FTX’s Future Fund donated $13.9M to the Center for Effective Altruism. This was apparently most (all?) of their 2022 donations and over 50% of their total donations ever received.
Just to be clear, this is because most people within EA circles don't donate to EA infrastructure. SBF was a director of CEA for a few months prior to opening Alameda and likely was lobbied by someone to donate to infrastructure after it received so little.
Also, if you believe your link, the first FTX donation to CEA was in 2022, and this was purchased in 2021. But eyeballing the numbers at the link I don't think it's complete.
Please don't conflate effective altruism with SBF/FTX. Although SBF was a major donor to EA organizations, they were not party to his fraud and EAs do not generally approve of doing unethical things "for the greater good."(Citation: Point #5 here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-250)
When the most famous advocate of your philosophy is the perpetrator of one of the biggest frauds in history, the conflation is unavoidable. EA will have to rebrand.
This is the closest thing in that thread, but it doesn't appear to be an official justification. In the replies of that tweet, someone suggests this as a better-faith representation of a justification.
> why? a quick glance through the twitter thread doesnt reveal anything
One would almost think a twitter rant is not a great starting point for a thoughtful discussion :o
I had to scroll this far, one comment above the grayed-out comments, to find the first person asking for the other side of the story instead of either (top comment) providing more info or (every other comment) taking out the pitchforks and condemning the whole concept of science-based altruism.
Ok I know I’m the outlier here but I’m some ways I really don’t feel outraged about this and I almost understand it?
The foundation still owns the property, and if money was still going to the right places is it the end of the world?
I wonder where people would actually suggest they’d have their head quarters ? I know individuals who spend 2/10ths of they on their personal house so for a foundation it doesn’t see too outrageous.
the tweet is scant on details, maybe a foundations member donated the money for that specific property ?
Seems like Twitter is always looking for some thing / someone to lynch?
I am in two minds about it. It costs less than top exec yearly compensation, and probably less than a lot of London office floors (presumably ?).
That said, there are cheaper ways to fire up the imagination of these luminaries: some decent grade tents in the woods, campfires etc. Sort of a poor mans burning man. I think the connection to nature and simplicity, and having slugs crawl on you at night, would create that creative bubble they are looking for.
Optics are important too, and even if this estate is genuinely good for how the money is spent, there is no way the average charity donator will see this. Also I reckon anyone well connected enough to be an EA doesn't need accommodation or money or a job to survive.
Top execs where? The top exec at EA makes $18MM/yr? That is a lot of money, more than the overwhelming majority of "top execs" make outside of the very largest companies in the world.
I'm not making any comparison. I'm saying that the comment suggesting "top execs" generally make $18MM/yr is wildly off. But this is some of the magical thinking that helps people justify making extravagant purchases in the name of "altruism".
Of course, not everyone will agree with their decision, but it wasn’t done haphazardly. Here’s an excerpt:
> We had various calculations about costings, which made it look somewhere between “moderately money-saving” and “mildly money-spending” vs renting venues for events that would happen anyway, depending on various assumptions e.g. about usage that we couldn’t get great data on before running the experiment. The main case for the project was not a cost-saving one, but that if it was a success it could generate many more valuable workshops than would otherwise exist. Note that this is a much less expensive experiment than it may look on face value, since we retain the underlying asset of the building.
What are the workshops though? Admittedly if this was an org with a different mission it seems like something people would critique as inefficient overhead. But because its EA its assumed to be efficient?
I still prefer the EA mindset to most other mindsets on giving but dont have a lot of faith that this org has produced much value. I think a lot of wealthy people (like Bill Gates) have already been doing this type of giving for years so I'm not sure what they have really invented either.
I assume Introduction to EA Fellowships and their subsequent follow-up Fellowships will be the main ones. They do run AI Safety workshops in Cambridge so maybe they'll move those down there? There will be quite a few both directly related to EA and other topics that they're interested in.
I guess my point is what efficacy do any of those programs have - especially the AI safety workshop? It seems extremely unproven to me and frankly I'm a bit cynical about it. Even if you do think that's very important, why not just have video lectures on it for the public?
Video lectures for the public seem like they're trying to do a very different thing than a workshop? In general, the goal in a workshop is to get a group of people together to think about a problem and a collaborative way, while the goal of public lectures is to spread information.
That's fair enough. But I'm still having trouble seeing how this would pass the scrutiny of EA's philosophy on good charity other than for the fact its in house.
Like there are already hundreds of universities with the abilities to do this or hose a workshop on it. And there's also no special reason to think that the assortment of people they will bring in will do good instead of talk in circles or come to the wrong conclusion. Like - it seems similar to the same thinking a large church does by bringing in religious leaders to talk about stuff?
It's expensive in that part of the country. Say I rent a room at an Oxford college for a conference which is subsidized, I'd be looking at 70 or 80 a night. Say it's five nights, that's 350/400 just on accommodation. Have 30 people and that's 12k per week saved, against a non-depreciating asset in an area that is very unlikely to reduce in value. On top of this you can do what you want with the place and have permanent work spaces etc. Seems sensible to me, even if my first instinct was WTF.
CEA is based in Oxford, as is 80,000 hours, the Future of Humanities Institute, and many more orgs. In Cambridge you have similar organizations. At the same time there's transport links to Heathrow. All of this in a property that will appreciate in value due to Oxfordshires zoning laws and the general history of the place. If this was 15m sunk cost I'd agree it's crazy but owning a conference space that's cheaper than you'd find in the cities, close to a lot of the core orgs, and is a nice place that won't depreciate in value (and that was privately funded directly, this isn't using an aggregate of peoples infrastructure funds).
I agree overall with many points you make, but I am not convinced about the property’s immunity to depreciation. Certainly the land can be expected to appreciate in value, but what is the annual upkeep on a historic castle? A castle can easily depreciate, depending on circumstances and maintenance.
If the property will appreciate in value and they uniquely know about that then: rent out the property to someone else and make even more to spend on malaria bed nets, and have the conference in the cinderblock building or Nissen huts elsewhere. This is the center for effective altruism not center for building nerd Versailles.
Probably the main goal is minting more EAs. If 10% of program participants are convinced to be EAs and 10% of EAs donate 10% of their income[1], every participant is worth 0.1% of the lifetime earnings of the average participant (probably a decently-paid software engineer) in expectation.
What's the main difference between when breast cancer awareness spends so much money on advertising to raise more money? In both cases it is true that spending on overhead raises total lifetime donations but ultimately it seems to increase the amount of productive hours spent doing administrative work that means nothing on its own.
I wouldn't argue there's a difference except that "EA" taken as a whole probably has way less overhead than Susan G. Komen (for example). If (if!) a breast cancer charity running ads drastically increases the amount of money they get in donations, that's probably a good thing up until the point that the marginal benefit to breast cancer researchers of the charity running more ads outweighs the marginal benefit to breast cancer researchers of just getting the money. If $1 in ads consistently brought in $2 of donations, it'd seem like the right thing to do to run a ton of ads, even if we agree running ads about breast cancer or AI or malaria nets or tickets to the opera for inner city youth is not intrinsically valuable.
I think I can speak for EAs when I say overhead is not the greatest metric by which to judge a charity[1]. I understand why it's an intuitive one, and overhead is probably correlated with measures of effectiveness, but if your targets are concrete enough you can just... actually measure effectiveness.
All of this sounds, to put it bluntly, like a lot of hemming and hawing to get around the fact that your favorite charity organization just spent $15 million on a castle.
Breast cancer charities aren't effective with the money they use to further their goal compared to givewell charities. Focusing on overhead is a mistake, impact matters.
I suppose that's fair. I dont want to conflate EA the org with EA the movement or with Givewell - but still the pitch I usually here is "If you give you know your money is going directly to efficient programs where it will actually save lives". The pitch is not "If you give you know your money is going to an administrative org which will multiply your donations by advertising, workshops, and branding"
If I am trying to do the second (influence behavior of others or multiple givings through sustainable orgs) then I would probably donate to Democratic politicians, not EA.
100% of donations to the givewell fund go to the charities they support. Their operations are wholly funded by dustin moskovitz. I don't think the center for EA has ever acted like money donated there was going to anything other than org building. Some people believe org building is the most effective use for their money, but for those that don't they can go to givewell.
I'm not a huge fan of the org building stuff, and I think the center for EA especially has been wasteful due to SBF abundance, so my donations go to givewell where I know exactly what I'm "buying".
To be cynical - how is this meaningfully different than someone running church programs and pointing out that people who attended the church programs state after it influenced how they view giving and charity?
