I’m confused why peoplekeepinsistingthisisa “CEA” decision even after Owen Cotton-Barratt’s clarification (which I assume everyone commenting has read).
I see the process on deciding to purchase Wytham Abbey as:
Owen Cotton-Barratt made a proposal to spend ~$15M for a conference center
His funder(s) were willing to give him money.
Effective Ventures agreed to be a fiscal sponsor.
To the extent that anyone is responsible for this decision, it’s primarily (1) Owen, and (2) his funder(s). I don’t think (3) is much to blame here. Also, CEA the organization is distinct from EV, their fiscal sponsor.
I think if you think this is an ineffective use of limited resources, you absolutely should feel entitled to critique it! In many ways this is what our movement is about! But I think you should place the burden of blame on the actual decision-makers, and not vaguely associated institutions.
People are talking about a purchase in April 2022, at which point the organization doing the purchasing really was “CEA”. For example, you’d say “why did Google start a self-driving car project?” and not “why did Alphabet start a self-driving car project?”, since at the time they started the project the umbrella organization was still called “Google”.
I also think it’s hard to get people to start using a new name for an organization: people still colloquially used “Google” for “Alphabet” for years. And that was with a big marketing push, while this transition has been much quieter and somewhat uneven:
The 2022-09-13 post announcing the change doesn’t show any sort of diagram, and makes it sound like the change is from [CEA [core, 80k, GWWC, etc]] to [CEA [EV ops, core, 80k, GWWC, etc]] and not to [EVF [CEA, 80k, GWWC, …]. See the confusion in the comments and “We didn’t want to make a big deal about this rebrand”.
CEA’s footer didn’t switch to EVF until 2022-10-26 (old, new).
The footer on EA Funds said it was part of CEA, not EAF, until I wrote to them to ask on 2022-11-28.
CEA’s “team” page still called the umbrella organization “CEA” until 2022-11-30 (old, new).
There are still many references to “CEA UK” on CEA’s site, even though (pretty sure) it’s no longer a thing. Ex, Owen’s page says he’s a trustee of CEA UK, but I think should instead say a trustee of EVF. [EDIT: I found ~10 places like this and wrote to EVF]
I tentatively think this is wrong, and calling it EVF is both clearer, and important in ensuring people understand what happened.
If I say “Google is manipulating results to benefit some groups over others,” you’d interpret that differently than if I said “Google maps directions is manipulating results to benefit some groups over others.” And if I said “Google invests heavily in AI safety” you’d think I meant something different than Deepmind’s safety research.
By saying “CEA bought a castle,” they are implying (or incorrectly inferring) that the organization that people donate to named CEA is the same as the one that bought the castle. Yes, the two organizations are related, but phrasing it that way seems pretty actively misleading, and disambiguating seems critical.
they are implying (or incorrectly inferring) that the organization that people donate to named CEA is the same as the one that bought the castle
The organization that people donate to is the same as the one that bought the manor house. CEA has no legal existence distinct from EVF; any distinction between the two is purely a matter of internal organization within the legal entity now called EVF (but called CEA at the time of the purchase).
(Also, I’d be happier if people here wouldn’t amplify the “castle” meme. It’s not a castle.)
When the building (it’s not a castle) was bought (in early 2021), the name of the organisation that bought it was CEA. The change at some point after that to Effective Ventures. It’s unclear how much governance-wise a separate ‘umbrella CEA’ existed to a ‘core CEA’ at the point of the purchase, but even now, CEA does not seem to have a board separate from Effective Ventures, and it’s ultimately the same people that hare fully responsible and it’s legally the same organisation that people donated to (unclear what kind of restrictions could put on their donations at which point in time). Note that this is different from your Google/Deepmind example, as both of these are separte legal entities (albeit owned by the same umbrella company).
That people should use “EVF” to refer to the umbrella organization and “CEA” to refer to the community building org when talking about things happening after the rebranding is uncontroversial, no? My comment isn’t “go ahead and keep saying CEA when you mean the umbrella org” but instead that (a) what phrasing to use for events before the rebranding isn’t obvious and (b) because rebranding is hard it’s not surprising some people will still call the umbrella organization “CEA”.
Your “Google” examples don’t feel clarifying to me because they’re in the present tense and about things that haven’t recently gone through rebranding, and so avoid both (a) and (b).
The way Owen started his comment, by explicitly talking about the two ’CEA’s, is great, BTW.
I think we mostly agree—but I would claim that if you’re interested in clarity, calling the umbrella organization pre-renaming “CEA” is confusing, and that if you’re not calling it EVF, you should at least disambiguate clearly.
This might be because Owen is (at least according to CEA’s website) part of CEA’s ‘team’ as a strategic advisor and trustee of CEA UK. It’s not obvious (at least not obvious enough to avoid confusion) in which capacity Owen is speaking here and assuming that’s in relation to one of his roles at CEA is not that farfetched (even if it might not be correct).
