[As is always the default, but perhaps worth repeating in sensitive situations, my views are my own and by default I’m not speaking on behalf of the Open Phil. I don’t do professional grantmaking in this area, haven’t been following it closely recently, and others at Open Phil might have different opinions.]
I’m disappointed by ACE’s comment (I thought Jakub’s comment seemed very polite and even-handed, and not hostile, given the context, nor do I agree with characterizing what seems to me to be sincere concern in the OP just as hostile) and by some of the other instances of ACE behavior documented in the OP. I used to be a board member at ACE, but one of the reasons I didn’t seek a second term was because I was concerned about ACE drifting away from focusing on just helping animals as effectively as possible, and towards integrating/compromising between that and human-centered social justice concerns, in a way that I wasn’t convinced was based on open-minded analysis or strong and rigorous cause-agnostic reasoning. I worry about this dynamic leading to an unpleasant atmosphere for those with different perspectives, and decreasing the extent to which ACE has a truth-seeking culture that would reliably reach good decisions about how to help as many animals as possible.
I think one can (hopefully obviously) take a very truth-seeking and clear-minded approach that leads to and involves doing more human-centered social justice activism, but I worry that that isn’t what’s happening at ACE; instead, I worry that other perspectives (which happen to particularly favor social justice issues and adopt some norms from certain SJ communities) are becoming more influential via processes that aren’t particularly truth-tracking.
Charity evaluators have a lot of power over the norms in the spaces they operate in, and so I think that for the health of the ecosystem it’s particularly important for them to model openness in response to feedback, and rigorous, non-partisan, analytical approaches to charity evaluation/research in general, and general encouragement of truth-seeking, open-minded discourse norms. But I tentatively don’t think that’s what’s going on here, and if it is, I more confidently worry that charities looking on may not interpret things that way; I think the natural reaction of a charity (that values a current or future possible ACE Top or Standout charity designation) to the situation with Anima is to feel a lot of pressure to adopt norms, focuses, and diversity goals it may not agree it ought to prioritize, and that don’t seem intrinsically connected to the task of helping animals as effectively as possible, and for that charity worry that pushback might be met with aggression and reprisal (even if that’s not what would in fact happen).
This makes me really sad. I think ACE has one of the best missions in the world, and what they do is incredibly important. I really hope I’m wrong about the above and they are making the best possible choices, and are on the path to saving as many animals as possible, and helping the rest of the EAA ecosystem do the same.
Hey, I wanted to clarify that Open Phil gave most of the funding for the purchase of Wytham Abbey (a small part of the costs were also committed by Owen and his wife, as a signal of “skin in the game”). I run the Longtermist EA Community Growth program at Open Phil (we recently launched a parallel program for EA community growth for global health and wellbeing, which I don’t run) and I was the grant investigator for this grant, so I probably have the most context on it from the side of the donor. I’m also on the board of the Effective Ventures Foundation (EVF).
Why did we make the grant? There are two things I’d like to discuss about this, the process we used/context we were in, and our take on the case for the grant. I’ll start with the former.
Process and context: At the time we committed the funding (November 2021, though the purchase wasn’t completed until April 2022), there was a lot more apparent funding available than there is today, both from Open Phil and from the Future Fund. Existential risk reduction and related efforts seemed to us to have a funding overhang, and we were actively looking for more ways to spend money to support more good work, especially by encouraging more people to dedicate their careers to addressing the associated risks. Also, given the large amounts of funding available at the time, and relatively lower number of grantmakers, we wanted to experiment with decentralizing some influence over funding to other people with experience in the space who understood our long-run priorities but had visions for how to use the funding that were somewhat different from our grantmakers’.
So, we were experimenting with more defaulting to saying “yes” to shovel-ready grant requests that seemed aimed at our core priorities, especially when they didn’t require enormous amounts of funding. (As others have noted and as I’ll explain below, we modeled the amount of funding at stake here as being in the low millions of dollars, rather than the higher sticker price, since it was to purchase a durable asset that can be resold.)
What did we think about this grant? In the abstract, we thought the idea of buying real estate to use for events was a reasonable one.
When evaluating a grant, my team tends to focus on the question “to what extent (per dollar) will this grant result in more promising people focusing their careers on doing as much good as possible in our longtermist focus areas?” (Other Open Philanthropy programs use different criteria.) I and other people on my team have invested a fair amount in collecting data and developing metrics for evaluating the value-for-money of grants aimed at this goal, though also it’s still a work in progress in many ways.
