoted that, just like they do on every damn forum on the internet, and your comment was no different, and that’s cool man I mean lots of people get upset and write mean things on the internet, you shouldn’t feel bad, but let’s just all go ahead and admit that this forum isn’t enlightened or a great place for dialogue or any of that, and it’s maybe 20% better than the YouTube comment section, which is the absolute asshole of the earth in terms of intelligent dialogue. Okay, sorry, done with my complete rant.
Your comment made false claims, and these false claims substantially exaggerated the issue (which isn’t to say there isn’t a serious issue left worth addressing after the claims are corrected and the exaggerated removed). I assumed (and still assume) this was just a well-intentioned mistake on your end.
I pointed out that these claims were false. This wasn’t intended as an attack on you (people can go back and look at the comment and judge for themselves whether it was appropriate). Because I assumed (and still assume) you are interested in the truth, my assumption was that you would reply with something like, “Oh, that’s my bad. I’ve edited accordingly”, before turning back to discuss the substantive issue.
Had you done that, I think that people would have moved on to discussing the substance of your concern (I doubt that anyone much cares about this discussion of clarifications, in and of itself).
Instead, your response felt to me fairly dismissive. It did not feel to me like you truly acknowledged that you’d made a mistake here. I think this choice on your end was well intentioned, and I can see where you were coming from: I think you were just trying to drag people’s attention back to what you see as the core issue.
Unfortunately, I think that not simply acknowledging the mistake can be misinterpreted as you not really being interested in the truth and as instead just trying to score points. It is somewhat natural that this might make people uninterested in engaging with you, because you might not look to them like a good faith actor.
I think the EA Forum is far from perfect, in many ways (perhaps including some that you point to), but I do think you’re underestimating how much this is a reaction to what looks like a failure to acknowledge misrepresentation.
By the way, I’m not sure whether it will come across this way, but the fact that I’m writing this message reflects the fact that I do genuinely believe you’re a good faith actor, and also reflects the fact that I think you deserve an attempt at an explanation. I hope that my genuine desire for productive conversation comes across, though I wouldn’t be surprised if I have communicated poorly at some point in this message. If so, I apologise.
You could be right that people argued against my point because I wrote “castle” instead of “manor house” and “owned” instead of “stayed at”. To me, those felt like details that are kind of incidental to the main point, even if they did exaggerate the point, and so correcting them was this way to undermine my argument without really engaging with me.
I think we definitely had different opinions. On the whole yeah of course we’re both acting in our best faith haha. I’m just a guy who doesn’t keep track of details as much as long as the meaning is the same (like mixing up “chicken” with “turkey”) and you’re someone who places a high value on factual correctness, even when the facts don’t change the underlying argument. Are you someone who corrects friends when they’re talking? Everyone has a different personality, and yeah we’re definitely all acting in good faith.
Kind of regardless of all this I do think that people on the internet upvote what they already believe in, regardless of misuse of words. You haven’t totally convinced me there, but you’re right I think that misuse of words played some part. It’s just that if people (such as you) wanted to engage me in a good faith manner I’d hope they say “hey I understand your point here and here, but you used the terms here and here incorrectly”, but instead you corrected me (without addressing my point) and another guy called me pompous and ignorant.
Last thing I do just want to say we both have good intentions and we both felt each other’s comments were dismissive. Perhaps we would both rewrite things if we could go back in time. We’re not writing books here, we probably aren’t proofreading, and we probably just have different ways of looking at the world. I disagree that people are neutral in what they upvote and write online, and I still think that people upvote what they agree with, without giving things substantive thought. You haven’t changed my mind on that. But yeah you’re right it didn’t exactly help things that I used the wrong words.
Let’s just move on. Thanks for your thoughts! We both have a lot of effective altruisming to do and I’m not sure this is it.
edit: I think there’s also potentially a trend on this forum to be positive about EA, regardless of all the talk about red teaming. So it’s very possible that one explanation of why everyone in disagreement to this and other comments I’ve written is that they go against EA decisions somehow. There’s also a lot of comments here which support the decision to buy the manor house. Honestly, when I compare this to my experience on reddit.com/r/effectivealtruism where everyone was like WTF this purchase is terrible and the one negative comment I made there, someone else agreed with me. So yeah overall just seems a bit of dogpiling and cliquish, which isn’t too surprising because that’s how the internet works. I think upvoting and downvoting is a terrible terrible idea for listening to others and having independent thoughts.
I’d be curious about why you think my comment about optics was also heavily downvoted (well, first it was upvoted, then downvoted). There weren’t any word mixups in that case. So to me it seems like there’s some explanation besides word mixups, which you are claiming is the main reason. (Indeed I think that may have been your main reason for not agreeing with my comment, but there isn’t much evidence that it’s the reason for negative reaction in general to that comment. I mean even in your comment you said you think that’s why, but don’t provide much evidence (other than people upvoting your comment, again, but it’s sort of weird to think that the evidence for why people are reacting on a forum would be how they react to ideas about why they react a certain way)).
It’s a little disappointing that one of the main things you got out of my response was a potential personal attack. Definitely wasn’t meant that way. Yeah this conversation isn’t really helping either of us. Take care.
“a large building or group of buildings fortified with thick walls, battlements, and often a moat; castles were the strongholds of noblemen in the Middle Ages
2. any massive dwelling somewhat like this”
Personally, and as a Canadian who mostly learned about castles in French, I probably wouldn’t use castle (or chateau) even informally to describe Wyntham Abbey, since it’s not as big (especially as tall) as how I imagine castles to be. My images of ‘manor’ and ‘mansion’ are also smaller and more compact than Wytham Abbey, too, though. ‘Estate’ seems about right.
There’s no debate over the definition of a castle: Wytham Abbey is not a castle (it is not a form of military fortification). Roughly, Wytham Abbey is a castle in the way that an underground eco-house is a nuclear bunker. Which is to say: not at all (it’s not some mere technicality that makes it not a castle; it is radically not a castle). There is no debate about definition to be had here.
