I visited the EA Hotel last year for a few days and enjoyed my stay and think the project is good on net and would like to see it funded. But I think it could be better, namely I disagree about the vetting policy being so open if it aims to be an incubator:
The fact that it is possible to randomly get some good outcomes despite low vetting standards does not make a cost-effective way to get good outcomes. The Hotel being hits-based approach does not preclude a better vetting policy.
IMO, the acceptance policy should be: by default all rooms cost and then people working on impact projects or prep for future impact work can apply to have a room for free. If they meet the minimum standard I take them. If there are more applications that meet the minimum standard than rooms, I prioritise them. I would have no fixed amount of rooms for paying or non-paying guests. My minimum standard would vary according to the financial situation and with reflections when enough data builds up.
You said, “strong vetting is nice, but there’s no replacement for simply trying many things and seeing what works”—these are not mutually exclusive. When you do strong vetting, you typically have criteria (priors) that you update as well as updating the process as you learn what is working.
About the plans to vet post-hoc: I predict bias towards keeping people because of sunken costs on both sides.
Projects are not independent, interesting projects happening there will attract even more interesting projects (in particular complementary ones). They could be put on the website under Current Residents creating positive feedback loops. Especially since people who are planning to drop things and move to Blackpool are going to want to have some confidence in where they’re going.
I agree that tapping into the thought diversity of the larger community is good, I just think that you need some vetting—what I would like to see is a plan for a vetting process which both gets this diversity but also maximises quality. I don’t think you need a total open doors policy to get thought diversity, although acknowledge the trade off.
The comparison to https://www.cityyear.org/boston is interesting. If the goal is to create something similar to that then I take back all my points about vetting. I just think that is a quite a different goal to the one of being an incubator for high impact projects. Why do I think this. Because I think the set of people who need lots of support to “stay on track” and the set of people whose incubated projects are going to make very high positive impact in the world overlap rarely. The project aims to target these rare people, but I think this particular rare group are exceptional by definition and have already learnt how to bootstrap by themselves.
However, maybe there are people in the tails of a slightly different but similar distribution of people who will not make very high impact things but might do medium impact things, who do not yet know how to bootstrap. This population seems hard to model in my head somehow, at least the boundaries are fuzzy. The EA Hotel’s approach makes more sense to me if this is the goal. If I were them I might test the hypothesis of a very low bar, though I would still have the bar be a little bit higher than it is currently, if only for the feedback loops I talked about.
Basically I think as an incubator the model doesn’t work without increasing the bar, as a refuge it works and could be very valuable but then it shouldn’t be portrayed as an incubator. If it aims to be both, then it is really hard to model this medium potential impact target audience and I think that some work should be done to identify who is and who is not in it—and ultimately there should still be some raising of the bar. I also think the Hotel is valuable for visitors and for random events like retreats and unconferences. All round, a truly uniquely good idea.
An irrelevant aside: I don’t like the pyramid. In particular, the distinction drawn between someone who self-identifies strongly or weakly as EA seems irrelevant. Do you believe there is any correlation of interest with respect to getting a project funded? When I look at the most interesting things, some are done by people who self-identify strongly and others are done by people who keep their identity small.
The fact that it is possible to randomly get some good outcomes despite low vetting standards does not make a cost-effective way to get good outcomes. The Hotel being hits-based approach does not preclude a better vetting policy.
That’s true, but I think it actually IS a cost-effective way to get good outcomes. There are already grant giving organizations that fill the next step in the pyramid with stronger vetting based on status, credentials, and results. I think organizations with stronger vetting need to exist as well, but a community that has organizations with very strong feedback loops (and weak vetting upfront) as well as organizations later in the pipeline with only strong vetting, will get more hits than one that only has organizations with very strong pre-vetting procedures.
About the plans to vet post-hoc: I predict bias towards keeping people because of sunken costs on both sides.
I agree this is a risk, but don’t agree it’s inevitable, especially if you’re looking for it.
I agree that tapping into the thought diversity of the larger community is good, I just think that you need some vetting—what I would like to see is a plan for a vetting process which both gets this diversity but also maximises quality. I don’t think you need a total open doors policy to get thought diversity, although acknowledge the trade off.
I don’t think this is the actual policy of the hotel, nor what I was advocating. It only makes sense when you have less people then slots available (which has been the case much of the time). I do think that a policy of “accept anyone if there’s space, vet a bit more if it’s competitive,” makes sense for something looking to fill the niche of the EA hotel.
