"yes obviously there's a lot of gift-economy around", some further observations
- It's more embedded in the larger social setting and economy than typically-studied gift economies.
- Open-source sofware might be an interesting comparison with both gifts and lots of money around.
- You need some mechanism to prevent extractive behavior; typically that's either ticketing or private invites
- 'pass it forward' often looks similar to 'making the world and community I want to live in'; both are noble
- The incredibly wide range of incomes and wealth is really unusual and nobody really knows what to do with it, alas.
1I mostly agree with all of that.
- I think the way it's embedded in the larger social setting and economy is a pretty good strength.
- OSS is a good comparison. I'm curious how OSS handles rivalrous goods? Sharing HPMOR and other stories and songs scales for close-to-free much like most OSS libraries, but I don't know the OSS community well enough to comment on how scalable services (e.g. AO3, which I'd guess is comparable to the LessWrong site) or attendance at events (e.g. Open Source Summit, vaguely comparable to LessOnline?) work.
- Splitting "extractive" for a moment; in some parts, the answer is it's fine, we don't care, not that much can be extracted via this angle. There's only so much damage the one person eating all the chips at the open invite potluck can usually do, and if needed the mechanisms there are more around asking them to stop or disinviting specific people. More extractive behavior does exist but I think usually has other mechanisms providing friction.
- I think 'pass it forward' and 'make the world and community I want to live in' are similar. I usually notice them getting a little distinct when someone's being specific about one area; to use myself as an example, I entered the IRL community via the East Coast Rationalist Megameetup, and I correspondingly prioritize ECRM higher than other things with that rough shape
- Yep. 'Give good advice to college students and cross subsidize events a bit, plus gentle pressure via norms to be chill about the wealth differences' is my best current answer. Kinda wish I had a better one.
There just aren't that many rivalrous goods in OSS - website hosting etc. tends to be covered by large tech companies as a goodwill/marketing/recruiting/supply-chain expense, c.f. the Python Sofware Foundation. Major conferences usually have some kind of scholarship program for students and either routinely pay speakers or cover costs for those who couldn't attend otherwise; community-organized conferences like PyCon tend to be more generous with those. Honor-system "individual ticket" vs "corporate ticket" prices are pretty common, often with a cheaper student price too.
A key mechanism I think is that lots of people are aware that they have lucrative jobs and/or successful companies because of open source, that being basically the only way to make money off OSS, and therefore are willing to give back either directly or for the brand benefits.
- Yep. 'Give good advice to college students and cross subsidize events a bit, plus gentle pressure via norms to be chill about the wealth differences' is my best current answer. Kinda wish I had a better one.
Slight, some, if any nudges toward politics being something that gives people a safety net, so that everyone has the same foundation to fall on? So that even if there are wealth differences, there aren't as much large wealth enabled stresses
Is any subculture not a gift economy? Smuggling in 'small' connotations to exclude things like 'the gay community' (though ca. 1960 maybe them too) or 'goths,' but I think it's the default and it's notable when a subculture deviates from it.
Possible places to find exceptions, highly monetizing and/or systematizing, many of which I suspect are as much gift economies as us:
- Anglophone quant traders
- Pro and semi-pro poker players
- Crypto coin boosters
- /r/WallStreetBets
How small is small? Subcultures I think mostly aren't gift economies, a non-exhaustive list:
- Magic the Gathering and associated Friday Night Magics/game stores.
- The average community soccer league.
- Toastmasters.
- Your average martial arts dojo.
They do have some gift, but it's not what they principally run on. Of those, MtG has the most gifts (I got my start playing magic using a gift of a friend's extra cards) but the local game store I frequented years ago was making a pretty deliberate profit off me, and I expect the whole thing would look different if Wizards of the Coast suddenly public-domained Magic and vanished.
I think those are all more gift economies than they are market economies. I've never been part of a dojo long-term but there was 'hey want a ride' 'sure I'll pick up dinner' at least a bit even with the one I was part of briefly. Buying and selling MtG was something you did with the store, not the other players, almost always. (Some people were aggressive value traders but they were almost their own subculture because no one really enjoyed dealing with them.) And for the kind of card trades that didn't look at all at what book value was and just swapped what seemed good to them... Man, I guess that's at least 40% market economy but it sure didn't feel transactional. And it died pretty rapidly when the aggressive value traders who were indisputably a market economy showed up, which feels like that's a sign the market economy part was fragile and noncentral?
