rossry

• rossry 15 Dec 2025 20:59 UTC

  6 points

  2

  on: Toss a bit­coin to your Light­cone – LW + Lighthaven’s 2026 fundraiser

  (I’ve got three different comments wearing three different hats; I’ll make them all at the top level.)

  Comment Hat #3: Involved in an adjacent project to one sub-project mentioned

  Figure out how to deploy money at scale to make things better

  If I’m being honest, I’m less interested in Lightcone doing this than the other things you’ve listed. I have a natural bias here, though, as a board member of Manifund, another org in the ecosystem that is interested in (1) running experiments in fund-allocation processes and (2) building bespoke financial infrastructure for unique needs in the community.

  I suspect that if we talked for long enough about it, I’d end up believing that:

  • diversification of service providers for things like fiscal sponsorship is good for the ecosystem

  • insofar as Oliver and Austin have different visions for the finding ecosystem, we’re better off having both of them execute on them.

  • where they have overlapping visions, we’re probably better off with some specialization of offerings.

  • I’m not sure whether [capabilities lab liquidity] suggests that we just need a large number of thoughtful deployment-helping orgs online (or in any case more than two) or if it suggests focusing on building one dedicated infra stack.

  • I’m still very excited about the other things Lightcone is up to, and so on the margin that makes me more prefer that the marginal funding-related project be housed at Manifund.

  • I still don’t know how biased I am by being closer to one of these orgs than the other.

  I’d definitely be interested in hearing about Oliver’s thoughts along these lines (here, or in meeting with me /​ Austin /​ Manifund’s board, or wherever).

• rossry 15 Dec 2025 20:39 UTC

  5 points

  0

  on: Toss a bit­coin to your Light­cone – LW + Lighthaven’s 2026 fundraiser

  (I’ve got three different comments wearing three different hats; I’ll make them all at the top level.)

  Comment Hat #2: Serial project organizer

  This is a question for Oliver, though I figured it’d be more useful to us and others to have the discussion in public rather than private messages: If a project in the greater “rage, rage against the civilizational inadequacy” space (but not AI) ^[[1]] would benefit from Lightcone’s web design services, under what conditions would it be positive for you to be involved?

  e.g., “If you can pay market rate for us to design a high-quality site for browsing [content], that brings us surplus in cash by applying resources that are marginally cheap for us to use” or “That might advance our mission but won’t help our finances, so it’s a topic skew to fundraising” or “If it’s not about AI, it’s likely not above the waterline for our work, even at market rate, but I’ll hear you out offline.”

  I’m asking in the role of an advisor to a funded project that currently has a hole shaped like “build a site to do [technically easy but nontrivial thing] to present information useful to society for [goal]”; I’m wondering if it’s more of a distraction to pitch Lightcone on contracting for the engineering work, or more of a boon, or something else entirely.

  1. ↩︎

     What’s your least-favorite governmental regulation? Mine holds back the medical innovation that we would need to have a well-stocked pharma toolbox against future pandemics, and the project I have in mind aims to take a chip out of the.

• rossry 15 Dec 2025 20:22 UTC

  5 points

  2

  on: Toss a bit­coin to your Light­cone – LW + Lighthaven’s 2026 fundraiser

  (I’ve got three different comments wearing three different hats; I’ll make them all at the top level.)

  Comment Hat #1: Reviewer, organizer, potential donor

  I’m not donating to Lightcone this year, as I’m not donating directly to anything (other than hard-dollar politics) while my family is in an unsettled financial state. I’m also personally litigating against the FTX estate to unblock a six-figure donation they’d previously promised to a different EA org, which produces a long tail of considerations that make other donations somewhat complicated right now. ^[[1]]

  However, little has changed my overall opinion from last year:

  I believe there is a strong case for considering a donation to Lightcone to be among the best opportunities in “close to home” effective-altruist community building. (I’ll leave it to your judgment how that cause area segment compares to others.) In a world barely different from this one, I expect I would donate between $1,000 and $5,000 to their general fundraiser this year.

