Why is the EA Hotel having trouble fundraising?

1. We hope to post a list of outputs soon (within the next week).

2. Those on salaries from Rethink Priorities have been paying cost price (£10/day). AFAIK they have not adjusted their salaries downward because staff are staying at the hotel. RAISE has contributed to the Hotel from the limited funding they have received recently.

3. Depends what your counterfactual use of the money is in terms of what the bar of EV to clear is. Given our low costs, the EV bar could be quite low over a number of comparisons. We aim to adjust the entry bar depending on supply.

4. We have a pitch doc we've been circulating to potential funders. Will release it publicly soon (within the next week).

5. The rationalist group house in Manchester was most definitely not my project! I just moved into the original rental house with the organiser and a couple of others (and later bought a house and offered it as a shared space, while they continued to organise the project).

6. This doesn't seem like something most EAs would be that concerned with, but I could be wrong. If you think having more backers for nominal amounts is good, please donate a nominal amount!

Strong upvoted, and thank you, because finally someone is honest about their doubts. You're as critical in your speech as you are in your thoughts. This should be standard, but it's rare.

projects that seem pretty tragic like “writing a novel on AI alignment” and “writing a mobile game” - it’s a difficult balance here, unoccupied rooms are doing nothing for the hotel but equally I doubt indulging these sorts of things are valuable

This is what I understand to be hits-based giving. If you have 20 rooms, you can make these kinds of weird gambles, and someone should be doing that.

Poor presentation- I found the post on expected value essentially incoherent as a pitch , but in all of the posts so far little thought seems to have been put into the elevator pitch of why fund this or what are the best aspects of the project are. Funders want a one paragraph or one sentence summary of why they should fund it which seems absent here

I take full responsibility for that. Perhaps I should have studied how other meta organisations estimate their value. I was hubristic to assume that I would be able to do it from scratch.

People don’t want to be associated with something low status

I'd rather assume EA's to be above status when it comes to stakes this high.

not even close to every current/previous resident had made even a nominal donation of £5 to the campaign

I don't see why they should. At that point you're just manipulating impressions. I want to present an honest picture, and I don't want to engage in a signalling race to the bottom.

Perhaps that's naive.

A few thoughts this post raised for me (not directed at OP specifically):

1. Does RAISE/the Hotel have a standardized way to measure the progress of people self-studying AI? If so, especially if it's been vetted by AI risk organizations, it seems like that would go a long ways towards resolving this issue.

2. Does "ea organisations are unwilling to even endorse the hotel" refer to RAISE/Rethink Charity (very surprising & important evidence!), or other EA organizations without direct ties to the Hotel?

3. I would be curious what the marginal cost of adding a new resident is: if high, this would be a good reason to leave rooms unoccupied rather than funding "tragic" projects.

4. Strongly agreed: the EV post seemed like an overly complex toy model that was unlikely to predict real-world outcomes. I think high-level heuristics for evaluating impact would be much more useful/convincing (e.g. the framework laid out here)

5. In general, donors who take a "hits-based giving" approach to funding speculative projects in their personal network are likely to become associated with failed projects regardless of personal competence, so I don't think this is evidence against the case the EA hotel makes. My relatively uninformed inside view is that the founder of the Kernel project should be associated with its failure, rather than Greg, and I think the outside view agrees.

6. I wonder how different the fundraising situation would be if it had started during the burst of initial enthusiasm/publicity surrounding the hotel?

"People don’t want to be associated with something low status and are likely to subject anything they perceive as low status to a lot of scrutiny."

Ouch! Alas, it is true in general. However, I think it's a dangerous heuristic when not backed by the kinds of substantive comments made in 1-6.

I do think toning down 5 might foster a better culture. Perhaps there is more information here I don't know. But this kinda sounds like someone tried something it didn't work out, and they don't get a second chance. That's not a great rubric to establish if you want people to take risks.

3. Guest output and testimonials are not ready to be released. It's clear that several donors would prefer evidence of concrete output over an estimate of the value added by living at the hotel.

Aiming for this Friday.

We now also have a PayPal MoneyPool.

Whoa, didn't know about the donation swap!

Fwiw I think GoFundMe is a pretty mainstream fundraising vehicle.

I think I disagree with this piece because although I think it's true that places are valuable for connecting, that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be a place that people own. In London we can use pubs, cafes and parks, often for free with just a picnic blanket indicating the edge of this space that separates the conversations from the outside world.

Note that he's since retracted his recommendation.