I learned about this ten months ago, personally, and (in an informal peer context) spoke to one of the people involved about it. The person in question defended the decision by saying they intended to run retreats and ask “Hamming questions”. They added that the £15m was an investment, since the castle (“technically it’s not a castle”) wouldn’t depreciate in value. Also, they opined that the EA community as a whole shouldn’t have a veto on every large purchase, because consensus decision-making is infeasible on that scale and is likely to result in vetos for tons of potentially valuable proposals.
I think I agree with the third point at least to some extent, but that’s a meta level point, and the object level points did not seem like good arguments for buying a £15m castle. I came away from the conversation believing this was not a reasonable use of funds and with my opinion of CEA* lowered.
I didn’t, and still don’t, know what to do about this sort of thing. Changing how an EA org acts is hard; maybe public pressure helps, but I suspect a lot of the difficulties are in changing organizational norms and policies, and I don’t have a good sense of what would be useful policies or what wouldn’t be. I do have the intuition that having a larger number of distinct EA orgs would be good, so CEA has less influence individually.
*I understand CEA to be an umbrella organization housing a number of sub-orgs, and so I remain unsure how far this negative update should propagate; certainly I’m sure there are folks who work in other branches of CEA who had nothing to do with this and no say in it.
[ETA: Changed “their decision” to “the decision” upon receiving a reminder that the person in question was (probably) not the person who had actually made the original decision to buy the castle.]
In response to the person’s point about decisionmaking, there are ways to promote accountability to all donors, the community, and the general public without turning every decision into a referendum with veto power. Providing sufficiently detailed business justifications after the fact for purchases like this is one of them.
If “the general public” strikes a nerve with anyone, recall that the grantor’s home country likely provided an indirect tax subsidy of several million pounds or equivalent on this. If one does not like public scrutiny, one does not have to apply for favored tax status. Then it would be none of the general public’s business.
Strongly agree with this—accountability and transparency does not mean voting by consensus ot committee. I would be interested in hearing what disagree voters find objectionable about this comment.
If you’re an organisation that solicits donations part of your basic obligations in your relationship with your donors is to be clear about whatyyou have spent money on in the past, and intend to spend it on in the future, so that people can look at that and make a reasonable judgement about what their donation is likely to be used for
I learned about this ten months ago, personally, and (in an informal peer context) spoke to one of the people involved about it. The person in question defended the decision by saying they intended to run retreats and ask “Hamming questions”. They added that the £15m was an investment, since the castle (“technically it’s not a castle”) wouldn’t depreciate in value. Also, they opined that the EA community as a whole shouldn’t have a veto on every large purchase, because consensus decision-making is infeasible on that scale and is likely to result in vetos for tons of potentially valuable proposals.
I think I agree with the third point at least to some extent, but that’s a meta level point, and the object level points did not seem like good arguments for buying a £15m castle. I came away from the conversation believing this was not a reasonable use of funds and with my opinion of CEA* lowered.
I didn’t, and still don’t, know what to do about this sort of thing. Changing how an EA org acts is hard; maybe public pressure helps, but I suspect a lot of the difficulties are in changing organizational norms and policies, and I don’t have a good sense of what would be useful policies or what wouldn’t be. I do have the intuition that having a larger number of distinct EA orgs would be good, so CEA has less influence individually.
*I understand CEA to be an umbrella organization housing a number of sub-orgs, and so I remain unsure how far this negative update should propagate; certainly I’m sure there are folks who work in other branches of CEA who had nothing to do with this and no say in it.
[ETA: Changed “their decision” to “the decision” upon receiving a reminder that the person in question was (probably) not the person who had actually made the original decision to buy the castle.]
In response to the person’s point about decisionmaking, there are ways to promote accountability to all donors, the community, and the general public without turning every decision into a referendum with veto power. Providing sufficiently detailed business justifications after the fact for purchases like this is one of them.
If “the general public” strikes a nerve with anyone, recall that the grantor’s home country likely provided an indirect tax subsidy of several million pounds or equivalent on this. If one does not like public scrutiny, one does not have to apply for favored tax status. Then it would be none of the general public’s business.
Strongly agree with this—accountability and transparency does not mean voting by consensus ot committee. I would be interested in hearing what disagree voters find objectionable about this comment.
If you’re an organisation that solicits donations part of your basic obligations in your relationship with your donors is to be clear about whatyyou have spent money on in the past, and intend to spend it on in the future, so that people can look at that and make a reasonable judgement about what their donation is likely to be used for