The vetting also looks very different for an organization at that stage in the pyramid, more “have they actually thought through the idea/project?” than “do they have previous accomplishments that they makes me think they could pull the project off?” or “do I agree it’s a high value project?”.
I just think that is a quite a different goal to the one of being an incubator for high impact projects.
This is a good point. I do think there’s value in incubating both people and projects. People may find out they’re not cut out to run projects, or good people may find out their project isn’t viable, but either way they’ve gained valuable skills that allow them to get across the chasm and move up the pyramid.
don’t like the pyramid. In particular, the distinction drawn between someone who self-identifies strongly or weakly as EA seems irrelevant
I agree that could have been worded better. The point is if you’re “sort of into EA” there are ways to get you really into EA—meetup groups, conferences, etc. Once there, you might start thinking of creating a project that does as much good as possible… at which point you hit the chasm. That is, it’s trying to show that there are parts of the pipeline that exist before the Chasm.
I think you are doing the right thing here, and if anything I would say you could go further in the direction you are already going.
I observe that less vetting means fewer decisions and less costs for the Hotel. Further, if demand for slots is low enough that no vetting is required, this effectively makes the project zero-risk to the Hotel. A good member of the community is still helpful to all the other members of the community, even if their project goes nowhere.
Following on that point, I support coming down hard on the side of optimizing for people over projects. I can think of several reasons, but the simplest is that this was the explicit position for Xerox PARC, which birthed personal computing and is therefore a candidate for the highest-impact project of all time. A lot of relevant detail is in Alan Kay’s The Power of the Context, and a fuller history in The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop.
Further, a person’s impact is probably spread over many projects so investing in them is usually a gain, whereas a failed project is a sunk cost. Lastly, the people optimization method will help with another way in which EA is constrained: unambiguous signals about how and where to apply the absurd surplus of talent available. I expect this last to work both ways, so people who have spent time at the Hotel will also have a better sense of where they can contribute next.
I observe that less vetting means fewer decisions and less costs for the Hotel. Further, if demand for slots is low enough that no vetting is required, this effectively makes the project zero-risk to the Hotel.
This seems to assume the marginal cost to the hotel of taking on a guest is negligible. That does seem plausible to me, but it’s worth highlighting explicitly.
This is close to what I was assuming, but you are right I should have been explicit.
My actual assumption is that the marginal difference in cost between taking on one or another guest is negligible. Based on this I make the claim that projects which are not evaluated by the Hotel are zero risk (to the Hotel).
I expect we should always prefer the case where we did not evaluate the project at all to the case where we evaluated it and were wrong. I don’t see any reason to expect that the cost of evaluating experimental projects will have a high enough success rate to be a net benefit, even before we consider the impact of taking time and money away from the focus on supporting people.
I would have no fixed amount of rooms for paying or non-paying guests.
I think having at least some rooms reserved for each is actually pretty important. If there aren’t any non-paying guests working on projects then you lose out on the networking/synergy/culture of productivity, which is the main reason the hotel is interesting in the first place. Not having rooms for short-term paying guests also seems like a failure mode, for cultural reasons: the hotel’s status as a “destination” raises its own visibility and attracts more projects in the future, but I think even more importantly it serves as a symbol of the community. Taking a train out to the countryside to stay in a hotel where a bunch of EAs are incubating their projects is the sort of emotionally resonant experience that strengthens people’s bond with the movement, and is also the sort of thing that is interesting to talk about and will organically raise the visibility of effective altruism as a whole.
You need a critical mass of people working on projects to develop culture, and enough short-term visitors to disseminate that cultural product. Too much skew in either direction makes the whole thing less impactful.
We have dorms that are purely dedicated to short term paying guests. This allows us to honestly tell people that they’re always welcome. I think that’s great.
Actually I agree this is really good, I hadn’t thought enough about it before. Not sure I agree that reserving rooms for non-paying impact projects/people is good though. I think this should vary with demand of good projects.
For me, the fact that my post is currently here means something: there are people who are working on it. I want to encourage them into working on it, so I need to get a leg up on them.
My own, lesswrongish, one that I’d have a problem with. My first reaction is “of course it helps, but...”, which isn’t enough to make this post. Just because it didn’t fit my goals and my motivation is insufficient, I need to change that.
