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Comment by fasthands9 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

[1]: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/pledge

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.

[1]: https://blog.givewell.org/2009/12/01/the-worst-way-to-pick-a...

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.

Yeah I can't really defend that. But this was probably how they convinced themselves it was "effective".

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".

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.

Why would you limit yourself to running events only in one of the most expensive places on earth? Do they not intend to have attendees from elsewhere?

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).

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.

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.

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