Also, CEA is not distinct from EV, they are a project/brand of EV, but legally fully part of it. (There is no such thing as a ‘fiscal sponsor’ in UK law.) It’s unclear to me how much CEA have their own governance structure.
While Owen’s page does say “trustee of CEA UK” I’m pretty sure it should say “trustee of EVF”. I’ve written to EVF to point this out (along with some other places that need fixing)
I think if you think this is an ineffective use of limited resources, you absolutely should feel entitled to critique it! In many ways this is what our movement is about! …
Strongly disagree here—despite liking Linch and respecting his work, I think this mindset is actively harmful, and needs to be pointed out and pushed back against.
The movement is about inspiring people to investigate what is or will be effective at improving the world in an impartial welfarist sense, and then to actively invest personally, financially, and professionally in making that happen. Attacking people for doing something you think is sub-optimal seems completely unrelated—and is often detrimental. I keep seeing the assumption that “someone is involved in EA” implies “I should criticize them if they aren’t doing what I think is optimally good.” That’s both horrible as epistemics, and a recipe for a really dysfunctional community—and it needs to stop.
I’m surprised, but happy you engaged—I think that it’s reasonable to disagree, and I’d love to understand more about why. However, I don’t understand the mindset, which you seem to support, that says “it’s fine to tell people you barely know that they are acting sub-optimally, even if plausibly positive” but that it’s wrong, per your downvote, to do what I did, and tell someone to stop doing something that I think is bad for the social dynamics in EA. (And note that I have said very similar things, publicly, more than once, before now.)
I am not saying not to discuss the decision, and whether it was optimal—I am saying that trying to address “the actual decision makers” is not a good norm. Of course, if your position was that it is inappropriate to publicly criticize others generally, it would make sense to agree with my main point, and still downvote me for publicly telling Linch ‘I think this is bad,’ and potentially you could tell me that privately. (But I don’t think that would have been helpful here, especially because a number of people seem to have the same opinion, given the number of disagree votes.)
My point, however, was that criticizing people because they did something less than optimally good is generally unacceptable unless you know them well. In my view, telling people not to do something harmful has a lower bar, and maybe that’s people’s criticism here. (But that’s not how I read most of the discussion—and it definitely wasn’t what Linch’s comment said was “what [EA] is all about”.) I do think I know Linch well enough that he would be OK with me criticizing things he’s doing, though I would likely have done so in private in other circumstances. However, in my view, publicly criticizing people you don’t know for ineffective but plausibly positive things, or worse, what I saw here, encouraging the community generally to publicly criticize specific people for such things, is very harmful, and, as I said, I think it needs to stop.
I think a culture of critique and debate, where people are expected to argue for their resource allocation decisions (or at least major ones involving large amounts of resources), is core to what I see as making EA a promising approach to improving the world. For various reasons, I also prefer as many of these conversations as possible to happen publicly. I’m much less excited about a version of EA where all the important conversations happen in private, & publicly everyone is nice and deferential and stays quiet when they see large amount of resources being spent in ways that they think are ineffective or problematic.
Donating large amounts of money to build a nice theatre is probably mildly good for the world, but if someone was spending EA money to do this I’d absolutely want to see public pushback and critique, and in the absence of that my default assumption would be that the culture would decay to ~uselessness over time.
(I also think it’s generally a mistake to draw a strong qualitative distinction between “harmful” and “suboptimally good”, here and elsewhere. Strong omission/commission distinctions are usually a mistake, and what ultimately matters in both cases is the value of what you did relative to the alternatives.)
In terms of why I downvoted rather than just disagreevoting, I think the comment was phrased as an explicit attempt at moral policing/shaming (“horrible”, “dysfunctional”, “needs to stop”). I would like to see less of this on the Forum, especially given that I think the position being enforced would be bad for the community and the world.
I think that proposing impact models for an intervention someone is considering and discussion values of the variables and the structure is great. That isn’t what we’re discussing here—this has basically just been social shaming and talking about and playing level three. Even aside from that, the correct place for discussion of impact is the people who are considering giving. That means that when Givewell publishes recommendations, they are suggesting everyone give money, and public criticism is absolutely warranted. And post-hoc “lessons learned” written by uninvolved people seems less defensible—but even that requires at least considering the value proposition, and proposing what you think is wrong. What happened here was none of that.
I also think that policing optimality (not drawing “a strong qualitative distinction between ‘harmful’ and ‘suboptimally good’”) is even worse than an optimizing mindset, which itself is a problem, as I argued there.
At this point, it might be helpful if you pointed to some specific things you think Linch was endorsing that you think “need to stop”. It sounds here like you have some specific examples in mind, and it’s unclear how much I/you/Linch would have different opinions about those specific cases.
I continue to disagree with your general claims, which seem to point towards a (strong form of a) “our giving is our business” attitude that I think runs counter to building an effective and epistemically healthy EA community, especially once we’re at the scale of £15m gifts.
