Why did CEA buy Wytham Abbey?

Hey,

First I want to explain that I think it's misleading to think of this as a CEA decision (I've edited to be more explicit about this). To explain that I need to disambiguate between:

1. CEA, the project that runs the EA Forum, EA Global, etc.
   • This is what I think ~everyone usually thinks of when they think of "CEA", as it's the group that's been making public use of that brand
2. CEA, the former name of a legal entity which hosts lots of projects (including #1)
   • This is a legacy naming issue ... 
     • The name of the legal entity was originally intended as a background brand to house 80,000 Hours and Giving What We Can; other projects have been added since, especially in recent years
     • Since then the idea of "effective altruism" has become somewhat popular in its own right! And one of the projects within the entity started making good use of the name "CEA"
   • We’ve now renamed the legal entity to EVF, basically in order to avoid this kind of ambiguity!
      

Wytham Abbey was bought by #2, and isn’t directly related to #1, except for being housed within the same legal entity. I was the person who owned the early development of the project idea, and fundraised for it. (The funding comes from a grant specifically for this project, and is not FTX-related.) I brought it to the rest of the board of EVF to ask for fiscal sponsorship (i.e. I would direct the funding to EVF and EVF would buy the property and employ staff to work on the project). So EVF made two decisions here: they approved fiscal sponsorship, agreeing to take funds for this new project; and they then followed through and bought the property with the funds that had been earmarked for that. The second of these is technically a decision to buy the building (and was done by a legal entity at the time called CEA), but at that point it was fulfilling an obligation to the donor, so it would have been wild to decide anything else. The first is a real decision, but the decision was to offer sponsorship to a project that would likely otherwise have happened through another vehicle, not to use funds to buy a building rather than for another purpose. Neither of these decisions were made by any staff of the group people generally understand as "CEA". (All of this ambiguity/confusion is on us, not on readers.)

I’d also like to speak briefly to the “why” — i.e. why I thought this was a good idea. The central case was this: 

I’ve personally been very impressed by specialist conference centres. When I was doing my PhD, I think the best workshops I went to were at Oberwolfach, a mathematics research centre funded by the German government. Later I went to an extremely productive workshop on ethical issues in measuring the global burden of disease at the Brocher Foundation. Talking to other researchers, including in other fields, I don’t think my impression was an outlier. Having an immersive environment which was more about exploring new ideas than showing off results was just very good for intellectual progress. In theory this would be possible without specialist venues, but researchers want to spend time thinking about ideas not event logistics. Having a venue which makes itself available to experts hosting events avoids this issue.

In the last few years, I’ve been seeing the rise of what seems to me an extremely important cluster of ideas — around asking what’s most important to do in the world, and taking chains of reasoning from there seriously. I think this can lead to tentative answers like “effective altruism” or “averting existential risk”, but for open-minded intellectual exploration I think it’s better to have the focus on questions than answers. I thought it would be great if we could facilitate more intellectual work of this type, and the specialist-venue model was a promising one to try. We will experiment with a variety of event types. 

We had various calculations about costings, which made it look somewhere between “moderately money-saving” and “mildly money-spending” vs renting venues for events that would happen anyway, depending on various assumptions e.g. about usage that we couldn’t get great data on before running the experiment. The main case for the project was not a cost-saving one, but that if it was a success it could generate many more valuable workshops than would otherwise exist. Note that this is a much less expensive experiment than it may look on face value, since we retain the underlying asset of the building.

We wanted to be close to Oxford for easy access to the intellectual communities there. (Property prices weren’t falling off significantly with distance until travel time from Oxford and London had become significantly higher.) We looked at a lot of properties online, and visited the three properties we found for sale with 20+ bedrooms within about 50 minutes of Oxford. These were all "country houses", which are commonly repurposed as event venues in England. The other two were cheaper (one ~£6M and one ~£9M at the end of a competitive process; compared to a purchase price for Wytham of a bit under £15M) but needed significantly more work before they were usable, which would have added large expense (running into the millions) and delay (likely years). (And renovation expense isn’t obviously recoverable if one sells — it depends on how much the buyers want the same things from the property as you do.)

We thought Wytham had the most long-term potential as a venue because it had multiple large common rooms that could take >40 people. The other properties had one large room each holding perhaps a max of 40, but there would be pressure on this space since it would be wanted as both a dining space and for workshop sessions, and would also reduce flexibility of use for meetings (extra construction might have been able to address this, but it was a big question mark whether you could get planning consent). Wytham also benefited from being somewhat larger (about 27,000 sq ft vs roughly 20,000 sq ft for each of the other two) and a more accessible location. Overall we thought that a combination of factors made it the most appropriate choice.