I have never been part of a (non-children's) sports league but I would guess they did a lot of 'sure do you a favor' the same way I'd expect from dojos. And I avoid Toastmasters* like it's radioactive, so IDK.
I think there's a very fuzzy distinction between 'technically gift economy but not ~integrated enough to meaningfully be trading' and 'not a gift economy'. Probably a similar distinction exists at the low end of market economy, though I suspect on no direct evidence it's less fuzzy.
(*Even if I witnessed some Master Toasts trading things or doing favors, I still wouldn't know, because my experience is that a Master Toast emits primarily Simalacrum-Level-4 statements with the occasional S3 or S2 and so I couldn't begin to guess whether their 'favors' were actually favors.)
I want to make the case that the rationalist community is less of a gift economy than you make out, and that where it goes more gift economy that can be bad.
To start I'd like to compare to a university charging tuition. There is a clearly marked out rate that is standard tuition, the rate at which one is paying ones own way. Maybe it's $50k/yr. Some nontrivial fraction of students/parents are surely paying exactly that. Some are paying more. Maybe Sally's dad has been donating a few thousand a year to the university, which happens to be his alma mater, for decades, in the hope that it would help Sally's chances of admission. Maybe Joe Johnson's mom donated tens of millions, both earning Joe a place and getting her name on Johnson Hall. And there are surely people paying less than $50k/yr, maybe even nothing - they are relatively poor and attending on some kind of scholarship or financial aid. In short, the prices being paid range over several orders of magnitude, and everybody knows it. Yet this is not a gift economy. This is a market economy.
I would read bay area solstice tickets the same way. Yes there is a broad range that someone could contribute. But there is a price clearly marked as the price at which one is paying ones own way, $35. If someone doesn't have much money it is fine to pay less, but this is essentially informal financial aid. If one of those highly paid software engineers paid less than $35, I expect this would be viewed as reflecting rather negatively on them. I'd certainly be less inclined to invite such a person to my parties. And some people do pay more than $35, because they have plenty of money and want to contribute, and that is great, but not particularly expected of anyone, even the highly paid software engineer. This is all fine and good and how it should be, but it is also very much like university tuition, not particularly giftish.
By contrast, I have occasionally seen rationalist events in other cities that have a range of prices you could pay for the same thing, but don't have a price clearly marked as the price where one is paying ones own way. This is bad. It makes it impossible for people like me, who have enough money to pay their own way but not enough to throw it around, to know what to pay. The ambiguity makes signing up for these events very aversive. It can also come off as a bit stealy - like the organizers think they are entitled to more money from the highly paid software engineers than is their fair share. This does look more like a gift economy, and it does not look desirable.
It is also worth noting that a nontrivial fraction of our community tries to make a virtue of betting on things. I don't like this practice, but it is there, and it is kindof the opposite of a gift economy.
Separately, great point on labeling the "break-even" price explicitly. I also find that practice helpful for calibrating expectations. I forgot to do that for a recent event but I probably should have.
I agree. The gift economy framework is a useful lens to view a lot of this, in particular labor. But ticket pricing tiers are pure price discrimination, very market-shaped, and that is good. I don't think pricing is mostly about charity, I think it is mostly about distinguishing willingness to pay, enforced by social norms.
A few examples illustrate the point:
- If a rationalist software engineer making $500k doesn't enjoy Solstices but is dragged along as someone's date, I think he should reasonably pay the lowest (subsidized) price. I expect someone would raise an eyebrow at that, and then he should explain, and everyone would recognize "Ah, yes, you have a low willingness to pay for this event, this is the tier system working as intended, thank you for the information."
- If a rationalist software engineer making $500k enjoys Solstices and pays the subsidized or even the break-even rate, I predict that would probably be seen as a defection, albeit minor. Some flavors of gift economies would also see this as a defection[1], but I think the New England genteel/egalitarian gift economy that Skyler is describing would not.
- I think a key feature of gift economies is that you're actually discouraged from giving gifts "above your station". If a relatively poorer family brings a monetarily-expensive dish to the church potluck, or tries to donate too much to the annual capital fund without a good reason, this would be seen as embarrassing in some way, and actively discouraged. But if a graduate student who isn't independently wealthy really loves solstices, and chooses to pay twice the list price, I predict that would be interpreted as "wow, thank you for the vote of confidence, I'm glad you appreciate this event."
