Bureaucrat. Penguin enthusiast.
JohnofCharleston
Karma: 522
This is very interesting and a lot rings true. I particularly like your examples of how “Embarrassed Cults” are trying to appear, that makes the concepts really click.
I’m curious about why the lines in your graph curve, rather than being firm size limits. I feel like I understand the Robert’s Limit… something about how Roberts Rules start breaking in meetings of a dozen without someone “in charge,” but can function for larger meetings when someone wields more authority? I could see a similar/opposite point that you don’t need structure in small cliques, but with someone ’lightly in charge” you can avoid structure up to 25-30. Either seems reasonable.
I’m more confused about the Dunbar number curving, even in fairly authoritarian systems you should still be able to know and maintain personal relationships with other members of the group. There’s also the implication that a Guild could be a reasonable format for 50-100 people if mostly egalitarian, but hits size limits as the leader takes on more authority, which seems the opposite of what I’d expect.
I’m looking forward to the rest of this sequence.
I notice the refund policy is not included in FAQs. Is this unchanged from prior practice (i.e. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PuCdt9k3SFePwo6LG/lighthaven-ish-ticket-strategy-three-pillars-of-fomo )?
Dinner plans:
I’m expecting significantly more people than have RSVP’d publicly, so I don’t think we can easily plan a group dinner in the comments section. Plan instead is:
We will place a group takeout/delivery order at about 6:15. To be included, show up by that time or reach out to me via Signal.
Otherwise plan to bring your own dinner or eat beforehand. There are lots of nearby takeout options
I will also bring some snacks and drinks.
Nearby takeout/delivery options that are quick and easy include:
Chicken + Whiskey (14th St)
Chipotle (14th St)
Oh! Naan Indian kitchen (14th St)
DC Vegan (P and 17th Street)
Various pizza places (will ask the residents for recommendations)
Thank you for hosting this! It was a great event, good to see everyone.
Hello! I will be in the Bay for EAG this coming weekend and intend to come to the reading group on February 17th. Could someone publish the reading list for that date? I hope to bring a not-rationalist-yet friend, and want to send him the readings in advance.
$87,000 in wages (Jenn at 35 hours a week and a policy analyst at 10 hours a week)
This implies an average fully-burdened labor cost, seemingly including benefits and payroll/self-employment taxes, of $37/hr. This is well below market for serious DC policy work. Depending on how you account for benefits, this would be comparable to General Schedule Grade 7 in the US Federal Civil Service, i.e. entry level for junior policy analysts.[1]
It is reasonable for non-profits to pay less than industry given funding constraints, culture, compensating differential, etc. It is unreasonable for non-profits to pay senior staff as if they were entry-level trainees in government. I didn’t see more appropriate pay for policy staff on your “What Additional Funding Enables” list. This should be your top priority if your fundraiser is successful.
- ^
Base pay for GS-7 starts at $27.66 per hour. Assuming a 35% benefit and payroll/self-employment tax rate (which is conservative), that comes out to slightly more than Balsa’s average hourly rate. However that is only for the first year. Within a few years, GS-7s should either advance in step to >$30/hr + benefits, or be promoted to higher grades. See 2026 hourly pay tables for the DC region at:
https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries-wages/salary-tables/26Tables/html/DCB_h.aspx
When I started in the Federal Civil Service in 2012, before finishing my Master’s program, I took a pay cut from my non-profit university salary to start at GS-7, on the understanding that I’d be quickly promoted to a full performance level of GS-12 within a few years. My job title at GS-7 was, literally, “Budget Trainee”.
- ^
Agreed. @Screwtape, I expected less hinged-ness, not these very reasonable takes.
Habryka says I’m too poor for the gazebo. But perhaps if I can recruit some friends to scheme...
Other more sophisticated options are left as an exercise to the reader.
Lightcone-branded tenements, of course.
In particular Baltimore has a rationalist community a decade old, and it’s in driving distance of Vibecamp, ManifestxDC, and an annual Secular Solstice.
Seconding Maryland. There are rationalist clusters in Rockville and Baltimore. You’re within public transit or driving distance of frequent EA events and occasional rationalist events in DC. There are twice-annual local Solstices, sometimes also a less legible EA one, and other fledging rationalist holidays.
