Announcement on the future of Wytham Abbey

My understanding (based on talking to people involved in Wytham and knowing the economics of renting and buying large venues in a lot of detail) is that the sale of Wytham (edit: as done here, where the venue will either be sold at a very large discount or lie empty for a long period of time) does not actually make any economic sense for EV in terms of its mission to do as much good as possible. It is plausible that the initial purchase was a mistake, and that it makes sense to set plans in motion to sell the venue, but my understanding is that it will likely take many years for EV to sell during which the venue will be basically completely empty, or the venue will have to be sold at a pretty huge loss. This means at this point, it's likely worth it to keep it running. 

Also based on talking to some of the people close to these decisions, and trying to puzzle together how this decision was made, it seems very likely to me that the reason why Wytham is being sold is not based in a cost-effectiveness analysis, but the result of a PR-management strategy which seems antithetical to the principles of Effective Altruism to me. 

EV (and Open Phil) are supposed to use its assets and funds to help the most people and cause the most good for the world, not to protect their own reputation. Making donations and major financial decisions primarily driven by reputation-concerns is the primary pathology of most of the world's charity landscape, where vanity projects and complicated signaling games dominate where donations go, and going down this path seems to me a very worrying development for the future of EA.

My sense is that with this move, EV and Open Philanthropy have opened up a huge number of organizations within EA to attacks by any sufficiently large online mob, despite potentially producing enormous value, given that they have demonstrated they are willing to force the leadership of the EA community to give up projects with little concern for their cost-effectiveness if they do not align with the signaling aims of Open Phil and EV.

It is possible that maybe someone made a cost-effectiveness analysis here that turned out negative, and if so I would love to see it since it has large relevance to my work. But I would be extremely surprised that a positive cost-effectiveness analysis here would cause EV to reverse the sale of the property, and in conversations on this topic with people involved it seemed that curiosity and appetite for understanding the actual cost-effectiveness of this project was very low compared to the PR-implications of it. 

(To be clear, I am not saying that we should fully blind ourselves to considerations of reputation and public relations. However, I think this kind of reputational optimization is perilous and if is one of the domains where naive consequentialist-type reasoning tends to most often go awry. 

I think our reputational strategy should primarily be oriented around acting with integrity and honesty. And on that dimension the central tenet of how the EA community has presented itself is that we make decisions on the basis of what we think will help the most people, and are very much not making decisions on the basis of what will look good to other people, or will put us personally in the most powerful positions. 

Imagine GiveWell releasing their recommended charities saying "well, there was one charity that easily defeated AMF in terms of the cost-effectiveness of its program activities, but it was dealing with sanitization issues which are really gross that nobody wants to donate to and we expected that if we recommended it this would overall reduce the donations going through GiveWell. We thought this effect was big enough to cause us to decide to not recommend this charity as our top charity". I think this would be crazy and clearly violate the principles that GiveWell set out according to which it compiles its recommendations. While weaker, I think something similar is going on in how this decision seems to have been made) 

Is there going to be a post-mortem including an explanation for the decision to sell?

OP gave some reasoning for their views on their recent blog post:

Another place where I have changed my mind over time is the grant we gave for the purchase of Wytham Abbey, an event space in Oxford.

We initially agreed to help fund that purchase as part of our effort to support the growth of the community working to reduce global catastrophic risks (GCRs). The original idea presented to us was that the space could serve as a hub for workshops, retreats, and conferences, to cut down on the financial and logistical costs of hosting large events at private facilities. This was pitched to us at a time when FTX was making huge commitments to the GCR community, which made resources appear more abundant and lowered our own bar. Since its purchase, the space has gotten meaningful use for community events and gatherings. But with the collapse of FTX, our bar for this kind of work rose, and the original grant would no longer have risen to the level where we would want to provide funding.

Because this was a large asset, we agreed with Effective Ventures ahead of time that we would ask them to sell the Abbey if the event space, all things considered, turned out not to be sufficiently cost-effective. We recently made that request; funds from the sale will be distributed to other valuable projects they run.

While this grant retroactively came in below our new bar, I don’t think that alone is a big problem. If you didn’t make some grants that look less attractive when the expected funding drops by half, you weren’t spending aggressively enough before.