I did feel a little nervous about the optical effects, but think it’s better to let decisions be guided less by what we think looks good, and more by what we think is good — ultimately this was a decision I felt happy to defend.

On why we hadn’t posted publicly about this before: I'm not a fan of trying to create hype. I thought the natural time to post about the project publicly would be when we were ready to accept public applications to run events, and it felt a bit gauche to post before that. Now that there's a public discussion, of course, it seemed worth explaining some of the thinking.

I hope this is helpful.

Hey, I wanted to clarify that Open Phil gave most of the funding for the purchase of Wytham Abbey (a small part of the costs were also committed by Owen and his wife, as a signal of “skin in the game”). I run the Longtermist EA Community Growth program at Open Phil (we recently launched a parallel program for EA community growth for global health and wellbeing, which I don’t run) and I was the grant investigator for this grant, so I probably have the most context on it from the side of the donor. I’m also on the board of the Effective Ventures Foundation (EVF).

Why did we make the grant? There are two things I’d like to discuss about this, the process we used/context we were in, and our take on the case for the grant. I’ll start with the former. 

Process and context: At the time we committed the funding (November 2021, though the purchase wasn’t completed until April 2022), there was a lot more apparent funding available than there is today, both from Open Phil and from the Future Fund. Existential risk reduction and related efforts seemed to us to have a funding overhang, and we were actively looking for more ways to spend money to support more good work, especially by encouraging more people to dedicate their careers to addressing the associated risks. Also, given the large amounts of funding available at the time, and relatively lower number of grantmakers, we wanted to experiment with decentralizing some influence over funding to other people with experience in the space who understood our long-run priorities but had visions for how to use the funding that were somewhat different from our grantmakers’.

So, we were experimenting with more defaulting to saying “yes” to shovel-ready grant requests that seemed aimed at our core priorities, especially when they didn’t require enormous amounts of funding. (As others have noted and as I’ll explain below, we modeled the amount of funding at stake here as being in the low millions of dollars, rather than the higher sticker price, since it was to purchase a durable asset that can be resold.)

What did we think about this grant? In the abstract, we thought the idea of buying real estate to use for events was a reasonable one.

When evaluating a grant, my team tends to focus on the question “to what extent (per dollar) will this grant result in more promising people focusing their careers on doing as much good as possible in our longtermist focus areas?” (Other Open Philanthropy programs use different criteria.) I and other people on my team have invested a fair amount in collecting data and developing metrics for evaluating the value-for-money of grants aimed at this goal, though also it’s still a work in progress in many ways. 

When we surveyed ~200 people involved or interested in longtermist work, we found that many had been strongly influenced by in-person events they’d attended, particularly ones where people relatively new to a topic came into contact with relatively experienced people working full-time in that area. (Some other data and our general experiences in the space are largely supportive of this too). Overall, we feel fairly confident in-person events like workshops, learning retreats, and conferences can be very impactful for people considering big career changes, and have historically often been good value-for-money via helping people interested in our longtermist focus areas make professional connections and deepen their understanding about these topics. 

We support projects that cumulatively run dozens of events per year (disproportionately in the Bay Area and UK), and we saw several reasons a venue purchase could be valuable for both increasing the number and quality of impactful events, and potentially saving some money:

• The number of events was growing fast. 
• Suitable venues are often of limited availability and book up far in advance, making more spontaneous events challenging.
• Rented venues sometimes have issues that aren’t discovered until an event has begun (and we’ve seen events go substantially worse, or have to execute difficult mid-event moves, because of issues arising with the venues after the event was already underway). 
• Ops capacity to organize before and after events is a resource we value highly. Organizing and preparing for events takes more time and may go worse on average when you need to orient to the layout of different venues, move in and out all the equipment, learn about new areas (and travel to/from them) and available vendors that the event allows, etc.
• Renting venues varies a lot in price, but venues for events near top EA hubs can be very expensive. Often, the cost of the venues was in the $30-100k range (though there were also smaller, shorter events aimed at students with venue costs in the $10k-ish range, and large conferences can be much more expensive).
  • Other locations are often cheaper, but have a more difficult time attracting busy professionals, relative to ones that take place near where they live, and demand more time from ops staff, senior staff, and (sometimes) instructors helping with events (and, we generally highly value all those folks’ time, even if they are willing to travel). 

The fact that the funding was going to be used to purchase a durable asset means that for the purposes of our cost-effectiveness analysis, we modeled the financial stakes as being somewhere in the low millions (rather than the meaningfully higher sticker price of the property).  Our grantees also stood to potentially save money through the investment, since they wouldn’t end up paying rental costs to run their events. We still wouldn’t have been surprised if the investment turned out net negative from a financial perspective, but losing most of the investment seemed unlikely. Given this model of the costs, we thought it was consistent with our overall experiment in lowering barriers to longtermist funding to “default to yes” for a shovel-ready grant.