Pretty much all not for profits needs to attract and specifically, retain members, the workshops could be about introducing them to the program and the associated benefits with regards to donating.
But how is that different from the other orgs they criticize?
Isnt the end state of this that they realize they can spend $100 and expect to raise $150 from that investment - and this scales to an administrative staff of hundreds of people who spend millions a year advertising? Essentially Susan Komen but for malaria nets and AI research.
Don't forget to factor in maintenance costs. If you own the place, you're on the hook for maintenance, which can be pretty high for old buildings. While the asset may appreciate in value over time, the cost of carry may negate that price appreciation.
Or you can decide not to do maintenance but then the value won't appreciate.
Lots of those costs will still be there. Catering, food, AV, Decorations, etc etc don’t just become free because you bought a palace. Also now you have to take care of a centuries old building, hire gardeners.
All that is besides the point which is that these people are clearly not motivated by the principles they espouse.
If you focus on the essentials, bypass the glitz, and are selective with sourcing, you can run a great wedding for a few thousand. The main costs are land-hire, marquee, catering, and equipment. The rest is free or low-cost. That's what we did, and people still remember it fondly nearly ten years on.
One thing your numbers probably don't consider is the cost of hosting the guests? For a wedding that is usually not considered the responsibility of the hosts, but it is still a cost associated of the event. In this case, one of the reasons why this building seems to be a good fit for the project is that most of it has been carved up into small bedrooms. (I think this happened in the early 20th century when it was used as student housing, if I remember what Owen told me correctly.)
We invited guests to camp over at the field that we hired; it was about £20 per tent which we passed half of to the guests. So that counted a few hundred towards our overall costs (included in my few thousand figure).
Obviously I wouldn't expect CEA to run a campsite, but it was a lot of fun for wedding.
If you’re going to hold a lot of events in royal manors then sure maybe buying a royal manor is cheaper. However, most events don’t need to be held in royal manors, especially if they are about altruism or shit like that.
I did my undergrad in one of the many German universities where the main building was a 'schloss', an aristocrat's huge mansion, similar to OP's manor.
It was the worst building for teaching, as ballrooms are flat so you can't see the speaker past the third row, and acoustics are awful because these rooms are just not made to carry sound from one spot to the rest of the room.
I don't think that's a problem in this case? I've been to the building (I'm friends with the person who started the project and he showed it to me in April when I was visiting) and it doesn't have a ballroom. The rooms it does have do seem like a good size and configuration for the planned use (medium sized residential workshops).
The comment claims it is about an experiment. How about running regular workshops for some years in rented space so that you can judge interest/success first?
Then you can buy a building which is appropriate with some space to grow.
Google famously has spent billions of dollars on NYC real estate, including Chelsea Market and the Port Authority building.
I don't think this is all relevant, though, since the trade-offs for a large publicly traded tech company are very different than for a grant funded events project at a charity?
I would have accepted it if they bought a big space that's close to public transport, so that events can be organized often and very efficiently, with high accessibility.
I read the top reply. What, exactly, about it do you find persuasive? To me, it seems like a pretty great illustration of one of the major critiques of EA: it introduces a set of vague axioms that are then used to build arguments for all sorts of silly, compromised arguments, like "we should buy a ￡15MM estate" or "we should divert money from the poor to AI research".
If FTX had been doing what they were widely believed to be doing, providing a place where people could trade cryptocurrencies and taking a cut on the trades, I wouldn't have any problem with that: there wouldn't have been harmful means that needed justifying. Which is why all the condemnation is coming out after we learned that they were actually doing something much much worse.
Running a crypto exchange is a grey hat. It is a place for crims, money launderers, gamblers and of course there is the environmental impact of crypto to consider.
I see it a little bit like a dodgy party donor, which is very much appreciated by the party profiting from the filthy lucre being sent in their general direction.
Then suddenly scandal engulfs the donor and the honchos in the profiting party are shocked! SHOCKED! I tell you.
I think that's a quite good analogy to what happened here. While the money was rolling nobody asked questions from where it's actually coming from. Only when that whole house of cards, built within other houses of cards collapsed did the "condemnation" start.
Nobody is really interested in details how the sausage is made as long the money is rolling. Thus, any condemnation or distancing from Mr. Bankman-Fried and his business rings very, very hollow to me.
> nobody asked questions from where it's actually coming from
What do you mean? The public story around FTX, and what they said when you asked them, was that the money was coming from charging fees on trading, which was plausible given the level of trading and the size of their fees. That the condemnation didn't start until it turned out that SBF and FTX were actually doing other things and lying to everyone is not surprising?
Like a lot of other organizations and leaders, EA has egg on its face from SBF/FTX, no doubt. You can see it roiling the community. But while I'm in no way an expert on their funding, I think it's an open question whether SBF funding is part of a pattern of "filthy lucre" as you put it, or one--or maybe one of a few--instance of an unknown criminal funding source doing some reputation washing. My sense is it's the latter.
I'd also go further to say that it's pretty hard to track down the sources of all your funding. Even government organizations (the FEC, the IRS, the FBI) have a super hard time doing this. Nonprofits generally just go by reputation, as they have essentially zero investigative power.
"Ends justify the means, even when the means include significant harm" has never been within mainstream EA. For example, Will MacAskill's post on the FTX collapse includes lots of examples from his book where he said not to do this: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WdeiPrwgqW2wHAxgT/...
We call ourselves the good guy squad. Everything we do is eventually good even if you don't see how it's good now. Any time we do something you think is bad like buying a $15 million mansion that who the heck knows what we're using it for now, it's due to someone making an honest mistake. You wouldn't criticize the good guy squad, because then you'd be part of the bad guy squad!
"I only read one Book because its Good Book don't you know, and I know it's Good because a really Good Book would." (c) somehow reminded me about that song :)
* Why they want to run a particular kind of event.
* Why this building is a good fit for the events they want to run.
* It was funded by a grant from a donor who specifically wanted to support this project.
These are all not things that you would get from the tweet, and are useful in understanding why they made their decision.
That doesn't mean you have to agree that this project meets the high standards EA claims to set for itself, but having the context of what they're doing and why they think it's worth doing helps a lot in targeting critiques (and there are a lot of off-target critiques below from people are missing this context).
I wasn't involved in this project (though when I visited friends in Oxford this April the author of that comment showed me around the building) and it's not how I would personally donate, but I think it's a reasonable choice for a donor who (a) is already intending to invest some of their portfolio in real estate and (b) thinks that progress on improving the world is mostly limited by figuring out what to do and not by the amount of funding for proven things.
When donors want something ineffective, isn't it EA's job to convince them to want something effective instead?
If they are only holding their own events there, it's a waste. If they're renting out the space, it's a distraction and a business masquerading as a charity.
> When donors want something ineffective, isn't it EA's job to convince them to want something effective instead?
To a point, yes. On the other hand, it's good for people to be trying a range of things: it's a hedge against groupthink, opens up new areas that might turn out to be important, what most needs doing might change over time and it's good to be prepared, people don't all have the same beliefs about what matters or the same theories of change, diminishing returns from overinvesting in an area, etc. This means that while it's good to push back on proposals to understand how they're plausibly high impact, "that's not what I'd put my time or donations towards but I don't think it's bad that you're working on it" is a common view for EAs to have of other EAs' work.
> If they are only holding their own events there, it's a waste.
I do think this is what they're doing. How is it a waste?
> It was funded by a grant from a donor who specifically wanted to support this project.
It seems (from what I gather) the venue was a decision from CEA, not the donor (he cites his reasoning behind the choice). It's important to highlight this was not money directed toward donations, but instead money directly for CEA (supposedly they could manage their finances and buy property for meetings).
Still, that's really expensive for a venue -- in the last case, if they had so much money, why not funnel it back to great causes that could really use the money? (sorry, I have to go there: $18M/$5000 == 3600 lives saved from preventable diseases -- is the property that important?)
> (b) thinks that progress on improving the world is mostly limited by figuring out what to do and not by the amount of funding for proven things.
In that case, I think a better investment would be in proper, well thought out, academic infrastructure that would help people research more effective ways of giving. It seems way too easy to "fool ourselves" thinking: we bought a lavish castle, but it's going to make us think better! -- the high standards applied to giving should definitely by applied to our internal decisions as well, and we need to be specially vigilant when it stands to benefit ourselves -- in what appears as a lavish expensive.
My main concern would be the lack of transparency -- why wasn't this decision made publicly and transparently, why didn't they consult for example the effectivealtruism.org forums, or donors?
