Hacker News Reader

Comment by a_bonobo | Hacker News Reader

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wytham_Abbey

View on HN

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.

[0] https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/charities/effective-altruism...

> Buying a multimillion pound stately country estate for your HQ

Nit: they bought it as an events space. HQ is rented in a normal office building.

Which, in my book, makes the decision even worse.

Umm.. how?

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).

As I said: In my book. Your opinion may differ.

The day-to-day business of the project that bought the building is hosting workshops there, though?

I suspect the point is the utilization rate of this particular resource is lower, because workshops are rarely every day.

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.

Saint Hill Manor, East Grinstead, Hubbard's headquarters during most of the 1960s.

From a marketing perspective, I can assure you that effective altruism does itself absolutely no favors by blatantly betraying its supposed core principles.

> The gardening costs alone will be astronomical

They don't own the land, they own the house.

Really? The listing says it includes 25 acres of land. (~ 15 soccer fields or 400 tennis courts)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com