(I've got three different comments wearing three different hats; I'll make them all at the top level.)
Comment Hat #2: Serial project organizer
This is a question for Oliver, though I figured it'd be more useful to us and others to have the discussion in public rather than private messages: If a project in the greater "rage, rage against the civilizational inadequacy" space (but not AI) [1] would benefit from Lightcone's web design services, under what conditions would it be positive for you to be involved?
e.g., "If you can pay market rate for us to design a high-quality site for browsing [content], that brings us surplus in cash by applying resources that are marginally cheap for us to use" or "That might advance our mission but won't help our finances, so it's a topic skew to fundraising" or "If it's not about AI, it's likely not above the waterline for our work, even at market rate, but I'll hear you out offline."
I'm asking in the role of an advisor to a funded project that currently has a hole shaped like "build a site to do [technically easy but nontrivial thing] to present information useful to society for [goal]"; I'm wondering if it's more of a distraction to pitch Lightcone on contracting for the engineering work, or more of a boon, or something else entirely.
What's your least-favorite governmental regulation? Mine holds back the medical innovation that we would need to have a well-stocked pharma toolbox against future pandemics, and the project I have in mind aims to take a chip out of that inadequacy. ↩︎
(I've got three different comments wearing three different hats; I'll make them all at the top level.)
Comment Hat #1: Reviewer, organizer, potential donor
I'm not donating to Lightcone this year, as I'm not donating directly to anything (other than hard-dollar politics) while my family is in an unsettled financial state. I'm also personally litigating against the FTX estate to unblock a six-figure donation they'd previously promised to a different EA org, which produces a long tail of considerations that make other donations somewhat complicated right now. [[1]]
However, little has changed my overall opinion from last year:
I believe there is a strong case for considering a donation to Lightcone to be among the best opportunities in “close to home” effective-altruist community building. (I’ll leave it to your judgment how that cause area segment compares to others.) In a world barely different from this one, I expect I would donate between $1,000 and $5,000 to their general fundraiser this year.
I also ran a 48-hour private event as Lighthaven (as well as co-running a public one) this year. Our guests (most of them from far outside the extended Lightcone social network) were impressed by the venue and how well the venue worked to promote serendipitous meetings and re-meetings over a long weekend event. Two couples attending with children noted that, once there was an on-site room organized as the "baby nap room", it was an excellent venue for a baby-inclusive event, which made me very pleased. (My co-organizer has a longer post reflecting on our event; I'll let her post it rather than stealing her commentary further.)
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.
Counsel for the estate in fact mentioned ties between a co-defedant and Lighthaven in their argument against our case for the donation. Our response to that was-- well, my counsel would rather I say "our filed papers speak for themselves". As indeed they do. ↩︎
It might!
In case it would also help to have two-to-three Harvard and/or MIT professors who work on exactly this topic to write supporting letters or talk with your school board, I'll bet money at $1:$1 that I could arrange that. Or I'll give emails and a warm intro for free.
With respect, I think that's wrong.
If all parents agree that school A is better than B, but parent 1 cares much more about A>B than parent 2 does, then the sum-of-utilities is different (so, not "zero sum") depending on whether [ 1→A; 2→B ] or [ 1→B; 2→A ]. Every change in outcomes leads to someone losing (compared to the counterfactual), but the payoffs aren't zero-sum.
That example is kind of useless, but if you have three parents and three schools (and even if parents agree on order), but each of the parents care about A>B and B>C in different ratios, then you can use that fact to engineer a lottery where all three parents are better off than if you assigned them to schools uniformly at random. (Sketch of construction: Start with equal probabilities, and let parents trade some percentage of "upgrade C to B" for some (different?) percentage of "upgrade B to A" with each other. If they have different ratios of their A>B and B>C preferences, positive-sum trades exist.)
Then, in theory, a set of parents cooperating could implement this lottery on their own and agree to apply just to their lottery-assigned school, and if they don't defect in the prisoners' dilemma then they all benefit. Not zero-sum.
Of course, it can also be the case that they value different schools different amounts and a bad mechanism can lead to an inefficient allocation (where pairs would just be better off switching), and I could construct such an example if this margin weren't too narrow to contain it.
It is separately the case that if the administrators have meta-preferences over what parents' preferences get satisfied, then they can make a choice of mechanisms ("play the metagame", as you put it) that give better / worse / differently-distributed results with respect to their meta-preferences.
While the zero-sum nature is unavoidable
I believe this is false as stated:
While 'zero-sum' is correct in a loose colloquial sense that at least one person has to lose something for any group to improve, I think it's actually important to realize that there are mechanisms that improve overall welfare -- and so the system administrators should be trying to find them!
You cite the Gale-Shapley papers, but are you aware that the school-choice mechanism you described is called the "Boston mechanism" in the field of mechanism design? Because, well, it was also the system in place at Boston Public Schools (until the early 2000s, when they changed to a Gale-Shapley algorithm).
Pathak and Sonmez (2008) is the usual citation on the topic, and they find (as you suggest) that the change makes the most "sophisticated" parent-players worse off, but the least-sophisticated better off.
Think of it as your own little lesson in irreversible consequences of appealing actions, maybe? Rather than a fully-realistic element.
(I've got three different comments wearing three different hats; I'll make them all at the top level.)
Comment Hat #3: Involved in an adjacent project to one sub-project mentioned
If I'm being honest, I'm less interested in Lightcone doing this than the other things you've listed. I have a natural bias here, though, as a board member of Manifund, another org in the ecosystem that is interested in (1) running experiments in fund-allocation processes and (2) building bespoke financial infrastructure for unique needs in the community.
I suspect that if we talked for long enough about it, I'd end up believing that:
I'd definitely be interested in hearing about Oliver's thoughts along these lines (here, or in meeting with me / Austin / Manifund's board, or wherever).