So I’m not having a debate about definition; I’m noting a misrepresentation. I agree that the optics issue is already lost. I also think that we should not be misrepresenting things on the forum, and I think this misrepresentation is not totally irrelevant.
To give a comparison: I think calling Wytham Abbey a castle it’s roughly as big a misrepresentation as claiming that Wytham Abbey cost £80 million rather than £15 million. A castle is a much more expensive, much rarer structure than a mansion (which is basically what Wytham Abbey would be accurately described as: a mansion).
As noted, I agree that the optics battle is lost, but I find it a little odd that people seem to think it’s totally irrelevant that a comment misrepresented things in a way that radically overstates the case (a castle owned by Elizabeth I is more than an order of magnitude more ostentatious than a manor house visited by Elizabeth I). This sort of misrepresentation is not good epistemics (just as it would be bad if a forum comment misstated the price as being £80 million and it would be reasonable to correct this misstatement).
My statement is the following: let’s just represent things correctly and then have the perfectly reasonable discussion from that starting point. If £15 million is too much to spend, let’s say that (rather than discussing whether £80 million is too much to spend). If a manor house is the wrong thing to buy, let’s say that (rather than discussing whether it would be wrong to buy Elizabeth I’s castle).
It’s entirely reasonable to say, as a normative claim, that people should be accurate in reporting.
But when you are thinking about reputational impact of a choice you should be examining not just what the reaction would be to strictly accurate reporting, but how people operating in bad faith could easily represent it, or how good faith people could misinterpret it. Whether they should or not is irrelevant to the predictable consequences.
I want to downvote this comment more strongly than any other comment I’ve downvoted on the EA Forum.
On the EA Forum, we should care about what’s actually true. “Haha, you lose for having to clarify your point!” may be the rule of the game in soundbite politics, but it can’t become the rule of the game in EA’s internal decision-making or in conversations on the EA Forum, or we have little hope of actually doing the most good (as opposed to “doing the thing that’s safest and plays the best, in adversarial soundbite form, to a random consumer of mass media with no context or interest in the topic”).
Truth matters, and the hearts and minds we want to win should heavily skew toward those who care about truth, and not just on what things look like to hypothetical third parties.
I agree much more with Rob’s principles than with my guess at projectionconfusion’s principles. But looking just at PC’s literal statements: yeah, it is stupid anyone thought manor house vs castle was a relevant argument. The question is whether you think it’s a good idea to spend lots of money on a large building at all (I think it can be but obviously depends on specifics), and if so, does it matter if it’s a nice building whose previous owners were rich. I think it’s obvious the latter doesn’t matter, but for people for whom it does matter I don’t think it matters exactly what kind of large old rich person building it is.
So I do view people arguing manor house vs castle as conceding that a castle would be bad optics, and that this is dumb because none of the differences between manor houses and castles are relevant to the question. I just don’t care about the optics of buying large old rich people buildings.
I agree that people shouldn’t think that way, but observably they do. And acknowledging human irrationality and working around it was the founding insight or rationalism and EA. I honestly can’t really respond to most of your first two paragraphs since it seems to be based on the idea we shouldn’t even be considering the question.
I’m not saying truth doesn’t matter (if it came across that way I apologise) but that reputational effects are real and also matter. Which is very different from the strawman position of “we shouldn’t do anything at all odd or unpopular”.
Truth matters, and the hearts and minds we want to win should heavily skew toward those who care about truth, and not just on what things look like to hypothetical third parties.
I disagree with this fundamentally. Its short sighted to narrow down the people we want to persuade to being only a certain set of people. The donations and other contributions of everyone are equally valuable. And the general perception of EA effects people’s likelihood to learn more to begin with.
These are not hypothetical people either. This and FTX are the main stories people are discussing online in relation to EA, and therefore what comes up when people initially do searches looking into it. And if someone’s first impression is negative they are less likely to find out more and more likely to dismiss the movement.
To narrow down our disagreement a bit. Is your position a) this won’t have reputational effects on EA b) there will be reputational effects but they won’t decrease recruitment and donations or c) even if it does decrease recruitment and donations we shouldn’t care about that.
Cool, thanks for clarifying your view! To clarify, here’s a version of your comment that I wouldn’t have objected to at all (filling in details where I left things in square brackets):
‘You’re right that the building is a manor house rather than a castle, and I’m generally in favor of EAs being accurate and precise in our language. That said, I think [demographic D] will mostly not be convinced of EA’s virtue by this argument, because people still think of manor houses as quite fancy. And I think it’s important for EA to convince [demographic D] of our virtue, because [two-sentence summary of why I think we should prioritize appealing to demographic D].’
The main things I found objectionable about “At the point you are having to debate the definition of a castle you’ve lost the optics argument even if you’re technically correct.” were:
The response is snarky, in a way that slightly nudges EA toward a norm of “it’s cringey and low-status to get into nit-picky arguments about what’s true, when what really matters is public perception”. I want to pump hard against moves in that direction, even small ones. I’m already wary of how much EA focuses on public perception; propagating the meme that we should focus on public perception and it’s laughable to care about what’s true (on topics with PR implications) seems outright toxic to me, even if that wasn’t your intent at all.
The response says nothing about whether you agree or disagree with the nitpick about castle terminology, further reinforcing the idea that accuracy is silly and unimportant for EAs to internally think about whenever a topic is PR-adjacent.
The response gives no argument for who you think EA should be trying to court here, or why we should be courting them. I think this is a pretty important step, because it’s quite important (and not trivial) for EAs to carefully mentally distinguish “let’s do PR action X because of specific real-world goal Y” from generalized “we feel socially anxious that we aren’t being socially embraced by enough other monkeys, and will reflexively try to appease them”.
The latter approach doesn’t work in a hostile environment of journalists or Twitter trolls who will strategically drum up outrage in order to push your psychological buttons and compel concessions from you. If you’re going to “play the game” and try to outmaneuver them, it’s very important that you do so in a clear-sighted way. Which requires being unusually explicit about why you think X is a good idea, as opposed to just smirkily shooting down other EAs’ points with an “lol how cringe of you to respond to falsehoods with corrections”.