There’s great connectivity. Philadelphia is nearby, about as close as Sacramento is to San Francisco, and New York is a train ride away. There’s an excellent airport and two other airports in the area, with direct flights to SF and other places.
Good jobs are available, with interesting and important work to do, for both genders of rationalists (programmers and not). If you don’t mind commuting into DC, you can help run the world.
This is an admission against interest. I live in Virginia, inside the DC-area ring road. I’ve tried to get critical mass for casual regularly recurring things in DC, but find myself driving to Maryland much more often. As Berkeley is to San Francisco, Rockville and Baltimore are to Washington DC.
I intend to donate an amount on the order of $5k.
Edit 1: I have donated stock, which left my account, but the paperwork may not complete by the time the fundraiser closes. Hopefully the tracker still counts this, I want number to go up.
Edit 2: Number Went Up.This is several percent of my income, it works out to roughly two weeks of my labor. I could tell a story about how the ideas developed by this website improve my productivity by at least that amount. I could mention that I bought the appreciated stock I am donating because of a few specific posts about noticing confusion and market prices. The gratitude framing would hold together, but it’s not the real reason.
I notice that I have reinvested far more than two weeks of my time this year into the community. I spent two weeks at Lighthaven specifically. I had the seed of an idea in a comfy Lighthaven nook, then gathered some friends in Glass Hall and developed it. I let Eneasz peer pressure me into doing a podcast, wrote it up in my first LessWrong post, then expanded those ideas into conference talks at LessOnline, Manifest, and EA Global NYC. I attended a ridiculous number of meetups, info sessions, discussion groups, “happy hours” both with and without alcohol, developing nuanced preferences between partiful, luma, and eventbrite. I helped edit and promote a book. And schemed to put on a conference locally, with the express intent of Lighthaven-pilling my friends.
I did not have time to do all this. I’m so tired, my apartment is a mess, I’m way behind on my to-do list, my personal life has suffered, and my coworkers have started making jokes about how much time I’m spending in Berkeley. I’m also drug tested more frequently, though I’m sure that’s coincidental. So I don’t think I can make the “thanks for the productivity hack” case with a straight face.
The real reason I’m donating is that I think we’re on to something here. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about these topics. I’m excited to contribute in my small way to the infrastructure and the ideas. I expect my gratitude to date will pale in comparison to how this place and this community benefit us all in the future.
In the ‘future plans’ section of your 2024 fundraising post, you briefly mentioned slowly building out an FHI-of-the-west as one of the things for which you wish you had the time & funding.
I think this is happening, albeit slowly and piecemeal. There are several resident scholars at Lighthaven now, and I know some writers who have used the equivalent of “visiting scholar” positions at Lighthaven as a first step in moving to the Bay full-time. It might be worth making this more legible, though I can imagine counterarguments too.
Yeah, I went looking for the decompression zone and didn’t find it. Gave up and talked to the crowd instead.
Most of our events aren’t open access!
I suspect there’s a growing list of tech folks a few degrees of separation away from the community who’ve started coming to Lighthaven events. I met several people at the Solstice afterparty who did not even know that it was an afterparty for another event at all.
I am also pretty confused who would show up to the afterparty to mock Solstice. What a weird move.
Followed up with DM.
Thank you for running Solstice this year, and for starting this tradition.
It’s been several days, but I still don’t know how I feel about it. My thoughts seem too disorganized and contradictory to fit in the feedback form, though I did try.
Emotional Arc
I watched the livestream of the 2022 Bay Solstice, and came in person to the 2024 Bay Solstice. I found them both to be really moving, each a useful call to action in their own way. You warned us that Solstice this year would be unusually dark. I took that seriously, and braced myself.
This year’s solstice was difficult to bear. The middle hour was particularly painful for me, surfacing grief and anger that I thought I had processed. The uplift section at the end felt more intellectual than emotional. Ordinarily that might be a good fit for me. In context it landed like a pale imitation, weakly argued, compared to what came before.
I left 2024′s solstice with a sense of defiance, spurred to do my part with righteous indignation against the laws of nature that offend my values. I left 2025′s angry and sad. Depression as a service.
I recognize a lot of this is particular to me, but felt I should share the data point.
Overall I’m glad this year’s version existed. I’m glad you ran this experiment, I appreciate the artistic strength and coherence. But I think it wasn’t for me. I probably shouldn’t come to future versions that are similarly dark, unless I’m starting from a significantly better place emotionally.