But I still think I personally made a mistake in not objecting to this grant back when the initial decision was made and I was co-CEO. My assessment then was that this wasn’t a major risk to Open Philanthropy institutionally, so it wasn’t my place to try to stop it. I missed how something that could be parodied as an “effective altruist castle” would become a symbol of EA hypocrisy and self-servingness, causing reputational harm to many people and organizations who had nothing to do with the decision or the building.

This is a tough balance to strike because I think it’s easy for organizations to be paralyzed by concerns over reputational risk, rendering them unable to make nearly any decisions. And I think a core part of our hits-based giving philosophy is being able to make major bets that can fail outright, even in embarrassing ways. I want to maintain that openness to risk when the upside justifies it. But this example has made me want to raise our bar for things that could end up looking profligate or irresponsible to the detriment of broader communities we’re associated with.

FWIW ... in my opinion, retaining the property might have been a more beneficial decision. 

Also, I think some people working in the space should not make an update against plans like "have a permanent venue", but plausibly should make some updates about the "major donors". My guess this almost certainly means Open Philanthropy, and also likely they had most of the actual power in this decision. 

Before delving further, it's important to outline some potential conflicts of interest and biases:
- I did co-organize or participated at multiple events at Wytham. For example, in 2023, ACS organized a private research retreat aimed at increasing the surface area between Active Inference and AI Alignment communities. The event succeeded to attracts some of the best people from both sides and was pretty valuable for the direction of alignment research I do care about, and the Oxford location was very useful for that. I regret running events like that in future will be more difficult.
- I have friends in all orgs or sides involved - Wytham project, Open Phil, EV, EAs who disapproved the purchase,...
- I lead an org funded by Open Philanthropy 
- I also lead an org which was fiscally sponsoring a different project of venue purchase, which was funded by FTX regrant (won't comment on that for legal reasons)

Also, without more details published, my current opinion is personal speculation, partially based on my reading of the vibes. 

My impression-from-a-distance is part of the decision is driven by a factor which I think should not be given undue weight, and a factor where I likely disagree

Factor where I possibly disagree is aesthetics. As far as I can tell, the current preferred  EA aesthetics is something more similar to how recent EAG Bay looked like. At EAG Bay, my impression of the vibes of venue was... quite dystopian - the main space is a giant hall with unpleasant artificial lights, no natural light, no colours, endless rows of identical black tables utilized by people having endless rows of 1:1s. In some vague aesthetic space, nearby vibes vectors are faceless bureaucracies, borgs and the scifi portrayals of heart-less technocratic baddies. Also something about naive utilitarianism and army.

Wytham seemed to stand in stark contrast to this aesthetics: the building was old and full of quirks. The vibes were more like an old Oxford college. 

Factor which I would guess was part of the decision and I suspect had weight was PR concerns. Wytham definitely got some negative media coverage both in traditional media, social media, and on this forum. 

What I dislike about this, these concerns often seemed to be mostly on the Simulacra levels 3 and 4, detached from the reality of running events in Oxford, or actual concern about costs. (Why I do think so? Because of approximately zero amount of negative PR, forum criticisms etc. anyone and anything in the ecosystem is getting for renting properties, even if they are more expensive per day or per person.)

To be clear 
- I don't think these were the only or main(?) factors. 
- * I would expect somewhere also exists some spreadsheet with some estimates of "value" of events at Wytham. If this is the case, I probably also disagree about some of the generative opinions about what's valuable.

Still, given the amount of speculative criticism the purchase of Wytham generated on the forum, it seems good for transparency to also express critical view about the sale. 

I was the main person at Open Philanthropy working on our recent funding evaluation of Wytham Abbey. I’d like to share some key points on why I recommended that we cease future funding for the Wytham project and that the Abbey be sold. I can’t speak for Effective Ventures, which made the final decision to sell the property, or other people at Open Phil who, as per our standard process, approved my recommendation; but it’s probably fair to say that my work was among the most important inputs into the decisions that led to the outcome announced here.

