I donated $1000. Originally I was worried that this is a bottomless money-pit, but looking at the cost breakdown, it’s actually very reasonable. If Oliver is right that Lighthaven funds itself apart from the labor cost, then the real costs are $500k for the hosting, software and accounting cost of LessWrong (this is probably an unavoidable cost and seems obviously worthy of being philanthropically funded), plus paying 4 people (equivalent to 65% of 6 people) to work on LW moderation and upkeep (it’s an unavoidable cost to have some people working on LW, 4 seems probably reasonable, and this is also something that obviously should be funded), plus paying 2 people to keep Lighthaven running (given the surplus value Lighthaven generates, it seems reasonable to fund this), plus a one-time cost of 1 million to fund the initial cost of Lighthaven (I’m not super convinced it was a good decision to abandon the old Lightcone offices for Lighthaven, but I guess it made sense in the funding environment of the time, and once we made this decision, it would be silly not to fund the last 1 million of initial cost before Lighthaven becomes self-funded). So altogether I agree that this is a great thing to fund and it’s very unfortunate that some of the large funders can’t contribute anymore.
(All of this relies on the hope that Lighthaven actually becomes self-funded next year. If it keeps producing big losses, then I think the funding case will become substantially worse. But I expect Oliver’s estimates to be largely trustworthy, and we can still decide to decrease funding in later years if it turns out Lighthaven isn’t financially sustainable.)
then the real costs are $500k for the hosting and hosting cost of LessWrong
Raw server costs for LW are more like ~$120k (and to be clear, you could drive this lower with some engineering, though you would have to pay for that engineering cost). See the relevant line in the budget I posted.
Total labor cost for the ~4 people working on LW is closer to ~$800k, instead of the $500k you mention.
(I’m not super convinced it was a good decision to abandon the old Lightcone offices for Lighthaven, but I guess it made sense in the funding environment of the time, and once we made this decision, it would be silly not to fund the last 1 million of initial cost before Lighthaven becomes self-funded).
Lighthaven is actually cheaper (if you look at total cost) than the old Lightcone offices. Those also cost on the order of $1M per year, and were much smaller, though of course we could have recouped a bunch of that if we had started charging for more things. But cost-savings were actually a reason for Lighthaven, since according to our estimates, the mortgage and rent payments would end up quite comparable per square foot.
I fixed some misunderstandable parts, I meant the $500k being the LW hosting + Software subscriptions and the Dedicated software + accounting stuff together. And I didn’t mean to imply that the labor cost of the 4 people is $500k, that was a separate term in the costs.
Is Lighthaven still cheaper if we take into account the initial funding spent on it in 2022 and 2023? I was under the impression that buying Lighthaven is one of the things that made a lot of sense when the community believed it would have access to FTX funding, and once we bought it, it makes sense to keep it, but we wouldn’t have bought it once FTX was out of the game. But in case this was a misunderstanding and Lighthaven saves money in the long run compared to the previous option, that’s great news.
I fixed some misunderstandable parts, I meant the $500k being the LW hosting + Software subscriptions and the Dedicated software + accounting stuff together. And I didn’t mean to imply that the labor cost of the 4 people is $500k, that was a separate term in the costs.
Ah yeah, I did misunderstand you there. Makes sense now.
Is Lighthaven still cheaper if we take into account the initial funding spent on it in 2022 and 2023?
It’s tricky because a lot of that is capital investment, and it’s extremely unclear what the resell price of Lighthaven would end up being if we ended up trying to sell, since we renovated it in a pretty unconventional way.
Total renovations cost around ~$7M-$8M. About $3.5M of that was funded as part of the mortgage from Jaan Tallinn, and another $1.2M of that was used to buy a property right next to Lighthaven which we are hoping to take out an additional mortgage on (see footnote #3), and which we currently own in full. The remaining ~$3M largely came from SFF and Open Phil funding. We also lost a total of around ~$1.5M in net operating costs so far. Since the property is super hard to value, let’s estimate the value of the property after our renovations at our current mortgage value ($20M).[1]
During the same time, the Lightcone Offices would have cost around $2M, so if you view the value we provided in the meantime as roughly equivalent, we are out around $2.5M, but also, property prices tend to increase over time at least some amount, so by default we’ve probably recouped some fraction of that in appreciated property values, and will continue to recoup more as we break even.
My honest guess is that Lighthaven would make sense even without FTX, from an ex-post perspective, but that if we hadn’t have had FTX there wouldn’t have been remotely enough risk appetite for it to get funded ex-ante. I think in many worlds Lighthaven turned out much worse than it did (and for example, renovation costs already ended up in the like 85th percentile of my estimates due to much more extensive water and mold damage than I was expecting in the mainline).
