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?


FWIW, as someone who also works in communications, I strongly disagree here and think EA spends massively too much of its mental energy thinking about optics.
More specifically:
I tend to criticize virtue ethics and deontology a lot more than I praise them -- IMO these are approaches that often go badly wrong. But I think PR (for a community like EA) is an area where deontology-like adherence to "behave honestly and with integrity" and virtue-ethics-like focus on "be the sort of person internally who you would find most admirable and virtuous" tends to have far better consequences than "select the action that naively looks as though it will make others like you the most".
If you're an EA and you want to improve EA's reputation, my main advice to you is going to look very virtue-ethics-flavored: be brave, be thoughtful, be discerning, be honest, be honorable, be fair, be compassionate, be trustworthy; and insofar as you're not those things, be honest about it (because honesty is on the list, and is paramount to trusting everything else about your apparent virtues); and let your reputation organically follow from the visible signs of those internal traits of yours, rather than being a thing you work hard on optimizing separately from optimizing whether you're actually an awesome person.
Have integrity, and speak truth even when you're scared to, and be the sort of person you'd have found inspiring to run into in your early days at EA, if someone could read your mind and see the generators of your behavior.
Do stuff that you feel really and deeply proud of, rather than stuff that you'd be embarrassed by if someone fully understood what you were doing and why, context and all.
I think that for all or nearly-all EAs, that should pretty much be the entire focus of their thoughts about EA's reputation.