  I also ran a 48-hour private event as Lighthaven (as well as co-running a public one) this year. Our guests (most of them from far outside the extended Lightcone social network) were impressed by the venue and how well the venue worked to promote serendipitous meetings and re-meetings over a long weekend event. Two couples attending with children noted that, once there was an on-site room organized as the “baby nap room”, it was an excellent venue for a baby-inclusive event, which made me very pleased. (My co-organizer has a longer post reflecting on our event; I’ll let her post it rather than stealing her commentary further.)

  My sense is that bringing Lighthaven revenue-paying business that improves on their outside option is as good as some size of donation, but I’m not sure about the exact fungibility surface. Still, if you’re thinking about donating, maybe think about also organizing an event! It’ll cost nonnegative money, as good things often do, but I predict your event will probably go well, especially if it’s for people outside the usual attendee set.

  1. ↩︎

     Counsel for the estate in fact mentioned ties between a co-defedant and Lighthaven in their argument against our case for the donation. Our response to that was—well, my counsel would rather I say “our filed papers speak for themselves”. As indeed they do.

Pod­cast: How not to waste a billion dol­lars (on your clini­cal trial), with Meri Beck­with on Devel­op­ment & Research

Pod­cast: From molecule to medicine, with Ross Rhe­in­gans-Yoo on Com­plex Systems

• rossry 5 Mar 2025 21:42 UTC

  3 points

  2

  in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Mid­dle School Choice

  It might!

  In case it would also help to have two-to-three Harvard and/​or MIT professors who work on exactly this topic to write supporting letters or talk with your school board, I’ll bet money at $1:$1 that I could arrange that. Or I’ll give emails and a warm intro for free.

• rossry 5 Mar 2025 21:36 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: rossry’s comment on: Mid­dle School Choice

  You shouldn’t take my claims on argument-from-authority alone, but it might help you have better priors about whether I’m right to know that I’ve published traditional-academic work in the specific field of matching theory.

  (Also in matching with monetary transfers: 1; 2)

• rossry 5 Mar 2025 21:31 UTC

  10 points

  2

  in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: Mid­dle School Choice

  With respect, I think that’s wrong.

  If all parents agree that school A is better than B, but parent 1 cares much more about A>B than parent 2 does, then the sum-of-utilities is different (so, not “zero sum”) depending on whether [ 1→A; 2→B ] or [ 1→B; 2→A ]. Every change in outcomes leads to someone losing (compared to the counterfactual), but the payoffs aren’t zero-sum.

  That example is kind of useless, but if you have three parents and three schools (and even if parents agree on order), but each of the parents care about A>B and B>C in different ratios, then you can use that fact to engineer a lottery where all three parents are better off than if you assigned them to schools uniformly at random. (Sketch of construction: Start with equal probabilities, and let parents trade some percentage of “upgrade C to B” for some (different?) percentage of “upgrade B to A” with each other. If they have different ratios of their A>B and B>C preferences, positive-sum trades exist.)

  Then, in theory, a set of parents cooperating could implement this lottery on their own and agree to apply just to their lottery-assigned school, and if they don’t defect in the prisoners’ dilemma then they all benefit. Not zero-sum.

  Of course, it can also be the case that they value different schools different amounts and a bad mechanism can lead to an inefficient allocation (where pairs would just be better off switching), and I could construct such an example if this margin weren’t too narrow to contain it.

  It is separately the case that if the administrators have meta-preferences over what parents’ preferences get satisfied, then they can make a choice of mechanisms (“play the metagame”, as you put it) that give better /​ worse /​ differently-distributed results with respect to their meta-preferences.

• rossry 4 Mar 2025 22:24 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: Mid­dle School Choice

  While the zero-sum nature is unavoidable

  I believe this is false as stated:

  1. Given the mechanism you described, it is not possible to give every parent better outcomes with a change to their schools...

  2. ...but it might be the case that the parents being improved get more increase in value than the parents being disapproved, so it’s not constant-sum.

  While ‘zero-sum’ is correct in a loose colloquial sense that at least one person has to lose something for any group to improve, I think it’s actually important to realize that there are mechanisms that improve overall welfare—and so the system administrators should be trying to find them!