(Note: I’m not saying you should take these posts seriously or otherwise deal with them, nor am I saying you should. I’m saying “you may not like my post, but I would prefer that you take the post seriously” because the only reason I’d like to do that is so that I don’t need to.)
I find this bit much more distracting than the previous two, which strikes me as rather good. The worst part is the third part, which gives people a way of seeing the “hey, what’s going on?” and the lack of obvious structure.
I visited the EA Hotel last year for a few days and enjoyed my stay and think the project is good on net and would like to see it funded. But I think it could be better, namely I disagree about the vetting policy being so open if it aims to be an incubator:
The fact that it is possible to randomly get some good outcomes despite low vetting standards does not make a cost-effective way to get good outcomes. The Hotel being hits-based approach does not preclude a better vetting policy.
IMO, the acceptance policy should be: by default all rooms cost and then people working on impact projects or prep for future impact work can apply to have a room for free. If they meet the minimum standard I take them. If there are more applications that meet the minimum standard than rooms, I prioritise them. I would have no fixed amount of rooms for paying or non-paying guests. My minimum standard would vary according to the financial situation and with reflections when enough data builds up.
You said, “strong vetting is nice, but there’s no replacement for simply trying many things and seeing what works”—these are not mutually exclusive. When you do strong vetting, you typically have criteria (priors) that you update as well as updating the process as you learn what is working.
About the plans to vet post-hoc: I predict bias towards keeping people because of sunken costs on both sides.
Projects are not independent, interesting projects happening there will attract even more interesting projects (in particular complementary ones). They could be put on the website under Current Residents creating positive feedback loops. Especially since people who are planning to drop things and move to Blackpool are going to want to have some confidence in where they’re going.
I agree that tapping into the thought diversity of the larger community is good, I just think that you need some vetting—what I would like to see is a plan for a vetting process which both gets this diversity but also maximises quality. I don’t think you need a total open doors policy to get thought diversity, although acknowledge the trade off.
The comparison to https://www.cityyear.org/boston is interesting. If the goal is to create something similar to that then I take back all my points about vetting. I just think that is a quite a different goal to the one of being an incubator for high impact projects. Why do I think this. Because I think the set of people who need lots of support to “stay on track” and the set of people whose incubated projects are going to make very high positive impact in the world overlap rarely. The project aims to target these rare people, but I think this particular rare group are exceptional by definition and have already learnt how to bootstrap by themselves.
However, maybe there are people in the tails of a slightly different but similar distribution of people who will not make very high impact things but might do medium impact things, who do not yet know how to bootstrap. This population seems hard to model in my head somehow, at least the boundaries are fuzzy. The EA Hotel’s approach makes more sense to me if this is the goal. If I were them I might test the hypothesis of a very low bar, though I would still have the bar be a little bit higher than it is currently, if only for the feedback loops I talked about.
Basically I think as an incubator the model doesn’t work without increasing the bar, as a refuge it works and could be very valuable but then it shouldn’t be portrayed as an incubator. If it aims to be both, then it is really hard to model this medium potential impact target audience and I think that some work should be done to identify who is and who is not in it—and ultimately there should still be some raising of the bar. I also think the Hotel is valuable for visitors and for random events like retreats and unconferences. All round, a truly uniquely good idea.
An irrelevant aside: I don’t like the pyramid. In particular, the distinction drawn between someone who self-identifies strongly or weakly as EA seems irrelevant. Do you believe there is any correlation of interest with respect to getting a project funded? When I look at the most interesting things, some are done by people who self-identify strongly and others are done by people who keep their identity small.
That’s true, but I think it actually IS a cost-effective way to get good outcomes. There are already grant giving organizations that fill the next step in the pyramid with stronger vetting based on status, credentials, and results. I think organizations with stronger vetting need to exist as well, but a community that has organizations with very strong feedback loops (and weak vetting upfront) as well as organizations later in the pipeline with only strong vetting, will get more hits than one that only has organizations with very strong pre-vetting procedures.
I agree this is a risk, but don’t agree it’s inevitable, especially if you’re looking for it.
I don’t think this is the actual policy of the hotel, nor what I was advocating. It only makes sense when you have less people then slots available (which has been the case much of the time). I do think that a policy of “accept anyone if there’s space, vet a bit more if it’s competitive,” makes sense for something looking to fill the niche of the EA hotel.
