Edit to add (9/1/2023): This post was written quickly and I judged things prematurely. I also regret not reaching out to Effective Ventures before posting it. Regarding my current opinion on the Abbey: I don't have anything really useful to say that isn't mentioned by others. The goal of this post was to ask a question and gather information, mostly because I was very surprised. I don't have a strong opinion on the purchase anymore and the ones I have are with high uncertainty. More thoughts in my case for transparent spending.
Yesterday morning I woke up and saw this tweet by Émile Torres: https://twitter.com/xriskology/status/1599511179738505216
I was shocked, angry and upset at first. Especially since it appears that the estate was for sale last year for 15 million pounds: https://twitter.com/RhiannonDauster/status/1599539148565934086
I'm not a big fan of Émile's writing and how they often misrepresent the EA movement. But that's not what this question is about, because they do raise a good point here: Why did CEA buy this property? My trust in CEA has been a bit shaky lately, and this doesn't help.
Apparently it was already mentioned in the New Yorker piece: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/the-reluctant-prophet-of-effective-altruism#:~:text=Last year%2C the Centre for Effective Altruism bought Wytham Abbey%2C a palatial estate near Oxford%2C built in 1480. Money%2C which no longer seemed an object%2C was increasingly being reinvested in the community itself.
"Last year, the Centre for Effective Altruism bought Wytham Abbey, a palatial estate near Oxford, built in 1480. Money, which no longer seemed an object, was increasingly being reinvested in the community itself."
For some reason I glanced over it at the time, or I just didn't realize the seriousness of it.
Upon more research, I came across this comment by Shakeel Hashim: "In April, Effective Ventures purchased Wytham Abbey and some land around it (but <1% of the 2,500 acre estate you're suggesting). Wytham is in the process of being established as a convening centre to run workshops and meetings that bring together people to think seriously about how to address important problems in the world. The vision is modelled on traditional specialist conference centres, e.g. Oberwolfach, The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center or the Brocher Foundation.
The purchase was made from a large grant made specifically for this. There was no money from FTX or affiliated individuals or organizations." https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Et7oPMu6czhEd8ExW/why-you-re-not-hearing-as-much-from-ea-orgs-as-you-d-like?commentId=uRDZKw24mYe2NP4eq
I'm very relieved to hear money from individual donors wasn't used. And the <1% suggests 15 million pounds perhaps wasn't spent. Still, I'd love to hear and understand more about this project and why CEA thinks it's cost-effective. What is the EV calculation behind it?
Like the New Yorker piece points out, with more funding there has been a lot of spending within the movement itself. And that's fine, great even. This way more outreach can be done and the movement can grow. But we don't want to be too self-serving, and I'm scared too much of this thinking will lead to rationalizing lavish expenses (and I'm afraid this is already happening). There needs to be more transparency behind big expenses.
Edit to add: If this expense has been made a while back, why not announce it then?
This will overlap a great deal with what other people have said, but I will still take the chance to write down my personal (current) takeaway from this discussion:
I feel like I cannot evaluate whether buying Wytham Abbey was a good decision. A reason for this is that I possess no relevant expertise at all, i.e., I have basically no specific knowledge of how to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of purchasing real estate. But my impression is that this is not the key reason: Even if I had more expertise, it seems to me that there is not enough public information to actually make a qualified judgement on whether buying this building was cost-effective (both when excluding and when including anticipated “PR effects“). The explanation provided by Owen Cotton-Barratt is illuminating but it’s still a great deal removed from what you would need to build a detailed enough model of the relevant considerations for the decision to properly scrutinize its reasoning. To do this, you would need numerical estimates regarding many factors, e.g., the estimated number of conferences taking place in the new building and the probability that the funder financing the purchase would have donated an equivalent amount of money to another effective cause instead, if the building were not purchased by CEA.
In particular, there is not enough public information to confirm that the decision was the result of a plausible cost-effectiveness analysis rather than a (perhaps unconsciously caused) self-serving rationalization of lavish spending. Ruling out this concern seems important, and not just for “PR” reasons: Becoming less mission-oriented and increasing self-serving expenses while growing is a common failure mode for charities. Perhaps, in the absence of contrary evidence, it should even be our default expectation that this happens (to some extent). In particular, these effects are more likely when a charity is not very transparent about the actions it takes and the reasons for them and when the actions (e.g., buying fancy buildings) are very liable to this kind of rationalization and can be explained by these effects. If important decisions of CEA are not explained and justified publicly, outsiders cannot get evidence to the contrary, i.e., evidence that decisions are made because there is a plausible case that they are the most (altruistically) cost-effective actions.
I am not sure whether the analogy is appropriate but consider that the main reason why we trust, and place much weight on, Givewell’s charity recommendations is because they publish detailed analyses supporting their recommendations. If that was not the case, if one would have to simply take their recommendations on trust, it would seem foolish to me to be very confident that Givewell’s recommendations are actually supported by good arguments (In particular, that the detailed analysis is public and can be scrutinized should increase my confidence in the recommendations, even in case I myself didn’t actually read them). Analogously, if there is no sufficient public justification of most of CEA’s concrete actions, maybe I (and people in a similar epistemic position, e.g., not personally knowing people who actually work at CEA etc.) should not have a high confidence that their decisions are usually reasonable?
If this is broadly correct, then it seems plausible that CEA should focus more on transparency, i.e., publicly and prominently reporting, explaining and justifying their most important decisions (also mentioning uncertainties and counteracting considerations, of course). I am curious whether these thoughts seem broadly correct to people. I should emphasize that I am not very familiar with and haven’t thought long about most of this, I am mostly synthesizing comments made in the discussion so far which seemed plausible to me.