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CronoDAS comments on $100 off for Less Wrong: Singularity Summit 2011 on Oct 15 - 16 in New York - Less Wrong
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Comments (23)
Even at $485 I still wouldn't be able to convince my family members to attend.
Weekend passes to an event like Comic-Con or Otakon usually run less than $100. Smaller fan conventions, such as Intervention also keep admissions prices below $100. NECSS, a seemingly similar event, charges $65 for full price tickets. What makes the Singularity Summit so much more expensive than all these other events?
Singularity Institute learns new things every year about cutting expenses from putting on a major conference, but we know enough that we're now heading into the 6th annual Singularity Summit and can attract big-name speakers. Why does it cost more? There isn't yet much corporate sponsorship or paid booths, as at Comic-Con, though we're working on that as we go into the future. And we have higher profile speakers than Intervention or NECSS. But I certainly want to talk to the people who put together NECSS; thanks for providing the link.
Outside speculation, but surely some of the booths at Comic-con and the like have paid for the privilege of being there? In this way, the cost of entry is subsidised by vendors and stalls, I would suspect. The Singularity Summit, as far as I know, pays all of its presenters to be there, and has no vendors which might subsidise the costs.
The dealers' room is a major profit center for conventions which have them; at ICON this year (I was a volunteer), dealers were charged $15, not for any extra space, but for any additional folding tables. Some dealers did pay up, so you can imagine what it must have cost to gain actual entry... (One of the old ICONers told me that when the university kicked ICON out one year, it lost so many tens of thousands of dollars in revenue, they immediately asked ICON back.)
Perhaps the Summit should have a dealer's room with representatives from longevity supplement makers and wearable computing device companies, recruiters from AI-focused startups, etc.
Yes, I was at Otakon a few years ago and the dealer's room spaces were something like $750 each - there were probably about 100 dealers and I think each had about 3 spaces on average. Also, $65 each for extra dealer's badges for employees. That said, I believe the money from the dealer's room mostly goes to cover the expense of having a dealer's room.
But remember that fan conventions tend to run at cost, while the Singularity Summit is a source of revenue for SIAI.
The ticket price isn't "$485". The ticket price is "$100 off", it says so in the post title.
"Off" as it is used here is a two-place predicate, taking a number as x and an implied price as y and reducing y by x to produce the new price.
"Off" has other meanings, but we can tell they're not in use here because $100 is not a object with toggle-able states.
Conspicuously absent from the post is any mention of the actual ticket price. It's an exercise in framing. Humans aren't best described as having an objective preference for $485 instead of a ticket to the conference or vice versa. If the post had been a reminder of an old $485 ticket price, or announced the price as having risen from $385 or whatever to $485, it would have been less effective.
Sure, but that's obviously not the problem for CronoDAS's family members. Their problem is that it's a big luxury purchase, not the equivalent of a nice meal out that is easier to justify.
My apologies for scoring points by making it look like you don't know what "$100 off" means, by the way.
When I followed the link, the price without the discount was $585. With the $100 discount applied, it would be $485 a ticket.
I was stricken with a bad case of illusion of transparency. I was referring to the way the price was framed.
There should be a lot of people reading this who know better than me, but I thought that the Singularity Summit is what pays for many of SIAI's activities.
Also, how many names of speakers at the SSummit do you recognize, and how many at NECSS? I don't know if any of the famous people speak for free.
In addition to the other issues mentioned I also expect that there is much less demand elasticity for the singularity summit due to different demographics.