> It seems (from what I gather) the venue was a decision from CEA, not the donor (he cites his reasoning behind the choice).
This is minor, but my read from the post is that the project was a decision from an EA (Owen) who lined up funding (the donor) and a host organization (CEA, since renamed to EAV).
> that's really expensive for a venue
Is it? This is a building with room to host 30-50 people, meeting space, and (I think) a commercial kitchen. Very roughly, it costs 10 times as much as my house for 10 times the space.
> if they had so much money, why not funnel it back to great causes that could really use the money?
As I wrote above, I think it's probably because they think that the most important work is not bottlenecked on funding but on figuring out what to do. I think bednet distribution is great (and just made my annual donation via GiveWell) but there isn't a clear consensus on how best to improve the world. I do think the donor would bite your bullet and say that they thought that the benefit to humans, over time, of the workshops this space will facilitate is larger than the benefit to humans today of using that money to prevent additional deaths from disease.
> My main concern would be the lack of transparency -- why wasn't this decision made publicly and transparently, why didn't they consult for example the effectivealtruism.org forums, or donors?
I would love it if they had publicly written up their plans at the stage of "we're thinking about buying a building to host residential workshops, here's about what we think it would cost, here's why we think it's worth doing", and I would strongly encourage others to do that. I also think that if you are soliciting donations from the public at large you should be clear about what you intend to spend the money on and why you think it's plausibly one of the most valuable things to do with that money. At the same time, I think a norm where effective altruists should prioritize transparency so highly that a group of them can't spend their own money without making the case publicly would go too far. For example, I know some people who hosted a workshop (elsewhere!) on figuring out what sort of safety studies would be valuable for evaluating UVC light as a disease transmission reducer. I don't believe they wrote anything up publicly justifying the cost of the workshop, instead the cost was between them and their funder, and that's ok! Public communication is a lot of work, and it trades off with other things you could be doing instead.
To be clear, I consider myself an effective altruist.
> Very roughly, it costs 10 times as much as my house for 10 times the space
I highly appreciate the transparency! To be fair, I think your house is expensive (I suppose you live in a very expensive place! around here, you could buy 10 large apartments for that kind of money). Is everywhere in Oxford that expensive?
I do live in a developing country, and have a relatively comfortable lifestyle for my country. Still, I try to be frugal and avoid spending more than I need, even in everyday life. An EA that I want to support is an EA that is radically compassionate, open minded, pragmatic, altruistic and bravely focused on a better world; not one that is self-serving with sprinkles of charitable giving.
I also feel that self-vigilance, self-skepticism (and embracing criticism and improvement with an open heart and mind) is an important component of EA, which is what I'm trying to do here.
> At the same time, I think a norm where effective altruists should prioritize transparency so highly that a group of them can't spend their own money without making the case publicly would go too far.
I agree to an extent (although I plan to make my own giving as transparent as I reasonably can in the future), but that is specifically an EA charity, not private individuals -- as an EA org, I think they show commitment to effective spending and I think it's very reasonable they should embrace transparency.
From wiki: "Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) is an Oxford-based charity that builds and supports the effective altruism community". This makes me less confident than I would like in supporting CEA over effective charities like GiveWell or other EA charities.
Please see this post (from me): Be simple and transparent, a heuristic
> it's probably because they think that the most important work is not bottlenecked on funding but on figuring out what to do.
Note that this has very much changed in the past few weeks, for reasons I'm not going to get into in this comment. We'll see how EA funding does in this upcoming giving season, but for now the general assumption is that EA is broadly funding-constrained.
Sorry, yes, I should have said that this is a bullet I think the donor would have bitten at the time, not necessarily a bullet they would bite today in the post-FTX lower-funding environment.
> Is it? This is a building with room to host 30-50 people, meeting space, and (I think) a commercial kitchen. Very roughly, it costs 10 times as much as my house for 10 times the space.
That really sounds like a yes. You apparently live somewhere that is extremely expensive, as you seem to be saying you have a 1.5 mil house that can fit 3-5 people. I'm pretty sure I can host 20 if they don't need to sleep here, and definitely 3-5 if they do need to sleep here, and my house was bought for $390k. I'm not in some dump in the middle of nowhere. It's a downtown townhouse with an unobstructed skyline view in the 4th largest metro in the United States. You don't have to buy an event space in one of the world's most expensive places to buy a building. Hell, I'm even in a major transportation hub right in the middle of the country! It would be very easy for people from all over the place to meet here. There has to be some similar part of the UK if they absolutely needed a building in that country.
Sorry, when I said "host" I should have clarified I'm including sleeping.
I live in Somerville MA, where $1M will buy you a 3-4br.
There are definitely cheaper areas than Somerville or Oxford. For example, https://ceealar.org bought a 17br former hotel in Blackpool (Northern England) which cost 1% as much (£140k). [1] My understanding from talking to people in the UK, though, is that for the kind of events they're looking to host proximity to London and Oxford is pretty important, and that's expensive.
You give no data on why those arguments are silly, it’s only your opinion, very far from being factual. The whole EA premise is that we shouldn’t think like that. I agree.
I didn't and don't have an opinion about it. Like everyone else here, I don't have enough information to reach a conclusion, let alone a high-confidence one.
The comment I linked to was a reminder that none of us have anywhere near enough information to evaluate this decision. We'd need at least some idea how frequently they expect to use it, the alternatives, the predicted benefits of a high-end venue, and so on.
A productive comment would ask questions ("I wonder how they estimated…", "I hope they share more information about…"), not try to turn relatively little information into an opinion.
> I didn't and don't have an opinion about it. Like everyone else here, I don't have enough information to reach a conclusion, let alone a high-confidence one.
This seems to be a few (shaky, IMO) premises.
1. EA the organization (not the philosophy) are made of people who are adept at doing risk-reward calculation. This is the premise I find most suspicious given their recent record of blowing wild axioms out of proportion and blowing up their own face by suckering up too much to the FTX money without realizing the risk.
2. The people in the org are in it for actually doing good instead self aggrandization, a sin they blame most charities for. I find it more suspicious that somehow the world gathered a few angels in human form in one place, and more plausible that it's the classic "oh that guy is shady, listen to me" variant of the scam. Am I cynical? Maybe. But the evidence here supports me.
Which leads me to the final point, circumstantial evidence. In a third world country where I grew up, if my region had a large flood that brought in a lot of charitable donations, and the next week the local politician showed up in a new SUV, we didn't debate all that you're arguing. If it quacks like corruption and walks like corruption, it's probably corruption and not some 357-dimensional chess by the most brilliant minds of our generation.
If you have calculations about costings, it seems absolutely nonsensical to go for 'stately country estates' owned by British royalty, 'one of the loveliest houses in England')[1]. The gardening costs alone will be astronomical, and what does that have to do with workshops?
Any university building laid out for workshops/teaching will suffice.
Thinking about this more, I'm so baffled by this decision.
EA touts itself as the best strategy for giving as they present themselves as a rational force evaluating all approaches, then going for the 'best' one.
Buying a multimillion pound stately country estate for your HQ is clearly not the 'best' use of money. Yet, EA argues that it is the best use of money with their usual vocabulary. That means I now cannot trust any of their decisions as they clearly bend the outcomes to whatever they want them to be.
I.e., there's nothing 'effective' about the entire organisation, it's just your run-of-the-mill moneypit for rich people to feel better.
> I.e., there's nothing 'effective' about the entire organisation, it's just your run-of-the-mill moneypit for rich people to feel better.
Same scam, different copy. The good that SBF did for the world was exposing this particular underbelly. The world will move on, to the same scam with new window dressing.
Note that CEA is specifically a community-building organization,
> Our mission is to build and nurture a global community of people who are thinking carefully about the world’s biggest problems and taking impactful action to solve them. We hope that this community can help to build a radically better world.
> To foster this community, we run conferences, support hundreds of local groups, and provide online resources and forums for discussion.
You shouldn't imagine that people are donating to generic maximal impact causes and the money is ending up in surprise luxury real estate. (Or, at least, if it is then that's news to me.)
When CEA says (paraphrasing) ‘this is a reasonable way to spend the money we have on hosting a ton of conferences,’ the ‘host a ton of conferences’ part is an inherited assumption from this being CEA money (a specific grant for this purpose, in this case), not a broader claim about the value of lots of conferences vs. global health charities.
I'm not sure about that - most of the charities in the EA sphere have 'community building' as one of their cause areas, although from what I've read, it is the smallest pot of money. On givingwhatwecan.org, EA infrastructure is one of the areas you can donate to. [0]
It seems that in this particular case the purchase was funded by an individual donation though. Would be great to have some more transparency on this issue.