We discussed Owen’s reasoning behind selecting this kind of venue, and we thought it broadly made sense. The main goal was to have a venue relatively near Oxford with sufficient capacity for the types of events we thought could be highly impactful. 

Despite the points above, we were relatively uncertain about this specific opportunity, and there was some internal debate over the amount and structure of our funding; we also expressed our uncertainty to Owen.

 We were mainly uncertain about: 

• Owen being the person driving this forward, despite him not wanting to be the main point person actually helping oversee the property and run relevant events over the next few years
• Whether refurbishing and maintaining the property would end up being much more time-consuming and expensive than Owen forecasted
• Whether the process was moving too quickly and whether more should be done to investigate the state and expected value of the property, and whether a better opportunity might arise in the coming years
• Whether the number and kinds of events (and the value of those events) had been sufficiently well-scoped, and whether this venue would prove a good fit for a sufficient fraction of them. 

Internally at OP (including with our communications team), we discussed how this would reflect on us somewhat, but mostly from the perspective of us as a funder, rather than the wider ecosystem as a whole. I think that it was a mistake on my part that the funding conversations didn’t focus more on that broader question, and I regret it, though I think we should have a high bar to rejecting otherwise solid-seeming grants on optics grounds because that kind of approach can be hard to limit and then can end up being surprisingly costly to impact. (My recollection is that we thought of it mainly as a longtermist/existential risk reduction field resource and didn’t think enough about how what was then called CEA providing fiscal sponsorship might make it sound more like an EA project.) 

We also told Owen that we would want to check in about venue usage and think about the value it was generating in terms of the community growth metrics we generally use, and discuss selling the property if it didn’t seem like things were going well. (Proceeds from a sale would be used as general funding within EVF, and that funding would replace some of our and other funders’ future grants to EVF.)

Where do I stand on this grant now? With the huge decline in available funds since November 2021, I don’t know whether we’d make this grant again today. I still think it could turn out to be importantly effort-saving and event-increasing-and-improving relative to regularly renting one-off event venues, and it could also lead to a higher number of impactful events being run. But it’s currently too soon to say whether the usage will justify the investment. If we were considering a similar grant now, we’d want to get more into the details of modeling the effective financial cost (incorporating the resale possibility), hammering out plans and predictions for future operations and usage, etc. but I think we might consider it to be good enough value-for-money that we’d want to go forward with some possible projects in this vein.

Why isn’t there a published grant page right now? (This isn’t my domain but) we typically aim to publish grants within three months of when we make our initial payment, but we're currently working through a backlog of older grants. Wytham is one of many grants in that category.

Just to set some context: 15 million pounds may sound like a lot of money to young academics and researchers, or to buyers of residential real estate (e.g. typical single family homes). It may look like 'lavish spending'. 

But it's really not a lot compared to typical buildings for academic departments on and around university campuses. 

I've worked in a dozen universities over the last 35+ years, and we frequently see announcements of new buildings being constructed for 10-50 million dollars -- even in state universities with relatively limited budgets.

This 2016 review of building costs in higher education is slightly outdated now (given high inflation rates since then), but it reports a typical cost of $800/square feet for new academic buildings. 

Consider a modest building for a medium-sized department like mine (e.g. 25 faculty, 70 grad students, 15 staff, etc.). The building (Logan Hall, UNM) is 55,000 gross square feet, so its build cost new would be about $44 million. 

Costs for new building in the Oxford area are probably even higher, and greatly complicated by British zoning and building regulations within the Oxford Green Belt. 

Long story short, 15 million pounds might sound like a lot for Wytham Abbey, but it's not out of line for an academic research/conference center, and it's arguably fairly cheap, given the extremely high complexity and cost of building in south-east England.

I'm confused why people keep insisting this is a "CEA" decision even after Owen Cotton-Barratt's clarification (which I assume everyone commenting has read). 

I see the process on deciding to purchase Wytham Abbey as:

1. Owen Cotton-Barratt made a proposal to spend ~$15M for a conference center
2. His funder(s) were willing to give him money.
3. Effective Ventures agreed to be a fiscal sponsor.

To the extent that anyone is responsible for this decision, it's primarily (1) Owen, and (2) his funder(s). I don't think (3) is much to blame here. Also, CEA the organization is distinct from EV, their fiscal sponsor.

I think if you think this is an ineffective use of limited resources, you absolutely should feel entitled to critique it! In many ways this is what our movement is about! But I think you should place the burden of blame on the actual decision-makers, and not vaguely associated institutions. 
 

edited numbers

I think if you run a lot of conferences it can make sense to own a conference centre.

