$100 Prize to Best Argument Against Donating to the EA Hotel

Speaking for why I haven't donated, this is close to the key question:

>Then the question is (roughly) whether, given £60,000, it makes more sense to fund 1 researcher who's cleared the EA hiring bar, or 10 who haven't (and are in D).

My intuition has been that if those 10 are chosen at random, then I'm moderately confident that it's better to fund the 1 well-vetted researcher.

EA is talent-constrained in the sense that it needs more people like Nick Bostrom or Eric Drexler, but much less in the sense of needing more people who are average EAs to do direct EA work.

I've done some angel investing in startups. I initially took an approach of trying to fund anyone who has a a good idea. But that worked poorly, and I've shifted, as good VCs advise, to looking for signs of unusual competence in founders. (Alas, I still don't have much reason to think I'm good at angel investing). And evaluating founder's competence feels harder than evaluating a business idea, so I'm not willing to do it very often.

I use a similar approach with donating to early-stage charities, expecting to see many teams with decent ideas, but expecting the top 5% to be more than 10 times as valuable than the average. And I'm reluctant to evaluate more pre-track-record projects than I'm already doing.

With the hotel, I see a bunch of little hints that it's not worth my time to attempt an in-depth evaluation of the hotel's leaders. E.g. the focus on low rent, which seems like a popular meme among average and below average EAs in the bay area, yet the EAs whose judgment I most respect act as if rent is a relatively small issue.

I can imagine that the hotel attracts better than random EAs, but it's also easy to imagine that it selects mainly for people who aren't good enough to belong at a top EA organization.

Halffull has produced a better argument for the EA Hotel, but I find it somewhat odd that he starts with arguments that seem weak to me, and only in the middle did he get around to claims that are relevant to whether the hotel is better than a random group of EAs.

Also, if donors fund any charity that has a good idea, I'm a bit concerned that that will attract a larger number of low-quality projects, much like the quality of startups declined near the peak of the dot-com bubble, when investors threw money at startups without much regard for competence.

The following arguments are ideas and have not been thoroughly researched. They may not reflect my actual views. Counterarguments are not mentioned because the OP is "mainly interested in seeing critiques." I may post counterarguments after the reward deadline has passed.

Claim to argue against: "$172,000 to the EA Hotel has at least as much EV as $172,000 distributed randomly to grantees from EA Meta Fund grantees or EA grants grantees."

Argument 1: The EA Hotel has a low counterfactually-adjusted impact

In this post, the EA Hotel states:

Out of 19 residents, 15 would be doing the same work counterfactually, but the hotel allows them to do, on average, 2.2 times more EA work -- as opposed to working a part time job to self-fund, or burning more runway.

This datapoint supports the view that most EA Hotel residents would be doing the same work whether or not they stay at the hotel. The claim that "the hotel allows them to do, on average, 2.2 times more EA work" could be incorrect. To gain more certainty about this, the EA Hotel should track what residents that are not accepted actually end up doing instead.

EA Hotel residents have many options to consider to do the same work while not staying at the hotel. For example, depending on the time and location requirements of the work, they could do some combination of: (1) part-time work to finance their living expenses, (2) living with parents, friends, or another location with near-zero living expenses, or (3) living in very low-cost housing that resembles the cost of the EA Hotel.

If someone pursues option (2), the EA Hotel is negative EV because someone can choose a free option instead of the EA Hotel, which consumes community funds.

If someone pursues options (1) and (3), they might only have to work a very limited amount of time. For example, I believe I recently heard of someone that was able to find a one bedroom living arrangement in Berkeley, CA in a large house for $500 a month, although they have to share a bathroom with many people. So someone might only need to do paid work 25% of the time and can do EA work 75% of the time. This suggests that the "2.2 times more EA work" figure greatly overstates the benefit of the EA Hotel in terms of reducing living expenses. Pursing options (1) and (3) seems to be feasible for the vast majority of people.

If direct funding allows people to pursue option (3) and secure low-cost housing, and if the cost is around the same as the EA Hotel, there may be no need for the EA Hotel itself to exist. The question becomes what is the counterfactually-adjusted impact of funding living expenses at the EA Hotel compared to option (3)? Adjustments should be made for things like missing out on the benefits of living elsewhere than Blackpool as well as relocation time and expenses which would further reduce counterfactual impact. The EA Hotel community certainly provides benefits, although coworking out of REACH may provide similar benefits.