Contrary to speculation in another comment, my recommendation was primarily driven by a cost-effectiveness analysis. In doing so, I considered the following benefits Wytham was providing:

1.  Cost savings for non-counterfactual events
   1. Wytham provides a “free” venue to events that would otherwise have had to pay for some other venue (but would have happened, just elsewhere)
2. Counterfactual events
   1. The availability of Wytham causes some events that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, e.g., because the event organizers couldn’t have gotten funding for a venue in time or didn’t have the staff capacity for things like venue scoping, organizing food, and some other ops/logistics things that Wytham takes care of. There’s probably also some effect of increasing the salience that running retreat-like events is something one can relatively easily do thanks to Wytham.
3. Improving the quality/impact of events
   1. You could imagine that due to factors like its more “secluded” location, closeness to nature, the layout and decoration of rooms, etc., Wytham enables better or deeper conversations than would have happened elsewhere; and in fact several people reported that Wytham seemed like a good venue for events to them in terms of its vibe. In addition, probably some non-counterfactual events would otherwise have happened as a shorter version, or not as residential events where participants stay overnight, thus allowing for less conversation/bonding time; and some events would plausibly have benefitted in various ways from the accumulated event hosting experience of the Wytham team. 

The bottom line was that historically, i.e. based on looking at past Wytham events, Wytham’s operating expenses (for now ignoring the opportunity cost of capital being bound up in the property) clearly exceeded Open Phil’s willingness to pay for these benefits given our current funding bar. (Under our pre-Nov 2022 funding bar, which was the one we were using at the time of the original grant to buy and operate Wytham Abbey, it would have comfortably been the other way around.) 

I then considered how likely this seemed to change in the future. While there were several reasons to expect both falling costs and increasing benefits, I didn’t end up being sufficiently optimistic, though that seemed like a much closer call. PR-related questions played a role at this stage, but mainly via the relatively specific channel of making the venue less attractive for some organizations that may have wanted to host future events there if not for worries that they’d then be associated with the venue (though in some of these cases, the desire to avoid being associated with the EA community more generally was more important for that than the implications of Wytham-specific media coverage). These considerations were not decisive on their own. Depending on how you individuate the reasons considered in my analysis, I’d say that PR considerations were among the top 10, but not among the top 3 most important considerations, ranking behind e.g. Wytham’s track record, some more mundane fundamentals of the venue (e.g., the number of bedrooms and bathrooms) constraining the kind of events and audiences Wytham seemed like a good fit for, and strategic background assumptions about the value of different kinds of events.
 

The above analysis established that continuing to fund Wytham’s operating expenses wouldn’t have met our funding bar. However, this doesn’t conclusively answer the question whether, to maximize impartial impact, we should recommend that EV sells the property (e.g., what if they could find other funding for some or all of Wytham’s operating cost?). That also depends on the opportunity cost of capital being bound up in Wytham – capital that could otherwise be used for other high-impact projects or invested into other assets to maximize its financial return (with those returns being directed to high-impact projects in the future). I spent more time looking into this question, and again PR considerations were relatively minor; my analysis was primarily based on theoretical arguments on the financial returns of different asset classes (e.g., real estate vs. stocks), data on the price appreciation of real estate in various relevant reference classes, estimates of foregone rental income while EV is holding the property, the appropriate amount of risk aversion for financial returns, the willingness to pay vs. cost estimates from the previous analysis, and whether the conclusion could plausibly change depending on different assumptions on how much the existing portfolio of capital intended for global catastrophic risk reduction might be underinvested in Wytham-like assets. On net, it seemed to me that EV holding on to Wytham would amount to a sufficiently large cost that hypothetical third-party funders or other realistic changes would be unable to compensate, such that from an impartial perspective it seemed better to recommend that EV sells the property.

A commenter asked what would have happened if my cost-effectiveness analysis had come back more positive. There are two ways to understand this question. One is: How would it have affected my recommendation if my impression of Wytham’s impact potential (and/or potential cost savings) had been stronger? It’s hard to make confident claims about such counterfactuals, but I suspect that I would have spent more time considering the implications of the broader PR picture, and what that might mean for Wytham’s future impact and any potential externalities on other projects (e.g., effects on the perception of Effective Ventures or EA more broadly), since that seems like a relatively ‘high-variance’ consideration that could potentially flip an initially positive-seeming picture. My guess is that I would’ve concluded that these broader PR issues were on net a moderately strong reason against funding Wytham, though the issue is sufficiently complex that my error bars are fairly wide here. I would then have considered this together with all other relevant considerations, including the amount by which (in this hypothetical) Wytham seemed above our funding bar based on quantitative estimates that ignore these broader PR ramifications; depending on my impression of the strength of the various considerations at play, I might or might not have recommended to renew our funding for Wytham. To be clear, this would have been an entirely normal process: For reasons that will be very familiar to many readers (see, e.g., discussions here and here, though note I don’t necessarily agree with every point), our funding recommendations are typically based on a holistic analysis of several quantitative and qualitative inputs, rather than being mechanistically determined by the output of a single-number quantitative cost-effectiveness model; and when using the term “cost-effectiveness analysis” in this comment, I was referring to just such a holistic analysis. For this reason, I would summarize this scenario as “if some aspects considered in the cost-effectiveness analysis had suggested a higher expected impact for Wytham, I would have spent more time on the analysis, which may or may not have changed my ultimate recommendation” – not as “if the cost-effectiveness analysis had come back more positive, I might still have recommended to not fund Wytham based on some highly unusual and qualitatively different additional step”.

