Habryka says I'm too poor for the gazebo. But perhaps if I can recruit some friends to scheme...

Other more sophisticated options are left as an exercise to the reader.

Lightcone-branded tenements, of course.

In particular Baltimore has a rationalist community a decade old, and it's in driving distance of Vibecamp, ManifestxDC, and an annual Secular Solstice. 

Seconding Maryland. There are rationalist clusters in Rockville and Baltimore. You're within public transit or driving distance of frequent EA events and occasional rationalist events in DC. There are twice-annual local Solstices, sometimes also a less legible EA one, and other fledging rationalist holidays.

There's great connectivity. Philadelphia is nearby, about as close as Sacramento is to San Francisco, and New York is a train ride away. There's an excellent airport and two other airports in the area, with direct flights to SF and other places.

Good jobs are available, with interesting and important work to do, for both genders of rationalists (programmers and not). If you don't mind commuting into DC, you can help run the world.

This is an admission against interest. I live in Virginia, inside the DC-area ring road. I've tried to get critical mass for casual regularly recurring things in DC, but find myself driving to Maryland much more often. As Berkeley is to San Francisco, Rockville and Baltimore are to Washington DC.

I intend to donate an amount on the order of $5k.

This is several percent of my income, it works out to roughly two weeks of my labor. I could tell a story about how the ideas developed by this website improve my productivity by at least that amount. I could mention that I bought the appreciated stock I am donating because of a few specific posts about noticing confusion and market prices. The gratitude framing would hold together, but it's not the real reason.

I notice that I have reinvested far more than two weeks of my time this year into the community. I spent two weeks at Lighthaven specifically. I had the seed of an idea in a comfy Lighthaven nook, then gathered some friends in Glass Hall and developed it. I let Eneasz peer pressure me into doing a podcast, wrote it up in my first LessWrong post, then expanded those ideas into conference talks at LessOnline, Manifest, and EA Global NYC. I attended a ridiculous number of meetups, info sessions, discussion groups, "happy hours" both with and without alcohol, developing nuanced preferences between partiful, luma, and eventbrite. I helped edit and promote a book. And schemed to put on a conference locally, with the express intent of Lighthaven-pilling my friends.

I did not have time to do all this. I'm so tired, my apartment is a mess, I'm way behind on my to-do list, my personal life has suffered, and my coworkers have started making jokes about how much time I'm spending in Berkeley. I'm also drug tested more frequently, though I'm sure that's coincidental. So I don't think I can make the "thanks for the productivity hack" case with a straight face.

The real reason I'm donating is that I think we're on to something here. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to stop thinking about these topics. I'm excited to contribute in my small way to the infrastructure and the ideas. I expect my gratitude to date will pale in comparison to how this place and this community benefit us all in the future.

In the ‘future plans’ section of your 2024 fundraising post, you briefly mentioned slowly building out an FHI-of-the-west as one of the things for which you wish you had the time & funding.

I think this is happening, albeit slowly and piecemeal. There are several resident scholars at Lighthaven now, and I know some writers who have used the equivalent of "visiting scholar" positions at Lighthaven as a first step in moving to the Bay full-time. It might be worth making this more legible, though I can imagine counterarguments too.

Yeah, I went looking for the decompression zone and didn't find it. Gave up and talked to the crowd instead.

Most of our events aren't open access!

I suspect there's a growing list of tech folks a few degrees of separation away from the community who've started coming to Lighthaven events. I met several people at the Solstice afterparty who did not even know that it was an afterparty for another event at all. 

I am also pretty confused who would show up to the afterparty to mock Solstice. What a weird move.

Followed up with DM. 

Thank you for running Solstice this year, and for starting this tradition.

It's been several days, but I still don't know how I feel about it. My thoughts seem too disorganized and contradictory to fit in the feedback form, though I did try. 

Emotional Arc

I watched the livestream of the 2022 Bay Solstice, and came in person to the 2024 Bay Solstice. I found them both to be really moving, each a useful call to action in their own way. You warned us that Solstice this year would be unusually dark. I took that seriously, and braced myself. 

This year's solstice was difficult to bear. The middle hour was particularly painful for me, surfacing grief and anger that I thought I had processed. The uplift section at the end felt more intellectual than emotional. Ordinarily that might be a good fit for me. In context it landed like a pale imitation, weakly argued, compared to what came before. 

I left 2024's solstice with a sense of defiance, spurred to do my part with righteous indignation against the laws of nature that offend my values. I left 2025's angry and sad. Depression as a service.

I recognize a lot of this is particular to me, but felt I should share the data point.

Overall I'm glad this year's version existed. I'm glad you ran this experiment, I appreciate the artistic strength and coherence. But I think it wasn't for me. I probably shouldn't come to future versions that are similarly dark, unless I'm starting from a significantly better place emotionally.

Afterparty

I found the afterparty particularly infuriating. I went looking for the decompression sessions, found Damon briefly, but didn't really find my way in. Instead I talked to people and eavesdropped on loud public conversations. I feel I got a reasonably representative sample of the crowd. Most of the people I heard from at the afterparty had not been to Solstice. Several didn't even know what it was. 

The people who came only for the afterparty varied widely in motivation. One person told me they left Solstice after ten minutes because the tone wasn't for them, but came to the afterparty to discuss, which I admired. Several others knew Solstice wasn't for them but wanted to see friends who were in town--fair enough. 

A vocal minority thought Solstice was dumb and cringe and came to the afterparty to mock it in person. I'm still baffled by this. It was Saturday night in one of the world's greatest cities. There were other places to be. What sort of person chooses to go to an afterparty for an event they despise? If you dislike and disrespect people trying to process emotions from this ritual, why choose to spend time with them? I don't think we should welcome those who consider that a fun evening out.

I suspect this is a growing problem with Lighthaven events. 

Did the new/updated Fooming Shoggoth songs ever get posted somewhere other than Suno? Pinging for Solstice afterparty interest this weekend. @davekasten has specific preferences about which version of these songs to play, which are difficult to fulfil. 

Survey surveyed