If it actually matters to avoid some “cringe” behavior, then we should do that in a self-aware way that involves explicitly understanding what we’re doing and why, rather than just parroting whatever the current social gradient is. This helps ensure, among other things, that EA deliberately keeps its cringiness in contexts where it’s actually better to select the cringe option.
More broadly, I objected to what struck me as an attempt to import into the EA Forum the norms of “play the politics game rather than trying to figure out what’s true”, as opposed to merely describing those norms here and explicitly proposing some policy response.
If you’re going to take on the epistemic risk of playing the Game, you need to be sure that you’re explicitly simulating the Game’s moving parts in your world-model, as opposed to steering toward options based primarily on inchoate feelings about what’s popular or unpopular. Otherwise, you’re liable to over-weight near-term status risks, because human brains hyperbolically discount, and were mostly built by evolution to handle coalitional politics in ~200-person local communities where rejection meant literal death.
To narrow down our disagreement a bit. Is your position a) this won’t have reputational effects on EA b) there will be reputational effects but they won’t decrease recruitment and donations or c) even if it does decrease recruitment and donations we shouldn’t care about that.
None of the above! It’s: This will plausibly decrease recruitment and donations a nonzero amount, and that’s a real cost, but news-cycle-obsessed status-anxious people will tend to fixate on this more than makes sense, in ways that:
exaggerate the long-term importance of specific news-cycle ups and downs, resulting in panicky and untethered-from-reality reactions;
distract from more useful stuff we’d otherwise be doing;
provide bad incentives for nervous EAs to dissemble-in-the-name-of-EA or rush-to-concede-too-much;
signal weakness and blood-in-the-water in the political game;
and incentivize adversaries to try to push your buttons more.
Something can be a real cost/problem, and yet the natural reaction to that cost/problem be something that makes things worse rather than better.
I think a few EAs should have a day job of thinking about hit-piece writers (and related topics), and other EAs should mostly ignore the topic, except insofar as they see locally false things and (candidly, unstrategically) chime in to say the true thing in response. (In particular, we should chime in with the true thing whether doing so makes EA look better or worse.)
Its short sighted to narrow down the people we want to persuade to being only a certain set of people. The donations and other contributions of everyone are equally valuable. And the general perception of EA effects people’s likelihood to learn more to begin with.
I agree that we shouldn’t completely write off anyone. But we should very much prioritize reaching some groups over others, and it’s rarely the case that there’s any action available to EA that will please everyone equally. E.g., research of a given quality level is equally useful regardless of who it comes from, but not all human beings are equally likely to do useful research, and pretending that they are doesn’t help anyone.
We shouldn’t put equal effort into outreach to theologians and to biosecurity specialists. Generalizing this principle, we shouldn’t put equal effort into outreach to “people who care a lot about truth” and “people who don’t care a lot about truth”. (Though yes, we should put nonzero effort into reaching the latter group, insofar as we can do so without compromising our core principles or neglecting more-tractable and more-important opportunities.)
I wonder to what degree there’s an America/Europe divide (or at least a UK/non-UK divide) here.
From my perspective as an (admittedly fairly well-off) Brit, the English countryside is littered with these kinds of manor houses. Seriously, they’re everywhere. Turning them into conference centres is honestly a better use for them than most common alternatives.
(Not making a claim about whether the Wytham purchase was a good idea all-things-considered—I currently lean weakly towards “no”—just commenting on this specific aspect.)
For calibration, I’d guess that there are probably 20+ properties (90% CI roughly 10-200) within a 90-minute drive of where I grew up that fall into roughly the same reference class as Wytham Abbey. Including several actual castles, though very few of those would be for sale.
The question here isn’t whether building a new castle from scratch would cost £15,000,000, or whether the real estate is properly valued; I assume it is. The question is whether you need to buy a castle to host yearly or monthly conferences—to which the answer is clearly not.
Investing £15,000,000 would yield roughly £1,000,000 a year on the stock market. If you are spending a million pounds on the venue for a conference, you are not doing it right. A convention hall runs in the tens of thousands of dollars, not the millions. This is a 10-100x markup.
£15,000,000 sounds like a lot to a researcher because it is.
In my experience from actually renting spaces to run tech conferences and events, a convention hall in a reasonably dense city runs in the tens of thousands for a single <5 day long event.
Consider just 3 breakout rooms, typically ~$90-$180/room/hour, 8 hours a day, 5 days takes you into the $20-$40k range, that gets you no food, no lodging for attendees, once you add that stuff in and the all-in cost for a fully-paid for typical 30-40 person event can easily land just inside $80-100k, with costs growing slightly sublinearly per person for a while before they balloon again once you rise above the size where there are multiple competing venues in your area.
If the convention center you are using isn’t a hotel now you have to move your attendees back and forth. For tech conferences you can charge a few hundred $ per person, and have them book with your hotel out of a bloc, incurring obligations from your org to a hotel about occupancy, and then you can generally come up with a way to make your event break even. Conferences are expensive for a reason.
Locating an event in the middle of nowhere? Maybe that room becomes maybe a fixed rate $350 space at a cheaper hotel, $1000/day for 3 becomes so $5k for a 5 day event, but now its harder to get folks to the venue.
At the end of the day, in either of these scenarios you are subsidizing the hotel and event space industry rather than focusing in on your events.
On the other hand, using the model of a typical CFAR event, using a venue that is already owned, you are dealing with some cleanup, a couple of members of the team providing operations support, catering costs, but the venue itself remains relatively customized to purpose. People can sleep on site, enabling folks to drift in and out of conversations, the event can run all night with people talking in smaller more intimate groups long past when a hotel would have kicked you out of the space. If your goal is to built a community and have folks come together, this is a much better model.
If you can keep this above 50% utilization, this even strikes me as way more than break-even or even if I’m delusionally out of touch and hotel prices have some how plummeted in the last 3 years while the cost of everything else has gone up, at least far closer than the 10-100x swing you are arguing for here.
