That… I think is below my bar for having any actual logical content instead of just snark, but if a few people want to second that they would have somehow found this valuable to read, I can add it to the post.
What I linked was a stance, an evaluation of your cost-effectiveness. You were explicitly asking for exactly that kind of thing.
But on 2nd thought, I retract the link I posted. There’s also quite a bit of sneering in there that distracts from the bits I consider important, which are these:
Running Less Wrong doesn’t (have to) cost 1.4M per year. It’s a website. Websites of this scale can be run at 1/10th the cost, or even 1/100th the cost if you’re frugal. Having extremely onerous community management practices is a choice you’re making.
If someone believes that a large part of your value is in hosting LW, and what you do outside this pales in importance (or may even be negative!), then there’s a bundling issue for that person. It’s impossible to donate to the upkeep of LW without donating to all that other stuff, correct?
I agree it is technically an evaluation of our cost-effectiveness! Though not much more than generic insults are, which I wouldn’t feel much of a need to link. I think it was reasonable for you to link it here, and also don’t think it makes sense to include it in the post.
Running Less Wrong doesn’t (have to) cost 1.4M per year. It’s a website. Websites of this scale can be run at 1/10th the cost, or even 1/100th the cost if you’re frugal. Having extremely onerous community management practices is a choice you’re making.
This is just really not true. LessWrong is a software project of substantial complexity, with a substantially large user-base. I don’t know any other platform that does anything remotely similar to what LessWrong does and supposedly would run at anything like 1/100th or 1/10th the cost.
Of course, if you just grab a forum software off-the-shelf and don’t bother moderating then you can run things much cheaper, but this is a strategy that generally does not work, and does not produce anything with the cultural or social impact of something like LessWrong. Online forums have been declining across the board for decades. There exist very few alive and growing internet forums. It is an exceptionally difficult task to make a thing like LessWrong grow and to continue producing a huge amount of research and intellectual contributions when your competitors are hyper-optimized social media platforms.
The problem that LessWrong is trying to solve does not have an off-the-shelf solution. Of course it would be great if it had, and in that case the high cost would be born by whoever developed that off-the-shelf solution, but there really isn’t one.
It’s a website.
I mean, Facebook is a website. Google is a website. ChatGPT is a website. Airtable is a website. Figma is a website. I don’t really know what this means. More than 10% of U.S. GDP is spent on “websites”. As a category they are not cheap to run, and the software behind them is not easy or cheap to build. I am not saying there are no valid critiques to make here, but the reference class of “website” is certainly not particularly helpful here.
For some more discussion on these topics see last year’s fundraiser post comments:
If someone believes that a large part of your value is in hosting LW, and what you do outside this pales in importance (or may even be negative!), then there’s a bundling issue for that person. It’s impossible to donate to the upkeep of LW without donating to all that other stuff, correct?
Yep, it’s a bundling problem, though a pretty common one. You can’t invest in Deepmind, you can only buy Google stock. In general organizations benefit a lot from the ability to re-allocate resources between different projects. I certainly don’t want to commit to not investing in new projects.
Like, from a decision-making perspective it’s not even clear how accepting funds just for the purpose of donating to LW would work. Money is fungible, and as long as we receive fewer funds earmarked such than what we are planning to spend on LW anyways, this wouldn’t really affect our decisions at all, and I think it’s very unlikely we would end up receiving more funds than that.
I do care non-trivially about what our donors think and so saying you would like us to spend more resources on LW is a good thing to say at the same time as you donate!
That… I think is below my bar for having any actual logical content instead of just snark, but if a few people want to second that they would have somehow found this valuable to read, I can add it to the post.
What I linked was a stance, an evaluation of your cost-effectiveness. You were explicitly asking for exactly that kind of thing.
But on 2nd thought, I retract the link I posted. There’s also quite a bit of sneering in there that distracts from the bits I consider important, which are these:
Running Less Wrong doesn’t (have to) cost 1.4M per year. It’s a website. Websites of this scale can be run at 1/10th the cost, or even 1/100th the cost if you’re frugal. Having extremely onerous community management practices is a choice you’re making.
If someone believes that a large part of your value is in hosting LW, and what you do outside this pales in importance (or may even be negative!), then there’s a bundling issue for that person. It’s impossible to donate to the upkeep of LW without donating to all that other stuff, correct?
I agree it is technically an evaluation of our cost-effectiveness! Though not much more than generic insults are, which I wouldn’t feel much of a need to link. I think it was reasonable for you to link it here, and also don’t think it makes sense to include it in the post.
This is just really not true. LessWrong is a software project of substantial complexity, with a substantially large user-base. I don’t know any other platform that does anything remotely similar to what LessWrong does and supposedly would run at anything like 1/100th or 1/10th the cost.
Of course, if you just grab a forum software off-the-shelf and don’t bother moderating then you can run things much cheaper, but this is a strategy that generally does not work, and does not produce anything with the cultural or social impact of something like LessWrong. Online forums have been declining across the board for decades. There exist very few alive and growing internet forums. It is an exceptionally difficult task to make a thing like LessWrong grow and to continue producing a huge amount of research and intellectual contributions when your competitors are hyper-optimized social media platforms.
The problem that LessWrong is trying to solve does not have an off-the-shelf solution. Of course it would be great if it had, and in that case the high cost would be born by whoever developed that off-the-shelf solution, but there really isn’t one.
I mean, Facebook is a website. Google is a website. ChatGPT is a website. Airtable is a website. Figma is a website. I don’t really know what this means. More than 10% of U.S. GDP is spent on “websites”. As a category they are not cheap to run, and the software behind them is not easy or cheap to build. I am not saying there are no valid critiques to make here, but the reference class of “website” is certainly not particularly helpful here.
For some more discussion on these topics see last year’s fundraiser post comments:
CowardlyPersonUsingPseudonym proposing we cut salaries in half
Czynski strongly endorsing Lighthaven but not LessWrong
David Matolsci discussing the funding breakdown of Lightcone
Mixed praise and critique by abstractapplic
Yep, it’s a bundling problem, though a pretty common one. You can’t invest in Deepmind, you can only buy Google stock. In general organizations benefit a lot from the ability to re-allocate resources between different projects. I certainly don’t want to commit to not investing in new projects.
Like, from a decision-making perspective it’s not even clear how accepting funds just for the purpose of donating to LW would work. Money is fungible, and as long as we receive fewer funds earmarked such than what we are planning to spend on LW anyways, this wouldn’t really affect our decisions at all, and I think it’s very unlikely we would end up receiving more funds than that.
I do care non-trivially about what our donors think and so saying you would like us to spend more resources on LW is a good thing to say at the same time as you donate!