When we surveyed ~200 people involved or interested in longtermist work, we found that many had been strongly influenced by in-person events they’d attended, particularly ones where people relatively new to a topic came into contact with relatively experienced people working full-time in that area. (Some other data and our general experiences in the space are largely supportive of this too). Overall, we feel fairly confident in-person events like workshops, learning retreats, and conferences can be very impactful for people considering big career changes, and have historically often been good value-for-money via helping people interested in our longtermist focus areas make professional connections and deepen their understanding about these topics.
We support projects that cumulatively run dozens of events per year (disproportionately in the Bay Area and UK), and we saw several reasons a venue purchase could be valuable for both increasing the number and quality of impactful events, and potentially saving some money:
The number of events was growing fast.
Suitable venues are often of limited availability and book up far in advance, making more spontaneous events challenging.
Rented venues sometimes have issues that aren’t discovered until an event has begun (and we’ve seen events go substantially worse, or have to execute difficult mid-event moves, because of issues arising with the venues after the event was already underway).
Ops capacity to organize before and after events is a resource we value highly. Organizing and preparing for events takes more time and may go worse on average when you need to orient to the layout of different venues, move in and out all the equipment, learn about new areas (and travel to/from them) and available vendors that the event allows, etc.
Renting venues varies a lot in price, but venues for events near top EA hubs can be very expensive. Often, the cost of the venues was in the $30-100k range (though there were also smaller, shorter events aimed at students with venue costs in the $10k-ish range, and large conferences can be much more expensive).
Other locations are often cheaper, but have a more difficult time attracting busy professionals, relative to ones that take place near where they live, and demand more time from ops staff, senior staff, and (sometimes) instructors helping with events (and, we generally highly value all those folks’ time, even if they are willing to travel).
The fact that the funding was going to be used to purchase a durable asset means that for the purposes of our cost-effectiveness analysis, we modeled the financial stakes as being somewhere in the low millions (rather than the meaningfully higher sticker price of the property). Our grantees also stood to potentially save money through the investment, since they wouldn’t end up paying rental costs to run their events. We still wouldn’t have been surprised if the investment turned out net negative from a financial perspective, but losing most of the investment seemed unlikely. Given this model of the costs, we thought it was consistent with our overall experiment in lowering barriers to longtermist funding to “default to yes” for a shovel-ready grant.
We discussed Owen’s reasoning behind selecting this kind of venue, and we thought it broadly made sense. The main goal was to have a venue relatively near Oxford with sufficient capacity for the types of events we thought could be highly impactful.
Despite the points above, we were relatively uncertain about this specific opportunity, and there was some internal debate over the amount and structure of our funding; we also expressed our uncertainty to Owen.
We were mainly uncertain about:
Owen being the person driving this forward, despite him not wanting to be the main point person actually helping oversee the property and run relevant events over the next few years
Whether refurbishing and maintaining the property would end up being much more time-consuming and expensive than Owen forecasted
Whether the process was moving too quickly and whether more should be done to investigate the state and expected value of the property, and whether a better opportunity might arise in the coming years
Whether the number and kinds of events (and the value of those events) had been sufficiently well-scoped, and whether this venue would prove a good fit for a sufficient fraction of them.
Internally at OP (including with our communications team), we discussed how this would reflect on us somewhat, but mostly from the perspective of us as a funder, rather than the wider ecosystem as a whole. I think that it was a mistake on my part that the funding conversations didn’t focus more on that broader question, and I regret it, though I think we should have a high bar to rejecting otherwise solid-seeming grants on optics grounds because that kind of approach can be hard to limit and then can end up being surprisingly costly to impact. (My recollection is that we thought of it mainly as a longtermist/existential risk reduction field resource and didn’t think enough about how what was then called CEA providing fiscal sponsorship might make it sound more like an EA project.)
We also told Owen that we would want to check in about venue usage and think about the value it was generating in terms of the community growth metrics we generally use, and discuss selling the property if it didn’t seem like things were going well. (Proceeds from a sale would be used as general funding within EVF, and that funding would replace some of our and other funders’ future grants to EVF.)
Where do I stand on this grant now? With the huge decline in available funds since November 2021, I don’t know whether we’d make this grant again today. I still think it could turn out to be importantly effort-saving and event-increasing-and-improving relative to regularly renting one-off event venues, and it could also lead to a higher number of impactful events being run. But it’s currently too soon to say whether the usage will justify the investment. If we were considering a similar grant now, we’d want to get more into the details of modeling the effective financial cost (incorporating the resale possibility), hammering out plans and predictions for future operations and usage, etc. but I think we might consider it to be good enough value-for-money that we’d want to go forward with some possible projects in this vein.
Why isn’t there a published grant page right now? (This isn’t my domain but) we typically aim to publish grants within three months of when we make our initial payment, but we’re currently working through a backlog of older grants. Wytham is one of many grants in that category.