I donated $500. I get a lot of value from the website and think it’s important for both the rationalist and AI safety communities. Two related things prevented me from donating more:
Though it’s the website which I find important, as I understand it, the majority of this money will go towards supporting Lighthaven.
I could easily imagine, if I were currently in Berkeley, finding Lighthaven more important. My guess is that in general folks in Berkeley / the Bay Area will tend to value Lighthaven more highly than folks elsewhere. Whether this is because of Berkeley folks overvaluing it or the rest of us undervaluing, I’m not sure. Probably a bit of both.
To me, this suggests unbundling the two rather different activities.
Sustainability going forward. It’s not clear to me that Lightcone is financially sustainable, in fact the numbers in this post make it look like it’s not (due to the loss of funders), barring some very large donations. I worry that the future of LW will be endangered by the financial burden of Lighthaven.
ETA: On reflection, I think some large donors will probably step in to prevent bankruptcy, though (a) I think there’s a good chance Lightcone will then be stuck in perpetual fundraising mode, and (b) that belief of course calls into question the value of smaller donations like mine.
Though it’s the website which I find important, as I understand it, the majority of this money will go towards supporting Lighthaven.
I think this is backwards! As you can see in the budget I posted here, and also look at the “Economics of Lighthaven” section, Lighthaven itself is actually surprisingly close to financially breaking even. If you ignore our deferred 2024 interest payment, my guess is we will overall either lose or gain some relatively small amount on net (like $100k).
Most of the cost in that budget comes from LessWrong and our other generalist activities. At least right now, I think you should be more worried about the future of Lighthaven being endangered by the financial burden of LessWrong (and in the long run, I think it’s reasonably likely that LessWrong will end up in part funded by revenue from Lighthaven).
I originally missed that the “Expected Income” of $2.55M from the budget means “Expected Income of Lighthaven” and consequently had the same misconception as Joel that donations mostly go towards subsidizing Lighthaven rather than almost entirely toward supporting the website in expectation.
as I understand it, the majority of this money will go towards supporting Lighthaven
I think if you take Habryka’s numbers at face value, a hair under half of the money this year will go to Lighthaven (35% of core staff salaries@1.4M = 0.49M. 1M for a deferred interest payment. And then the claim that otherwise Lighthaven is breaking even). And in future years, well less than half.
I worry that the future of LW will be endangered by the financial burden of Lighthaven
I think this is a reasonable worry, but I again want to note that Habryka is projecting a neutral or positive cashflow from Lighthaven to the org.
That said, I can think of a couple of reasons for financial pessimism[1]. Having Lighthaven is riskier. It involves a bunch of hard-to-avoid costs. So, if Lighthaven has a bad year, that does indeed endanger the project as a whole.
Another reason to be worried: Lightcone might stop trying to make Lighthaven break even. Lightcone is currently fairly focused on using Lighthaven in revenue-producing ways. My guess is that we’ll always try and structure stuff at Lighthaven such that it pays its own way (for example, when we ran LessOnline we sold tickets[2]). But maybe not! Maybe Lightcone will pivot Lighthaven to a loss-making plan, because it foresees greater altruistic benefit (and expects to be able to fundraise to cover it).
So the bundling of the two projects still leaks some risk.
Of course, you might also think Lighthaven makes LessWrong more financially robust, if on the mainline it ends up producing a modest profit that can be used to subsidise LessWrong.
My understanding of the numbers is that we lost money once you take into account staff time, but broke even if you don’t. And it seems the people most involved with running it are hopeful about cutting a bunch of costs in future.
I donated $500. I get a lot of value from the website and think it’s important for both the rationalist and AI safety communities. Two related things prevented me from donating more:
Though it’s the website which I find important, as I understand it, the majority of this money will go towards supporting Lighthaven.
I could easily imagine, if I were currently in Berkeley, finding Lighthaven more important. My guess is that in general folks in Berkeley / the Bay Area will tend to value Lighthaven more highly than folks elsewhere. Whether this is because of Berkeley folks overvaluing it or the rest of us undervaluing, I’m not sure. Probably a bit of both.
To me, this suggests unbundling the two rather different activities.
Sustainability going forward. It’s not clear to me that Lightcone is financially sustainable, in fact the numbers in this post make it look like it’s not (due to the loss of funders), barring some very large donations. I worry that the future of LW will be endangered by the financial burden of Lighthaven.
ETA: On reflection, I think some large donors will probably step in to prevent bankruptcy, though (a) I think there’s a good chance Lightcone will then be stuck in perpetual fundraising mode, and (b) that belief of course calls into question the value of smaller donations like mine.
I think this is backwards! As you can see in the budget I posted here, and also look at the “Economics of Lighthaven” section, Lighthaven itself is actually surprisingly close to financially breaking even. If you ignore our deferred 2024 interest payment, my guess is we will overall either lose or gain some relatively small amount on net (like $100k).
Most of the cost in that budget comes from LessWrong and our other generalist activities. At least right now, I think you should be more worried about the future of Lighthaven being endangered by the financial burden of LessWrong (and in the long run, I think it’s reasonably likely that LessWrong will end up in part funded by revenue from Lighthaven).
Thanks for this! I just doubled my donation because of this answer and @kave’s.
FWIW a lot of my understanding that Lighthaven was a burden comes from this section:
I initially read this as $3m for three interest payments. (Maybe change the wording so 2 and 3 don’t both mention the interest payment?)
I originally missed that the “Expected Income” of $2.55M from the budget means “Expected Income of Lighthaven” and consequently had the same misconception as Joel that donations mostly go towards subsidizing Lighthaven rather than almost entirely toward supporting the website in expectation.
Aah, that makes sense. I will update the row to say “Expected Lighthaven Income”
I think if you take Habryka’s numbers at face value, a hair under half of the money this year will go to Lighthaven (35% of core staff salaries@1.4M = 0.49M. 1M for a deferred interest payment. And then the claim that otherwise Lighthaven is breaking even). And in future years, well less than half.
I think this is a reasonable worry, but I again want to note that Habryka is projecting a neutral or positive cashflow from Lighthaven to the org.
That said, I can think of a couple of reasons for financial pessimism[1]. Having Lighthaven is riskier. It involves a bunch of hard-to-avoid costs. So, if Lighthaven has a bad year, that does indeed endanger the project as a whole.
Another reason to be worried: Lightcone might stop trying to make Lighthaven break even. Lightcone is currently fairly focused on using Lighthaven in revenue-producing ways. My guess is that we’ll always try and structure stuff at Lighthaven such that it pays its own way (for example, when we ran LessOnline we sold tickets[2]). But maybe not! Maybe Lightcone will pivot Lighthaven to a loss-making plan, because it foresees greater altruistic benefit (and expects to be able to fundraise to cover it).
So the bundling of the two projects still leaks some risk.
Of course, you might also think Lighthaven makes LessWrong more financially robust, if on the mainline it ends up producing a modest profit that can be used to subsidise LessWrong.
Other than just doubting Habryka’s projections, which also might make sense.
My understanding of the numbers is that we lost money once you take into account staff time, but broke even if you don’t. And it seems the people most involved with running it are hopeful about cutting a bunch of costs in future.