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>and to have all of their line-items exhaustively audited [...]? That part they should have expected (and I'm sure they did). Scott claims they expected negati
by tux3 3y ago
>and to have all of their line-items exhaustively audited [...]?
That part they should have expected (and I'm sure they did). Scott claims they expected negative social reactions, just maybe not to this extent.
Even in the absence of journalist attention, EAs love to exhaustively audit line-items. Something as big as Wytham Abbey was clearly not going to escape commentary.
I don't follow why SBF somehow excuses this. It seems you're suggesting buying the abbey would have been fine if only it could have been kept quiet, but because of this unforeseeable black swan event people heard about the Secret EA Castle and now we have all this outrage.
I heard about it from the EA Adjacent forum, and I don't see what SBF has to do with the argument that this burned a lot of social capital and reputation within the community for very nebulous gains (compared to buying a counterfactual property). The abbey might be relatively cheap for what it is, but not absolutely cheap. And it turned out to be very expensive in other ways.
- johnfn 3y agoMy point is that you could take an action which seems reasonable and justified and thought out within the community that you're in (e.g. EA) because you know everyone's working off the same set of axioms and can follow your reasoning. But when you suddenly get the entire world watching, that's not true any more, and you realize you can't explain the axioms to them, because it's a lot easier to say haha castle stupid EA people than to actually think it through and besides they're already scrolling past on their feed to the next bit of outrage-bait.
- tux3 3y agoThanks. I didn't experience that part, but I can definitely see that this would happen. My position is still that it was a very questionable idea even without outside attention, but this definitely didn't help