Regarding optimality, while I disagree with a lot of the pushback against optimising mindset I’ve seen recently, I think focusing on this is something of a red herring in this context; Linch’s original claim that you contested was that we should “feel entitled to critique” “ineffective use of limited resources”. Weakening the goal from finding the optimal thing to merely finding exceptionally good things doesn’t have much bearing on that claim IMO—there will still be many uses of money that fall far short of that bar, and deploying large amounts of resources on those things should result in criticism.
(I also still think “was this harmful or not” is not a particularly useful heuristic in cases close to the zero line, and I don’t think we should draw much of a distinction between “slightly harmful in expectation” and “slightly good in expectation”, as long as both are much worse than other counterfactual options. This claim also survives a weakening of the EA goal away from strict optimisation.)
First, I think much of the discussion in the comments to this post are an example—it’s generally bad when criticism of what someone else did isn’t “this has concrete negative value” or even “this erodes a norm that we have agreed on,” and is instead “this will make others think differently in ways that harms reputations, regardless of the object level impact.”
Second, criticism of individuals, without any relationship with them. In this case, until we found out that this was funded by an openphil grant—which definitely makes criticism far more reasonable—the criticism was of an unknown donor. If Owen had a non-EA rich contact who he convinced to give the donation, perhaps because they think that academic retreats are great, and that more castles should be used as conference centers, I think it would be a very bad idea to publicly tell them that they shouldn’t have given money to a project that you think looks bad, with very little analysis.
Third, all resources are by definition limited, and there is a huge difference between criticizing the use of limited community resources, compared to criticizing the use of personal resources. For example, I’ve had EAs tell me that I’d really be more effective if I moved to a different city, for example. They are correct, I’d be more impactful as an EA if I was located elsewhere—but I have a family, and prioritize them, and really don’t think that people who just met me should “feel entitled to critique” the use of my personal limited time and energy. (But, yes, several EAs have done so shortly after meeting me, because that’s evidently the norm in the community. Which I think is “horrible”, “dysfunctional”, and “needs to stop.”) Similarly, I sometimes do ineffective things with my money. I think that’s actually good—which is why I said so. But even if I wasn’t interested in publicly defending my donations to my local synagogue, I don’t think it’s anyone else’s place to try to correct me.
Separately, I think we disagree about the expected value of the project. If we ignore PR, (which I think we almost all always should, in favor of questions of norms and ethics,) I think this is nowhere near “close to the zero line,” and think that it’s obviously reasonably high expected value, even if it’s not as effective as whichever top charity you’d prefer. And I think we agree that there’s no useful dividing line between slightly net good and slightly net harmful, and I certainly did not intend to imply that the issue here was that it was close to such a line, and since it was barely above the line, it shouldn’t be criticized. Instead, I’m arguing the point we disagree about, which was optimizing mindset, given that I think this was obviously a reasonably valuable investment.
And to explain my claim that it’s clearly valuable, first, there is tons of retained value in real estate, so the expected cost of the purchase was very small, except for opportunity cost of doing other things with the money—which I think was clearly understood to be far lower when the decision was made.
And the benefit is potentially very large. There is a strong potential for really useful retreats and conferences, better than most of the ones which have occurred already within EA. I know several papers that came out of previous GPI conferences, and the conferences would have been much better if they didn’t have everyone staying in different parts of Oxford, splitting up and making ad-hoc collaborations harder. In contrast, I found events like “Palmcone,” which was run by Lightcone over a week at a resort, incredibly valuable, and had several important connections and projects kickstarted. It was easily worth a multiple of the price of the flight, specifically because it was the type of immersive retreat that this would allow -several days of unstructured discussions with a relatively small group of people, which was really helped by being in a very nice location. However, I heard from people at Lightcone that the only reason it was possible was that the venue was available at a steeply discounted price due to a cancellation.
CEA or EV is the ultimate decision maker and owns the building. Owen Cotton-Barratt made a proposal and they accepted, which they didn’t have to do. I don’t think it’s helpful or productive to individualize decisions and responsibility in the way you’re suggesting.
CEA or EV is the ultimate decision maker and owns the building.
What do you mean by ultimate decision maker here? I think that fiscal sponsor is a pretty weird role, and doesn’t imply much responsibility. I mostly see it as a weird role that exists for legal reasons, where EV provides a useful service for smaller orgs and projects who don’t want to fully incorporate on their own. I think that applying some minimal bar for “is this org’s work worth supporting” seems good, but that it’s not their job to carefully evaluate whether they agree with everything that org is doing, or whether it meets a cost effectiveness bar. IMO it seems pretty bad if small orgs need to be constantly stressed about EV pulling fiscal support if EV disagrees with a decision, and I don’t think EV should be trying to do the evaluative job of a grantmaker (though I’m pro some orgs existing to evaluate projects, grantmaker or no)
I could be getting this completely wrong, and please correct me if I am, but EV is the ultimate decision maker in the sense that they bought and will be running the building—Owen Cotton-Baratt brought EVF a proposal and a donor to do something, and they accepted to do it and are now doing it. Owen or the donor did not buy the building, will not be running the programs out of it—EVF will, if not directly then as a project run within the legal entity of EVF (the statement that they will employing staff to work makes me believe its the former) much like CEA. I’m truly very confused as to how EVF is not the decision maker here and would greatly appreciate an explanation.
