(Happy to reactivate your account, though I think you can also do it yourself)

I do not know. I asked them for a donation link, they said they just wanted people to email. I agree that this is a trivial inconvenience that will reduce donations, but in this case it’s not my call.

Yeah, seems like a reasonable critique. In general I feel confused how to best do this kind of social proof. I know that many (especially lower-context) donors care a lot about it, but it’s hard to communicate the exact level of endorsement in an email that already was straining the lengths of what is reasonable to send out to lower-context people.

On reflection, I feel like I shouldn’t have put you on the list, given that the $1,000 feels too small to be called “unusually large”.

Yes! We now have tax-deductability in Germany via effektiv-spenden. Just send an email to me (habryka@lightconeinfrastructure.com) and Johanna Schröder (johanna.schroeder@effektiv-spenden.org) and we'll send you payment details, and you get those sweet sweet government tax reductions.

Well, to be clear, that too has been solidly falsified. Gemini seems plenty capable of making sense of information on the web.

Lol, I am sorry about the fundraising email. It was really quite embarrassing.

(Context, a recent fundraising email I sent out to a bunch of old LessWrong accounts had unsubscribe links that pointed to localhost:3000 instead of lesswrong.com, which of course is the most important link not to break)

The graphs here say the number of monthly users is ~4000. If you disqualify the ~half of those who are students, lurkers, drive-by posters, third-worlders, or people who just forgot their wallet . . . that implies ~$1000, per person, per year, to run a web forum. (Contrast the Something Awful forums, which famously sustain themselves with a one-time entry fee of $10-$25 per person (plus some ads shown to the people who only paid $10).)

Oops, sorry, I just realized I am displaying the metrics in the most counterintuitive way. I will update that tonight (I focused on illustrating the trend and so didn't check the intuitiveness of the exact numbers). 

The current metrics show you monthly averages of weekly values, not monthly values directly. The number of active logged in users is more like 10k, and similarly the number of monthly logged-in post views is more like 120k. That is not at all obvious from the graphs, and I will fix it ASAP.

The other big thing to emphasize is of course that the vast majority of engagement with LessWrong happens logged out. LessWrong as a website gets about 2.5 million unique users per year, and more like 230,000 monthly active users which is of course a lot more than 10,000.

Given that the US taxes income everywhere in the world for citizens, I am pretty sure you could at least offset any donations from your US taxes. And then my best guess is you could get out of the same taxes in Australia given various tax treaties, but I am not confident. I would ask Claude or ChatGPT for a rough guidance.

Yeah, the average is around $190k or so. It's brought up by one ~$300k salary for our CTO (who before he joined us made $400k+), and the median is ~$160k.

In general our salary policy policy has been "70% of your conservative industry salary in a kind of similar job". This means the people on the generalist team have concretely worked for ~1.4x their current salary, or gotten concrete job offers for 1.4x their current salary, or when I asked some independent evaluators with industry experience had their salary estimated at 1.4x their current salary. 

The generalists at Lightcone are pretty competent, so their opportunity cost is high, and as I mentioned in other places, I don't think it makes sense for people to sacrifice more than 30% of their salary to work on these things.

Oh no, alas. Of course those were supposed to be www.lesswrong.com/emailToken/$TOKEN. 

I had to rig up some things in a slightly unusual way and apparently missed this URL transformation. It's particularly annoying since I did double and triple-check every other link in that email. 

Not much to do now, I think sending another email to everyone as follow-up would be more spammy.