Afterparty
I found the afterparty particularly infuriating. I went looking for the decompression sessions, found Damon briefly, but didn’t really find my way in. Instead I talked to people and eavesdropped on loud public conversations. I feel I got a reasonably representative sample of the crowd. Most of the people I heard from at the afterparty had not been to Solstice. Several didn’t even know what it was.
The people who came only for the afterparty varied widely in motivation. One person told me they left Solstice after ten minutes because the tone wasn’t for them, but came to the afterparty to discuss, which I admired. Several others knew Solstice wasn’t for them but wanted to see friends who were in town—fair enough.
A vocal minority thought Solstice was dumb and cringe and came to the afterparty to mock it in person. I’m still baffled by this. It was Saturday night in one of the world’s greatest cities. There were other places to be. What sort of person chooses to go to an afterparty for an event they despise? If you dislike and disrespect people trying to process emotions from this ritual, why choose to spend time with them? I don’t think we should welcome those who consider that a fun evening out.
I suspect this is a growing problem with Lighthaven events.
Did the new/updated Fooming Shoggoth songs ever get posted somewhere other than Suno? Pinging for Solstice afterparty interest this weekend. @davekasten has specific preferences about which version of these songs to play, which are difficult to fulfil.
Survey surveyed
I see. Yes, I think that mostly does.
I misread you, your paying-your-own way price is more nuanced than I had realized. I think after including things like protecting against not selling all tickets and providing some extra for subsidizing student tickets, it would be noticeably above the break-even price. I think Skyler’s East Coast Megameetup provides a good case study, as of yesterday he had a “Low” price of $65, a “breakeven” price of $100, a “high” price of $120, with several additional sponsorship tiers. He defines the “breakeven” price as something like if everyone paid this and the event sells all tickets, we would break even, and the “high” price as something like if 2/3rds of participants paid High and 1⁄3 paid “Low”, while selling all tickets, the event would breakeven. I think under your schema the “paying your own way price” is the High one ($120), or even higher to account for the risk of not selling out, not the breakeven price of $100, right?
I think yes, this does resolve at least most of our disagreement. I think it’s reasonable to expect the software engineer to contribute more to public goods than the grad student. I think events count as mostly public goods (they’re technically club goods, since they’re somewhat rival and somewhat excludable, but there are still substantial spillover effects from events that should provide you value by binding the community together even if you don’t go, so I think rounding them to public goods is close enough.) Descriptively, not endorsing, I think some in the community would expect the software engineer to pay more than $120 or $135 (building in sales risk) for the East Coast Rationalist Megameetup, unless they have some good reason to have a low willingness to pay. But your framework has a lot to recommend it, and I think could reasonably be the median expectation from the community.
I agree with Skyler that it’s not reasonable to describe expecting public goods to be funded more proportionally to income as “stealing,” at least not at the margins we’re typically looking at in practice in the community. But it could get there! If, for instance, there was a social pressure and expectation that the richest 10 people in the community must pay for the whole event, I would describe that social pressure as immoral. I’d probably call it something like an “unjust entitlement to someone’s resources”, rather than stealing, but these are mainly prudential questions with fuzzy boundaries.
Separately, great point on labeling the “break-even” price explicitly. I also find that practice helpful for calibrating expectations. I forgot to do that for a recent event but I probably should have.
Valid, this makes sense.
Interesting. I took you to be riffing off of a phase diagram, yes? My intuition was that the Dunbar Curve should slope the other way, at least for part of the range. If a guild of 120 people exists, it likely has more structure and more empowered leadership than a guild of 40. But most organizations that I’d think of as analogous to guilds simply fail if they grow faster than their organizational capabilities. There could be some margin at which surviving organizations necessarily become cults if they get too authoritarian to manage their membership, but I think there are plenty of examples of groups in the ~200 person range that use Robert’s Rules type structures, notably committees, to maintain coherence with moderate levels of leadership authority.
I almost want to add another category to the graph, for groups too big and disorganized to still be guilds, but too lacking of leadership to be proper cults. Leaderless mobs? Maybe this is just a special case of cult, though.
Eagerly looking forward to more of your sequence on this. I imagine it will make some of these distinctions more clear.