More thoughts on this in my Ticket Pricing Strategy post.
- ^
You would absolutely get a bitchy letter about this from Ashur-uballit I. See one of my favorite letters of all time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amarna_letter_EA_16
I don't think I agree with your nuances. For the engineer who doesn't enjoy the event but goes along as someone's date, I would still expect them to pay the $35, and would look down on them if they did not. If the date isn't worth $35 to someone making $500k, I think they've made bad dating choices.
In the case of the $500k engineer who enjoys solstice paying exactly $35, it actually seems very important to me that they be seen as having fulfilled their obligations, as having cooperated, not defected. If you apply social pressure to get them to pay more, you are essentially trying to use social pressure to commit a theft. That sets of very loud alarm bells for me. That is absolutely not an ok thing to do, and I do not want to be part of any community that operates that way. A community does not become entitled to my wealth just because I am part of it, it only becomes entitled to my wealth to the extent that I choose to draw on community resources. This is the point I was trying to make when I said that not having a price marked as paying ones own way came off as a bit stealy - one possible reading of that is that the organizers think the software engineer should pay more than their fraction of the event, and if that reading is correct, it is an attempt at stealing from the software engineer and should absolutely not happen in a community of honest people. The incentives at play here should also be obvious: if you try to exploit the financially well off by expecting them to pay more than their share, many of them will, with a great deal of justification, stop associating with you, and then you will have a smaller poorer community to spread the costs of your events over. Many other people who see the ethical problem will also stop associating with you.
edit: I'm not sure if this is our point of confusion or not, so I'll throw it out and you can tell me what you think. When I think of a price that constitutes "paying ones own way", I think it is fine for the organizers to include in that price things like informal financial aid (the subsidizing of the lower tear tickets), compensating the risk that the event incurs a loss, setting aside money for the next iteration of the event, etc. That can definitely result in a higher ticket price than simply taking the cost of the venue, the equipment, the musicians, etc, and dividing by the number of attendees. And that can create some amount of fuziness. And that is all fine. But it still seems important to me that the organizers pick a number that is within the range of that fuziness, publicly specify it as the price at which one is paying ones own way, and then treat everyone who pays that price, regardless of their income or wealth, as having fully cooperated. Is that similar to what you were trying to get at, or do we still have a genuine disagreement?
I think I've got substantial disagreement, but I want to agree that in general I think a 'pay your share' ticket is a good default. My one line advice on ticket pricing is something like "first add up the costs of venue, food, equipment, etc, second divide that by the number of people you expect to attend, third add 10% for your planning fallacy, and that's your one ticket price." If I get more lines of advice I add more of course.
I empathize a lot with wanting to be able to just pay ones fair portion of something. There also are some real horror stories of groups trying to pry more money loose from their memberships.
Still, substantial disagreements below:
This is the point I was trying to make when I said that not having a price marked as paying ones own way came off as a bit stealy - one possible reading of that is that the organizers think the software engineer should pay more than their fraction of the event, and if that reading is correct, it is an attempt at stealing from the software engineer and should absolutely not happen in a community of honest people.
(emphasis mine.)
I want to strongly push back against calling this stealing from the SWE. My central example of stealing is if Bob sneaks into Carla's house, riffles through her wallet, and takes some cash from it without permission. If instead Dean honestly offers a trade like "you give me money and I give you a seat at a concert" and Eve accepts the trade, gives Dean the money, and gets the seat at the concert she wanted, that's not stealing. Eve has a real choice, she can really decide not to go to the concert.
That's still true even through at least 'normal'[1] amounts of price discrimination. Dean could offer front row seats for a higher price than the nosebleed section, that seems fine. He could explicitly use student status, asking for student ID or a .edu email, and in a high-trust environment it seems mostly fine to just use the honour system. Seems reasonable.
That's still true even if community membership was contingent on paying, which it's not. Off the top of my head, Toastmasters and Rotary Club both have mandatory membership dues to be at a local chapter, every Friday Night Magic I've been to had an entrance fee of some kind, and the first choir that came to my mind has membership dues. (They even explicitly do variable options: ctrl+f for "Member dues are a core part of BCE's budget".)
I believe it is not an attempt at stealing anything and it is not dishonest to do price discrimination where you say upfront what the price points are and let people decide whether to pay or not.
It can also come off as a bit stealy - like the organizers think they are entitled to more money from the highly paid software engineers than is their fair share.