Ah. I don’t have much inside knowledge here, but my understanding was that Owen (and other people on his team) is the one running the project—organising what programs run (or coordinating with the external groups organising them), making strategic decisions for the space, etc. And that EVF are only involved for some logistical things where you need a fiscal sponsor, but not actually running the project.
I believe EVF have historically had similar relationships with a bunch of other orgs, eg EA Funds or Giving What We Can (this may no longer be true). My understanding is that EVF specialises in giving the necessary kind of logistical/legal support to projects, which otherwise basically run themselves (including having their own ops staff dealing with day-to-day things)
Thank you for the explanation, I understand your point of view better now. That being said, the way you explained still reads to me more as Owen and his team running a project (albeit with a high degree of autonomy) for EVF than EVF acting a facilitator. But in either case, EVF was ultimate decision maker and they are the organization that bought the building. I don’t think the degree of separation is significant enough to say that this was not an EVF decision or that EVF is not responsible for it.
I agree with your points about EVF micromanaging the projects of its subsidiaries under threat of pulling out being undesirable, but I don’t think they apply very well here. This is because a) the decision was not whether org X’s action was a cost effective ot reasonable one but whether this action should be taken under the stewardship and sponsorship of EVF in the first place, b) because it was a very high stakes decision simply in terms of initial and ongoing costs, and c) the degree of involvement that EVF will have seems to be enough that this should be treated as an EVF project regardless. The last point is the one I’m most unsure about and is based on a lot of comments in this thread justifying the choice of Oxford as a venue because of the convenience for CEA staff, although I’m unclear how much of that is based on actual information about how the venue will be used versus speculation from commenters.
Additionally, if this is a situation where the Abbey is going to be run independently from EVF and with a dedicated team, I think further justification of Oxford should be necessary, both because of the high cost of the area and because if how difficult it is to get UK visas (which would arguably diminish the expected value as it limits the use and the range of activities- I’ll admit to some bias here because I’ve had a number of friends and colleagues get rejected for UK visas for legitimate work and education travel for workshops and conferences over the past couple months and I’m not certain how common that it is. Still, it seems like selecting somewhere in the Schengen zone or Eastern Europe where you can still have the “pleasant surroundings” for a cheaper price and with less economic and time costs involved in being able to actually get there might have been a good thing to consider)
I don’t find this compelling. The statement “The Centre for Effective Altruism spent £15m on a country manor house” is completely true as written. I don’t think the extra details substantially change the moral or optical picture here.
On the first point, “factually correct” doesn’t mean “not misleading,” especially when some details are omitted. Which was the second point, but “I said something factually correct” doesn’t really seem like much of a defense against the claim that the extra details matter.
That’s a distinction without a difference. EV was spun out from CEA, and for the purposes of this discussion, they are basically the same organization.
One important difference is that when you’re donating to CEA, you’re donating to CEA the organization, not EV (formerly CEA) the fiscal sponsor. If I gave money to CEA, I have a right to ask the money is put to good uses. I do not have such a direct claim to other projects under the EV umbrella (like GovAI or asterisk or Longview) . Similarly, if I donate to GovAI, I do not have a right to question them about the actions of CEA. The non-consequentialist part of my rights here, aside from the general belief that all actions should be directed to further the good, is from general affiliation as part of the same loosely connected social movement or community.
It’s currently my impression that the use of the term “fiscal sponsor” here (& elsewhere in these comments) misleads more than it enlightens.
When you donate “to CEA” or “to GovAI” (or GWWC or 80K or etc etc), you’re making a donation to EVF. You’re making a restricted donation, but a lot of charities have multiple programs and enable restricted donations. This isn’t fundamentally (or legally) distinct from donating to GiveDirectly and restricting it to going to their Africa programs instead of their US ones.
I appreciate this response, and I re-read Owen’s comment which explains that the “CEA” that authorized the Wytham purchase was always an umbrella organization that houses multiple projects, including “CEA” the community building organization, and that none of CEA proper’s staff were involved in the decision.
The sense in which they’re “the same org” to me is that CEA and EVF, besides being legally part of the same nonprofit, are tightly connected organizations that form the center of the EA community. Not all of EVF’s projects are “central” parts of the EA network – for example, GovAI is cause-specific – but many of them are, like 80K, GWWC, and Asterisk. As Wytham will likely be used for EA community-building events, it seems to fall into this category.
I’m confused why people keep insisting this is a “CEA” decision even after Owen Cotton-Barratt’s clarification (which I assume everyone commenting has read).
