Bureaucrat. Penguin enthusiast.
JohnofCharleston
Karma: 898
I think this is onto something, EA and Objectivism share a lot of qualities, and this describes it well. But I’d be careful introducing and using so many acronyms and terms of art. I get that’s a staple of certain branches of philosophy, the practices has its uses. But it can hide subtle problems and differences that the chain of formal definitions flattened, then paved over with symbols. Using full words, rather than reducing things to acronyms, can keep your analysis grounded and help spot where it might not fit.
Summer Camp added many additional hats, including cardinal hats, a pope hat, crowns, and a turban. All were excellent.
Good option but tends to work better indoors than outdoors. Also requires having glassware and cutlery, which meetups often do not. But I agree this is better in contexts where it’s doable.
I suggested organizers should occasionally use this tool they already have for the purpose of resetting the noise level at events they are responsible for.
A low monotone. You can imagine it as an “om” hum if that helps. The idea should be everyone joining in to the same hummed note.
This is a good and interesting point. I’m familiar with think tanks as institutions, but not as physical spaces. I will say, the output of most think tanks isn’t something we want to emulate, it seems fine and on topic but not particularly intellectually lively, with the notable exception of new entrants like FAI and IFP. And it just so happens that those are, at least, influenced by this community. A significant portion of each have accounts here, not something that’s true of Brookings.
So I believe think tank interior design could be interesting, but I suspect it wouldn’t have much to teach a project like this.
I already have a job that I like.
Yeah, I agree with and was tracking most of what you say. In drafts, I got a comment that laid out a similar point:
[...] The options I see:
1) Lighthaven East wears the rationalist/EA banner loud and proud and leave it to adjacent organizations to decide how they feel about the association risks.
2) Lighthaven East works carefully to brand themselves as something more generalized—a neutral tech-policy event space, for instance, to aid in broader coalition building[...] I think that many politicals especially on the right would prefer option 2.
I replied: “you’re right that I need to lay out both paths, rather than just the one I prefer.” I started writing up option 2… and made almost no progress on the draft for a week. This past weekend I realized option 2 just didn’t move me, so I abandonedthat alternative. There may well be a “Constellation East” in the works. Someone could also just scale up NET to a similar effect. I’m sure either would be feasible and great community resources. They’re just not for me, not what I was analyzing here.
I disagree on a key point, though. I wrote this post to say that Option 1, the full fledged “doing something with ambition on the scale of Lighthaven, with all the weirdness that entails,” seems feasible to me. People are welcome to disagree, several friends in DC do, but I see this city as much more able to consider weirdness than the cynical rationalist caricature would have you believe. They may not ultimately agree, they may not think they can build a coalition for something weird yet. But they don’t turn off their brains to even considering the idea as often as our community thinks.
Last year, I wrote:
Many people misunderstand the problem with pushing for policy that’s outside the Overton Window. It would be difficult to find a policymaker in DC who isn’t happy to share a heresy or two with you, a person they’ve just met. The taboo policy preference isn’t the problem; it’s the implication that you don’t understand their constraints.
I still believe that’s true. In fact we’ve passed that point, because their constraints have started to change. Six months after writing that, I watched a Senator open for @So8res at a press event. Last month I saw another Senator introduce @David Scott Krueger and @Max Tegmark. This town is openly discussing some of our weird ideas already. It’s more ready than you think.
I like it aesthetically, but the connotations aren’t great. It’s similar to and derived from “junta,” which I know is supposed to be a neutral term, but in English implies a military junta or some sort of small-group takeover.
We could still play off this history, though. “Franklin Assembly” means the same thing, and is five syllables?
Is there a Lighthaven-shaped hole in the Philadelphia community? What would filling it look like?
See, this is why we need better name ideas!
We could use better name ideas! Please give us your suggestions, and explain why you like them, as replies to this comment.
Yeah, I think this is what I’m getting at. Robert’s Rules says there’s no real point in formality if the group is about 12 or fewer; this defines the minimum size at which the group will think adopting formal rules is a good idea. More authoritarian groups can postpone that discussion till later.
Valid, this makes sense.
My intuition is: That line represents the point at which people start thinking “This bureaucratic structure is too cumbersome to get anything done with this many people; we therefore need strong leaders who can act through personal authority rather than merely bureaucratically-delegated authority.” I.e., the guild starts turning into a cult. And the population threshold at which people will give up on the guild structure will be lower the more authoritarian the culture.
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.
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”.
- ^
I pulled on this thread last week when talking to @habryka about his design decisions. As you might have guessed, this wasn’t an accident, was a very deliberate design choice.
I’m DC-pilled enough to see the value in tables. I too enjoy ridiculously over-engineered board games that take all day. One of my formative moments as a bureaucrat was printing out 11x17 sized slices of a complicated econometric model I’d made to analyze a question, then tracing various assumptions through the pages spread out around a big conference table. They’re also quite helpful for eating, especially when you have food that you need to cut.
Lighthaven implicitly asks you to “just use several whiteboards,” or “plan for catering that doesn’t need knives.” That can be annoying… but I see Oliver’s point. Part of what makes Lighthaven work is optimizing for conversations in the 3-6 person range. Part of that is lowering switching costs, encouraging people to leave conversations that aren’t a good fit or have grown too large. In his example, putting your food down at a table ties you there for a while, you pay a large social cost to get up from a table and take your food elsewhere, in a way that you don’t if you’re holding or regularly picking up your plate anyway.
My current synthesis, weakly held:
I think tables are great in break-out rooms, for planned workshops and where conversations that spark “wait let’s sit down and talk about this more” can go.
I think Lighthaven is right to minimize tables in the main social spaces.
Curious for more table thoughts!