Speaking as one of the organizers who sometimes runs stuff without a clear pay-your-way price point (though the breakeven price point with a bit of margin is my default these days), I don't think I'm entitled to this in the current model, and if you want the market economy answer I think the arrow flips around. Like, I don't get paid out of hypothetical profits for East Coast Rationalist Megameetup or Boston Solstice.[2] In the market economy version of ECRM, I'd add my expected time investment as a cost, and also I'd add more margin because I'd want to make a profit.
Take airplane seats as an example; it seems like a category error of some kind to say 'United Airlines thinks they're entitled to more money from the highly paid professionals than is their fair share.' United Airlines wants as much of my money as they can get me to pay, I want them to fly me around for as little as I can pay. In a market economy they figure out how much they want to offer tickets at, I decide whether to buy from them or Delta or whether I want to call them up and try to negotiate with their representative or whether I want to stay home. They're probably not going to sell me a ticket for less than the opportunity cost of selling my seat to someone else. They very likely aren't going to sell me a ticket for less than the marginal cost of my weight[3] but from a market economy perspective, the fair price isn't the marginal cost of all the passenger's collective seats, it's the price point where supply and demand curves cross.
There do exist rationalist (or at least adjacent) events that get run like this, paying organizers and/or staff for their time and charging enough that there's a decent return on investment. I want to be careful about using non-public information here, so I'll stop for the moment at just saying they exist, they're great, and also they're a minority.
I mildly think the $35 ticket for California Bay Solstice is not actually a market price. I don't have any inside information on the budget for Berkeley Solstice, but I could ask and I'd be pretty surprised (p(5%)) if everyone paying $35 means that the musicians and organizers all get paid market rate for their time, or pays for the afterparty food and venue and ops time. I hear they sold out last year; in a market, if you sell out all copies, the obvious thing is to keep raising prices until that stops happening.
- ^
"Normal" is not well defined here and I don't expect I could give a good principled definition without working on it for a while.
- ^
In the past, the net profit got paid forward to the next year. It did rest on my accounts for the year and I didn't account for interest earned; I would have if I thought it'd be more money than the cost of my time take to track the interest.
- ^
Though they might if they have some clever reason, like they think it'll make me a more loyal customer and that's worth it? But afaik the actual marginal cost of an extra ~200lbs of flesh blood and luggage is way cheaper than any airline ticket I'll ever buy.
1I want to strongly push back against calling this stealing from the SWE. My central example of stealing is if Bob sneaks into Carla's house, riffles through her wallet, and takes some cash from it without permission. If instead Dean honestly offers a trade like "you give me money and I give you a seat at a concert" and Eve accepts the trade, gives Dean the money, and gets the seat at the concert she wanted, that's not stealing. Eve has a real choice, she can really decide not to go to the concert.
That is certainly the most central example of stealing, but we use the word to describe a lot of things that don't look too much like that in the specifics. We have words for whole categories of crime that we will colloquially call stealing, because they prompt the exact same moral revulsion for the same kinds of reasons, even though the specifics are rather different. I'm thinking of things like fraud, extortion, blackmail, and embezzlement. None of us would hesitate to call was SBF did stealing, for example. And what I'm trying to point at there is that charging higher rates based on income for the same product, even if enforced only by social pressure, falls into that same category.
With price discrimination, I think you are equating some rather different things under that label. Where a genuinely different product is being sold, and the customer can choose which product to buy, I don't think of that as price discrimination, at least not of the wrongful sort. The first class seat on an airplane is actually bigger and nicer than the economy seat. And when I was a software engineer I continued to fly economy and personal item only, and while the airlines may have tried to entice me with the luxuries of a more expensive ticket, they never once suggested that I ought to pay them more because I was making more. So I don't see anything wrong there.
Another situation where I see a similar wrong occurring is haggling. The whole point of a haggling economy is to try to exploit people who have more money just because they have more money, by charging them more for the same product. That, to my mind, is theft too, and I would not participate in a space where it was practiced.
In the context of organizing a community event, I don't think we need to be as ruthlessly profit maximizing as a stereotypical for-profit corporation, but I also don't see anything wrong with paying organizers and aiming for some profit to build up the organization. I think that is what good organizers do when the community can support it. I don't know why you seem to want to treat it as something shameful. When I buy a ticket to an event at Lighthaven, I know very well that a fraction of that is going to pay the half dozen staff of Lightcone, and that is fine. Nobody seems to object to this.