The second way to understand the question is: If I had recommended to fund Wytham, would the final Open Phil decision-makers have agreed? The short answer is that I don’t know, and can’t speak for other people. On one hand, the base rate of grant recommendations not being approved is low. On the other hand, this was clearly an unusual case, given that our previous funding for Wytham had been an outlier regarding the amount of externalities on other projects. I would therefore have expected decision-makers such as Open Phil leadership or possibly Cari and Dustin (who, as described in our annual review blog post, have recently been more engaged with our work) to review a hypothetical recommendation to renew our funding for Wytham’s operations in more depth than usual, and would have anticipated that the risk of non-approval was higher than baseline. That expectation likely also had some effects on how I went about my evaluation, e.g., how much time I was willing to spend to proactively search for long-shot attempts to change the bottom line such as by proposing changes to the project, thinking about potential different uses of the property, etc., (though these would generally be relatively uncommon uses of time for a grant investigator since we can typically achieve a higher grant volume – and thereby have more impact – by evaluating more shovel-ready proposals rather than by trying to bolster projects that at first blush don’t meet our bar).

So I don’t want to claim that PR or adjacent considerations had zero influence here: Specific ways in which they might limit Wytham’s future impact were among the top 10 (though not top 3) most important considerations behind my recommendation not to renew funding; and while I don’t have any reason to believe that they would have been decisive in all or even most possible worlds, there are some counterfactual worlds in which broader PR considerations regarding e.g. the impact on other projects would have tipped the scales against renewing our funding. But I want to be very clear that, from my perspective, we fundamentally conducted a standard grant investigation that aimed to holistically weigh an opportunity's expected impact against its cost, and concluded that it did not meet our bar.
 

How to best handle the property until it’s sold was outside the scope of my investigation, so I don’t think it’d be appropriate for me to comment on it. We haven’t advised EV what to do with Wytham Abbey until it’s sold, nor have we recommended a specific date by which to conclude the sale (though I gave some input on how they might want to trade off timing and price).

I don’t think I’ll have the bandwidth to engage in further discussion, and I’m sorry that this comment likely won’t answer all the questions people might have. But it seemed better to provide some high-level information on the work I did than to let readers reach an inaccurate understanding of what happened.

As a closing note, my personal view is that this has basically been a tragic story: We funded a project, the project team overall did a good job running it from an operational perspective (based on the impression I got during my evaluation), and then events beyond the control of anyone involved meant they were no longer above our funding bar.

That's really sad to hear! Given the number of events hosted there and the renting costs of alternative venues, it seemed like a solid investment (while also being much more picturesque, of course). So, I'm also hoping for a post-mortem with more details. 

Are financial statements going to be released? In particular, how much was spent on estate agent fees, maintaince and bills? And the value of the events hosted. Is the reason for the change that EA has less money or that there was an error in the initial reasoning for buying it?

Wytham Abbey has been such a gem for events, and the thought of it closing is disheartening. I'm curious to know more about the decision-making process behind this, especially considering its popularity and the challenges of finding comparable venues. Hopefully, there will be some insights shared soon.

This case is harder, but I'll note that in general I don't read EV explanations of spending less than $100mn. If there wasn't all the controversy, I doubt I'd care and probably I don't want EV feeling the need to explain every $20mn expenditure. Though this case may be different, hard to think about.

I have made an edit to this post, saying that since this announcement, we have decided that we will use some of the proceeds on Effective Venture's general costs. I consider EV to be a high-impact charity.