Thoughts on Wytham Abbey

Article image by Dave Price, released under CC-SA-BY 2.0

by Vesa Hautala.

In the aftermath of the FTX scandal, the EA community has been hit with new controversy. Effective Ventures (the legal entity that hosts CEA, 80,000 hours, Giving What We Can, and other projects) bought Wytham Abbey, a manor in Oxfordshire worth £15 million.

When information about the purchase spread, various levels of concern and outrage followed along with the inevitable ”EA bought a castle” memes (some of which were actually quite funny). Critics thought buying Wytham Abbey was obviously bad and self-serving use of money. The community's internal response has been more mixed. Some are suspicious while others find the reported thought process behind the purchase reasonable. There are also more meta-level critiques of the process.

Facts about the situation

Before going deeper into the criticism it is helpful to lay out facts about the purchase as told by Owen Cotton-Barratt who played a key role in the project and Claire Zabel who was the grant investigator for the grant OpenPhil gave to fund the purchase. If you’re interested in the situation and haven’t yet read both of these responses, I highly encourage you to do so.

Wytham Abbey was bought to be used as a conference centre, especially for longtermist community building purposes. Owen Cotton-Barratt owned early development of the idea and fundraised for it. He brought the project to the EVF board to ask EVF for fiscal sponsorship, meaning EVF would receive the funding, and then buy the property and employ staff to work on the project with the earmarked money

Why get a conference centre? Owen Cotton-Barratt explained that he thinks specialist conference centres have value for intellectual progress. Calculations about costings also made it look between moderately to mildly money-saving compared to renting venues for events that would happen anyway, though this was dependent on certain assumptions that could not be verified beforehand. The main case for the project was not cost saving but the possiblity of generating many more valuable workshops than would otherwise take place. Whytham Abbey in particular was chosen because it is located near Oxford, is large enough, and needed much less work than other alternatives before it was usable.

It’s worth noting that real estate can be sold later and is likely to retain its value, so the real cost is the opportunity cost (what else the money could have been used for) and operating costs. OpenPhil estimated the actual costs to be in the low millions because of this.

Concerns raised

The facts above answer some of the concerns that were initially raised, but not all of them. One of the main worries seems to be, as a forum commenter put it, ”that it's extremely easy for people to trick themselves into believing that spending money on their own comfort/lifestyle/accommodations is net-good-despite-looking-bad (for productivity reasons or whatever). This generalizes to the community level.” Some outside the movement were very quick to claim Wytham Abbey as evidence that EA is a scam. It seems some EAs were also dismayed and angry because they interpreted the purchase as self-serving opulence justified by appealing to impact.

Christians should find it easy to agree that this is a very real danger. The Bible warns against the desire to get rich (“those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction” 1 Tim. 6:9 ESV) and against ostentatious displays of wealth (1 Tim. 2:9). It is easy to see that conspicuous consumption goes against Christian ethics and that there are dangers involved in courting luxury and prestige even when it is done from good motives. At a general level, the advice to be vigilant against justifying self-benefitting actions by appeals to impact is very important. 

In the case of Wytham Abbey, though, the question is whether it in fact was a useful purchase or not. This is much more an empirical question where people may reasonably disagree, so in my opinion they should be charitable before making accusatory interpretations. It is not a bad thing to raise concerns, but this is different from jumping to conclusions like denouncing EA as corrupt. Unless there’s strong evidence, I believe making conclusions like this goes against Christian charity.

Another, related worry seems to be whether EA is drifting away from its roots. In addition to pursuing interventions strongly backed by experimental data, EA is doing more and more things like movement building and trying to influence the future of humanity (including not just longtermism but also more immediate x-risk mitigation). The longtermism–neartermism split is part of this, but I think there’s a more general question about how uncertain projects EA should pursue.

There are also concerns about optics. Many believe that regardless of whether the purchase was financially justified, it simply looks so bad that its net impact is negative. The optics concern also has a financial side, because it could decrease the likelihood of big donors engaging with EA.

It is true Wytham Abbey has provided critics of EA with ammo and brought EA some negative publicity. However, I think the bad optics was greatly exacerbated by the FTX scandal, so a PR problem of this magnitude would have been harder to predict beforehand. Also, as several people have commented, the effects of optics are hard to estimate and not always clear. Perhaps some people will be more attracted to the movement if they see EAs doing what they think is best regardless of how it looks from the outside? In my opinion, these considerations make it harder to support the conclusion that buying Wytham Abbey was obviously a bad move at the time.

The Wytham Abbey case highlights pre-existing fault lines within the community and shows that some people in EA have concerns about how EA organisations use money. It also demonstrates how sensitive to optics EA has become.

I admit I’m personally somewhat uncomfortable with the purchase and with the fact that I’m not more uncomfortable with it. Still, I’m not sure if there is an obvious Christian take on the issue. Asceticism definitely has its place, but sometimes organisations really do need to make expensive purchases. Perhaps the take-away is that we need to accept both that sometimes such decisions are justified and that when making such decisions, individuals and organisations should hold themselves to a high standard and be very mindful of the common human tendency to justify self-serving decisions.