To be fair, you cannot create a hmpor larp without a fancy castle so this is entirely a justified purchase. Stealing from others to make your fantasy castle fits with the harry potter lore, those damn muggles should have read the sequences and turned themselves into wizards.
That’s a really bizarre inference tbh
I got a £16 refund on an item I impulse bought yesterday, does that mean when I spend the same amount on tobacco today (which I will, because I do that every time I start running out) that I’m paying for it with refund money?
They can just be crooks and liars without making up shit they crooked and lied about
~~This just isn't true. The castle was brought in 2021, before FTX made the donation in March 2022.~~
Seems it was bought earlier this year, though explicitly not with FTX money.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Et7oPMu6czhEd8ExW/why-you-re-not-hearing-as-much-from-ea-orgs-as-you-d-like?commentId=uRDZKw24mYe2NP4eq
I was thinking about this after having read some of the justifications regarding the acquisition.
Seems to me that they began spending outside of their means because they had support from a newly minted billionaire backer.
They can retroactively justify the purchase all they want but I find it hard to believe that without FTX behind them they would have felt comfortable making the purchase and this is somewhat borne out by their lack of transparency at the time.
They thought they would have enough coming in that they could handwave these purchases as trivial; what's 15 million compared to billions?
I think this is a much larger problem than they are realising, the first wave of justification focused on distancing, claiming that the crash was unforeseeable and minimising the donations to the cause; the real issue however is the clear cut lack of rational behaviour; the moment they get a whiff of cash they drop 15 million on an abbey in Oxford without even consulting the community at large? Bonkers
It was a straight up impulse buy, no matter how they want to sugarcoat it. They could have spent a few years slowly building a case, consulting the community, making sure their newly minted billionaire golden boy was actually on the level.
Are most of the EA crowd actually based in Oxfordshire? Do they propose to cover the costs of every member who wants to travel to each conference, of the many they say they aim to host? Are those lower earners based outside the UK shit out of luck with regard to using the facilities?
If I was a member of the EA community right now and this was how they were spending money I donated I would have some serious questions. If I couldn't attend the multitude of conferences each year will I even have a good idea of where the rest of my money is going, how the choices are being made? They have already demonstrated a willingness to spend needlessly without even notifying the community.
They have essentially laid the foundations for an old boys club where Mcaskill and his chums can get together and make deals and schmooze business leaders without scrutiny from the wider community.
This I wholeheartedly agree with. There’s no need to suggest that they went to FTX and said “hey I want some money for a mansion”. You put it well with the “old boys club” reference at the end: I even like that there’s an inherent British flavour to clueless academics running into money and losing their minds trying to find ways to spend it, then make it up again when they mismanage it, and landing on this bullshit.
As implied in the linked SSC thread in which they try to justify the purchase: If it feels like a nice cosy place to swirl brandy and discuss the impending AI genocide, that overrides rational considerations like cost and utility.
The whole thing is just so patently elitist. At least it's a nice short commute for Mr Mcaskill...
It's amazing that anybody thinks this can turn into anything other than another Thiel-esque 'think tank'. Do the members at the lower income levels really believe that the interests of the movement will be steered by bright eyed micro-donors when you have guys like Bankman Fried able to donate, in a year, orders of magnitude more than the whole org had raised over the course of the whole decade prior to his involvement?
I'd forgotten how brain-numbing a lot of the jargon can be here. "Framing" seems to mean something different that what I'm expecting.
Regardless, YIKES. Cheers for the link
Ethical altruism doesn’t actually sound like a charity following best
practices to help the most. It sounds like a billionaire members club.
How is any of this actually helping the less fortunate or making a
positive difference in the world?
One thing to criticize the leadership of the EA movement on this purchase, and another to discredit the entire thing. EA should still get some credit for all the global poverty work it's doing. A lot of the EAs I know personally are middle class 20 to 30 somethings who donate half their income to AMF, GiveWell and the like.