I see the process on deciding to purchase Wytham Abbey as:
Owen Cotton-Barratt made a proposal to spend ~$15M for a conference center
His funder(s) were willing to give him money.
Effective Ventures agreed to be a fiscal sponsor.
To the extent that anyone is responsible for this decision, it’s primarily (1) Owen, and (2) his funder(s). I don’t think (3) is much to blame here. Also, CEA the organization is distinct from EV, their fiscal sponsor.
I think if you think this is an ineffective use of limited resources, you absolutely should feel entitled to critique it! In many ways this is what our movement is about! But I think you should place the burden of blame on the actual decision-makers, and not vaguely associated institutions.
People are talking about a purchase in April 2022, at which point the organization doing the purchasing really was “CEA”. For example, you’d say “why did Google start a self-driving car project?” and not “why did Alphabet start a self-driving car project?”, since at the time they started the project the umbrella organization was still called “Google”.
I also think it’s hard to get people to start using a new name for an organization: people still colloquially used “Google” for “Alphabet” for years. And that was with a big marketing push, while this transition has been much quieter and somewhat uneven:
The 2022-09-13 post announcing the change doesn’t show any sort of diagram, and makes it sound like the change is from [CEA [core, 80k, GWWC, etc]] to [CEA [EV ops, core, 80k, GWWC, etc]] and not to [EVF [CEA, 80k, GWWC, …]. See the confusion in the comments and “We didn’t want to make a big deal about this rebrand”.
CEA’s footer didn’t switch to EVF until 2022-10-26 (old, new).
The footer on EA Funds said it was part of CEA, not EAF, until I wrote to them to ask on 2022-11-28.
CEA’s “team” page still called the umbrella organization “CEA” until 2022-11-30 (old, new).
There are still many references to “CEA UK” on CEA’s site, even though (pretty sure) it’s no longer a thing. Ex, Owen’s page says he’s a trustee of CEA UK, but I think should instead say a trustee of EVF. [EDIT: I found ~10 places like this and wrote to EVF]
The US branch of EVF is still called CEA today.
The purchase was in April 2022 not in 2021; however the rest of your comment seems fair.
Thanks! Edited!
I tentatively think this is wrong, and calling it EVF is both clearer, and important in ensuring people understand what happened.
If I say “Google is manipulating results to benefit some groups over others,” you’d interpret that differently than if I said “Google maps directions is manipulating results to benefit some groups over others.” And if I said “Google invests heavily in AI safety” you’d think I meant something different than Deepmind’s safety research.
By saying “CEA bought a castle,” they are implying (or incorrectly inferring) that the organization that people donate to named CEA is the same as the one that bought the castle. Yes, the two organizations are related, but phrasing it that way seems pretty actively misleading, and disambiguating seems critical.
The organization that people donate to is the same as the one that bought the manor house. CEA has no legal existence distinct from EVF; any distinction between the two is purely a matter of internal organization within the legal entity now called EVF (but called CEA at the time of the purchase).
(Also, I’d be happier if people here wouldn’t amplify the “castle” meme. It’s not a castle.)
When the building (it’s not a castle) was bought (in early 2021), the name of the organisation that bought it was CEA. The change at some point after that to Effective Ventures. It’s unclear how much governance-wise a separate ‘umbrella CEA’ existed to a ‘core CEA’ at the point of the purchase, but even now, CEA does not seem to have a board separate from Effective Ventures, and it’s ultimately the same people that hare fully responsible and it’s legally the same organisation that people donated to (unclear what kind of restrictions could put on their donations at which point in time). Note that this is different from your Google/Deepmind example, as both of these are separte legal entities (albeit owned by the same umbrella company).
That people should use “EVF” to refer to the umbrella organization and “CEA” to refer to the community building org when talking about things happening after the rebranding is uncontroversial, no? My comment isn’t “go ahead and keep saying CEA when you mean the umbrella org” but instead that (a) what phrasing to use for events before the rebranding isn’t obvious and (b) because rebranding is hard it’s not surprising some people will still call the umbrella organization “CEA”.
Your “Google” examples don’t feel clarifying to me because they’re in the present tense and about things that haven’t recently gone through rebranding, and so avoid both (a) and (b).
The way Owen started his comment, by explicitly talking about the two ’CEA’s, is great, BTW.
I think we mostly agree—but I would claim that if you’re interested in clarity, calling the umbrella organization pre-renaming “CEA” is confusing, and that if you’re not calling it EVF, you should at least disambiguate clearly.
This might be because Owen is (at least according to CEA’s website) part of CEA’s ‘team’ as a strategic advisor and trustee of CEA UK. It’s not obvious (at least not obvious enough to avoid confusion) in which capacity Owen is speaking here and assuming that’s in relation to one of his roles at CEA is not that farfetched (even if it might not be correct).
Also, CEA is not distinct from EV, they are a project/brand of EV, but legally fully part of it. (There is no such thing as a ‘fiscal sponsor’ in UK law.) It’s unclear to me how much CEA have their own governance structure.
