It's not necessarily a loss of a million pounds if many of the events that happened there would have spent money to organise events elsewhere (renting event spaces and accommodation for event attendees can get quite pricey) and would have spent additional time on organising the events, finding venues, setting them up etc (compared to having them at Wytham).
For comparison, EA Global events cost in the ballpark of a million pounds per event.
I feel that often saying X is overrated/underrated is a lazy way for people (including me sometimes) to increase/decrease X's status without making the effort to state concretely their position on X (which opens them up to more criticism and might require introspection and more careful reasoning rather than purely evaluating vibes)
I'm not sure what would be the best thing since I don't remember there being a particular post about this. However, he talks about it in his book review for Going Infinite and I also like his post on Altruism is Incomplete. Lots of people I know find his writing confusing though and it's not like he's rigorously arguing for something. When I agree with Zvi, it's usually because I have had that belief in the back of my mind for a while and him pointing it out makes it more salient, rather than because I got convinced by a particular argument he was making.
This post got some flak and I am not sure if it actually led to more EAs seriously considering engaging with the Sequences. However, I stand by the recommendation even more strongly now. If I were in a position to give reading recommendations to smart young people who wanted to do big, impactful things, I would recommend the Sequences (or HPMOR) over any of the EA writing.
Strong upvoted and couldn't decide whether to disagreevote or not. I agree with the points you list under meta-uncertainty and your point on naively using calibration as a proxy for forecasting ability + thinking you can bet on the end of the world by borrowing money. I disagree with your thoughts on ethics (I'm sympathetic to Zvi's writing on EAs confusing the map for the territory).
Am also skeptical about the intellectual benefits directly from gender diversity.
However, I think one pretty plausible way it could happen is because women tend to specialise in different fields from men (more women in life sciences, biology, and psychology as opposed to computer science) and maybe the benefits result from the diversity of expertise in different fields. Eg: PIBBS seems to have greater diversity in their fellows than other programmes and it seems like a good idea for it to exist.
Some folks explicitly prefer a world in which a lower proportion of money spent on EA-ish projects was from Open Philanthropy even if overall donations were the same. That seems like a sensible preference.
I think another example of the jerking people around thing could be the vibes from summer 2021 to summer 2022 that if you weren't exceptionally technically competent and had the skills to work on object-level stuff, you should do full-time community building like helping run university EA groups. And then that idea lost steam this year.
It's not necessarily a loss of a million pounds if many of the events that happened there would have spent money to organise events elsewhere (renting event spaces and accommodation for event attendees can get quite pricey) and would have spent additional time on organising the events, finding venues, setting them up etc (compared to having them at Wytham).
For comparison, EA Global events cost in the ballpark of a million pounds per event.
I feel that often saying X is overrated/underrated is a lazy way for people (including me sometimes) to increase/decrease X's status without making the effort to state concretely their position on X (which opens them up to more criticism and might require introspection and more careful reasoning rather than purely evaluating vibes)
Do you think it ended up having a net positive impact so far?
I'm not sure what would be the best thing since I don't remember there being a particular post about this. However, he talks about it in his book review for Going Infinite and I also like his post on Altruism is Incomplete. Lots of people I know find his writing confusing though and it's not like he's rigorously arguing for something. When I agree with Zvi, it's usually because I have had that belief in the back of my mind for a while and him pointing it out makes it more salient, rather than because I got convinced by a particular argument he was making.
This post got some flak and I am not sure if it actually led to more EAs seriously considering engaging with the Sequences. However, I stand by the recommendation even more strongly now. If I were in a position to give reading recommendations to smart young people who wanted to do big, impactful things, I would recommend the Sequences (or HPMOR) over any of the EA writing.
Strong upvoted and couldn't decide whether to disagreevote or not. I agree with the points you list under meta-uncertainty and your point on naively using calibration as a proxy for forecasting ability + thinking you can bet on the end of the world by borrowing money. I disagree with your thoughts on ethics (I'm sympathetic to Zvi's writing on EAs confusing the map for the territory).
Am also skeptical about the intellectual benefits directly from gender diversity.
However, I think one pretty plausible way it could happen is because women tend to specialise in different fields from men (more women in life sciences, biology, and psychology as opposed to computer science) and maybe the benefits result from the diversity of expertise in different fields. Eg: PIBBS seems to have greater diversity in their fellows than other programmes and it seems like a good idea for it to exist.
Some folks explicitly prefer a world in which a lower proportion of money spent on EA-ish projects was from Open Philanthropy even if overall donations were the same. That seems like a sensible preference.
Have your thoughts on earning to give vs direct work changed (including the specific numbers) since the linked post from summer 2022?
I think another example of the jerking people around thing could be the vibes from summer 2021 to summer 2022 that if you weren't exceptionally technically competent and had the skills to work on object-level stuff, you should do full-time community building like helping run university EA groups. And then that idea lost steam this year.