Lightcone, by comparison, has been getting about 75% utilization out of the home it has been using as a conference space.
While those are reasonable comparisons it rather raises the question of why you are buying a venue in one of the most expensive areas of the UK to begin with.
Were there any business cases made comparing this to other cheaper venues in different locations? That’s the kind of basic due diligence I’d expect at most organizations I work with in my professional life, and I’m concerned if it’s not the case here.
Well Wytham Abbey is only a 10 minute Uber ride from Oxford rail station, which is only 1 hour from London Paddington Station; and it’s reasonably convenient by rail from Heathrow and Gatwick airports.
The key features of a good conference venue are (1) easy access to international flights and domestic rail connections, and (2) an enticing location that can attract busy, choosy intellectuals who have many other options of places to go and people to see.
Those features generally involve being located in places that many other people value—i.e. that, given supply & demand, tend to involve high real estate prices.
Just to set some context: 15 million pounds may sound like a lot of money to young academics and researchers, or to buyers of residential real estate (e.g. typical single family homes). It may look like ‘lavish spending’.
But it’s really not a lot compared to typical buildings for academic departments on and around university campuses.
I’ve worked in a dozen universities over the last 35+ years, and we frequently see announcements of new buildings being constructed for 10-50 million dollars—even in state universities with relatively limited budgets.
This 2016 review of building costs in higher education is slightly outdated now (given high inflation rates since then), but it reports a typical cost of $800/square feet for new academic buildings.
Consider a modest building for a medium-sized department like mine (e.g. 25 faculty, 70 grad students, 15 staff, etc.). The building (Logan Hall, UNM) is 55,000 gross square feet, so its build cost new would be about $44 million.
Costs for new building in the Oxford area are probably even higher, and greatly complicated by British zoning and building regulations within the Oxford Green Belt.
Long story short, 15 million pounds might sound like a lot for Wytham Abbey, but it’s not out of line for an academic research/conference center, and it’s arguably fairly cheap, given the extremely high complexity and cost of building in south-east England.
I appreciate the context, thank you. However, two points came to mind:
It seems like the purpose is quite different from the medium-sized university department you described, running workshops and retreats vs what standard academic departments do (offices, lecture halls, labs). So I’m not sure how good the comparison is
You point out that in the context of university buildings, it’s not a lot of money. But in the context of CEA’s other spending, it does seem like a lot. CEA received $14 million in funding from FTX[1], which has been discussed a lot. So it’s understandable that spending a supposedly similar amount of money on a single venue without much public explanation will raise some eyebrows.
Either way, I don’t think anyone can really judge whether the investment was a good decision based on the currently availabe information. Which is why I’d appreciate a more detailed explanation from CEA.
number taken from the wiki entry on CEA. I chose to use this comparison because I couldn’t immediately find recent numbers for how much money CEA is spending in total, but I assume that 15 million is a significant portion of it.
Discussed because it was received from FTX, or discussed because $14 million is a ton of money for EA and EA-writ-large should always debate spending and investments at that scale?
I see forty-four Open Phil grants at the $10+ million level on https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/?sort=high-to-low#categories. How many of these were extensively debated on the EA Forum before the grant was made, or ought to have been?
Given that purchase price minus resale price would probably be more like $1 million for a property like this, though, a fairer comparison might be to look at every time EA has spent at least $1 million on something. (As a start, Open Phil has made 399 grants at the $1+ million level.)
I really don’t think those should all receive extensive public debate.
Open Phil at least publishes decent explanations on their grants. CEA/EV should do this as well.
Agree. The absolute value seems much less important than the relative value to CEA, since it gives us some evidence of how they might spend a scaled-up budget.
joko—these are fair points.
I’m not sure how to compare Wytham Abbey, in terms of building size, form, functions, square footage, renovation costs, grounds, upkeep, etc to a standard university building. But of course, a standard university building at a regional state university in the US is quite different from a Grade 1 listed manor house built in 1480.
It’s not just about the money. The money calculations can make complete sense and everyone still feel uncomfortable going there and people are turned off from EA.
It’s the fact that it’s a mansion which has had a bunch of rich people live in it.
If it were a modern conference center which cost 30 million pounds, it wouldn’t get as much bad headlines. Consider these two headlines:
”EA group buys a big conference center”
″EA group buys a mansion, the previous residents have included Oliver Cromwell, Elizabeth I, etc.”
which looks worse?
edited: I replaced “castle” with “mansion” and replaced “owners” with “residents”.
Just for clarity’s sake: it is not a castle and it was never owned by Oliver Cromwell or Elizabeth I.
On the first point, castles and manor houses are quite different things.
On the second point, Cromwell and Elizabeth were both visitors to the building. They never owned it.
Relatedly, there’s a common joke told in UK manor houses: “And this, this is the one bed in England that Elizabeth I never slept in”. The point is that Elizabeth did yearly tours where she would travel the country and stay in lots of manor houses (it meant she didn’t have to pay for her own upkeep but could instead make the lords host her). For this reason, quite a lot of manor houses have a room that Elizabeth I slept in. I’m not claiming it’s not a big deal at all, but I am noting that I think without context it’s easy to misstate how big a deal it is.
edit: I spoke with my American friends and they also referred to it as “a castle or whatever”, so I guess it’s normal for Americans to think in those words.
The average person reading this news in the US on Twitter or a newspaper isn’t going to think, “oh well, it’s only a manor house, not a castle”.
Your point could be totally accurate but I don’t think you’re addressing the point of how the public will perceive it, which is what I am concerned about. And yeah it’s totally unfair that people will form knee jerk reactions and everyone should really investigate claims that they read, but that’s not the reality we live in.
(Will Bradshaw made a good point about how perception of this purchase could be different in the UK vs the US. In the US we don’t know what a manor house is, but y’all might in the UK or Europe in general.)
Do you think that the perception will be, “meh, no big deal, that’s just a manor house,” and that people will differentiate between a manor house and a castle, or that they will consider the difference between a resident and owner in a significant way? If so, then yeah there may just be a cultural divide here.