I don't have any particular inside knowledge of the finances of bay area solstice either. (I do know that the after party is not included, that is a separate ticket). But if you are right that the $35 per person is not enough to pay for the venue and the equipment and such (I think the musicians might be volunteers?), then I think the organizers messed up and should have marked a higher price as the default price.
1I'm thinking of things like fraud, extortion, blackmail, and embezzlement. None of us would hesitate to call was SBF did stealing, for example.
Yep, I think there's central examples of theft (breaking into someone's house and taking cash out of their wallet), less central examples of theft that are still widely agreed upon to be theft (taking someone's money claiming it's being safeguarded on a trading exchange when actually some of customer funds pay for a bahamas office.)
And what I'm trying to point at there is that charging higher rates based on income for the same product, even if enforced only by social pressure, falls into that same category.
As long as they're clearly and honestly labeled I disagree, would expect >=7 out of 10 random Americans would also disagree, and though I think you've got the law background and I don't I would expect a court to disagree. Maybe I'm not modeling exactly how social pressure works here?
Where a genuinely different product is being sold, and the customer can choose which product to buy, I don't think of that as price discrimination, at least not of the wrongful sort. The first class seat on an airplane is actually bigger and nicer than the economy seat.
I am pretty sure (85%) that airplanes do other price discrimination than just seat size. How early the ticket is being booked, how I'm planning to pay for it, whether I often fly with that airplane. I believe they also do a bit of dynamic pricing based on IP address, which is a sneaky way to guess at how much the customer is willing to pay. It annoys me a bit, but as long as they show the price when I'm buying the ticket and honour that price I wouldn't call it stealing.
In the context of organizing a community event, I don't think we need to be as ruthlessly profit maximizing as a stereotypical for-profit corporation, but I also don't see anything wrong with paying organizers and aiming for some profit to build up the organization. I think that is what good organizers do when the community can support it. I don't know why you seem to want to treat it as something shameful. When I buy a ticket to an event at Lighthaven, I know very well that a fraction of that is going to pay the half dozen staff of Lightcone, and that is fine. Nobody seems to object to this.
(Emphasis mine.)
I don't think it's shameful. I'm pretty cheerful in both gift economies and market economies. I don't want to accidentally interact with one like it's the other, so sometimes I ask in various ways what mode we're all in. I'd feel bad if I took advantage of someone's gift to make a bunch of money, and I'd feel annoyed if someone took advantage of my gift to make a bunch of money, and so I try to be up front about what I'm doing under which hat. Edit: Eh, "I'd feel annoyed if someone took advantage of my gift to make a bunch of money" is a generalization, not true in every particular.
(I do know that the after party is not included, that is a separate ticket).
Ah, my mistake. Thanks for the update.
But if you are right that the $35 per person is not enough to pay for the venue and the equipment and such (I think the musicians might be volunteers?), then I think the organizers messed up and should have marked a higher price as the default price.
My point is that if the musicians and organizers and speakers are all volunteering, there's at gift being given as well as product being marketed.
I'm not trying to make a legal claim here, just using the word "stealing" in its colloquial sense, sorry for the confusion on that.
I think I want to taboo the phrase "price discrimination". It could refer to normal ok things like a price changing over time, or to things I want to call stealing. You seem to use it in both ways, and so I don't think it is carving reality at a joint that is useful for this conversation. I'll instead try to address the things airlines do that you pointed to individually.
The same product often does change price over time, for just about any product imaginable. So charging different prices for the same ticket based on when it is purchased seems fine.
There are also often economic reasons to sell things in bulk and charge a lower per-unit price for bulk purchases. That's all a frequent flier program is, so again, that is probably fine.
I'm honestly not sure what you are referring to by different payment methods.
But I would absolutely call charging different prices of different IP addresses stealing, and I think most people would agree that it is not ethical to do so. And when airlines are caught doing things like that, they sometimes are forced by public pressure to stop. This notion that you don't charge different people different prices for the same product is central to a fair and honest economy, and I think it is fair and important to call out violations of it as stealing.
Here's another thing airlines sometimes do: they charge more money for the ticket from city A to city B than for the ticket from city A to city C with a layover in city B. I'm not sure what the airlines think they are doing there, but it's clearly not a legitimate market transaction, as the second thing is just the first thing plus an extra things. So I have no qualms about buying the A->B->C ticket when I really just want to go from A to B. (For anyone else who wants to exploit this dishonest airline pricing, see skiplagged.com).