I think this is a potentially controversial choice, though I think it makes sense. I think most buyers would not be willing to pay remotely as much for the venue as that, since they would basically aim to return the property back to its standard hotel usage, and throw away most of our improvements, probably putting the property value at something like $15M. But I think our success of running the space as a conference venue suggests to me that someone else should also be able to tap into that, for e.g. weddings or corporate events, and I think that establishes the $20M as a more reasonable mean, but I think reasonable people could disagree with this.
I donated $1000. Originally I was worried that this is a bottomless money-pit, but looking at the cost breakdown, it’s actually very reasonable. If Oliver is right that Lighthaven funds itself apart from the labor cost, then the real costs are $500k for the hosting, software and accounting cost of LessWrong (this is probably an unavoidable cost and seems obviously worthy of being philanthropically funded), plus paying 4 people (equivalent to 65% of 6 people) to work on LW moderation and upkeep (it’s an unavoidable cost to have some people working on LW, 4 seems probably reasonable, and this is also something that obviously should be funded), plus paying 2 people to keep Lighthaven running (given the surplus value Lighthaven generates, it seems reasonable to fund this), plus a one-time cost of 1 million to fund the initial cost of Lighthaven (I’m not super convinced it was a good decision to abandon the old Lightcone offices for Lighthaven, but I guess it made sense in the funding environment of the time, and once we made this decision, it would be silly not to fund the last 1 million of initial cost before Lighthaven becomes self-funded). So altogether I agree that this is a great thing to fund and it’s very unfortunate that some of the large funders can’t contribute anymore.
(All of this relies on the hope that Lighthaven actually becomes self-funded next year. If it keeps producing big losses, then I think the funding case will become substantially worse. But I expect Oliver’s estimates to be largely trustworthy, and we can still decide to decrease funding in later years if it turns out Lighthaven isn’t financially sustainable.)
Thank you so much!
Some quick comments:
Raw server costs for LW are more like ~$120k (and to be clear, you could drive this lower with some engineering, though you would have to pay for that engineering cost). See the relevant line in the budget I posted.
Total labor cost for the ~4 people working on LW is closer to ~$800k, instead of the $500k you mention.
Lighthaven is actually cheaper (if you look at total cost) than the old Lightcone offices. Those also cost on the order of $1M per year, and were much smaller, though of course we could have recouped a bunch of that if we had started charging for more things. But cost-savings were actually a reason for Lighthaven, since according to our estimates, the mortgage and rent payments would end up quite comparable per square foot.
Again, thank you a lot.
I fixed some misunderstandable parts, I meant the $500k being the LW hosting + Software subscriptions and the Dedicated software + accounting stuff together. And I didn’t mean to imply that the labor cost of the 4 people is $500k, that was a separate term in the costs.
Is Lighthaven still cheaper if we take into account the initial funding spent on it in 2022 and 2023? I was under the impression that buying Lighthaven is one of the things that made a lot of sense when the community believed it would have access to FTX funding, and once we bought it, it makes sense to keep it, but we wouldn’t have bought it once FTX was out of the game. But in case this was a misunderstanding and Lighthaven saves money in the long run compared to the previous option, that’s great news.
Ah yeah, I did misunderstand you there. Makes sense now.
It’s tricky because a lot of that is capital investment, and it’s extremely unclear what the resell price of Lighthaven would end up being if we ended up trying to sell, since we renovated it in a pretty unconventional way.
Total renovations cost around ~$7M-$8M. About $3.5M of that was funded as part of the mortgage from Jaan Tallinn, and another $1.2M of that was used to buy a property right next to Lighthaven which we are hoping to take out an additional mortgage on (see footnote #3), and which we currently own in full. The remaining ~$3M largely came from SFF and Open Phil funding. We also lost a total of around ~$1.5M in net operating costs so far. Since the property is super hard to value, let’s estimate the value of the property after our renovations at our current mortgage value ($20M).[1]
During the same time, the Lightcone Offices would have cost around $2M, so if you view the value we provided in the meantime as roughly equivalent, we are out around $2.5M, but also, property prices tend to increase over time at least some amount, so by default we’ve probably recouped some fraction of that in appreciated property values, and will continue to recoup more as we break even.
My honest guess is that Lighthaven would make sense even without FTX, from an ex-post perspective, but that if we hadn’t have had FTX there wouldn’t have been remotely enough risk appetite for it to get funded ex-ante. I think in many worlds Lighthaven turned out much worse than it did (and for example, renovation costs already ended up in the like 85th percentile of my estimates due to much more extensive water and mold damage than I was expecting in the mainline).
I think this is a potentially controversial choice, though I think it makes sense. I think most buyers would not be willing to pay remotely as much for the venue as that, since they would basically aim to return the property back to its standard hotel usage, and throw away most of our improvements, probably putting the property value at something like $15M. But I think our success of running the space as a conference venue suggests to me that someone else should also be able to tap into that, for e.g. weddings or corporate events, and I think that establishes the $20M as a more reasonable mean, but I think reasonable people could disagree with this.