I am extremely skeptical of this common claim that EA adherents donate *half* their incomes, especially if it's tax deductable or they live in high CoL coastal cities.
And if they do, then they're total marks.
> . A lot of the EAs I know personally are middle class 20 to 30 somethings who donate half their income to AMF, GiveWell and the like.
More likely is that they say that they do for social points, but in reality are just Silicon Valley libertarians who don't want to pay taxes.
Have you listened to the crypto Critics Corner episode w/ Mario Gibney?
https://youtu.be/uWcORWQ-RXU
He used to donate to charity but after becoming an EA he actually stopped giving as he’s accumulating his crypto money now with an aim to donate in the distant future. He seems more typical of EA to me than your unnamed friends. I would recommended listening to the episode.
As I mentioned above, how do they feel knowing that they are the bottom of the barrel with regard to having a say in where the money goes?
As should be clear from the recent purchase of the Abbey for 14 million which was not vetted at all by members of the community outside of the Upper echelons; spending priorities vary wildly from person to person when your mission statement is simply 'do the most good possible'. The fact is that if you're donating to the CEA youre largely taking it on faith that your money is going to end up on effective causes.
The reason most charities have very clear mission statements is because generally you want to know where your money is going, and that mission statement, ideally, is totally separate from the demands of donors no matter how large. EA muddies this premise intolerably in my opinion. Their mission statement is so vague and diffuse, and their steps to achieve their goals so uncertain, that all it takes is a big enough money man to hijack the whole movement.
> having a say in where the money goes?
My understanding is that the money came from a grant made specifically for this purpose. It was not taken from general EA funding. The money was also appearantly [not related to FTX](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xof7iFB3uh8Kc53bG/why-did-cea-buy-wytham-abbey).
They've also hired quite expensive architects for what must be major refurbishment into a conference centre, and after that there will be ongoing upkeep costs.
So just answering on the purchase doesn't resolve the issue anyway.
so the major EA charity supported by leading lights in EA isn't *real* EA now
funnily enough, lol no
you need a new name for the good thing then, because the thing with this name was always bad
It's the most frustrating thing about EA for me. The concept is trivial - if you give to charity, you should give to ones that are effective in whatever cause you are concerned about.
And then they add these tedious layers on top and turn it into a MIRI grift and give charity and the idea of caring about outcomes a bad name, and serve to make billionaires more comfortable. Terrible creatures.
Just to make it clear, from now I’m just going to ban anybody who does this. We don’t need to hear it every fucking time. Just please mind your business and let people get the fuck on with SneerClub.
This is treated as trolling or sockpuppeting on behalf of EA
I read somewhere (not sure if true) that they dropped like $10M on promoting MacAskill's book, so it can well be both. They certainly seem to understand that you have to spend money to grift money.
Either way, a year old Reddit account that sat idle and then suddenly "activated" like this, a few posts then right to defending a grift, is quite sus.
Be fair. Their 20-something to 30-something friends probably get a lot of benefit from knowing that half their income is going towards helping Harry Potter fanfic study groups live like modern day nobility.
Are you high? They were directly responding to a rhetorical question. And the content of their “answer” was not remotely an attempt to answer that obviously rhetorical question.
What’s the interpretative rule you would have me use: “every statement which follows a question mark must be interpreted as an open and honest answer to the implied question, real or imagined”?
…don’t answer that.
They're also a very recently registered account with very bullshitty looking post history.
There's companies that will do that kind of shit for you, with various automated tools and a person just answering a question after question (which the tool found). Plus there's a lot of people just doing it manually for free. Because that helps 10^55 future people.
Not educated enough on finance to really understand the nuance of what SBF did but I just know this dude belongs in jail
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Ethical altruism doesn’t actually sound like a charity following best practices to help the most. It sounds like a billionaire members club. How is any of this actually helping the less fortunate or making a positive difference in the world?