Argument 2: The EA Hotel should charge users directly instead of raising funding

Rather than fundraising from EAs, the hotel should try to directly charge people who are benefiting from their services and community, which is an argument against donating to the hotel.

There doesn't seem to be a need to fund people who can afford the hotel. It's not clear what proportion of people fall under this category, but considering that it only takes 13 weeks of work at $15/hour to pay $7,900 for a one year stay at the hotel, it is possible that majority of residents can already afford to stay at the hotel.

For people who cannot afford the EA Hotel, applicants to funding organizations like EA Grants can include that they are requesting funding for living expenses and indicate EA Hotel expenses as part of their requested grant funding. EA Grants evaluators and other funders may be better equipped to evaluate the EV of projects people are working on as opposed to EA Hotel staff. If EA Grants can already cover this, there is no need to donate to the EA Hotel.

Argument 3: Funding projects has a higher impact than funding living expenses

I assume that EA Grants funds applicants' project expenses as well as their personal salary and living expenses. This could be higher impact than solely funding living expenses. Working at the EA Hotel with an unfunded project may be quite unproductive, particularly if the project requires funding to get anywhere. Seeking early-stage EA project funding seems to require waiting for long periods of time (perhaps months) for funders to get back to you rather than working full-time trying to acquire funding.

Argument 4: People should not donate to the EA Hotel until they improve their impact metrics and reporting

The EV estimation for the EA Hotel is highly mathematical and commenters have expressed that it is difficult to follow. Actual impact reporting appears to consist of testimonials which are hard to evaluate. It's even trickier to evaluate the counterfactually-adjusted impact.

Crossposting my comment from Facebook. Full disclosure: I work at the EA Hotel.

"Here's the article Greg mentions, and I think that it's the best argument for being lukewarm about the EA Hotel: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/ea-neoliberal/

The tldr is that the neoliberals managed to change the world to adopt their ideology chiefly through convincing academia. This isn't just some random hypothesis: they claimed that this was how to do it, *and then they did it*. Academia is mostly influenced through weird things like prestige and respectability, and therefore the success of the EA movement hinges on the impression that it makes, which hinges not on its total output as much as the *average* quality of its organisations. It seems likely that the EA hotel would push this average down.

(one can argue against this, for example by disagreeing that academia sets the overton window, or by arguing that ideology is just as likely to "trickle up" from the masses as it is likely to trickle down, or generally that there are other ways to set the overton window. The neoliberal story is compelling though, and one could claim that the same thing happened with social justice recently)"

I'm actually donating to the Patreon, but here are the arguments against that are most persuasive to me:

One argument I've heard raised is that the EA hotel is a rather expensive way of testing the idea of supporting EAs with low-cost living. Perhaps it would have been better to have started with a smaller scale experiment such as a group house and perhaps funding the EA hotel is too costly a way of learning about the potential of such projects.

Another is that the EA hotel should be more selective about who it admits, unlike its current very minimally low bar in order to achieve sufficient expected return. Some people may believe that the current approach is unlikely to be cost effective and that the hotel as it is currently structured is therefore testing the wrong thing. In this case, spending a few hundred thousand pounds on informational value could be seen as waste. Worse, we can imagine that after such a failure, funders would be extremely reluctant to fund a similar project that was more selective. In this case, the thing that we'd want to test might never actually be tested.

A third option is that people might not want to donate because they don't believe that other people will donate. Let's suppose that you believe the hotel needs to run for at least another year before it could build up the kind of track record for it to be sustainable and you have the option to donate one month's worth of funding. It seems that donating one month's worth of operating expenses might allow the hotel to do one month's worth of good regardless of whether it later collapses or not, so perhaps this is irrelevant.

However, there may be two ways in which you may be trying to leverage your donation to have more than just direct impact. Firstly, if the hotel survives to the point where it builds up a track record to justify for others to fund it, counterfactual value is generated to the extent that the hotel is better than the other opportunities available to those funders. And by allowing this opportunity to exist, you would get to claim part of this value. Secondly, we can imagine extreme success scenarios where the hotel turned out to be so successful that the EA community decided to copy the concept around the world. Again, you could claim partial responsibility for this.

But, the key point is that if you think other funders won't be forthcoming, you'll miss out on these highly leverage scenarios. And if these are the reasons you'd want to fund the hotel, you might decide it's best to fund something else instead.

And it looks like the prize goes to PeterMcCluskey's comment, which at the current time has 33 votes, the next highest being a tie with 21.

I'm going to break your rules a bit and instead start by critiquing the proposition:

$X to the EA Hotel has at least as much EV as $X to the most promising person at the Hotel.

