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.
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.