Let's say it replaces 50 days of 30-person conferences a year, which normally cost $1000 a head in terms of the venue. That's $1.5mn. (Staff and food costs are on top in both cases).

Does this place cost more than that in terms of mortgage payments and upkeep costs I dunno, seems comparable.. So it seems plausible that it's a good spend. I'd guess 70% that if I knew more I'd probably think it was reasonable.

[note: I don't work for CEA, but I did recently invest in a house to live in and do events in.] I wrote a piece on my blog about why. Here's what I wrote:

Real estate purchases can make sense for financial planning reasons in some cases. This money should not be considered to trade off against, e.g., donations to effective charities. Instead it should trade off against short-term rental budgets for retreats, conferences, etc. And because banks are willing to loan against real estate at very good rates, it is surprisingly cheap to invest in real estate, requiring little cash upfront and low ongoing interest costs. And you can make use of it while you own it. So if you can either use your real estate effectively, or rent it out when not in use, you should be approaching cost-competitiveness with short term rentals.

One risk to making effective use of the real estate is that you can’t just pay for what you need at every moment, you have to buy the whole thing and then waste any unused bits. This risk is compensated by commensurate upside - that of making the whole thing relatively cheaper. So if you have knowledge of how much utilization you’re expecting to get from some real estate (and that utilization is higher than whatever the market / existing owners get) then you’re likely to be beating the market by buying the property.

All the above analysis is all else being equal. But realistically, the venue you choose for an event has a major effect on everything that happens at the event. Some venues will be conducive to smaller conversations; some will force everyone into one room. Some venues will attract fancy people; others will attract nerds, or frugal types, or creative types, or whatever.

One venue isn’t right for every type of event. But I’ve done enough event planning at rented venues to know that sometimes the event will go fine at whatever venues are easily available on the market, and other times I am making substantial tradeoffs.

Occasionally my event has requirements that won’t work for an available hotel or airbnb. An example of this I can think of was wanting attendees to be able to relax in the evenings somewhere that was private, quiet and had no time pressure/social demands. The hotel rentable rooms felt very stuffy, the hotel bar was too public, and there were no available airbnbs that were big enough. In general, the short term rental market is not that liquid and doesn’t have huge amounts of inventory; if you don’t see what you want you might just be out of luck. Whereas if you buy, you can guarantee availability, and customize things to your liking. Such customizations, if done well, pay off event after event. If you believe (as I do) that facilities have a big impact on the quality of an experience, then it’s easy to see how such an investment would pay off, even if it is more expensive than whatever you would be able to get in the rental market.

I haven’t spoken to the CEA folks involved in the Wytham Abbey decision, but I assume they were thinking along similar lines when they pulled the trigger on this. To me, the critique in this thread is quite overblown - I think most of the shock is coming from over indexing on how things look (fancy estates, large numbers) rather than the economic and practical realities.

I wanted to provide some context on the recently purchased events venue near Prague that has been discussed here in one of the subthreads. The subthread contains some misleading content, and is not clearly visible, so I am posting this as a top level comment to provide more information on the project. It is extremely long, sorry.

1. My relationship to the project
2. Context for Forum readers
3. Context for outsiders
4. About the project
5. About the venue
6. Communication timelines

1. My relationship to the project

The project is led by Irena Kotikova and was something she started thinking about and working on multiple years ago, before the FTX Future Fund existed. 

I am not the recipient of the grant, nor am I responsible for the funding decision: I’m involved in the project as chairman of ESPR, which is a Czech non-profit housing part of the Hostacov project. The ESPR association decided to fiscally sponsor the project because it aligned with our mission (improving epistemics) and we already had the necessary “equivalency determination” to receive tax-exempt funding from a US foundation. However, the Hostacov project is independent and the property is owned by a separate legal entity. The ESPR association is not involved in the operation of the property.

I personally believe the project is good and I’m happy to defend it in my private capacity. The following comments are mine and not made on behalf of the project or its funder. I expect Irena to comment on this as well. (Even more context: I am friends with Irena and have collaborated with her on many projects.)
 

2. Context for EAs 

Irena and I were fairly involved with the Czech government’s Covid response. Our efforts were at least partially successful and likely contributed to preventing thousands of death and preventing some economic damage.  However, it also made us quite unpopular among anti-vax and anti-lockdown activists. (In the US context, you can imagine these groups as falling somewhere between the Great Barrington Declaration and QAnon.)

Based on one online media report, these circles noticed the venue purchase and are trying to frame our involvement in a false negative light, ranging from "me and Irena were aware of fraud within FTX" to "both we and FTX are part of an Illuminati conspiracy, we likely knew about the pandemic before it happened, our covid response efforts were part of the plot, and the grant is an expression of gratitude from the Illuminati". Obviously bizarre, but sadly not harmless.

