[matthewdgreen]

I searched the link you provided for anything that claimed Dustin Moskovitz requested that purchase, but I didn't find it. I did however find this detailed explanation of the grant-making process [1] by Claire Zabel of Open Philanthropy, and it seems pretty clear that the request to purchase Wytham Abbey came from Owen (Cotton-Barratt, I think?) of CEA (now known as Effective Ventures.)

Claire provides her justification for granting the funds to purchase the property, and it is not particularly compelling. (She even concludes that she would not have made the grant if she had a chance to do it over today.) There certainly doesn't appear to have been anything approaching due diligence about the cost-effectiveness of this particular purchase, which is really surprising given that effective use of resources is the core premise of EA.

To make things worse, the commenters point out that Claire Zabel is also on the board of Effective Ventures (formerly CEA), which makes this a much worse conflict of interest. It's hard to look at these organizations as anything more than a tightly-knit group of friends passing donor money around between them.

PS If CEA and OP are just fronts for Dustin Moscovitz, it's totally fine for them to spend money on whatever they want: as long as he's cool with it. I had the impression these organizations were part of a broader community promoting the principles of Effective Altruism as a movement, and the community would hold them to those principles. It is extremely difficult to look at the details of this episode and believe that's happening.

[1] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xof7iFB3uh8Kc53bG/...

[HDThoreaun]

Open Phil is literally just Dustin’s foundation. He’s also one of the main funders of givewell’s research work and I am not a fan of how incestuous a lot of the orgs are.

The point of the link was the explanation the guy at CEA who ran the project gave. I agree it’s not good enough and have come to conclusion that this is just something xx Dustin thought would be cool, which is not very EA, but I guess his prerogative.

[matthewdgreen]

The contention made (far!) up-thread was "When there is a lot of money moving around, it seems inevitable that power structures will form around it."

Then somebody else said that CEA's budget was only $6m, so how bad could things get? The Wytham Abbey example was brought up just to show how much more money CEA could tap into, through its connections with other EA orgs.

But from my perspective, the EA "castle adventure" is also an excellent illustration of those power structures. Here we see a small number of people (friends, colleagues, fellow board members) take control of core EA institutions (using enormous flows of donor cash) with very little pushback from the community. And worse, they are using this money for purposes that are completely at odds with the stated principles of the EA movement.

As an outsider, if a few people with access to cash are so easily able to capture the most prominent orgs in the EA movement and make them ineffective, then that's pretty terrible for EA as a brand. This doesn't mean I'm opposed to the broader concept of "giving money effectively", but I'm definitely going to feel an aversion to anything that carries the EA label.