The vetting also looks very different for an organization at that stage in the pyramid, more “have they actually thought through the idea/project?” than “do they have previous accomplishments that they makes me think they could pull the project off?” or “do I agree it’s a high value project?”.
That was comparing the culture, not the goals.
This is a good point. I do think there’s value in incubating both people and projects. People may find out they’re not cut out to run projects, or good people may find out their project isn’t viable, but either way they’ve gained valuable skills that allow them to get across the chasm and move up the pyramid.
I agree that could have been worded better. The point is if you’re “sort of into EA” there are ways to get you really into EA—meetup groups, conferences, etc. Once there, you might start thinking of creating a project that does as much good as possible… at which point you hit the chasm. That is, it’s trying to show that there are parts of the pipeline that exist before the Chasm.
I think you are doing the right thing here, and if anything I would say you could go further in the direction you are already going.
I observe that less vetting means fewer decisions and less costs for the Hotel. Further, if demand for slots is low enough that no vetting is required, this effectively makes the project zero-risk to the Hotel. A good member of the community is still helpful to all the other members of the community, even if their project goes nowhere.
Following on that point, I support coming down hard on the side of optimizing for people over projects. I can think of several reasons, but the simplest is that this was the explicit position for Xerox PARC, which birthed personal computing and is therefore a candidate for the highest-impact project of all time. A lot of relevant detail is in Alan Kay’s The Power of the Context, and a fuller history in The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop.
Further, a person’s impact is probably spread over many projects so investing in them is usually a gain, whereas a failed project is a sunk cost. Lastly, the people optimization method will help with another way in which EA is constrained: unambiguous signals about how and where to apply the absurd surplus of talent available. I expect this last to work both ways, so people who have spent time at the Hotel will also have a better sense of where they can contribute next.
This seems to assume the marginal cost to the hotel of taking on a guest is negligible. That does seem plausible to me, but it’s worth highlighting explicitly.
This is close to what I was assuming, but you are right I should have been explicit.
My actual assumption is that the marginal difference in cost between taking on one or another guest is negligible. Based on this I make the claim that projects which are not evaluated by the Hotel are zero risk (to the Hotel).
I expect we should always prefer the case where we did not evaluate the project at all to the case where we evaluated it and were wrong. I don’t see any reason to expect that the cost of evaluating experimental projects will have a high enough success rate to be a net benefit, even before we consider the impact of taking time and money away from the focus on supporting people.
I think having at least some rooms reserved for each is actually pretty important. If there aren’t any non-paying guests working on projects then you lose out on the networking/synergy/culture of productivity, which is the main reason the hotel is interesting in the first place. Not having rooms for short-term paying guests also seems like a failure mode, for cultural reasons: the hotel’s status as a “destination” raises its own visibility and attracts more projects in the future, but I think even more importantly it serves as a symbol of the community. Taking a train out to the countryside to stay in a hotel where a bunch of EAs are incubating their projects is the sort of emotionally resonant experience that strengthens people’s bond with the movement, and is also the sort of thing that is interesting to talk about and will organically raise the visibility of effective altruism as a whole.
You need a critical mass of people working on projects to develop culture, and enough short-term visitors to disseminate that cultural product. Too much skew in either direction makes the whole thing less impactful.
We have dorms that are purely dedicated to short term paying guests. This allows us to honestly tell people that they’re always welcome. I think that’s great.
Actually I agree this is really good, I hadn’t thought enough about it before. Not sure I agree that reserving rooms for non-paying impact projects/people is good though. I think this should vary with demand of good projects.
For me, the fact that my post is currently here means something: there are people who are working on it. I want to encourage them into working on it, so I need to get a leg up on them.
My own, lesswrongish, one that I’d have a problem with. My first reaction is “of course it helps, but...”, which isn’t enough to make this post. Just because it didn’t fit my goals and my motivation is insufficient, I need to change that.
(Note: I’m not saying you should take these posts seriously or otherwise deal with them, nor am I saying you should. I’m saying “you may not like my post, but I would prefer that you take the post seriously” because the only reason I’d like to do that is so that I don’t need to.)
I find this bit much more distracting than the previous two, which strikes me as rather good. The worst part is the third part, which gives people a way of seeing the “hey, what’s going on?” and the lack of obvious structure.