I agree that some things function as gifts rather than economic transactions, and some relationships have elements of both. Mixing the two can cause issues which are maybe out of scope for this conversation but are worth flagging as a reason to be hesitant to mix them. And when they are mixed, that seems like a point where it is especially important to explicitly demarcate how much money is market-based and how much is gift-based. But I think even in a gift economy, gifts are expected to be roughly proportional to other gifts, not to the giver's means. We don't expect the $500k software engineer to give gifts 10x the size of the $50k teacher.
I have more substantial disagreement, but I want to do a quick check;
I think it is fine for the organizers to include in that price things like informal financial aid (the subsidizing of the lower tear tickets),...
This seemed to me like one of the central examples of things you were against. Was I misreading?
If the cost (that is, the at-cost price of the venue space, food, etc) of an event is $50 per person, and the audience is totally bimodal (there's fifty students who can only afford $25, and fifty SWEs making $500k a year) do you think it's fine to have a student ticket for $25 and a SWE ticket for $75, with the SWEs cross-subsidizing the students?
(By my read you'd prefer there be three tickets; a $25, a $50, and a $75. I'm asking if you'd be fine with the subsidy in the two-ticket example.)
No real community is going to be perfectly bimodal like that, but in the hypothetical I think that is maybe fine? The events I am thinking of where this sort of thing has really bothered me had a ticket marked as "software engineer making $200k/yr" or something like that that cost hundreds of dollars, while other tickets that get you the same seats cost tens of dollars. When price differences are that dramatic, it becomes very obviously exploitation, not a student subsidy.
I also think it is fine to do as bay solstice is doing, having a $2000k ticket marked as "patron" or something to that effect, because that makes it clear that nobody, no matter how rich, is expected to pay that, it is just an opportunity to making a charitable donation on top of the ticket price conveniently packaged in the same transaction. I don't know if they are sending such people letters documenting a $1965 tax deductible donation or not, but they probably should.
No real community is going to be perfectly bimodal like that..
Yep, I'm making a frictionless vacuum spherical cow example.
My guess is the bay solstice organizers aren't sending a tax deduction because the obvious-on-first-pass setup is to set things up like people are buying tickets, but I guess it's plausible the underlying organization is a nonprofit? I know a few SF/F cons that I think have a track for larger donations to count as tax deductible.
I see. Yes, I think that mostly does.
I misread you, your paying-your-own way price is more nuanced than I had realized. I think after including things like protecting against not selling all tickets and providing some extra for subsidizing student tickets, it would be noticeably above the break-even price. I think Skyler's East Coast Megameetup provides a good case study, as of yesterday he had a "Low" price of $65, a "breakeven" price of $100, a "high" price of $120, with several additional sponsorship tiers. He defines the "breakeven" price as something like if everyone paid this and the event sells all tickets, we would break even, and the "high" price as something like if 2/3rds of participants paid High and 1/3 paid "Low", while selling all tickets, the event would breakeven. I think under your schema the "paying your own way price" is the High one ($120), or even higher to account for the risk of not selling out, not the breakeven price of $100, right?
I think yes, this does resolve at least most of our disagreement. I think it's reasonable to expect the software engineer to contribute more to public goods than the grad student. I think events count as mostly public goods (they're technically club goods, since they're somewhat rival and somewhat excludable, but there are still substantial spillover effects from events that should provide you value by binding the community together even if you don't go, so I think rounding them to public goods is close enough.) Descriptively, not endorsing, I think some in the community would expect the software engineer to pay more than $120 or $135 (building in sales risk) for the East Coast Rationalist Megameetup, unless they have some good reason to have a low willingness to pay. But your framework has a lot to recommend it, and I think could reasonably be the median expectation from the community.
I agree with Skyler that it's not reasonable to describe expecting public goods to be funded more proportionally to income as "stealing," at least not at the margins we're typically looking at in practice in the community. But it could get there! If, for instance, there was a social pressure and expectation that the richest 10 people in the community must pay for the whole event, I would describe that social pressure as immoral. I'd probably call it something like an "unjust entitlement to someone's resources", rather than stealing, but these are mainly prudential questions with fuzzy boundaries.
I agree with you, and also, the rationalist community seems unusually willing to buy things from friends with money. Bountied rationality exists. I know more than one couple that will pay each other to do things one wants but the other finds unpleasant. The "happy price" meme encourages people to ask for much more money and avoid a social obligation to give a friend price (which is kind of a gift).
