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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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About the plans to vet post-hoc: I predict bias towards keeping people because of sunken costs on both sides.
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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.
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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.
These too: [factmata.com](https://factmata.com/), [fullfact.org](https://fullfact.org/) (I know the latter a bit and like it a lot). These are for media sector though not academia.