Because it makes it a pure prestige object, which is not even used for the practical day to day business of the organization (and incurs 10s of thousands of yearly costs just for upkeep and maintenance in the bargain).
What will be really interesting is the log of who is living and staying there. I suspect that officers and friends are spending a lot of time there independent of any conferences.
This seems like a sham purchase to buy a nice home for the officers.
OTOH, that's exactly what you'd buy if you wanted to signal to rich, snobbish prospective donors that effective altruism is here to stay; not something overly weird, cultish or otherwise low status, but rather an eminently proper destination for their philanthropic dollars - or pounds, as the case may be. As a marketing expense, it makes total sense as much as we all wish that these dynamics didn't exist.
Actually, a massive country estate is exactly what I'd expect cultish organizations to gravitate towards. I wouldn't be surprised if the Church of Scientology bought up a place like this.
From a marketing perspective, I can assure you that effective altruism does itself absolutely no favors by blatantly betraying its supposed core principles.
I've read more compelling arguments in theological discussions
Maybe it's time to coin a new term: "altruism washing" whereas people will come up with wishy-washy reasons of why they should buy a 15MGBP castle and make it look like they're doing good with it
Wouldn't it make more sense to be able to hold workshops all around the world, thereby attracting a global audience instead of just people who can/want to travel to England?
> Of course, not everyone will agree with their decision, but it wasn’t done haphazardly.
Needless to say, the question in context should have been whether it was done "effecitvely". Fine fine, if you want to throw a ton of conferences or whatever owning a forum to do it in might plausibly save you money.
Was throwing a ton of conferences really the best, most effective use of fifteen million pounds at furthering the betterment of mankind? I think we all know the answer to that.
They wanted to throw a ton of parties and raise a ton of money and wanted to spend that money on stuff that made them feel important.
It sounds like it was done completely haphazardly.
1. As soon as effective altruism becomes about glamour and extravagance, you attract the type of people who don’t care about the cause (clearly already true)
2. Obviously buying a castle is not the best investment the EA could be making and using that as the excuse is just weird.
Of course none of this should be surprising as the Effective Altruism is essentially a PR stunt for people who do financial crimes.
Close to Oxford (aka PhD students, etc.), maintain the value instead of renting, good nature place for thinking.
I don't see the issue here if the space is utilized semi-effectively. They might need to think about how to get like 50% of the 15 million "out of the bricks" in order to utilize their capital better (assuming the house prices won't crash more than 50%).
EA was always Oxford-ish, culture is culture. No form of rationality will prevail from that (I'm looking at you HN! ;-) ). Given their cultural/emotional make up, I think this is an okay rational decision. It could've been way worse.
I don't get the fuss. It's kind of like being upset about the Kardashians or something (by that I specifically mean: it feels trivial and unimportant). It's a 15 million pounds decision that won't even make them lose 15 million pounds but a lot less. So who cares? Let's talk about CRISPR or something actually interesting. Let's live in the future.
Is it really trivial and unimportant? My understanding is that the organisation's goal is figuring out how to spend money effectively and without bias. If they're spending money in an overtly wasteful and selfish way, that feels important.
> My understanding is that the organisation's goal is figuring out how to spend money effectively and without bias.
Sure, but there will always be some bias. It's one of those things: they're wrong if they believe they can do away with all bias. Moreover, they are so wrong, I can't hold them responsible for it, even if they say they will hold themselves responsible for it. It's like a child saying "I will be responsible for building a time machine." You can't hold them responsible. But I get where you're coming from, I used to be more in your camp, but the longer I am out of academia the more I tend to look at the world in "grey terms" (I'm not implying you're still in academia or anything, that's just how my life journey is progressing at the moment).
Oxford is one of their biases that they can't seem to get rid off. It's super clear. Also, it's understandable. When I look at where I'd hire the best CS students, I'd go to students that studied VUSEC courses (a research group at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam).
I've been telling all kinds of people that only top tier CS students can complete their courses. But they haven't seen what I've seen (or they can't convince their managers). It's really a tough bias to get rid of, you understand your own uni intuitively so much more than anyone else's uni. Because does VUSEC really have the best students? Probably not. Is Oxford really the best place to be close to the best intellectual minds? Probably not.
And I get that there's a fundamental point to be made (I'm making one myself that one can't get rid of all bias). But when I read the comments I'm reading too much emotion, not enough reason and empiricism. I don't want drama on HN, I want awesomeness about science and the world, which is what I usually find :)
Sure, I agree that it's impossible even to be aware of the extent of one's own biases, let alone be rid of them. I'm not expecting perfect rationality, and I work hard to consider other perspectives.
Imagine the perspective of someone who's consdering where to donate. They're going to have a certain expectation of responsibility from organisations which claim to make rational, ethical use of their money. Unless there's further justification to this purchase, then I could well believe this falls below that expectation.
I think a lot of people are attracted to EA because they're put off by many traditional charities spending large proportions of their income on bureaucracy and marketing. This incident doesn't help to make EA look any different.
It doesn’t explain why they need to own the venue outright, rather than just rent the space when needed.
I don’t think of EA as a charity whose purpose is to run events 52 weeks a year. And even if they were, having a single space in England, beautiful though it is, doesn’t make sense for a global organization.
It would be a different story if someone donated the property and they wanted to make the best purpose for it (eg, Bellagio Center [0]). Although comically, I would expect EA to do the math and decide to sell such a donation and invest the capital in more productive charity.
I like some of the ideas, but they seem like charlatans and expect that anyone who donates directly to their orgs will regret it as more such fuckups like this are revealed over time.
I agree that the money should be given back if possible, but this isn't limited to EA, SBF spent much more money on both US parties for example, and was basically just throwing dollars at anyone with influence, prestige or a visible platform.
The capital appreciation of a listed building can be high, but is not always high. "it depends"
So from a non-altruistic PoV it may, or may not turn out to be a sound investment irrespective of it's utility as a venue right now.
As a venue, it may be profoundly attractive, induce all the right moods for visitors, and be sellable for service (weddings, funerals, videos..) so supplement income.
Have known occupants of listed buildings in the UK, stately homes. Mostly, tenants who got them off the National Trust on peppercorn rent for putting up with the perpetual damp.
If they are seeking investment funding having a villains lair (is there a dungeon? is it in working order?), or a mansion, might project the right kind of message to people with money who want to be altruistic. If they want to deal with poor people, less so.
If that's the case then they should rent it out to others, use the profits on EA causes, and hold their own conferences in rented (or financed with the castle's rent) cheaper venues.
used to support them but what a fucking joke. most of the world's renowned scientific research, including at universities, takes place in drab boxy office buildings. look at caltech. "creative thinking" has nothing to do with the buildings. such waste.
I used to support them until they jumped on the diversity bandwagon. I believe humanity has bigger issues to tackle right now.
The ftx involvement signals to me that they did not do their due diligence, supposedly their main job. A 15M estate in Oxford? Looks to me like their decision criteria is not aligned with what they preach.
In [1] I hosted Hugh Sinclair, who spent 10 years on the front lines of microfinance lending. What does that have to do with this? As he says:
The first thing a lot of the microfinance outfits in Africa do is buy new SUVs for the staff. Because, you know, they can't be taking a bus to go give loans to the poor, now can they?
This is the same sort of thinking: first take care of yourself. If there's any more needs you can't fill, ask for donations.
It's the same for any form of aid. For example, an NGO source on the ground in Ukraine said that before US auditors showed up (6 months later), only 30% of the US hardware made it to the frontlines. [1]
That means tens of billions of dollars of aid, equipment and weapons was effectively stolen by corrupt officials. Where is it now? Probably in the hands of European crime gangs & cartels, who will use it to tear Europe up.
Similarly, the Red Cross (a supposedly trustworthy organization) pilfered 25% of aid bound for Haiti and squandered the rest building effectively zero infrastructure/housing. [2] [3]
Charities and aid should be assumed a massive scam until proven otherwise.
> It's the same for any form of aid. For example, an NGO source on the ground in Ukraine said that before US auditors showed up (6 months later), only 30% of the US hardware made it to the frontlines. [1]
This is simply not true and requires a lot more nuance to even discuss. There’s a reason that CBS retracted nearly everything to do with it, it’s because they were misrepresenting the words of the people they spoke to.
No, they retracted it because it goes against prevailing narrative. The source said 70% of the hardware wasn't making it AT THE TIME, that's irrefutable.