It may not be easy to fund individuals, but if someone wanted to give, say, $10,000, what's to stop them from looking at the Hotel's guest list, picking the best-sounding project, and offering money directly to the person behind it? (Then, if that person doesn't need/want the money, they move to the next-best person, and so on.)

This may burn time on vetting, but it's at least easier than vetting everyone at the Hotel to get a sense for its average impact.

--

You could also try to estimate the Hotel's value as a tool for creating networks -- boosting research productivity by giving people an easier way to start conversations and help with one another's work. If that's the case, the comparison to EA Meta grantees becomes more apt.

That said, there are a lot of Meta grantees, and trying to find the "best" of them is difficult by any measure. So people may end up wanting to fund organizations with longer histories (like LEAN or The Life You Can Save), or organizations with an extremely good "best-case" scenario (like the Center for Election Science or Sparrow). It's hard to think of which sub-factor the EA Hotel is "best at" compared to all those other organizations.

Just to give one example: For $10,000, I could fund Giving Games where several hundred people are introduced to EA and make their first "EA-aligned" donation, or pay for 1.3 years of EA Hotel time. Those are very different things, and I could imagine at least 50% of potential meta donors thinking that the first option is better.

If the rest of those donors then compare the Hotel to the next project on the list, and the next... well, there aren't many people who make large donations to individual meta projects, and it's not surprising if only a small fraction of that already-small pool lands on the Hotel as their "final answer".

(This model is too simple, of course, since many donors give to multiple organizations. The most important point is that the Hotel has a lot of competition, and may not stand out enough compared to all the other options.)

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I work for CEA, but these views are my own.

Suppose that, on some level of general competence, Alice is 95th percentile among EAs on the Forum and is working on her own EA project independently, while Bob is of 30th percentile competence and is working on his project while socially immersed in his many in-person EA contacts.

I agree being immersed is important because risks are hard to anticipate for a single individual. I would argue that the scenario seems somewhat artificial, as general competence of someone not interacting with EAs is unlikely to be in the 95th percentile.

However, once these domain-specific pitfalls are pointed out to you, it's not that cognitively taxing to grok them and adjust your thinking/actions accordingly.

I agree. However, this is not really about skill or intelligence: Humans in general often don't take critical feedback nearly as seriously as they should, and often don't adjust their thinking/actions due to sunk costs, wanting to save face in their peer group, grandiose personality, etc. This also applies to EAs (maybe somewhat but not vastly less so).

From looking at the published list of EA Hotel residents, I tentatively think some people's work might come with high downside risk, while others have high upside potential and seem worth supporting. I'm not sure how this balances out. Discussing individual projects in public seems difficult, which is maybe part of the reason why people find the arguments against funding the EA Hotel unconvincing. All else equal, I'd probably prefer something like Aaron Gertler's approach of "looking at the Hotel's guest list, picking the best-sounding project, and offering money directly to the person behind it." I have also shared some thoughts for how to design the admission process with EA Hotel staff.

(If one accepted the premise that downside risk is prevalent and significant, one could argue that any donation to the EA Hotel that doesn't set incentives to reduce downside risk might counterfactually replace a donation that does. I'm not sure this argument works, but it could be worth thinking about.)

(All my personal opinion, not speaking for anyone here.)

Edited to add: In many ways, the EA Hotel acts like a de facto EA grantmaker, so the concerns outlined in my comment here apply:

When long-termist grant applications don't get funded, the reason usually isn't lack of funding, but one of the following:

--The grantmaker was unable to vet the project (due to time constraints or lack of domain expertise) or at least thought it was a better fit for a different grantmaker.

--The grantmaker thought the project came with a high risk of accidental harm.

(…)

High-quality grant applications tend to get funded quickly and are thereby eliminated from the pool of proposals available to the EA community, while applicants with higher-risk proposals tend to apply/pitch to lots of funders. This means that on average, proposals submitted to funders will be skewed towards high-downside-risk projects, and funders could themselves easily do harm if they end up supporting many of them.

(…)

FYI people are allowed/encouraged to defend the Hotel here, but I'm mainly interested in seeing critiques so that is what I'm financially incentivizing. I don't personally intend to get into the object-level any more than I did above (unless asked to clarify something).

This is awesome – thank you for doing it!

To verify I'm a real person that will in fact award $100, find me on FB here.

The link appears to be broken.

(my interest here is in finding/popularizing ways for users of this forum to easily prove their identity to other users in case they wish to).