The manor house cheekily known as the Effective Altruism Castle is finally hitting the market—with its sellers willing to take what amounts to a loss.

Effective Ventures Foundation bought Wytham Abbey in April 2022 for £14.9 million ($18.6 million) with grants from Open Philanthropy, whose funders include billionaire Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. The purchase initially stirred controversy that a charity dedicated to the most efficient use of money for the maximum good was buying one of the finest manor homes in England

It is plainly obvious to everyone that if you’re going to save the world, one of the first things you have to do is buy a 550-year-old British castle near the University of Oxford for about $15 million. This was the logic in 2021 when members of the so-called Effective Altruism movement’s signature institution bought a posh, 25-bedroom residence called Wytham Abbey as a place to have conferences and stage other various intellectual frolics. (Many of its most prominent members also went to Oxford.) This castle, previously owned by the Earl of Abingdon and later bequeathed to the university, would be the place where they could think deeply about ways to protect the future of humanity, particularly from the dangers of artificial intelligence.

Since buying the property, however, it’s turned out that that was not really so obviously a good idea, and the EA movement has been severely damaged by the collapse and criminal conviction of its most prominent backer, Sam Bankman-Fried. Now, Wytham Abbey is for sale (asking price: $20 million) as the EA movement struggles to pay back money that was stolen from Bankman-Fried’s victims. It has also, weirdly, become a meme in a very dumb Silicon Valley culture war.

First, it is worth noting that even people within the EA movement thought that the castle was a bad idea. Effective altruism, after all, is all about the efficient use of money — arguing that the most important long-term thing someone can do is to make as much money as possible in order to give it away. But to the leadership of Effective Ventures Foundation, the movement’s flagship nonprofit organization, it was a way to more effectively spread all their ideas. “Having an immersive environment which was more about exploring new ideas than showing off results was just very good for intellectual progress,” said Owen Cotton-Barratt, one of the EAs who claimed to have been involved in the purchase. It was around this time that the EA movement became preoccupied with artificial intelligence as a threat to continued existence of humanity, and had focused its intellectual firepower on stopping the world from descending into a Matrix-like hellscape.

Bloomberg