This has very little to do with the actual high-level topic at issue, but it's something I've seen elsewhere in rationalist discourse and I recently realised that I think it's probably nonsense.
I still think a lot of you all need to sit down with Atlas Shrugged to get nudged in a usefully more selfish direction.
I am pretty sure it scarcely ever happens that someone who is too altruistic reads Atlas Shrugged and comes away with their altruism moderated a bit, or that someone who is too selfish reads, er, the Communist Manifesto or the Sermon on the Mount or something[1], and comes away with their selfishness moderated a bit.
[1] I don't know whether it's Highly Significant somehow that I can't come up with a good symmetrical example of something advocating for extreme altruism as AS advocates for extreme selfishness.
I think what actually happens is that (usually) they say to themselves "wow, that was a load of pernicious nonsense, I resent having wasted my time reading it, and will now be even more zealous in opposing that sort of thing" and if anything have their original position reinforced, or (occasionally) they feel like the scales have fallen from their eyes and become a full-blown Objectivist or Marxist or Christian or whatever.
If I thought altruism was bullshit and everyone ought to be a Randian egoist then I might be all for giving copies of Atlas Shrugged to very altruistic people. But if what I wanted was more-moderately-altruistic people, I don't think that would be a good strategy.
I should in fairness say that I don't have any actual evidence for what happens when extreme altruists read Atlas Shrugged. Maybe (either in general, or specifically when they are rationalist extreme altruists) they do tend to emerge with their views moderated. But I don't think it's the way I'd bet.
n=1, I think reading Atlas Shrugged in my mid teens was the approximately correct amount of push I needed to wind up the right amount moderated. (After a couple of years of being a little bit of an obnoxious Objectivist before mellowing anyway, but the confounder there is I was in my late teens.)
Noted. But it seems to me that if the trajectory was excessively altruistic -> obnoxious Objectivist -> something reasonable, it's pretty plausible that without reading Rand you might just have gone straight from "excessively altruistic" to "something reasonable".
(But of course you may well have a better sense of that having been through it from the inside.)
C.S. Lewis is the usual author to cite for the other direction, and I've met both. More common among rationalist types. The Moon Is Harsh Mistress is possibly more effective than Rand.
Does Lewis really advocate for extreme altruism, as such? Of course he advocates for Christianity, and some versions of Christianity advocate extreme altruism, but Lewis's sort was mostly pretty moderate.
Anthropologists have several categories for how groups exchange goods and services. The one you're probably most familiar with is called a Market Economy, where I go to a coffee shop and give them a few dollars and they give me a cup of hot coffee. Rationalists, by and large, are fans of market economies. We just don't usually operate in one.
I. Market and Gift
Lets start with some definitions and examples in case you're unfamiliar with the genre. Allow me to describe two ways of organizing.
Someone offers you an experience you want, maybe some music. You take them up on it, which basically just involves walking over to their place and sitting down to listen; if you're not close enough you just go the Youtube channel with all the music. You have a great time. Later you write some story and put it on the internet where anyone can read it, sending a note to a friend you wrote it for. Your friend gushes about it back to you. A little while later your friend runs a party with a bunch of food and invites you; you don't go, but you hear the musician did and had a good time.
Or there's the other way.
There's some experience you want, maybe some music. It'd bring you joy, but you can't listen without offering the musician something first. You go write some stories, and offer to let people read the stories if and only if the people give you a kind of marker. One of those people arranges a small conference venue and makes some food, selling tickets that to get their own markers. They give you markers for your story, and you give markers to the musician. The musician does this a lot, it's how they get markers to go to places with people to talk to and food to eat.
Which of those sounded more like the rationalist community to you?
Hint: Here's the Bay Area Secular Solstice with music, you can go listen right now if you want. Here's one of, if not the, best rationalist story, which you can go read in its entirety right now if you want, or go listen to the audio version. Here's a list of places you can go hang out with rationalists; some of those have ticket prices but most don't, and many of them have free-to-the-attendee food.
Sometimes goods and services are gated by money within the rationalist community, but they mostly aren't. Even when money is a requirement it usually involves people working for free or for far below their market price. We know how to offer a good or service contingent on someone paying us a market price, including the cost of our labor. We just don't do it.