As a result, please note that the Czech media and these Covid sceptics might well find this discussion. So, anything you write on this post could easily be selectively quoted or otherwise used against you or me. I am not trying to prevent people expressing their opinions, but would ask that any speculation (or, for example, digging for the physical addresses of vaguely related entities) be done with the above in mind.
 

3. Context for outsiders (you can skip if you have followed the forum in past month)

In case you’re not familiar with FTX and its ill-fated philanthropy: FTX was a large crypto exchange that went bankrupt in early November. Soon after it was revealed that its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, lied about the state of their assets and may have used client money in a fraudulent way. I recommend Spencer Greenberg's podcast for more details.

FTX founded a charity, the FTX Future Fund / Foundation. The foundation was small compared to FTX, but quickly became a significant funder in several areas that I find important - AI safety, pandemic preparedness, catastrophic risks, tools to support collective epistemology, teaching critical thinking, etc. 

Regardless of what exactly happened at FTX, the result is extremely bad for everyone. First of all for FTX customers - it is unclear what fraction will be returned to them in the bankruptcy proceedings. But it is also bad for people who worked at the FTX Foundation, grant recipients, and those who were promised grants but received nothing.

According to its website, the FTX Foundation has given out hundreds of grants, more than $130M by summer 2022. If they continued their pace, by November this was likely well over $200M. The group of recipients is diverse, from research groups at about half of the top 10 universities in the relevant fields, to tiny non-profits and individuals. Personally, I think that most of the grants were beneficial.

What I want to emphasise is that the grant recipients have done nothing wrong and have nothing to be ashamed of or apologise for.

The implication "you got a grant from a foundation that was sponsored by FTX" => "what you are doing is suspicious" is nonsense. 

Unfortunately, some parts of online space are attempting to paint grant recipients as themselves scandalous or immoral, and shaming them. From what I have seen, this is based on ignoring context or on a clearly wrong framing:

1. Suggestive framing like "they got a grant not long before bankruptcy". The implication is that grantees should have done – in addition to basic due diligence about the FTX Foundation being a legitimate entity and usual anti-money laundering – some sort of brilliant investigation to discover that FTX was going to go bankrupt in a few months because of fraud inside it.

This is clearly an unreasonable demand. Ironically, if someone had reliable information proving the insolvency of FTX a few months ago, such information would be extremely valuable - it seems likely that the market worth of this info would be greater than total FTX Foundation donations.

2. Ignoring causality. For example, Irena was working on the discussed project for years. It isn't the case the SBF conceived this.

3. Thinking the grant recipients can just send the money back now. Grants are governed by contracts; organizations are governed by laws and bylaws. What should someone who has received money from the FTX Foundation do? Intuitively, one might think it best to immediately send the money "back" to FTX creditors. In practice, at least for a Czech non-profit, this would be likely illegal: a non-profit governed under Czech law cannot just take a donation it received from the Foundation for a specific purpose and send it to a private entity in the Bahamas. The reasonable option seems to be to wait for how the court proceedings develop, and adhere to contracts and the law. (This is not a legal advice)

4. Liability. Both the law and commonsense protect you if you took an action in good faith, as the grantees did. 

4. About the project

As I mentioned earlier, this project hasn’t been announced yet.

While I’m not speaking on behalf of the project, I can try to explain why it seems good, and something like this should exist, from my personal perspective.

I. First, I believe the venue should not be thought of as "EAs for EAs" but rather as something that aims to improve the world. How? By providing a space for topics that are adjacent to EA, such as good epistemics, sanity in times of rapid change, increasingly strong AI, and existential security.

A typical use I imagine is an 'epistemics workshop for decision-makers', with most of the guests not being EAs, but decision-makers or researchers. There are many possible events of the type 'some people should meet and think about something' or 'some people should meet and learn something' where the people meeting and learning is someone else than effective altruists, yet the whole event is quite impactful. In the above mentioned case, you can for example imagine someone working on e.g. regulation of AI in some non-EA capacity understanding better how to think in probability distributions and how to evaluate conflicting statements by various parties.

Overall, I think interventions of this type could be reasonably high-leverage.

II. Second, I believe that the space in which an event is held can make a significant impact on its success. It can easily contribute around 20% to some intuitive "goodness" metric. A stable and amazing venue can also create interesting feedback loops. For example, some people care more about research progress than money and if they have a positive experience at the venue, they may want to return even if monetary incentives point elsewhere.

III. Third, historically, EA and EA-adjacent organisations based in Prague have provided a lot of operational support for various events run by other organisations. This gives me data on the demand for this type of venue. 
 