To be clear, the distinction isn’t between resident and owner. It’s between owner and guest. I do not believe Elizabeth I resided at Wytham except in the sense that she stayed as a guest. So unless people in the US use “reside” to mean “stayed in the house once as a guest” then I do not think Elizabeth ever resided at Wytham Abbey.
On the more general point, I agree that my comment didn’t address your central claims. It wasn’t intended to. I think the central claim is worth making and discussing, I also just think it’s worth discussing it in accurate terms. My comment was intended to address this issue of accuracy.
It may be true that people won’t generally investigate the claims they make, but I believe that we should care about what the truth actually is in forum discussions. I think as much as possible, forum posts and comments should not misrepresent. Of course, it will happen sometimes and is no big deal, but in such cases I think it is a good thing if someone corrects a misrepresentation.
To the extent that any media backlash is the result of Americans making assumptions about other countries they don’t know much about, I’m a lot less sympathetic to the claim that CEA (a UK-based charity buying a venue in the UK!) should make otherwise-suboptimal purchasing decisions in order to avoid it.
(EDITed to tone down unnecessarily hurtful language.)
As someone who is neither American nor from the UK I think manor vs castle is a distinction without difference. It’s an extremely ostentatious purchase in any case and claiming that not being well versed in the nuances of palatial UK buildings is ignorant or offensive is at best severely off putting.
My point isn’t really whether it’s a castle or not. Sometimes I use words interchangeably, like calling a turkey a chicken. I think my point was about media perception or something… yeah sorry if I’m not super smart.
It’s not really nice to call people ignorant and presumptuous, and doesn’t lead to super great dialogue. I don’t think it really becomes EA to look down on other people, call them ignorant and presumptuous because they didn’t use the right words. A lot of people upvoted your comment, which makes me question whether I want to engage with EA more.
Yeah I might be ignorant. The people who hear about this manor house and are turned off from EA might be ignorant. So *** them right? They suck! But then EA is just sort of doomed to be this irrelevant movement that nobody wants to be part of because it is critical of other people and doesn’t care about what anybody else thinks or feels.
I’m sorry I hurt your feelings. I wrote my comment quickly before leaving my computer and didn’t put enough thought into my phrasing.
I do think there’s something real I’m gesturing at here—something like “Americans should be more humble in judging the offensiveness of things done in other cultures”. But I also think you’re probably pointing at a real dynamic affecting the conversation around this purchase, that is useful to have in our models, and I’m grateful that you did that.
It’s not just you. Before I wrote a reply sort of calling out the insults, your post had way more upvotes than any of my comments. I think there’s something systemic about the EA forum which doesn’t encourage good dialogue (I’m suspicious of the numbers at the top of comments, for starters).
I totally agreed with you when you pointed out that Americans and people from the UK might have different perspectives on this topic. So yeah, there’s something real you’re gesturing at. It’s a cultural difference. People from different economic backgrounds probably also look at this purchase differently.
That said, I don’t think this purchase was particularly frugal in any cultural context. Even Owen Cotton-Barratt, who played a big role in getting the manor house purchased, said (in the comment above) he thought the beautiful surroundings would be inspiring and it wasn’t done as a cost saving sort of thing.
And yeah, I know I was making a useful point about the real dynamic affecting the conversation! What I wrote wasn’t written perfectly, but the fact remains it’s a big fancy mansion.
I made the comment that the average person reading a headline isn’t going to think “hey it was actually only $10 million, not $15 million,” they’re just going to think “hey that’s a big fancy mansion where a bunch of rich people stayed, purchased by a charity”—and we’ve already seen this in headlines (so yeah, of course it’s a valid point, however poorly worded) and the fact that my comment was corrected in some ways which largely ignored the main thing I was arguing, and then the comment correcting me was upvoted 27 times compared to my upvote of 7, really says a lot about the lack of this platform for good dialogue and listening to others. I am just saying, it’s not you, you don’t need to feel bad, but I’m kind of venting that this platform isn’t great for dialogue and I wonder who thought that copying reddit (with the upvote, downvote thing) would lead to a good format for intellectual dialogue and an exchange of ideas. Feel free to ignore this paragraph (or whatever you want) but I’m just sort of venting at this point. I mean the counter-argument is that the people who read my comment might have agreed if it had been worded better, but I have a hard time believing that because in addition how much your comment was originally upvoted. I think people just had an opinion, and then read something they agreed with, and then upvoted that, just like they do on every damn forum on the internet, and your comment was no different, and that’s cool man I mean lots of people get upset and write mean things on the internet, you shouldn’t feel bad, but let’s just all go ahead and admit that this forum isn’t enlightened or a great place for dialogue or any of that, and it’s maybe 20% better than the YouTube comment section, which is the absolute asshole of the earth in terms of intelligent dialogue. Okay, sorry, done with my complete rant.
Your comment made false claims, and these false claims substantially exaggerated the issue (which isn’t to say there isn’t a serious issue left worth addressing after the claims are corrected and the exaggerated removed). I assumed (and still assume) this was just a well-intentioned mistake on your end.
I pointed out that these claims were false. This wasn’t intended as an attack on you (people can go back and look at the comment and judge for themselves whether it was appropriate). Because I assumed (and still assume) you are interested in the truth, my assumption was that you would reply with something like, “Oh, that’s my bad. I’ve edited accordingly”, before turning back to discuss the substantive issue.
Had you done that, I think that people would have moved on to discussing the substance of your concern (I doubt that anyone much cares about this discussion of clarifications, in and of itself).
Instead, your response felt to me fairly dismissive. It did not feel to me like you truly acknowledged that you’d made a mistake here. I think this choice on your end was well intentioned, and I can see where you were coming from: I think you were just trying to drag people’s attention back to what you see as the core issue.
Unfortunately, I think that not simply acknowledging the mistake can be misinterpreted as you not really being interested in the truth and as instead just trying to score points. It is somewhat natural that this might make people uninterested in engaging with you, because you might not look to them like a good faith actor.