Whether it's improved since then is irrelevant, because I clarified my original comment with "before US auditors arrived".
Guess what: TENS OF BILLIONS in weapons were delivered prior to US auditors arriving. So I guess we just gave billions of dollars of military hardware to Euro crime gangs through corrupt embezzling but it's fine because it doesn't happen anymore?
They DID NOT retract his original comments in the context of the time they were made.
You clearly don't know how war works. If you send your newly acquired equipment straight to the front lines, with troops who have not trained on that equipment and an army that does not have the logistics to support the equipment, then you will quickly find all that shiny new equipment being used as target practice by your enemy.
"Ohman’s nonprofit collects and distributes non-lethal aid such as night vision goggles, body armor, helmets, and commercial drones through unofficial networks developed by his organization. His quote was based on his own experience at the time: His organization was dealing with damaged roads, collapsed bridges, Russian drones and artillery strikes, and other obstacles. Most importantly, Ohman wasn’t in a position to know about official channels used to deliver military aid to Ukrainian troops at the front lines, and we have seen plenty of evidence that HIMARS and other long-range artillery are being utilized quite effectively."
So yes, at one point (8 weeks) into the war, only 30% of material for one particular nonprofit was making its way to the "frontlines". That particular nonprofit was an independent organization and had no knowledge about official US military aid. And no, their equipment wasn't getting stolen and sold off to crime gangs. It was sitting in warehouses waiting to be deployed.
Your source does no such thing. It basically says 'well the equipment that does make it is being used effectively, therefore it's wrong'. How is that debunking?
Your article then goes on to mention that AFTER AUDITORS ARRIVED, the situation improved. Look at my original comment - I specifically stated this was the case before auditors arrived. Not only did you miss the full context of my claim, you "disproved" it by citing a source that says it improved in a timeframe that was not a part of my claim at all.
Importantly, CBS did not retract the statement in the context of the timeframe it was used.
>And no, their equipment wasn't getting stolen and sold off to crime gangs. It was sitting in warehouses waiting to be deployed.
U.S. officials disagree with your unsourced opinion, specifically they have said embezzlement is a certainty. [1] They warned about it after auditors arrived, which really makes me think. What a coincidence :)
A National Security Council spokesman warned against the "risk of illicit diversion". What do you think 'illicit diversion' means? Who do you think would buy stolen weapons? Gangs, cartels, rogue nation states.
Further, the article reveals the terrible state of oversight prior to auditing: "Once U.S. equipment is handed to the Ukrainian government, U.S. officials said, they have little direct knowledge of where that material goes".
A Special Inspector General said this: "Even if it’s a noble cause, there’s going to be theft. There’s going to be misconduct. There’s going to be nepotism"
You (and the original CBS report) are trying to launder a poorly sourced statistic (the 30% figure) and spin it to insinuate massive amounts of fraud and theft.
The article I linked clearly traces that statistic back to the source (an off the cuff quote from Jonas Ohman) and links to sources where Jonas Ohman explains that that statistic was taken out of context, was only in reference to his own organization, and was only in reference to a short period of time during the initial chaos of the war. Additionally, Jonas is also quoted as saying "[I]n no way is it suggested that the support is being 'sold on the black market' or 'stolen.'"
I don't doubt that some theft and fraud has taken place. But you are using a poorly sourced, out of context quote to claim that 70% of material is getting stolen or lost. That is simply absurd. Even ignoring the fact that your original source was taken out of context, first principles would suggest that theft on that level would be nearly impossible to hide. We are taking about tanks, HIMARS, anti-aircraft systems, etc.. You can't just hide these things in your basement.
Again, and I've made this point repeatedly now, my only claim was that 70% of the material was not making it prior to auditing and that a substantial amount of that was embezzled.
You continue to repeat the strawman that I claim 70% of the material is continuing to be stolen, when I literally never made such a claim. My original comment specifically states a timeframe. Why do you continue to ignore it?
The CBS article DID NOT retract the 70% figure, they corrected it to say it had improved since. Your claim that the entire figure is debunked is absolutely absurd, not even the source retracted it in entirety.
If 70% of the material prior to auditing was lost, stolen or embezzled and it completely stopped since, that's a gigantic scandal and a massive scam.
Unfortunately, you continue to strawman my claim by removing the timeframe context I specifically included.
I literally pointed you to the source of the 30%/70% quote. And that person literally said that his quote was taken out of context (by Amnesty International, who later turned out to be very biased in the pro-Russian direction). The person literally said that his estimate was in regards to how difficult it was to get equipment to the front lines, and had nothing to do with embezzlement or theft. And here you are, doubling down on your mistake. Lead a horse to water and all that...
The WSJ is paywalled, unlike the source I linked to. How convenient.
Regardless, based on the headline it most likely a bunch of arm chair generals speculating about fraud, with no actual evidence.
Again, I am not saying fraud and theft doesn't exist. It almost certainly does. But there is no way in hell that is anywhere close to 70%. That is absurd. Maybe 5% at most, and that is just pure speculation, and it this point there are certainly audits and controls in place that will make sure those numbers stay low.
microfinancing (aka payday loans) in some countries is considered the most aggressive for-profit ripoff business you could run. How is that related to charity and aid?
Thanks for the YT link, very interesting and very enlightening presentation. I knew about some of the facts in there, or at least I could sense them, but seeing them laid out so clearly form a person that knows the microfinance system from inside out helps a lot. And to think that Nobel prizes have been given for stuff like this, stuff which it was proved that it does not work.
And this relates to the article how? I'm not in the loop on celebrity news / don't know who this Hugh is. They're not mentioned in the, uh, submitted "article".
I find this very disappointing - to me one of the main points of EA is trying to maximise proven effectiveness & minimising unnecessary overheads. Where is the evidence that hosting so many in-person conferences is much more effective than a rare large in-person conference + many "mini-conferences" online?
There are still many organisations that seem to be doing excellent work aligned with the EA ethos. The Life You Can Save, GiveWell and Animal Charity Evaluators are still updating their charity reviews. I hope the brand damage doesn't reduce their donations!
I don't see any problem with this. Buying a building for £15M doesn't make you £15M poorer because you can sell the building later. Additionally, as the funding came from a grant specifically for this purpose, it's not money they could have spent on other things, but the money they save by not paying conference centres can be spent elsewhere.
But is it the best possible way to spend £15M to achieve altruistic aims? Plus, they own the house and land but they also have to maintain it. That's not inexpensive: most of these country houses are no longer in the hands of the original owners because they couldn't afford the upkeep.
I wouldn't object to owning a place for reunion, but that's a lot of money. It does have historical value but even then, I think a more accessible place and better equipped for meetings and creativity would be far better. And although it is historical, it's debatable if that is aligned with EA's mission (if the house were like falling apart maybe that could be justified, but it doesn't seem the case). It really seems like the grant money got to their heads.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 237 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaIdHUx7FQg
So, yeah, FTX paid for this mansion.
[1] https://donations.vipulnaik.com/donee.php?donee=Centre+for+E...
"I was the person who owned the early development of the project idea, and fundraised for it. (The funding comes from a grant specifically for this project, and is not FTX-related.) ..." https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xof7iFB3uh8Kc53bG/...
Also, if you believe your link, the first FTX donation to CEA was in 2022, and this was purchased in 2021. But eyeballing the numbers at the link I don't think it's complete.
Abstractly hedonistic pleasure is of the devil
The box is still to be opened on that side, but I don't doubt we might find something soon
That remains to be seen. The investigation is ongoing, and for my part I suspect that more people in EA will be implicated.
https://www.semafor.com/article/12/07/2022/charity-money-lau...
This is the closest thing in that thread, but it doesn't appear to be an official justification. In the replies of that tweet, someone suggests this as a better-faith representation of a justification.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xof7iFB3uh8Kc53bG/...
One would almost think a twitter rant is not a great starting point for a thoughtful discussion :o
I had to scroll this far, one comment above the grayed-out comments, to find the first person asking for the other side of the story instead of either (top comment) providing more info or (every other comment) taking out the pitchforks and condemning the whole concept of science-based altruism.
“Small mansion,” the man said promptly. “They usually start with that.”
“They do?”
“Oh, yes. Later, they move to a warm climate and build a palace.”
Something for nothing, R. Sheckley
The foundation still owns the property, and if money was still going to the right places is it the end of the world?
I wonder where people would actually suggest they’d have their head quarters ? I know individuals who spend 2/10ths of they on their personal house so for a foundation it doesn’t see too outrageous.
the tweet is scant on details, maybe a foundations member donated the money for that specific property ?