5. The venue

The venue is a castle located about an hour and a half from Vaclav Havel Airport. Previously, it was operated as a hotel and often hosted events such as weddings or corporate meetings. In its current state, it can host around 60 people, and there is potential for expansion.

The specific venue was selected after Irena scouted for venues for years and investigated dozens of alternatives. I have seen some of the alternatives and, in my opinion, the decisive factor was that the venue was ready to use.

Some of the alternatives were much cheaper but usually required years of expensive reconstruction. Running some of the events I would be excited to happen now seems much more impactful than doing them in 3 years.

Another question could be, why there, and not in some entirely different place. In my view, given the growth of the fields in question, there is a space for multiple venues in different locations, with different use cases. 

Compared to the venues in Oxford and near Berkeley, this venue is significantly cheaper, somewhat larger and in better shape. 

In terms of travel: the venue is well-located in continental Europe (roughly midway between Berlin and Vienna). Prague Airport has direct flights to most of Europe and travel time from almost any big European airport to the venue is less than 5 hours. In my view, this makes the venue viable for events in Europe longer than roughly 3 or 4 days, and basically globally, for week-long events or longer.

…also, to reiterate, contrary to rumour, the property is not owned by Irena Kotíková or Czech EA association or "EA Prague". Also it's probably worth understanding for people involved, the project is mostly a lot of work, not some sort of leisure spending. 

6. Communication timelines

Buying a venue of this size takes time. In this case, it involved multiple checks by lawyers, accountants, and technicians. The grant agreement was signed in July, the transaction was not actually completed and visible in the registry until mid-October. It would have been odd to announce the purchase before the transaction was complete.

Regardless of whether there is an economic argument to be made for this decision, as Nathan Young and others are implying, large expenses being clearly communicated and justified seems like a worthwhile endeavor for the sake of transparency alone. If people are finding out about "EA buying a castle" from Émile Torres or the New Yorker (EDIT: and we can't point to any kind of public statement or justification), then we're probably doing something wrong.

Just for context on event costs

Wilton Park

They do lots of workshops on international security. Their events cost around £54,000 for two nights.

(see page 14 of their Annual Report: "In 2020/21, we delivered 128 (76 in 2019/20) events at average net revenue of £13k (£54k in 2019/20). The lower average net revenue this year was due to the reduced income generated from virtual events compared to that generated by face to face events in 2019/20. Virtual events are shorter, generally lasting half a day, compared to face to face events which are generally for two nights.")

West Court, Jesus College, Cambridge

I've been to several academic workshops and conferences here. Their prices are, for a 24 hour (overnight) rate:

Let's say 100 attendees overnight for 3 days (a weekend workshop) in the cheapest rooms: £200*100*3 = £60,000. 

Shakeel offers the further examples of "traditional specialist conference centres, e.g. Oberwolfach, The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center or the Brocher Foundation."

50 events (one a week) like these a year would cost £3m (£60,000*50=£3,000,000). So break even (assuming £15m was the actual cost) in 5 years - quicker if they paid less, which seems likely.

No idea if this is a good use of money, just sharing some information for context.

There are some good arguments for buying this thing, but why were these things below not done? I struggle to find arguments against these important actions which seem like basic due diligence. I would appreciate people giving reasons why these things might not have happened as I haven't seen it no the thread.

1. Publish publicly information about big spends when they happen 
2. Clearly state the reasons for the purchase including positives, potential negatives and counterfactuals in laymans terms.
3. Publish the math on this vs. running conferences elsewhere. If Givewell can do it, surely CEA can publish their math. 
4. Acknowledge publicly that although on balance the purchase was judged t be worthwhile, the optics are likely to look terrible to most people, who (whether right or wrong) are likely to see it as supposed do gooders buying themselves a mansion.

I'm not against this purchase (uncertain), but  confused why these steps weren't taken when it was bought, and haven't been done yet (although this can be rectified). I'm not asking for democracy, only asking for both the core principles of EA to be published and a bare minimum of transparency.  

And one extra point, I think after the SBF scandal, a higher degree of transparency than before  will be needed to turn this negative PR tide. 

This is honestly really embarrassing. I've read the comments and I don't want to argue that the economic calculus doesn't stack up, but the optics here makes this extremely EV negative. Every journalist is looking for material to write about EA since the SBF debacle and this kind of stuff is prime material.

Individual high profile media pieces can significantly reduce donations for years and years, kill startups and organisations and make it harder to find people to partner with due to lowered reputation. I have friends, colleagues and family message me about Wytham abbey and it makes me embarrassed, they are now less likely to donate to causes we care about here. I will not defend this decision to them, regardless of what the economic calculus around conferences/event costs says. 