I think the EA Forum is far from perfect, in many ways (perhaps including some that you point to), but I do think you’re underestimating how much this is a reaction to what looks like a failure to acknowledge misrepresentation.
By the way, I’m not sure whether it will come across this way, but the fact that I’m writing this message reflects the fact that I do genuinely believe you’re a good faith actor, and also reflects the fact that I think you deserve an attempt at an explanation. I hope that my genuine desire for productive conversation comes across, though I wouldn’t be surprised if I have communicated poorly at some point in this message. If so, I apologise.
Thanks for your perspective.
You could be right that people argued against my point because I wrote “castle” instead of “manor house” and “owned” instead of “stayed at”. To me, those felt like details that are kind of incidental to the main point, even if they did exaggerate the point, and so correcting them was this way to undermine my argument without really engaging with me.
I think we definitely had different opinions. On the whole yeah of course we’re both acting in our best faith haha. I’m just a guy who doesn’t keep track of details as much as long as the meaning is the same (like mixing up “chicken” with “turkey”) and you’re someone who places a high value on factual correctness, even when the facts don’t change the underlying argument. Are you someone who corrects friends when they’re talking? Everyone has a different personality, and yeah we’re definitely all acting in good faith.
Kind of regardless of all this I do think that people on the internet upvote what they already believe in, regardless of misuse of words. You haven’t totally convinced me there, but you’re right I think that misuse of words played some part. It’s just that if people (such as you) wanted to engage me in a good faith manner I’d hope they say “hey I understand your point here and here, but you used the terms here and here incorrectly”, but instead you corrected me (without addressing my point) and another guy called me pompous and ignorant.
Last thing I do just want to say we both have good intentions and we both felt each other’s comments were dismissive. Perhaps we would both rewrite things if we could go back in time. We’re not writing books here, we probably aren’t proofreading, and we probably just have different ways of looking at the world. I disagree that people are neutral in what they upvote and write online, and I still think that people upvote what they agree with, without giving things substantive thought. You haven’t changed my mind on that. But yeah you’re right it didn’t exactly help things that I used the wrong words.
Let’s just move on. Thanks for your thoughts! We both have a lot of effective altruisming to do and I’m not sure this is it.
edit: I think there’s also potentially a trend on this forum to be positive about EA, regardless of all the talk about red teaming. So it’s very possible that one explanation of why everyone in disagreement to this and other comments I’ve written is that they go against EA decisions somehow. There’s also a lot of comments here which support the decision to buy the manor house. Honestly, when I compare this to my experience on reddit.com/r/effectivealtruism where everyone was like WTF this purchase is terrible and the one negative comment I made there, someone else agreed with me. So yeah overall just seems a bit of dogpiling and cliquish, which isn’t too surprising because that’s how the internet works. I think upvoting and downvoting is a terrible terrible idea for listening to others and having independent thoughts.
I’d be curious about why you think my comment about optics was also heavily downvoted (well, first it was upvoted, then downvoted). There weren’t any word mixups in that case. So to me it seems like there’s some explanation besides word mixups, which you are claiming is the main reason. (Indeed I think that may have been your main reason for not agreeing with my comment, but there isn’t much evidence that it’s the reason for negative reaction in general to that comment. I mean even in your comment you said you think that’s why, but don’t provide much evidence (other than people upvoting your comment, again, but it’s sort of weird to think that the evidence for why people are reacting on a forum would be how they react to ideas about why they react a certain way)).
It’s a little disappointing that one of the main things you got out of my response was a potential personal attack. Definitely wasn’t meant that way. Yeah this conversation isn’t really helping either of us. Take care.
I think you’re the first native(?) English speaker I’ve met who uses “turkey” and “chicken” interchangeably fwiw.
Yeah my point was that I personally mix up words sometimes. Did I not write that clearly? I didn’t mean that everyone does it.
‘Castle’ has definitions that don’t require military fortification, and could often be used less formally that way (maybe more so in North America?):
“a massive or imposing house” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/castle
“a large magnificent house, esp when the present or former home of a nobleman or prince” https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/castle https://www.dictionary.com/browse/castle
“a large building or group of buildings fortified with thick walls, battlements, and often a moat; castles were the strongholds of noblemen in the Middle Ages 2. any massive dwelling somewhat like this”
“a large and stately residence, esp. one, with high walls and towers, that imitates the form of a medieval castle” https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/castle
You need to scroll a bit for some of these alternate definitions, though.
‘Mansion’ and ‘estate house’ are listed as synonyms here, too: https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/castle
Personally, and as a Canadian who mostly learned about castles in French, I probably wouldn’t use castle (or chateau) even informally to describe Wyntham Abbey, since it’s not as big (especially as tall) as how I imagine castles to be. My images of ‘manor’ and ‘mansion’ are also smaller and more compact than Wytham Abbey, too, though. ‘Estate’ seems about right.
At the point you are having to debate the definition of a castle you’ve lost the optics argument even if you’re technically correct.
There’s no debate over the definition of a castle: Wytham Abbey is not a castle (it is not a form of military fortification). Roughly, Wytham Abbey is a castle in the way that an underground eco-house is a nuclear bunker. Which is to say: not at all (it’s not some mere technicality that makes it not a castle; it is radically not a castle). There is no debate about definition to be had here.
So I’m not having a debate about definition; I’m noting a misrepresentation. I agree that the optics issue is already lost. I also think that we should not be misrepresenting things on the forum, and I think this misrepresentation is not totally irrelevant.
To give a comparison: I think calling Wytham Abbey a castle it’s roughly as big a misrepresentation as claiming that Wytham Abbey cost £80 million rather than £15 million. A castle is a much more expensive, much rarer structure than a mansion (which is basically what Wytham Abbey would be accurately described as: a mansion).
As noted, I agree that the optics battle is lost, but I find it a little odd that people seem to think it’s totally irrelevant that a comment misrepresented things in a way that radically overstates the case (a castle owned by Elizabeth I is more than an order of magnitude more ostentatious than a manor house visited by Elizabeth I). This sort of misrepresentation is not good epistemics (just as it would be bad if a forum comment misstated the price as being £80 million and it would be reasonable to correct this misstatement).
