Retrospectives are great, but I’m very confused at the juxtaposition of the Lightcone Offices being maybe net-harmful in early 2023 and Lighthaven being a priority in early 2025. Isn’t the latter basically just a higher-production-value version of the former? What changed? (Or after taking the needed “space to reconsider our relationship to this whole ecosystem”, did you decide that the ecosystem is OK after all?)
Lighthaven is quite different from the Lightcone Offices. Some key differences:
We mostly charge for things! This means that the incentives and social dynamics are a lot less weird and sycophantic, in a lot of different ways. Generally, both the Lightcone Offices and Lighthaven have strongly updated me on charging for things whenever possible, even if it seems like it will result in a lot of net-positive trades and arrangements not happening.
Lighthaven mostly hosts programs, and doesn’t provide office space for a ton of people. There is a set of permanent residents at Lighthaven, but we are talking about like 10-20 people including the Lightcone team, as opposed to the ~100+ people with approximately permanent access to the Lightcone Offices. As I mention in the fundraising post, I expect this set to grow very slowly, and I feel good about supporting everyone in this set (and would feel at the very least very conflicted and probably net bad about providing the same services to everyone who we supported via the Lightcone Offices)
More broadly, Lighthaven is both a lot more curated, and a lot less insular. We have lots of big events here with people from adjacent communities and ecosystems, and I feel good about the marginal improvement to idea exchange and communication we make here. And then the people and programs we do support more consistently are things I feel good about.
Adding onto this, I would broadly say that the Lightcone team did not update that in-person infrastructure was unimportant, even while our first attempt was an investment into an ecosystem we later came to regret investing in.
Also here’s a quote of mine from the OP:
If I came up with an idea right now for what abstraction I’d prefer, it’d be something like an ongoing festival with lots of events and workshops and retreats for different audiences and different sorts of goals, with perhaps a small office for independent alignment researchers, rather than an office space that has a medium-size set of people you’re committed to supporting long-term.
I’d say that this is a pretty close description of a key change that we made, that changes my models of the value of the space quite a lot.
For the record, all of Lightcone’s community posts and updates from 2023 do not seem to me to be at all good fits for the review, as they’re mostly not trying to teach general lessons, and are kinda inside-baseball / navel-gazing, which is not what the annual review is about.
Fwiw I disagree, I think the Review is deliberately openended.
Yes there’s a specific goal of find the top 50 posts, and to identify important timeless intellectual contributions. But, part of the whole point of the review (as I originally envisioned it) is also to help reflect in a more general sense on “what happened on LessWrong and what can we learn from it?”.
I think rather than trying to say “no, don’t reflect on particular things that don’t fit the most central use case of the Review”, it seems actively good to me to take advantage of the openended nature of it to think about less central things. We can learn timeless lessons from posts that weren’t, themselves, particularly timeless.
i.e. the question “what sort of community institutions are good to build?” is a timeless question. Why should we artificially limit our ability to reflect on that sort of thing during the Review, given that we set the Review up in an openended way that allows us to do that on the margin?
My understanding is that the Lightcone Offices and Lighthaven have 1) overlapping but distinct audiences, with Lightcone Offices being more ‘EA’ in a way that seemed bad, and 2) distinct use cases, where Lighthaven is more of a conference venue with a bit of coworking whereas Lightcone Offices was basically just coworking.
Retrospectives are great, but I’m very confused at the juxtaposition of the Lightcone Offices being maybe net-harmful in early 2023 and Lighthaven being a priority in early 2025. Isn’t the latter basically just a higher-production-value version of the former? What changed? (Or after taking the needed “space to reconsider our relationship to this whole ecosystem”, did you decide that the ecosystem is OK after all?)
Lighthaven is quite different from the Lightcone Offices. Some key differences:
We mostly charge for things! This means that the incentives and social dynamics are a lot less weird and sycophantic, in a lot of different ways. Generally, both the Lightcone Offices and Lighthaven have strongly updated me on charging for things whenever possible, even if it seems like it will result in a lot of net-positive trades and arrangements not happening.
Lighthaven mostly hosts programs, and doesn’t provide office space for a ton of people. There is a set of permanent residents at Lighthaven, but we are talking about like 10-20 people including the Lightcone team, as opposed to the ~100+ people with approximately permanent access to the Lightcone Offices. As I mention in the fundraising post, I expect this set to grow very slowly, and I feel good about supporting everyone in this set (and would feel at the very least very conflicted and probably net bad about providing the same services to everyone who we supported via the Lightcone Offices)
More broadly, Lighthaven is both a lot more curated, and a lot less insular. We have lots of big events here with people from adjacent communities and ecosystems, and I feel good about the marginal improvement to idea exchange and communication we make here. And then the people and programs we do support more consistently are things I feel good about.
Adding onto this, I would broadly say that the Lightcone team did not update that in-person infrastructure was unimportant, even while our first attempt was an investment into an ecosystem we later came to regret investing in.
Also here’s a quote of mine from the OP:
I’d say that this is a pretty close description of a key change that we made, that changes my models of the value of the space quite a lot.
For the record, all of Lightcone’s community posts and updates from 2023 do not seem to me to be at all good fits for the review, as they’re mostly not trying to teach general lessons, and are kinda inside-baseball / navel-gazing, which is not what the annual review is about.
Fwiw I disagree, I think the Review is deliberately openended.
Yes there’s a specific goal of find the top 50 posts, and to identify important timeless intellectual contributions. But, part of the whole point of the review (as I originally envisioned it) is also to help reflect in a more general sense on “what happened on LessWrong and what can we learn from it?”.
I think rather than trying to say “no, don’t reflect on particular things that don’t fit the most central use case of the Review”, it seems actively good to me to take advantage of the openended nature of it to think about less central things. We can learn timeless lessons from posts that weren’t, themselves, particularly timeless.
i.e. the question “what sort of community institutions are good to build?” is a timeless question. Why should we artificially limit our ability to reflect on that sort of thing during the Review, given that we set the Review up in an openended way that allows us to do that on the margin?
My understanding is that the Lightcone Offices and Lighthaven have 1) overlapping but distinct audiences, with Lightcone Offices being more ‘EA’ in a way that seemed bad, and 2) distinct use cases, where Lighthaven is more of a conference venue with a bit of coworking whereas Lightcone Offices was basically just coworking.