I got into EA for the empathetic and rational approach to doing good and I will continue donating to EA causes and using EA methodology for those same reasons. However, for outsiders, EA is a coherent "movement" that you "support" by donating. This must be taken into consideration when you act under the "EA brand". This movement is big now and needs to be careful about the way this brand is managed, because, as unsexy as it is, both current and future donations depends on that brand.

The "large grant made specifically for this" explanation is unconvincing without more. Did a grantor come up with this idea independently, or did CEA choose to approach a grantor with this idea (as opposed to other pitches it could have made for someone with that kind of money to spend)? If so, why did CEA decide this was the best ask for a huge grant? To the extent the "large grant" comment was meant to reassure donors that their money wasn't used for this, money is fungible.

It's certainly plausible the decision made economic sense, but in that case CEA needs to publish the math. That's not an unreasonable ask for a marquee organization in a movement focused on maximing social benefit for resources devoted to charitable purposes.

I'm not going to comment on the emotional/anger/PR side, but here are some numbers for the discussion to be somewhat connected with Oxford conference accommodation reality; speaking just in my personal capacity as someone who did run events in Oxford.

According to the first public price list in my google results, conference accommodation in a college in Oxford in 2020 was >£70 (standard room) + >$45 on meals + >~$1000 for 4 lecture rooms, per day. With a 30 person event, it's >£4500 per day. With 40 ppl and more lecture rooms, it would be more like >£6k/day, just for space and food. 

Multiplying it with days per year, it's >£2.2M/y. To get realistic comparisons, you would need to adjust for many other factors sometimes of order 0.3-3x, like occupancy, costs of adjusting venues to your needs, costs of the staff,... In impact calculation, you would also need to adjust for counterfactual loses such as "not able to run an event because everything good is either booked a year in advance, or even more expensive than the college price list" where having a friendly venue can cause the event to counterfactually happen at all.

I wonder how much of the emotion people feel on this issue is coming from feeling let down by other charities and Big Charity in general, and a difficult-to-articulate concern that this purchase could represent the first baby steps down a path many charities have slid down in the past.

I suggest that a decent number of charities have started off pretty effective (at least in comparison to others in their cause area), and have drifted downward over time due to "capture" of the charity (cf. the idea of regulatory capture). Unlike for-profit firms, charities don't have shareholders who will boot their management or sell the company if the firm loses sight of its reason for existence (for for-profits, to make shareholders money). So there is always a risk that a charity will become unduly influenced by insiders' desires and interests rather than focused on its intended beneficiaries and objectives. To be clear, I don't mean that insiders raid the charity to their own financial advantage -- I mean just the sort of problems we see in a lot of ineffective charities today. Those problems built up slowly over time.

Charities -- and social movements -- need explicit guardrails in place to mitigate against the risk of capture. Public reasons-giving is one of those guardrails. Some sort of external accountability is another.

I am undecided on the wisdom of purchasing this property, but I think the use of guardrails could have dampened the "optics" concern people are talking about.

I'm confused by this post and title: it opens as if this is a question that doesn't have an answer yet, but as you note Shakeel did already answer in the comment you linked to. Is this post to say that you don't find his answer satisfactory? To draw more attention to it?

Initially this was going to be a post rather than a question, where I would argue all expenses by CEA/EV above $500k should be publicly defended and explained with a detailed expected value calculation. But after pitching something similar under Nathan's post and getting 17 disagree votes I decided it was probably a bad idea: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CnAhPPsMWAxBm7pii/what-specific-changes-should-we-as-a-community-make-to-the?commentId=oa5xFokTTTb3maPwB

Still, I'd love to hear: Why is asking for more transparency behind CEA/EV's expenses a bad idea? Lots of individuals donate to them, so I feel like they deserve to know.

As a subsidiary question, can anyone say how the property has been used so far eg the rough sum over meetings of number of attendees times length of meeting in days? Or some other measure of utilisation/cost saving?

While I do think there is some merit in the argument that the purchase ultimately yields a net positive, I'm a bit more skeptical than most of the benefits of specialist venues, if you consider all the possible alternatives:

• A lot of intellectual work can be done remotely (the EA and rationalist forums being a good example of this)
• Ordinary intellectual work which needs in person collaboration can happen in an office
• Freer types of intellectual work which need in person collaboration can sometimes be successfully accomplished by just picking a convenient place for people to meet, such as a particular person's house, a café, or, if you're lucky enough, a park
• And if you need more space and quiet, you can more cheaply rent access to a large house somewhere in the country, in a way that more than offsets the additional costs of transportation, as many companies do for their yearly retreats. (This assumes a rich country such as the UK). In France, for example, it is 15 times more expensive to rent a few square feet of Parisian real state than a whole manor deep in the country.
• Unless you need specific equipment, of course, in which case ou definitely require some kind of "lab".