While Owen’s page does say “trustee of CEA UK” I’m pretty sure it should say “trustee of EVF”. I’ve written to EVF to point this out (along with some other places that need fixing)
I’d also guess that this is the case, but it helps create the confusion that CEA is involved.
Strongly disagree here—despite liking Linch and respecting his work, I think this mindset is actively harmful, and needs to be pointed out and pushed back against.
The movement is about inspiring people to investigate what is or will be effective at improving the world in an impartial welfarist sense, and then to actively invest personally, financially, and professionally in making that happen. Attacking people for doing something you think is sub-optimal seems completely unrelated—and is often detrimental. I keep seeing the assumption that “someone is involved in EA” implies “I should criticize them if they aren’t doing what I think is optimally good.” That’s both horrible as epistemics, and a recipe for a really dysfunctional community—and it needs to stop.
I downvoted this, mainly for the last sentence (specifically “it needs to stop”), though I quite strongly disagree with the rest as well.
I’m surprised, but happy you engaged—I think that it’s reasonable to disagree, and I’d love to understand more about why. However, I don’t understand the mindset, which you seem to support, that says “it’s fine to tell people you barely know that they are acting sub-optimally, even if plausibly positive” but that it’s wrong, per your downvote, to do what I did, and tell someone to stop doing something that I think is bad for the social dynamics in EA. (And note that I have said very similar things, publicly, more than once, before now.)
I am not saying not to discuss the decision, and whether it was optimal—I am saying that trying to address “the actual decision makers” is not a good norm. Of course, if your position was that it is inappropriate to publicly criticize others generally, it would make sense to agree with my main point, and still downvote me for publicly telling Linch ‘I think this is bad,’ and potentially you could tell me that privately. (But I don’t think that would have been helpful here, especially because a number of people seem to have the same opinion, given the number of disagree votes.)
My point, however, was that criticizing people because they did something less than optimally good is generally unacceptable unless you know them well. In my view, telling people not to do something harmful has a lower bar, and maybe that’s people’s criticism here. (But that’s not how I read most of the discussion—and it definitely wasn’t what Linch’s comment said was “what [EA] is all about”.) I do think I know Linch well enough that he would be OK with me criticizing things he’s doing, though I would likely have done so in private in other circumstances. However, in my view, publicly criticizing people you don’t know for ineffective but plausibly positive things, or worse, what I saw here, encouraging the community generally to publicly criticize specific people for such things, is very harmful, and, as I said, I think it needs to stop.
I think a culture of critique and debate, where people are expected to argue for their resource allocation decisions (or at least major ones involving large amounts of resources), is core to what I see as making EA a promising approach to improving the world. For various reasons, I also prefer as many of these conversations as possible to happen publicly. I’m much less excited about a version of EA where all the important conversations happen in private, & publicly everyone is nice and deferential and stays quiet when they see large amount of resources being spent in ways that they think are ineffective or problematic.
Donating large amounts of money to build a nice theatre is probably mildly good for the world, but if someone was spending EA money to do this I’d absolutely want to see public pushback and critique, and in the absence of that my default assumption would be that the culture would decay to ~uselessness over time.
(I also think it’s generally a mistake to draw a strong qualitative distinction between “harmful” and “suboptimally good”, here and elsewhere. Strong omission/commission distinctions are usually a mistake, and what ultimately matters in both cases is the value of what you did relative to the alternatives.)
In terms of why I downvoted rather than just disagreevoting, I think the comment was phrased as an explicit attempt at moral policing/shaming (“horrible”, “dysfunctional”, “needs to stop”). I would like to see less of this on the Forum, especially given that I think the position being enforced would be bad for the community and the world.
I think that proposing impact models for an intervention someone is considering and discussion values of the variables and the structure is great. That isn’t what we’re discussing here—this has basically just been social shaming and talking about and playing level three. Even aside from that, the correct place for discussion of impact is the people who are considering giving. That means that when Givewell publishes recommendations, they are suggesting everyone give money, and public criticism is absolutely warranted. And post-hoc “lessons learned” written by uninvolved people seems less defensible—but even that requires at least considering the value proposition, and proposing what you think is wrong. What happened here was none of that.
I also think that policing optimality (not drawing “a strong qualitative distinction between ‘harmful’ and ‘suboptimally good’”) is even worse than an optimizing mindset, which itself is a problem, as I argued there.
At this point, it might be helpful if you pointed to some specific things you think Linch was endorsing that you think “need to stop”. It sounds here like you have some specific examples in mind, and it’s unclear how much I/you/Linch would have different opinions about those specific cases.
I continue to disagree with your general claims, which seem to point towards a (strong form of a) “our giving is our business” attitude that I think runs counter to building an effective and epistemically healthy EA community, especially once we’re at the scale of £15m gifts.
