Coming here from your email. It’s great to see so much thought and effort go into trying to make an evidence-based case for asking for public donations, which I think is rare to see.
A question that occurs is that the donations chart seems to show that <$1M/year of donations were needed up to 2020 (I can’t read off precise figures) - let’s say it would be $1M/yr today after adding inflation. The site metrics seem to have been on solid upward trends by then, so it seems like it was at least possible to run LessWrong well on that budget. Would it be fair to say that LessWrong could be run with that much donated income? And Lighthaven too (since you seem to think Lighthaven will pay for itself)? You say that now 2025 spending will be ~$3M and expenses will be ~$2M/yr after that. I couldn’t follow what is the extra spending above 2020 levels getting?
PS It was fiddly to go back and forth between numbers/charts in the post to try to make sense of and crosscheck them and to check I was using the correct numbers here—I kept misremembering where I’d seen a piece of info and having to scroll around—perhaps making it easy to add a contents section with clickable links to section headings would be valuable for easing navigation of long posts!
Coming here from your email. It’s great to see so much thought and effort go into trying to make an evidence-based case for asking for public donations, which I think is rare to see.
A question that occurs is that the donations chart seems to show that <$1M/year of donations were needed up to 2020 (I can’t read off precise figures) - let’s say it would be $1M/yr today after adding inflation. The site metrics seem to have been on solid upward trends by then, so it seems like it was at least possible to run LessWrong well on that budget. Would it be fair to say that LessWrong could be run with that much donated income? And Lighthaven too (since you seem to think Lighthaven will pay for itself)? You say that now 2025 spending will be ~$3M and expenses will be ~$2M/yr after that. I couldn’t follow what is the extra spending above 2020 levels getting?
PS It was fiddly to go back and forth between numbers/charts in the post to try to make sense of and crosscheck them and to check I was using the correct numbers here—I kept misremembering where I’d seen a piece of info and having to scroll around—perhaps making it easy to add a contents section with clickable links to section headings would be valuable for easing navigation of long posts!