Seems like Twitter is always looking for some thing / someone to lynch?
That said, there are cheaper ways to fire up the imagination of these luminaries: some decent grade tents in the woods, campfires etc. Sort of a poor mans burning man. I think the connection to nature and simplicity, and having slugs crawl on you at night, would create that creative bubble they are looking for.
Optics are important too, and even if this estate is genuinely good for how the money is spent, there is no way the average charity donator will see this. Also I reckon anyone well connected enough to be an EA doesn't need accommodation or money or a job to survive.
Not quite 18 million, but plenty of extravagant salaries in the NGO world.
Particularly the top reply: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xof7iFB3uh8Kc53bG/...
Of course, not everyone will agree with their decision, but it wasn’t done haphazardly. Here’s an excerpt:
> We had various calculations about costings, which made it look somewhere between “moderately money-saving” and “mildly money-spending” vs renting venues for events that would happen anyway, depending on various assumptions e.g. about usage that we couldn’t get great data on before running the experiment. The main case for the project was not a cost-saving one, but that if it was a success it could generate many more valuable workshops than would otherwise exist. Note that this is a much less expensive experiment than it may look on face value, since we retain the underlying asset of the building.
I still prefer the EA mindset to most other mindsets on giving but dont have a lot of faith that this org has produced much value. I think a lot of wealthy people (like Bill Gates) have already been doing this type of giving for years so I'm not sure what they have really invented either.
Like there are already hundreds of universities with the abilities to do this or hose a workshop on it. And there's also no special reason to think that the assortment of people they will bring in will do good instead of talk in circles or come to the wrong conclusion. Like - it seems similar to the same thinking a large church does by bringing in religious leaders to talk about stuff?
[1]: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/pledge
I think I can speak for EAs when I say overhead is not the greatest metric by which to judge a charity[1]. I understand why it's an intuitive one, and overhead is probably correlated with measures of effectiveness, but if your targets are concrete enough you can just... actually measure effectiveness.
[1]: https://blog.givewell.org/2009/12/01/the-worst-way-to-pick-a...
If I am trying to do the second (influence behavior of others or multiple givings through sustainable orgs) then I would probably donate to Democratic politicians, not EA.
I'm not a huge fan of the org building stuff, and I think the center for EA especially has been wasteful due to SBF abundance, so my donations go to givewell where I know exactly what I'm "buying".
Isnt the end state of this that they realize they can spend $100 and expect to raise $150 from that investment - and this scales to an administrative staff of hundreds of people who spend millions a year advertising? Essentially Susan Komen but for malaria nets and AI research.
Or you can decide not to do maintenance but then the value won't appreciate.
All that is besides the point which is that these people are clearly not motivated by the principles they espouse.
Obviously I wouldn't expect CEA to run a campsite, but it was a lot of fun for wedding.
It was the worst building for teaching, as ballrooms are flat so you can't see the speaker past the third row, and acoustics are awful because these rooms are just not made to carry sound from one spot to the rest of the room.
Then you can buy a building which is appropriate with some space to grow.
I don't think this is all relevant, though, since the trade-offs for a large publicly traded tech company are very different than for a grant funded events project at a charity?
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Oxford+Station,+Park+End+St,...
So make sure to buy comfy plush pillows and foot massagers for the effective altruists so they can do their effective altruism more effectively!
At least not while the money was rolling in.
Then suddenly scandal engulfs the donor and the honchos in the profiting party are shocked! SHOCKED! I tell you.
I think that's a quite good analogy to what happened here. While the money was rolling nobody asked questions from where it's actually coming from. Only when that whole house of cards, built within other houses of cards collapsed did the "condemnation" start.
Nobody is really interested in details how the sausage is made as long the money is rolling. Thus, any condemnation or distancing from Mr. Bankman-Fried and his business rings very, very hollow to me.
What do you mean? The public story around FTX, and what they said when you asked them, was that the money was coming from charging fees on trading, which was plausible given the level of trading and the size of their fees. That the condemnation didn't start until it turned out that SBF and FTX were actually doing other things and lying to everyone is not surprising?
It's not like it was some obviously shady businessman making political donations or something.
EA is shady in a lot of ways but this seems like an unrealistic guilt by association.
I'd also go further to say that it's pretty hard to track down the sources of all your funding. Even government organizations (the FEC, the IRS, the FBI) have a super hard time doing this. Nonprofits generally just go by reputation, as they have essentially zero investigative power.
The time to condemn was when he was running a Ponzi scheme and handing out millions.
* The purchase was for an events space, not HQ.
* Why they want to run a particular kind of event.
* Why this building is a good fit for the events they want to run.
* It was funded by a grant from a donor who specifically wanted to support this project.
These are all not things that you would get from the tweet, and are useful in understanding why they made their decision.
That doesn't mean you have to agree that this project meets the high standards EA claims to set for itself, but having the context of what they're doing and why they think it's worth doing helps a lot in targeting critiques (and there are a lot of off-target critiques below from people are missing this context).
I wasn't involved in this project (though when I visited friends in Oxford this April the author of that comment showed me around the building) and it's not how I would personally donate, but I think it's a reasonable choice for a donor who (a) is already intending to invest some of their portfolio in real estate and (b) thinks that progress on improving the world is mostly limited by figuring out what to do and not by the amount of funding for proven things.
If they are only holding their own events there, it's a waste. If they're renting out the space, it's a distraction and a business masquerading as a charity.
To a point, yes. On the other hand, it's good for people to be trying a range of things: it's a hedge against groupthink, opens up new areas that might turn out to be important, what most needs doing might change over time and it's good to be prepared, people don't all have the same beliefs about what matters or the same theories of change, diminishing returns from overinvesting in an area, etc. This means that while it's good to push back on proposals to understand how they're plausibly high impact, "that's not what I'd put my time or donations towards but I don't think it's bad that you're working on it" is a common view for EAs to have of other EAs' work.
> If they are only holding their own events there, it's a waste.
I do think this is what they're doing. How is it a waste?
It seems (from what I gather) the venue was a decision from CEA, not the donor (he cites his reasoning behind the choice). It's important to highlight this was not money directed toward donations, but instead money directly for CEA (supposedly they could manage their finances and buy property for meetings).
Still, that's really expensive for a venue -- in the last case, if they had so much money, why not funnel it back to great causes that could really use the money? (sorry, I have to go there: $18M/$5000 == 3600 lives saved from preventable diseases -- is the property that important?)
> (b) thinks that progress on improving the world is mostly limited by figuring out what to do and not by the amount of funding for proven things.
In that case, I think a better investment would be in proper, well thought out, academic infrastructure that would help people research more effective ways of giving. It seems way too easy to "fool ourselves" thinking: we bought a lavish castle, but it's going to make us think better! -- the high standards applied to giving should definitely by applied to our internal decisions as well, and we need to be specially vigilant when it stands to benefit ourselves -- in what appears as a lavish expensive.
My main concern would be the lack of transparency -- why wasn't this decision made publicly and transparently, why didn't they consult for example the effectivealtruism.org forums, or donors?
This is minor, but my read from the post is that the project was a decision from an EA (Owen) who lined up funding (the donor) and a host organization (CEA, since renamed to EAV).
> that's really expensive for a venue
Is it? This is a building with room to host 30-50 people, meeting space, and (I think) a commercial kitchen. Very roughly, it costs 10 times as much as my house for 10 times the space.
> if they had so much money, why not funnel it back to great causes that could really use the money?
As I wrote above, I think it's probably because they think that the most important work is not bottlenecked on funding but on figuring out what to do. I think bednet distribution is great (and just made my annual donation via GiveWell) but there isn't a clear consensus on how best to improve the world. I do think the donor would bite your bullet and say that they thought that the benefit to humans, over time, of the workshops this space will facilitate is larger than the benefit to humans today of using that money to prevent additional deaths from disease.
> My main concern would be the lack of transparency -- why wasn't this decision made publicly and transparently, why didn't they consult for example the effectivealtruism.org forums, or donors?
I would love it if they had publicly written up their plans at the stage of "we're thinking about buying a building to host residential workshops, here's about what we think it would cost, here's why we think it's worth doing", and I would strongly encourage others to do that. I also think that if you are soliciting donations from the public at large you should be clear about what you intend to spend the money on and why you think it's plausibly one of the most valuable things to do with that money. At the same time, I think a norm where effective altruists should prioritize transparency so highly that a group of them can't spend their own money without making the case publicly would go too far. For example, I know some people who hosted a workshop (elsewhere!) on figuring out what sort of safety studies would be valuable for evaluating UVC light as a disease transmission reducer. I don't believe they wrote anything up publicly justifying the cost of the workshop, instead the cost was between them and their funder, and that's ok! Public communication is a lot of work, and it trades off with other things you could be doing instead.