Regarding optimality, while I disagree with a lot of the pushback against optimising mindset I’ve seen recently, I think focusing on this is something of a red herring in this context; Linch’s original claim that you contested was that we should “feel entitled to critique” “ineffective use of limited resources”. Weakening the goal from finding the optimal thing to merely finding exceptionally good things doesn’t have much bearing on that claim IMO—there will still be many uses of money that fall far short of that bar, and deploying large amounts of resources on those things should result in criticism.
(I also still think “was this harmful or not” is not a particularly useful heuristic in cases close to the zero line, and I don’t think we should draw much of a distinction between “slightly harmful in expectation” and “slightly good in expectation”, as long as both are much worse than other counterfactual options. This claim also survives a weakening of the EA goal away from strict optimisation.)
Thanks for taking this back to the object level!
Types of things that I object to:
First, I think much of the discussion in the comments to this post are an example—it’s generally bad when criticism of what someone else did isn’t “this has concrete negative value” or even “this erodes a norm that we have agreed on,” and is instead “this will make others think differently in ways that harms reputations, regardless of the object level impact.”
Second, criticism of individuals, without any relationship with them. In this case, until we found out that this was funded by an openphil grant—which definitely makes criticism far more reasonable—the criticism was of an unknown donor. If Owen had a non-EA rich contact who he convinced to give the donation, perhaps because they think that academic retreats are great, and that more castles should be used as conference centers, I think it would be a very bad idea to publicly tell them that they shouldn’t have given money to a project that you think looks bad, with very little analysis.
Third, all resources are by definition limited, and there is a huge difference between criticizing the use of limited community resources, compared to criticizing the use of personal resources. For example, I’ve had EAs tell me that I’d really be more effective if I moved to a different city, for example. They are correct, I’d be more impactful as an EA if I was located elsewhere—but I have a family, and prioritize them, and really don’t think that people who just met me should “feel entitled to critique” the use of my personal limited time and energy. (But, yes, several EAs have done so shortly after meeting me, because that’s evidently the norm in the community. Which I think is “horrible”, “dysfunctional”, and “needs to stop.”) Similarly, I sometimes do ineffective things with my money. I think that’s actually good—which is why I said so. But even if I wasn’t interested in publicly defending my donations to my local synagogue, I don’t think it’s anyone else’s place to try to correct me.
Separately, I think we disagree about the expected value of the project. If we ignore PR, (which I think we almost all always should, in favor of questions of norms and ethics,) I think this is nowhere near “close to the zero line,” and think that it’s obviously reasonably high expected value, even if it’s not as effective as whichever top charity you’d prefer. And I think we agree that there’s no useful dividing line between slightly net good and slightly net harmful, and I certainly did not intend to imply that the issue here was that it was close to such a line, and since it was barely above the line, it shouldn’t be criticized. Instead, I’m arguing the point we disagree about, which was optimizing mindset, given that I think this was obviously a reasonably valuable investment.
And to explain my claim that it’s clearly valuable, first, there is tons of retained value in real estate, so the expected cost of the purchase was very small, except for opportunity cost of doing other things with the money—which I think was clearly understood to be far lower when the decision was made.
And the benefit is potentially very large. There is a strong potential for really useful retreats and conferences, better than most of the ones which have occurred already within EA. I know several papers that came out of previous GPI conferences, and the conferences would have been much better if they didn’t have everyone staying in different parts of Oxford, splitting up and making ad-hoc collaborations harder. In contrast, I found events like “Palmcone,” which was run by Lightcone over a week at a resort, incredibly valuable, and had several important connections and projects kickstarted. It was easily worth a multiple of the price of the flight, specifically because it was the type of immersive retreat that this would allow -several days of unstructured discussions with a relatively small group of people, which was really helped by being in a very nice location. However, I heard from people at Lightcone that the only reason it was possible was that the venue was available at a steeply discounted price due to a cancellation.
CEA or EV is the ultimate decision maker and owns the building. Owen Cotton-Barratt made a proposal and they accepted, which they didn’t have to do. I don’t think it’s helpful or productive to individualize decisions and responsibility in the way you’re suggesting.
What do you mean by ultimate decision maker here? I think that fiscal sponsor is a pretty weird role, and doesn’t imply much responsibility. I mostly see it as a weird role that exists for legal reasons, where EV provides a useful service for smaller orgs and projects who don’t want to fully incorporate on their own. I think that applying some minimal bar for “is this org’s work worth supporting” seems good, but that it’s not their job to carefully evaluate whether they agree with everything that org is doing, or whether it meets a cost effectiveness bar. IMO it seems pretty bad if small orgs need to be constantly stressed about EV pulling fiscal support if EV disagrees with a decision, and I don’t think EV should be trying to do the evaluative job of a grantmaker (though I’m pro some orgs existing to evaluate projects, grantmaker or no)
I could be getting this completely wrong, and please correct me if I am, but EV is the ultimate decision maker in the sense that they bought and will be running the building—Owen Cotton-Baratt brought EVF a proposal and a donor to do something, and they accepted to do it and are now doing it. Owen or the donor did not buy the building, will not be running the programs out of it—EVF will, if not directly then as a project run within the legal entity of EVF (the statement that they will employing staff to work makes me believe its the former) much like CEA. I’m truly very confused as to how EVF is not the decision maker here and would greatly appreciate an explanation.
