UPDATE 5th Nov 2019: since this post went up, we have received ~£9,500 in donations and a further ~£4000 in backdated payments from residents. Following the latter, and adjusting costs for last 6 months downward to ~£5,100/month, our runway now extends ~3 months, to the beginning of Feb. Thanks for all the support, this is a great start to our latest fundraiser. We are working on more posts in the series listed below (will link to them in the list as they are completed).
This is a quick post to say that our financial situation is looking pretty dire right now. We were going to wait until “Giving Season” starts in December to start a fresh fundraiser, but now can’t afford to do that. We have several things in the pipeline to bolster our case (charity registration, compiling more outputs, more fundraising posts detailing the case for the hotel, hiring round for the Community & Projects Manager, refining internal systems), but they may not reach fruition in time unfortunately. If you are interested in donating, now is the perfect timing for you to have a large impact on the project! Happy to answer questions in the comments (have anticipated some below).
Relatively small amounts would allow us to keep things going long enough to gain the information needed to determine whether the experiment is/was worthwhile. As it is, if the project fails down to lack of funds now, we feel that we are leaving a lot of Value of Information on the table. Our costs are ~£5,700/month (based on the last 5 months’ spending). Even 1 month of funding will allow us some breathing space to get some of the work done.
To donate, and for more info (past posts making the case for the hotel), see: eahotel.org/fundraiser.
List of proposed posts for the continuation of this series (renewed runway permitting; provisional; linked when complete):
- EA Hotel Fundraiser 6: Concrete outputs after 17 months
- EA Hotel Fundraiser 7: Pitch focusing on case studies with counterfactuals
- EA Hotel Fundraiser 8: Life at the EA Hotel, and testimonials
- EA Hotel Fundraiser 9: Estimating the relative Expected Value of the EA Hotel (Part 2)
Suppose you're the newly appointed director of a large charitable foundation which has allocated its charitable giving in a somewhat random way. If you're able to resist status quo bias, then usually, you will not find yourself keeping the amount allocated for a particular cause at exactly the level it was at originally. For example, if the foundation is currently giving to education charities, and you don't think those charities are very effective, then you'll reduce their funding. If you think those charities are very effective, then you'll increase their funding.
Now consider "having EAs live alone in apartments in expensive cities" as a cause area. Currently, the amount we're spending on this area has been set in a somewhat random way. Therefore, if we're able to resist status quo bias, we should probably either be moving it up or moving it down. We could move it up by creating a charity that pays EAs to live alone, or move it down by encouraging EAs to move to the EA Hotel. (Maybe creating a charity that pays EAs to live alone would be impractical or create perverse incentives or something, this is more of an "in principle" intuition pump sort of an argument.)
Edit: With regard to the professionalism thing, my personal feelings on this are something like the last paragraph in this comment -- I think it'd be good for some of us to be more professional in certain respects (e.g. I'm supportive of EAs working to gain institutional legitimacy for EA cause areas), but the Hotel culture I observed feels mostly acceptable to me. Probably some mixture of not seeing much interpersonal drama while I was there, and expecting the Hotel residents will continue to be fairly young people who don't occupy positions of power (grad student housing comes to mind). FWIW, my personal experience is that the value of professionalism comes up more often in Blackpool EA conversations than Bay Area EA conversations. With the Bay Area, you may very well be paying more rent for a less professional culture. Just my anecdotal impressions.