With that being said, I have a sense that the same purchasing decision would have raised no eyebrows had it been made by the University of Oxford itself. Such decisions are made by the University of Oxford all the time.  (Well, perhaps student activists would have found something to protest about it, but it would have been linked to some symbolic matter about the history of the place rather than the financials). 

To the extent that the Centre of Effective Altruism is pursuing a long term intellectual project that seeks to study how to do the most good with the same rigor the University of Oxford brings to other endeavours, either you should not be shocked by this, or you should be shocked by the fact that the University of Oxford owns so much real estate. (I am generally more puzzled than shocked about things, so I'll leave it up to you to determine which angry emotion this evokes.)

This however does not seem to be the case. I am not too familiar with EA institutions, but it seems to me that the Centre of Effective Altruism is more akin to the seat of a movement of people trying to be altruistic in a particular way. As a result, it becomes an organization which - whether inadvertently or not - advertises its own goodness. "We are good, and you should be good like us too". For a number of complex reasons, people have a mental model that members of a movement of this kind should live in relative frugality and that if they don't, they are hypocrites. (Perhaps they should live like monks...  say, in a religious building made of stone surrounded by lush greenery. But also... it shouldn't be called an abbey, and they should be poor. Funny creatures aren't we.)

Not sure what to make of this, but it would seem to have implications for the proper delineation of "intellectual" and "movement" wings of EA, as well as the consideration of optics whenever switching from "is"to "ought" modes.

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.

I learned about this ten months ago, personally, and (in an informal peer context) spoke to one of the people involved about it. The person in question defended the decision by saying they intended to run retreats and ask "Hamming questions". They added that the £15m was an investment, since the castle ("technically it's not a castle") wouldn't depreciate in value. Also, they opined that the EA community as a whole shouldn't have a veto on every large purchase, because consensus decision-making is infeasible on that scale and is likely to result in vetos for tons of potentially valuable proposals.

I think I agree with the third point at least to some extent, but that's a meta level point, and the object level points did not seem like good arguments for buying a £15m castle. I came away from the conversation believing this was not a reasonable use of funds and with my opinion of CEA* lowered.

I didn't, and still don't, know what to do about this sort of thing. Changing how an EA org acts is hard; maybe public pressure helps, but I suspect a lot of the difficulties are in changing organizational norms and policies, and I don't have a good sense of what would be useful policies or what wouldn't be. I do have the intuition that having a larger number of distinct EA orgs would be good, so CEA has less influence individually.

*I understand CEA to be an umbrella organization housing a number of sub-orgs, and so I remain unsure how far this negative update should propagate; certainly I'm sure there are folks who work in other branches of CEA who had nothing to do with this and no say in it.

[ETA: Changed "their decision" to "the decision" upon receiving a reminder that the person in question was (probably) not the person who had actually made the original decision to buy the castle.]

Just wanted to answer this edited question:

Edit to add: If this expense has been made a while back, why not announce it then?

They did mention it on August 2nd:

What is Wytham Abbey?

The project is under development. In time, all being well, it will function as a workshop venue in Oxford.

Although I would like to point out that it was going to be revealed in the New Yorker a few days later.

Last year, the Centre for Effective Altruism bought Wytham Abbey, a palatial estate near Oxford, built in 1480.

It is possible that they were allowed to preview the article and were trying to get ahead of it.

Others please correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding was that the intended use of Wytham Abbey was specifically for non-EA/EA-adjacent programming, ie retreats currently organized by CEA would largely not be moved to WA. I'm not sure if that is still the intent and if I understood it correctly when it was explained to me ~8 months ago, but this seems relevant to the discussion if accurate.

Super hazy on my end, but I think I talked to the particular CEA person who offhandedly said when I asked about the price that they told CEA they wanted a venue for retreats, and then some other actor(s) at CEA handled it, and the first person was surprised (ish?) at the cost originally.

The property looked really cool but I don't know what specific sorts of retreats they plan to host. For comparison, CFAR has a mansion for retreats but AFAIK I didn't get an impression from the outside that they were utilizing it to the extent they could be, so I would probably hold a similar impression with regard to Wytham unless I saw evidence of activity otherwise.

I’ve see many comments about how many days of a year the Abbey can be reasonably used for EA events.

On the days that EA are not hosting events, the venue could also be rented out for conferences for other organizations , so we should take those into account as well.

What I'm wondering is why the benifactor gave the money for the building to EV rather than buying the building themselves and just allow EV to use it for free. This would likely have avoided all the optics issues and I guess would have had some other advantages.