My statement is the following: let’s just represent things correctly and then have the perfectly reasonable discussion from that starting point. If £15 million is too much to spend, let’s say that (rather than discussing whether £80 million is too much to spend). If a manor house is the wrong thing to buy, let’s say that (rather than discussing whether it would be wrong to buy Elizabeth I’s castle).
It’s entirely reasonable to say, as a normative claim, that people should be accurate in reporting.
But when you are thinking about reputational impact of a choice you should be examining not just what the reaction would be to strictly accurate reporting, but how people operating in bad faith could easily represent it, or how good faith people could misinterpret it. Whether they should or not is irrelevant to the predictable consequences.
I want to downvote this comment more strongly than any other comment I’ve downvoted on the EA Forum.
On the EA Forum, we should care about what’s actually true. “Haha, you lose for having to clarify your point!” may be the rule of the game in soundbite politics, but it can’t become the rule of the game in EA’s internal decision-making or in conversations on the EA Forum, or we have little hope of actually doing the most good (as opposed to “doing the thing that’s safest and plays the best, in adversarial soundbite form, to a random consumer of mass media with no context or interest in the topic”).
Truth matters, and the hearts and minds we want to win should heavily skew toward those who care about truth, and not just on what things look like to hypothetical third parties.
See also:
My other comment: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xof7iFB3uh8Kc53bG/why-did-cea-buy-wytham-abbey?commentId=irngCnzuDm4JR7ufc
It’s Not What It Looks Like
Common Knowledge and Miasma
Politics is way too meta
“PR” is corrosive; “reputation” is not.
I agree much more with Rob’s principles than with my guess at projectionconfusion’s principles. But looking just at PC’s literal statements: yeah, it is stupid anyone thought manor house vs castle was a relevant argument. The question is whether you think it’s a good idea to spend lots of money on a large building at all (I think it can be but obviously depends on specifics), and if so, does it matter if it’s a nice building whose previous owners were rich. I think it’s obvious the latter doesn’t matter, but for people for whom it does matter I don’t think it matters exactly what kind of large old rich person building it is.
So I do view people arguing manor house vs castle as conceding that a castle would be bad optics, and that this is dumb because none of the differences between manor houses and castles are relevant to the question. I just don’t care about the optics of buying large old rich people buildings.
What’s the second strongest time you wanted to downvote a comment on the EA Forum?
I agree that people shouldn’t think that way, but observably they do. And acknowledging human irrationality and working around it was the founding insight or rationalism and EA. I honestly can’t really respond to most of your first two paragraphs since it seems to be based on the idea we shouldn’t even be considering the question.
I’m not saying truth doesn’t matter (if it came across that way I apologise) but that reputational effects are real and also matter. Which is very different from the strawman position of “we shouldn’t do anything at all odd or unpopular”.
I disagree with this fundamentally. Its short sighted to narrow down the people we want to persuade to being only a certain set of people. The donations and other contributions of everyone are equally valuable. And the general perception of EA effects people’s likelihood to learn more to begin with.
These are not hypothetical people either. This and FTX are the main stories people are discussing online in relation to EA, and therefore what comes up when people initially do searches looking into it. And if someone’s first impression is negative they are less likely to find out more and more likely to dismiss the movement.
To narrow down our disagreement a bit. Is your position a) this won’t have reputational effects on EA b) there will be reputational effects but they won’t decrease recruitment and donations or c) even if it does decrease recruitment and donations we shouldn’t care about that.
Cool, thanks for clarifying your view! To clarify, here’s a version of your comment that I wouldn’t have objected to at all (filling in details where I left things in square brackets):
‘You’re right that the building is a manor house rather than a castle, and I’m generally in favor of EAs being accurate and precise in our language. That said, I think [demographic D] will mostly not be convinced of EA’s virtue by this argument, because people still think of manor houses as quite fancy. And I think it’s important for EA to convince [demographic D] of our virtue, because [two-sentence summary of why I think we should prioritize appealing to demographic D].’
The main things I found objectionable about “At the point you are having to debate the definition of a castle you’ve lost the optics argument even if you’re technically correct.” were:
The response is snarky, in a way that slightly nudges EA toward a norm of “it’s cringey and low-status to get into nit-picky arguments about what’s true, when what really matters is public perception”. I want to pump hard against moves in that direction, even small ones. I’m already wary of how much EA focuses on public perception; propagating the meme that we should focus on public perception and it’s laughable to care about what’s true (on topics with PR implications) seems outright toxic to me, even if that wasn’t your intent at all.
The response says nothing about whether you agree or disagree with the nitpick about castle terminology, further reinforcing the idea that accuracy is silly and unimportant for EAs to internally think about whenever a topic is PR-adjacent.
The response gives no argument for who you think EA should be trying to court here, or why we should be courting them. I think this is a pretty important step, because it’s quite important (and not trivial) for EAs to carefully mentally distinguish “let’s do PR action X because of specific real-world goal Y” from generalized “we feel socially anxious that we aren’t being socially embraced by enough other monkeys, and will reflexively try to appease them”.
The latter approach doesn’t work in a hostile environment of journalists or Twitter trolls who will strategically drum up outrage in order to push your psychological buttons and compel concessions from you. If you’re going to “play the game” and try to outmaneuver them, it’s very important that you do so in a clear-sighted way. Which requires being unusually explicit about why you think X is a good idea, as opposed to just smirkily shooting down other EAs’ points with an “lol how cringe of you to respond to falsehoods with corrections”.
If it actually matters to avoid some “cringe” behavior, then we should do that in a self-aware way that involves explicitly understanding what we’re doing and why, rather than just parroting whatever the current social gradient is. This helps ensure, among other things, that EA deliberately keeps its cringiness in contexts where it’s actually better to select the cringe option.
More broadly, I objected to what struck me as an attempt to import into the EA Forum the norms of “play the politics game rather than trying to figure out what’s true”, as opposed to merely describing those norms here and explicitly proposing some policy response.