Someone reading this is thinking of bringing up the larger Solstices, or big events like the East Coast Rationalist Megameetup (which, if you will pardon a shameless plug for a moment, is happening the weekend December 19th, 2025, and does sell tickets) or LessOnline. Those events do gate attendance on paying. . . somewhat.
But at LessOnline many people volunteered their time in exchange for cheap or free tickets, and the exchange rate was bizarre both ways; professional software engineers spent twelve hours moving chairs and tables instead of paying the ~$500 ticket price. And the price range for Californian Bay Solstice, a price range which gets you effectively the same ticket (as in it's not like front row seats vs balcony) currently look like this:
That's not market pricing. That's not even really price discrimination. That's a collection hat being passed around inviting gifts.
The far more common transaction around these parts is for people to just give you things.
II. What does a gift economy need?
Gift economies rely on a handful of components.
First, gift economies are most commonly seen where reputation can be tracked and remembered. Gifts between individuals work. You give me a nice pie, or let me sleep on your couch for a week when I'm traveling. I remember this. Even amid a vaguely Dunbar's number sized crowd people often can mentally track who is helping out other folks a lot.
Second, gift economies often take advantage of reciprocity. There's a very human instinct to do nice things for people who have done nice things for you. Sometimes this gets almost codified; when grandma gives you a toy for Christmas, you write her a thank you letter. But we also do nice things for people who do nice things to others. We do this all the time. The archetype here is the village priest never having to eat alone, or a questing knight being offered shelter even if they haven't slain any dragons around this town yet.
Another key fact is that gift economies rarely balance out. When I pay the pizza place twenty bucks for a pizza, that's it, we're square. If I decide to tip, I don't expect them to remember that and throw in an extra couple slices next time I order. Instead, everyone involved tries to provide a bit more than they take most of the time.
Lastly, gift economies are long term. They don't work well as a one-shot, prisoner's dilemma style. In small towns or villages where people don't leave very often, a gift economy can hum along with the goodwill you've earned coming back to you over time. If people are moving away all the time and you might not see them again, people are more likely to use market economies where that accumulated value can be taken with them when it's time to go.
Look at the rationalist community.
Local groups outside of the bay are sub-Dunbar. Many rationalists travel; even amid that crowd you start to recognize a few of the same faces from conference to conference whether the gathering is in Berkeley or Berlin. That's reputation.
For all the supposed ruthless optimization, rationalists are pretty open and warm. People keep trying to give their favourite blogger nice books or swords. I basically have to beat off offers of housing with a stick when I travel. Sure, me and Scott are unusually prominent, but it's not like offers of a couch are hard to get around here.
And oh man, do many rationalists have whole complexes about not having done enough to help others. I still think a lot of you all need to sit down with Atlas Shrugged to get nudged in a usefully more selfish direction.
It's tautological to say, but rationalists who stick around tend to stick around. Many people have been interacting for a decade or two at this point. Present rate no singularity, many people expect to be interacting with some of the newcomers for a decade to come. People may leave town (to go to Berkeley usually) but maybe they'll come back, or wind up working adjacent to you in the future.
III. Is this good?
I think it's pretty good.
This is a low friction, high trust way to be. The gift economy in these parts is taking a bit of an advantage of the generally high surpluses afoot; some folks make a lot of money in the market economy around us, there's a lot of talent and competence on display from a high percentage of people, other folks really like baking bread.
It does run into a few problems. We burn people out a bit often, and when we do we often can't replace them at prices people are happy with. We don't have as clear a signal on what's important to do as we might like, because there isn't a measurable signal coming in.
I'm not making an argument that we should change from being a gift economy. I have this buried anthropologist inside me that just wants to say out loud what's going on, because it's a useful Rosetta stone for understanding how many awesome parts of the community manage to exist in defiance of anything market shaped.
It's also useful to notice when something should shift from gift to market. There comes a scale of Solstice where the venue isn't someone's living room any more and it expects to be paid. At some stage of an organization's life and goals, it's better to swap to paying people a salary to work there.
And I think gift economies are easy to misunderstand if you're coming with a market mindset. You really can just eat the food at your local house party unless the host specifically says otherwise. It's not an explicit trade where you have to give the right sort of gift back. We do a lot of 'pass it forward' around here. If you haven't been in a gift economy, if you're used to having to earn each inch and settle the tab by the end of the night, you can relax a bit.
(Some people should reverse advice they hear, including this advice.)
Anyone want to try and change my mind?