> Very roughly, it costs 10 times as much as my house for 10 times the space
I highly appreciate the transparency! To be fair, I think your house is expensive (I suppose you live in a very expensive place! around here, you could buy 10 large apartments for that kind of money). Is everywhere in Oxford that expensive?
I do live in a developing country, and have a relatively comfortable lifestyle for my country. Still, I try to be frugal and avoid spending more than I need, even in everyday life. An EA that I want to support is an EA that is radically compassionate, open minded, pragmatic, altruistic and bravely focused on a better world; not one that is self-serving with sprinkles of charitable giving.
I also feel that self-vigilance, self-skepticism (and embracing criticism and improvement with an open heart and mind) is an important component of EA, which is what I'm trying to do here.
> At the same time, I think a norm where effective altruists should prioritize transparency so highly that a group of them can't spend their own money without making the case publicly would go too far.
I agree to an extent (although I plan to make my own giving as transparent as I reasonably can in the future), but that is specifically an EA charity, not private individuals -- as an EA org, I think they show commitment to effective spending and I think it's very reasonable they should embrace transparency.
From wiki: "Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) is an Oxford-based charity that builds and supports the effective altruism community". This makes me less confident than I would like in supporting CEA over effective charities like GiveWell or other EA charities.
Please see this post (from me): Be simple and transparent, a heuristic
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/yww9g6/be_s...
Note that this has very much changed in the past few weeks, for reasons I'm not going to get into in this comment. We'll see how EA funding does in this upcoming giving season, but for now the general assumption is that EA is broadly funding-constrained.
That really sounds like a yes. You apparently live somewhere that is extremely expensive, as you seem to be saying you have a 1.5 mil house that can fit 3-5 people. I'm pretty sure I can host 20 if they don't need to sleep here, and definitely 3-5 if they do need to sleep here, and my house was bought for $390k. I'm not in some dump in the middle of nowhere. It's a downtown townhouse with an unobstructed skyline view in the 4th largest metro in the United States. You don't have to buy an event space in one of the world's most expensive places to buy a building. Hell, I'm even in a major transportation hub right in the middle of the country! It would be very easy for people from all over the place to meet here. There has to be some similar part of the UK if they absolutely needed a building in that country.
I live in Somerville MA, where $1M will buy you a 3-4br.
There are definitely cheaper areas than Somerville or Oxford. For example, https://ceealar.org bought a 17br former hotel in Blackpool (Northern England) which cost 1% as much (£140k). [1] My understanding from talking to people in the UK, though, is that for the kind of events they're looking to host proximity to London and Oxford is pretty important, and that's expensive.
[1] https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/58714915
The comment I linked to was a reminder that none of us have anywhere near enough information to evaluate this decision. We'd need at least some idea how frequently they expect to use it, the alternatives, the predicted benefits of a high-end venue, and so on.
A productive comment would ask questions ("I wonder how they estimated…", "I hope they share more information about…"), not try to turn relatively little information into an opinion.
This seems to be a few (shaky, IMO) premises.
1. EA the organization (not the philosophy) are made of people who are adept at doing risk-reward calculation. This is the premise I find most suspicious given their recent record of blowing wild axioms out of proportion and blowing up their own face by suckering up too much to the FTX money without realizing the risk.
2. The people in the org are in it for actually doing good instead self aggrandization, a sin they blame most charities for. I find it more suspicious that somehow the world gathered a few angels in human form in one place, and more plausible that it's the classic "oh that guy is shady, listen to me" variant of the scam. Am I cynical? Maybe. But the evidence here supports me.
Which leads me to the final point, circumstantial evidence. In a third world country where I grew up, if my region had a large flood that brought in a lot of charitable donations, and the next week the local politician showed up in a new SUV, we didn't debate all that you're arguing. If it quacks like corruption and walks like corruption, it's probably corruption and not some 357-dimensional chess by the most brilliant minds of our generation.
Any university building laid out for workshops/teaching will suffice.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wytham_Abbey
EA touts itself as the best strategy for giving as they present themselves as a rational force evaluating all approaches, then going for the 'best' one.
Buying a multimillion pound stately country estate for your HQ is clearly not the 'best' use of money. Yet, EA argues that it is the best use of money with their usual vocabulary. That means I now cannot trust any of their decisions as they clearly bend the outcomes to whatever they want them to be.
I.e., there's nothing 'effective' about the entire organisation, it's just your run-of-the-mill moneypit for rich people to feel better.
Same scam, different copy. The good that SBF did for the world was exposing this particular underbelly. The world will move on, to the same scam with new window dressing.
> Our mission is to build and nurture a global community of people who are thinking carefully about the world’s biggest problems and taking impactful action to solve them. We hope that this community can help to build a radically better world.
> To foster this community, we run conferences, support hundreds of local groups, and provide online resources and forums for discussion.
You shouldn't imagine that people are donating to generic maximal impact causes and the money is ending up in surprise luxury real estate. (Or, at least, if it is then that's news to me.)
When CEA says (paraphrasing) ‘this is a reasonable way to spend the money we have on hosting a ton of conferences,’ the ‘host a ton of conferences’ part is an inherited assumption from this being CEA money (a specific grant for this purpose, in this case), not a broader claim about the value of lots of conferences vs. global health charities.
It seems that in this particular case the purchase was funded by an individual donation though. Would be great to have some more transparency on this issue.
[0] https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/charities/effective-altruism...
Nit: they bought it as an events space. HQ is rented in a normal office building.
As I said: In my book. Your opinion may differ.
This seems like a sham purchase to buy a nice home for the officers.
They don't own the land, they own the house.
Maybe it's time to coin a new term: "altruism washing" whereas people will come up with wishy-washy reasons of why they should buy a 15MGBP castle and make it look like they're doing good with it
Needless to say, the question in context should have been whether it was done "effecitvely". Fine fine, if you want to throw a ton of conferences or whatever owning a forum to do it in might plausibly save you money.
Was throwing a ton of conferences really the best, most effective use of fifteen million pounds at furthering the betterment of mankind? I think we all know the answer to that.
They wanted to throw a ton of parties and raise a ton of money and wanted to spend that money on stuff that made them feel important.
1. As soon as effective altruism becomes about glamour and extravagance, you attract the type of people who don’t care about the cause (clearly already true)
2. Obviously buying a castle is not the best investment the EA could be making and using that as the excuse is just weird.
Of course none of this should be surprising as the Effective Altruism is essentially a PR stunt for people who do financial crimes.
Close to Oxford (aka PhD students, etc.), maintain the value instead of renting, good nature place for thinking.
I don't see the issue here if the space is utilized semi-effectively. They might need to think about how to get like 50% of the 15 million "out of the bricks" in order to utilize their capital better (assuming the house prices won't crash more than 50%).
EA was always Oxford-ish, culture is culture. No form of rationality will prevail from that (I'm looking at you HN! ;-) ). Given their cultural/emotional make up, I think this is an okay rational decision. It could've been way worse.
I don't get the fuss. It's kind of like being upset about the Kardashians or something (by that I specifically mean: it feels trivial and unimportant). It's a 15 million pounds decision that won't even make them lose 15 million pounds but a lot less. So who cares? Let's talk about CRISPR or something actually interesting. Let's live in the future.
Sure, but there will always be some bias. It's one of those things: they're wrong if they believe they can do away with all bias. Moreover, they are so wrong, I can't hold them responsible for it, even if they say they will hold themselves responsible for it. It's like a child saying "I will be responsible for building a time machine." You can't hold them responsible. But I get where you're coming from, I used to be more in your camp, but the longer I am out of academia the more I tend to look at the world in "grey terms" (I'm not implying you're still in academia or anything, that's just how my life journey is progressing at the moment).
Oxford is one of their biases that they can't seem to get rid off. It's super clear. Also, it's understandable. When I look at where I'd hire the best CS students, I'd go to students that studied VUSEC courses (a research group at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam).
I've been telling all kinds of people that only top tier CS students can complete their courses. But they haven't seen what I've seen (or they can't convince their managers). It's really a tough bias to get rid of, you understand your own uni intuitively so much more than anyone else's uni. Because does VUSEC really have the best students? Probably not. Is Oxford really the best place to be close to the best intellectual minds? Probably not.