If you’re going to take on the epistemic risk of playing the Game, you need to be sure that you’re explicitly simulating the Game’s moving parts in your world-model, as opposed to steering toward options based primarily on inchoate feelings about what’s popular or unpopular. Otherwise, you’re liable to over-weight near-term status risks, because human brains hyperbolically discount, and were mostly built by evolution to handle coalitional politics in ~200-person local communities where rejection meant literal death.
None of the above! It’s: This will plausibly decrease recruitment and donations a nonzero amount, and that’s a real cost, but news-cycle-obsessed status-anxious people will tend to fixate on this more than makes sense, in ways that:
exaggerate the long-term importance of specific news-cycle ups and downs, resulting in panicky and untethered-from-reality reactions;
distract from more useful stuff we’d otherwise be doing;
provide bad incentives for nervous EAs to dissemble-in-the-name-of-EA or rush-to-concede-too-much;
signal weakness and blood-in-the-water in the political game;
and incentivize adversaries to try to push your buttons more.
Something can be a real cost/problem, and yet the natural reaction to that cost/problem be something that makes things worse rather than better.
I think a few EAs should have a day job of thinking about hit-piece writers (and related topics), and other EAs should mostly ignore the topic, except insofar as they see locally false things and (candidly, unstrategically) chime in to say the true thing in response. (In particular, we should chime in with the true thing whether doing so makes EA look better or worse.)
I agree that we shouldn’t completely write off anyone. But we should very much prioritize reaching some groups over others, and it’s rarely the case that there’s any action available to EA that will please everyone equally. E.g., research of a given quality level is equally useful regardless of who it comes from, but not all human beings are equally likely to do useful research, and pretending that they are doesn’t help anyone.
We shouldn’t put equal effort into outreach to theologians and to biosecurity specialists. Generalizing this principle, we shouldn’t put equal effort into outreach to “people who care a lot about truth” and “people who don’t care a lot about truth”. (Though yes, we should put nonzero effort into reaching the latter group, insofar as we can do so without compromising our core principles or neglecting more-tractable and more-important opportunities.)
I wonder to what degree there’s an America/Europe divide (or at least a UK/non-UK divide) here.
From my perspective as an (admittedly fairly well-off) Brit, the English countryside is littered with these kinds of manor houses. Seriously, they’re everywhere. Turning them into conference centres is honestly a better use for them than most common alternatives.
(Not making a claim about whether the Wytham purchase was a good idea all-things-considered—I currently lean weakly towards “no”—just commenting on this specific aspect.)
For calibration, I’d guess that there are probably 20+ properties (90% CI roughly 10-200) within a 90-minute drive of where I grew up that fall into roughly the same reference class as Wytham Abbey. Including several actual castles, though very few of those would be for sale.
I live in America so that theory checks out in my case at least.
The question here isn’t whether building a new castle from scratch would cost £15,000,000, or whether the real estate is properly valued; I assume it is. The question is whether you need to buy a castle to host yearly or monthly conferences—to which the answer is clearly not.
Investing £15,000,000 would yield roughly £1,000,000 a year on the stock market. If you are spending a million pounds on the venue for a conference, you are not doing it right. A convention hall runs in the tens of thousands of dollars, not the millions. This is a 10-100x markup.
£15,000,000 sounds like a lot to a researcher because it is.
In my experience from actually renting spaces to run tech conferences and events, a convention hall in a reasonably dense city runs in the tens of thousands for a single <5 day long event.
Consider just 3 breakout rooms, typically ~$90-$180/room/hour, 8 hours a day, 5 days takes you into the $20-$40k range, that gets you no food, no lodging for attendees, once you add that stuff in and the all-in cost for a fully-paid for typical 30-40 person event can easily land just inside $80-100k, with costs growing slightly sublinearly per person for a while before they balloon again once you rise above the size where there are multiple competing venues in your area.
If the convention center you are using isn’t a hotel now you have to move your attendees back and forth. For tech conferences you can charge a few hundred $ per person, and have them book with your hotel out of a bloc, incurring obligations from your org to a hotel about occupancy, and then you can generally come up with a way to make your event break even. Conferences are expensive for a reason.
Locating an event in the middle of nowhere? Maybe that room becomes maybe a fixed rate $350 space at a cheaper hotel, $1000/day for 3 becomes so $5k for a 5 day event, but now its harder to get folks to the venue.
At the end of the day, in either of these scenarios you are subsidizing the hotel and event space industry rather than focusing in on your events.
On the other hand, using the model of a typical CFAR event, using a venue that is already owned, you are dealing with some cleanup, a couple of members of the team providing operations support, catering costs, but the venue itself remains relatively customized to purpose. People can sleep on site, enabling folks to drift in and out of conversations, the event can run all night with people talking in smaller more intimate groups long past when a hotel would have kicked you out of the space. If your goal is to built a community and have folks come together, this is a much better model.
If you can keep this above 50% utilization, this even strikes me as way more than break-even or even if I’m delusionally out of touch and hotel prices have some how plummeted in the last 3 years while the cost of everything else has gone up, at least far closer than the 10-100x swing you are arguing for here.
Lightcone, by comparison, has been getting about 75% utilization out of the home it has been using as a conference space.
While those are reasonable comparisons it rather raises the question of why you are buying a venue in one of the most expensive areas of the UK to begin with.
Were there any business cases made comparing this to other cheaper venues in different locations? That’s the kind of basic due diligence I’d expect at most organizations I work with in my professional life, and I’m concerned if it’s not the case here.
Well Wytham Abbey is only a 10 minute Uber ride from Oxford rail station, which is only 1 hour from London Paddington Station; and it’s reasonably convenient by rail from Heathrow and Gatwick airports.
The key features of a good conference venue are (1) easy access to international flights and domestic rail connections, and (2) an enticing location that can attract busy, choosy intellectuals who have many other options of places to go and people to see.
Those features generally involve being located in places that many other people value—i.e. that, given supply & demand, tend to involve high real estate prices.