• rossry 4 Mar 2025 22:14 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: Mid­dle School Choice

  You cite the Gale-Shapley papers, but are you aware that the school-choice mechanism you described is called the “Boston mechanism” in the field of mechanism design? Because, well, it was also the system in place at Boston Public Schools (until the early 2000s, when they changed to a Gale-Shapley algorithm).

  Pathak and Sonmez (2008) is the usual citation on the topic, and they find (as you suggest) that the change makes the most “sophisticated” parent-players worse off, but the least-sophisticated better off.

Drug de­vel­op­ment costs can range over two or­ders of magnitude

• rossry 26 Sep 2024 16:22 UTC

  2 points

  1

  in reply to: Tapatakt’s comment on: [Com­pleted] The 2024 Petrov Day Scenario

  Think of it as your own little lesson in irreversible consequences of appealing actions, maybe? Rather than a fully-realistic element.

• rossry 26 Sep 2024 16:21 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: David Matolcsi’s comment on: [Com­pleted] The 2024 Petrov Day Scenario

  1. Great if true!

  2. As a Citizen, and without suggesting that you are, I would not endorse anyone else lying about similar topics, even for the good consequences you are trying to achieve.

• rossry 26 Sep 2024 16:18 UTC

  4 points

  2

  in reply to: Lao Mein’s comment on: [Com­pleted] The 2024 Petrov Day Scenario

  My guess would be that a commitment to retaliation—including one that you don’t manage to announce to General Logoff before they log off—is positive, not negative, to one’s reputation around these here parts. Sophisticated decision theories have been popular for fifteen years, and “I retaliate to defection even when it’s costly to me and negative-net-welfare” reads to me as sophisticated, not shameworthy.

  If a general of mine reads a blind commitment by General Logoff on the other side and does nuke back, I’ll think positively of them-and-all-my-generals. (Note: if they fire without seeing such a commitment, I’ll think negatively of them-and-all-my-generals, and update on whether I want them as collaborators in projects going forward.)

• rossry 26 Sep 2024 16:07 UTC

  7 points

  7

  in reply to: Martin Randall’s comment on: [Com­pleted] The 2024 Petrov Day Scenario

  Grumble grumble unilateralists’ curse...

• rossry 26 Sep 2024 16:01 UTC

  11 points

  3

  on: Chevy Bolt Review

  The charger was marked 150kWh, but my understanding is the best the Bolt can do, in ideal conditions with a battery below 50%, is 53kW. And the 23kWh I saw is about typical for a Bolt getting to 75%

  I think that this paragraph should say “kW” instead of “kWh” both times? Either that, or I’ve misunderstood what you’re trying to communicate.

• rossry 22 Jul 2024 16:59 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: philh’s comment on: Poker is a bad game for teach­ing epistemics. Fig­gie is a bet­ter one.

  I think all of Ben’s and my proposals have assumed (without saying explicitly) that you shuffle within each suit. If you do that, then I think your concerns all go away? Let me know if you don’t think so.

• rossry 19 Jul 2024 20:07 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Joseph Miller’s comment on: Poker is a bad game for teach­ing epistemics. Fig­gie is a bet­ter one.

  That makes sense; I am generally a big believer in the power of physical tokens in learning exercises. For example, I was pretty opposed to electronic transfers of the internal currency that Atlas Fellowship participants used to bet their beliefs (even though it was significantly more convenient than the physical stones that we also gave them to use).

  I do think that the Figgie app has the advantage of taking care of the mechanics of figuring out who trades with who, or what the current markets are (which aren’t core to the parts of the game I find most broadly useful), so I’m still trying to figure out whether I think the game is better taught with the app or with cards.

• rossry 19 Jul 2024 4:40 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Joseph Miller’s comment on: Poker is a bad game for teach­ing epistemics. Fig­gie is a bet­ter one.

  Good to hear it!

  One of the things I find most remarkable about Figgie (cf. poker) is just how educational it can be with only a minimal explanation of the rules—I’m generally pretty interested in what kinds of pedagogy can scale because it largely “teaches itself”.

• rossry 19 Jul 2024 4:30 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Joseph Miller’s comment on: Poker is a bad game for teach­ing epistemics. Fig­gie is a bet­ter one.

  Do you think it was educational even though you were making clearly bad decisions /​ not at “an acceptable standard” for the first dozen games?