And I get that there's a fundamental point to be made (I'm making one myself that one can't get rid of all bias). But when I read the comments I'm reading too much emotion, not enough reason and empiricism. I don't want drama on HN, I want awesomeness about science and the world, which is what I usually find :)
Imagine the perspective of someone who's consdering where to donate. They're going to have a certain expectation of responsibility from organisations which claim to make rational, ethical use of their money. Unless there's further justification to this purchase, then I could well believe this falls below that expectation.
I think a lot of people are attracted to EA because they're put off by many traditional charities spending large proportions of their income on bureaucracy and marketing. This incident doesn't help to make EA look any different.
I don’t think of EA as a charity whose purpose is to run events 52 weeks a year. And even if they were, having a single space in England, beautiful though it is, doesn’t make sense for a global organization.
It would be a different story if someone donated the property and they wanted to make the best purpose for it (eg, Bellagio Center [0]). Although comically, I would expect EA to do the math and decide to sell such a donation and invest the capital in more productive charity.
I like some of the ideas, but they seem like charlatans and expect that anyone who donates directly to their orgs will regret it as more such fuckups like this are revealed over time.
[0] https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/bellagio-center/
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/13/business/ftx-effective-al...
"The second-largest grant, in the amount of $13.9 million, went to the Center for Effective Altruism."
Don't get fooled.
So from a non-altruistic PoV it may, or may not turn out to be a sound investment irrespective of it's utility as a venue right now.
As a venue, it may be profoundly attractive, induce all the right moods for visitors, and be sellable for service (weddings, funerals, videos..) so supplement income.
Have known occupants of listed buildings in the UK, stately homes. Mostly, tenants who got them off the National Trust on peppercorn rent for putting up with the perpetual damp.
If they are seeking investment funding having a villains lair (is there a dungeon? is it in working order?), or a mansion, might project the right kind of message to people with money who want to be altruistic. If they want to deal with poor people, less so.
Kumbayah AI, Kumbayah
The ftx involvement signals to me that they did not do their due diligence, supposedly their main job. A 15M estate in Oxford? Looks to me like their decision criteria is not aligned with what they preach.
The first thing a lot of the microfinance outfits in Africa do is buy new SUVs for the staff. Because, you know, they can't be taking a bus to go give loans to the poor, now can they?
This is the same sort of thinking: first take care of yourself. If there's any more needs you can't fill, ask for donations.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhdZ2RfmiXo
That means tens of billions of dollars of aid, equipment and weapons was effectively stolen by corrupt officials. Where is it now? Probably in the hands of European crime gangs & cartels, who will use it to tear Europe up.
Similarly, the Red Cross (a supposedly trustworthy organization) pilfered 25% of aid bound for Haiti and squandered the rest building effectively zero infrastructure/housing. [2] [3]
Charities and aid should be assumed a massive scam until proven otherwise.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ukraine-military-aid-weapons-fr...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2016/06/16/482020436/senators-report-fin...
[3] https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-...
This is simply not true and requires a lot more nuance to even discuss. There’s a reason that CBS retracted nearly everything to do with it, it’s because they were misrepresenting the words of the people they spoke to.
Whether it's improved since then is irrelevant, because I clarified my original comment with "before US auditors arrived".
Guess what: TENS OF BILLIONS in weapons were delivered prior to US auditors arriving. So I guess we just gave billions of dollars of military hardware to Euro crime gangs through corrupt embezzling but it's fine because it doesn't happen anymore?
They DID NOT retract his original comments in the context of the time they were made.
1) It's not true
2) It's true, but it's not important
3) It's true, and it's important, but we already knew it
and then we can add #4:
4) It's true, and it's important, and we didn't know it, but we're not doing it anymore
Here is a pretty good article debunking your mis-info: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/8/2115258/-Author-of...
And here is the money quote:
"Ohman’s nonprofit collects and distributes non-lethal aid such as night vision goggles, body armor, helmets, and commercial drones through unofficial networks developed by his organization. His quote was based on his own experience at the time: His organization was dealing with damaged roads, collapsed bridges, Russian drones and artillery strikes, and other obstacles. Most importantly, Ohman wasn’t in a position to know about official channels used to deliver military aid to Ukrainian troops at the front lines, and we have seen plenty of evidence that HIMARS and other long-range artillery are being utilized quite effectively."
So yes, at one point (8 weeks) into the war, only 30% of material for one particular nonprofit was making its way to the "frontlines". That particular nonprofit was an independent organization and had no knowledge about official US military aid. And no, their equipment wasn't getting stolen and sold off to crime gangs. It was sitting in warehouses waiting to be deployed.
Your article then goes on to mention that AFTER AUDITORS ARRIVED, the situation improved. Look at my original comment - I specifically stated this was the case before auditors arrived. Not only did you miss the full context of my claim, you "disproved" it by citing a source that says it improved in a timeframe that was not a part of my claim at all.
Importantly, CBS did not retract the statement in the context of the timeframe it was used.
>And no, their equipment wasn't getting stolen and sold off to crime gangs. It was sitting in warehouses waiting to be deployed.
U.S. officials disagree with your unsourced opinion, specifically they have said embezzlement is a certainty. [1] They warned about it after auditors arrived, which really makes me think. What a coincidence :)
A National Security Council spokesman warned against the "risk of illicit diversion". What do you think 'illicit diversion' means? Who do you think would buy stolen weapons? Gangs, cartels, rogue nation states.
Further, the article reveals the terrible state of oversight prior to auditing: "Once U.S. equipment is handed to the Ukrainian government, U.S. officials said, they have little direct knowledge of where that material goes".
A Special Inspector General said this: "Even if it’s a noble cause, there’s going to be theft. There’s going to be misconduct. There’s going to be nepotism"
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/with-billions-going-to-ukraine-...
The article I linked clearly traces that statistic back to the source (an off the cuff quote from Jonas Ohman) and links to sources where Jonas Ohman explains that that statistic was taken out of context, was only in reference to his own organization, and was only in reference to a short period of time during the initial chaos of the war. Additionally, Jonas is also quoted as saying "[I]n no way is it suggested that the support is being 'sold on the black market' or 'stolen.'"
I don't doubt that some theft and fraud has taken place. But you are using a poorly sourced, out of context quote to claim that 70% of material is getting stolen or lost. That is simply absurd. Even ignoring the fact that your original source was taken out of context, first principles would suggest that theft on that level would be nearly impossible to hide. We are taking about tanks, HIMARS, anti-aircraft systems, etc.. You can't just hide these things in your basement.
You continue to repeat the strawman that I claim 70% of the material is continuing to be stolen, when I literally never made such a claim. My original comment specifically states a timeframe. Why do you continue to ignore it?
The CBS article DID NOT retract the 70% figure, they corrected it to say it had improved since. Your claim that the entire figure is debunked is absolutely absurd, not even the source retracted it in entirety.
If 70% of the material prior to auditing was lost, stolen or embezzled and it completely stopped since, that's a gigantic scandal and a massive scam.
Unfortunately, you continue to strawman my claim by removing the timeframe context I specifically included.
There's US government sources saying theft is a certainty, and you with an opinion that it isn't.
>and had nothing to do with embezzlement or theft
He never said that actually, and US government sources say equipment is lost due to theft, which explains the massive equipment losses.
Regardless, based on the headline it most likely a bunch of arm chair generals speculating about fraud, with no actual evidence.
Again, I am not saying fraud and theft doesn't exist. It almost certainly does. But there is no way in hell that is anywhere close to 70%. That is absurd. Maybe 5% at most, and that is just pure speculation, and it this point there are certainly audits and controls in place that will make sure those numbers stay low.
Microcredit is extended to poor entrepreneurs who invest it in income generating activities. That is very different from payday loans for consumption.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-microfinance-banks-p...
However, watch the video or read the book. Reality is not the same as the concept.
"considered" by whom? It's been featured on 60 Minutes.
Muhammad Yunus won a Nobel for it: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2006/yunus/biographi...
And it's eligible for IRS charity treatment in the US.
You are seriously misinformed. microfinancing is NOT also known as payday loans.
It's another form of charitable grifting. That's how it relates.
There are still many organisations that seem to be doing excellent work aligned with the EA ethos. The Life You Can Save, GiveWell and Animal Charity Evaluators are still updating their charity reviews. I hope the brand damage doesn't reduce their donations!
Spoken like someone who has never been responsible for the maintenance of a very old home. :)
It is way too easy to lie with language, this is why we have so many bullshit artists.
The proof is in the pudding, as they say.
If it talks like a racket...
Why didn't they just go the whole hog and buy a megachurch?