Ah. I don’t have much inside knowledge here, but my understanding was that Owen (and other people on his team) is the one running the project—organising what programs run (or coordinating with the external groups organising them), making strategic decisions for the space, etc. And that EVF are only involved for some logistical things where you need a fiscal sponsor, but not actually running the project.
I believe EVF have historically had similar relationships with a bunch of other orgs, eg EA Funds or Giving What We Can (this may no longer be true). My understanding is that EVF specialises in giving the necessary kind of logistical/legal support to projects, which otherwise basically run themselves (including having their own ops staff dealing with day-to-day things)
Thank you for the explanation, I understand your point of view better now. That being said, the way you explained still reads to me more as Owen and his team running a project (albeit with a high degree of autonomy) for EVF than EVF acting a facilitator. But in either case, EVF was ultimate decision maker and they are the organization that bought the building. I don’t think the degree of separation is significant enough to say that this was not an EVF decision or that EVF is not responsible for it.
I agree with your points about EVF micromanaging the projects of its subsidiaries under threat of pulling out being undesirable, but I don’t think they apply very well here. This is because a) the decision was not whether org X’s action was a cost effective ot reasonable one but whether this action should be taken under the stewardship and sponsorship of EVF in the first place, b) because it was a very high stakes decision simply in terms of initial and ongoing costs, and c) the degree of involvement that EVF will have seems to be enough that this should be treated as an EVF project regardless. The last point is the one I’m most unsure about and is based on a lot of comments in this thread justifying the choice of Oxford as a venue because of the convenience for CEA staff, although I’m unclear how much of that is based on actual information about how the venue will be used versus speculation from commenters.
Additionally, if this is a situation where the Abbey is going to be run independently from EVF and with a dedicated team, I think further justification of Oxford should be necessary, both because of the high cost of the area and because if how difficult it is to get UK visas (which would arguably diminish the expected value as it limits the use and the range of activities- I’ll admit to some bias here because I’ve had a number of friends and colleagues get rejected for UK visas for legitimate work and education travel for workshops and conferences over the past couple months and I’m not certain how common that it is. Still, it seems like selecting somewhere in the Schengen zone or Eastern Europe where you can still have the “pleasant surroundings” for a cheaper price and with less economic and time costs involved in being able to actually get there might have been a good thing to consider)
I don’t find this compelling. The statement “The Centre for Effective Altruism spent £15m on a country manor house” is completely true as written. I don’t think the extra details substantially change the moral or optical picture here.
See my other comment explaining why I disagree with this.
Which part? The claim that an entity called CEA bought a manor house, or the claim that the extra details don’t substantially change the picture?
I claim the first of these is uncomplicatedly factually correct. The second is obviously more subjective.
On the first point, “factually correct” doesn’t mean “not misleading,” especially when some details are omitted. Which was the second point, but “I said something factually correct” doesn’t really seem like much of a defense against the claim that the extra details matter.
That’s a distinction without a difference. EV was spun out from CEA, and for the purposes of this discussion, they are basically the same organization.
One important difference is that when you’re donating to CEA, you’re donating to CEA the organization, not EV (formerly CEA) the fiscal sponsor. If I gave money to CEA, I have a right to ask the money is put to good uses. I do not have such a direct claim to other projects under the EV umbrella (like GovAI or asterisk or Longview) . Similarly, if I donate to GovAI, I do not have a right to question them about the actions of CEA. The non-consequentialist part of my rights here, aside from the general belief that all actions should be directed to further the good, is from general affiliation as part of the same loosely connected social movement or community.
It’s currently my impression that the use of the term “fiscal sponsor” here (& elsewhere in these comments) misleads more than it enlightens.
When you donate “to CEA” or “to GovAI” (or GWWC or 80K or etc etc), you’re making a donation to EVF. You’re making a restricted donation, but a lot of charities have multiple programs and enable restricted donations. This isn’t fundamentally (or legally) distinct from donating to GiveDirectly and restricting it to going to their Africa programs instead of their US ones.
I appreciate this response, and I re-read Owen’s comment which explains that the “CEA” that authorized the Wytham purchase was always an umbrella organization that houses multiple projects, including “CEA” the community building organization, and that none of CEA proper’s staff were involved in the decision.
The sense in which they’re “the same org” to me is that CEA and EVF, besides being legally part of the same nonprofit, are tightly connected organizations that form the center of the EA community. Not all of EVF’s projects are “central” parts of the EA network – for example, GovAI is cause-specific – but many of them are, like 80K, GWWC, and Asterisk. As Wytham will likely be used for EA community-building events, it seems to fall into this category.