Thank you!
My sense is that bringing Lighthaven revenue-paying business that improves on their outside option is as good as some size of donation, but I'm not sure about the exact fungibility surface. Still, if you're thinking about donating, maybe think about also organizing an event! It'll cost nonnegative money, as good things often do, but I predict your event will probably go well, especially if it's for people outside the usual attendee set.
Yes, this is very true. Honestly it wouldn't surprise me if for many weeks this year I would trade event revenue to donations at a mere 0.7 multiplier for bigger events (i.e. getting us a $100k event rental is as good getting us a $70k donations), and a 0.4-0.6 multiplier for smaller events (i.e. getting us a $40k event rental is as good as getting us a ~$15k donation).
I expect this to be less true in future years, as this year is the first time our summer will not have MATS taking place at Lighthaven, which means we have a lot of extra availability for events. This means the opportunity cost for an event on a weekend might approach something very low, and so the value of adding an event there ends up very high.
So yes, if you know an organization or project or group of people that might want to run something at Lighthaven, please introduce them to me, or reach out. It really would help us a lot.
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1Huh, yeah, seems reasonable as another "extremely rough Fermi estimate" anchor point!
Given very different norms of LW and EAF I don’t really know how to make this work. I think it’s kind of rare that people want to crosspost comments, and the risks from making it easy outweigh the benefits.
Yeah, I agree with this. I think they are generally decent on comments, but some users really spam them on posts. It’s on my list to improve the UI for that.
Huh, I never knew that term had any such narrowly construed meaning. Good to know! Given that, I agree that this is a bad name for the thing Ray is talking about.
I agree it is technically an evaluation of our cost-effectiveness! Though not much more than generic insults are, which I wouldn't feel much of a need to link. I think it was reasonable for you to link it here, and also don't think it makes sense to include it in the post.
Running Less Wrong doesn't (have to) cost 1.4M per year. It's a website. Websites of this scale can be run at 1/10th the cost, or even 1/100th the cost if you're frugal. Having extremely onerous community management practices is a choice you're making.
This is just really not true. LessWrong is a software project of substantial complexity, with a substantially large user-base. I don't know any other platform that does anything remotely similar to what LessWrong does and supposedly would run at anything like 1/100th or 1/10th the cost.
Of course, if you just grab a forum software off-the-shelf and don't bother moderating then you can run things much cheaper, but this is a strategy that generally does not work, and does not produce anything with the cultural or social impact of something like LessWrong. Online forums have been declining across the board for decades. There exist very few alive and growing internet forums. It is an exceptionally difficult task to make a thing like LessWrong grow and to continue producing a huge amount of research and intellectual contributions when your competitors are hyper-optimized social media platforms.
The problem that LessWrong is trying to solve does not have an off-the-shelf solution. Of course it would be great if it had, and in that case the high cost would be born by whoever developed that off-the-shelf solution, but there really isn't one.
It's a website.
I mean, Facebook is a website. Google is a website. ChatGPT is a website. Airtable is a website. Figma is a website. I don't really know what this means. More than 10% of U.S. GDP is spent on "websites". As a category they are not cheap to run, and the software behind them is not easy or cheap to build. I am not saying there are no valid critiques to make here, but the reference class of "website" is certainly not particularly helpful here.
For some more discussion on these topics see last year's fundraiser post comments:
- CowardlyPersonUsingPseudonym proposing we cut salaries in half
- Czynski strongly endorsing Lighthaven but not LessWrong
- David Matolsci discussing the funding breakdown of Lightcone
- Mixed praise and critique by abstractapplic
If someone believes that a large part of your value is in hosting LW, and what you do outside this pales in importance (or may even be negative!), then there's a bundling issue for that person. It's impossible to donate to the upkeep of LW without donating to all that other stuff, correct?
Yep, it's a bundling problem, though a pretty common one. You can't invest in Deepmind, you can only buy Google stock. In general organizations benefit a lot from the ability to re-allocate resources between different projects. I certainly don't want to commit to not investing in new projects.
Like, from a decision-making perspective it's not even clear how accepting funds just for the purpose of donating to LW would work. Money is fungible, and as long as we receive fewer funds earmarked such than what we are planning to spend on LW anyways, this wouldn't really affect our decisions at all, and I think it's very unlikely we would end up receiving more funds than that.
I do care non-trivially about what our donors think and so saying you would like us to spend more resources on LW is a good thing to say at the same time as you donate!
Makes sense! Options like giving what we can regranting seem to work for a bunch of people but maybe they aren't willing to do it for lightcone?
GWWC wasn't accepting new applications for organizations to sponsor this way last time I checked a few months ago. I asked them to let me know when they do, and haven't heard back, but I should ping them again and double check!
Yep, agree that it's better to be funded by a collection of 20+ disagreeable frontier lab employees than 100% Open Phil, but I do also pretty intensely regret relying so much on Open Phil funding, so this is compatible with my state of belief.
I think social group beliefs are generally very correlated with each other, and think it will likely be the case that if we rely very heavily on frontier lab employee funding that there will be a lot of implicit pressure that will be backed by a threat of successful coordination to not fund us if we disagree.
(Also, to give a bit more context on my thinking here, I currently think that it's fine for us to accept funding from Deepmind safety employees without counting towards this bucket, largely because my sense is the social coordination across the pond here is much less intense, and generally the Deepmind safety team has struck me as the most independent from the harsh financial incentives here to date)
Ah, this is a great point. I will update the text of the article with some guidance to this effect.
Agree it would be good to set up some better way for small to medium UK based donors to donate tax deductibly, but haven't found a good way of doing so that wouldn't cost me 40+ hours.
Thank you! And am glad to hear the trend of the amount of cognitive dissonance involved in donating to us is going down!