LessWrong has a team of six (which includes site development and support, the Alignment Forum in collaboration with MIRI and the EA Forum in collaboration with CEA, plus some assorted smaller projects). We get some funding from small donors, but the majority of funding is from a few large donations. We chose which donations to pursue in part based on which donors would best preserve our independence, and don't talk to them about site directions and decisions very much. We are currently adequately funded and not actively seeking more donations.
Yep, for more context, most of our funding comes from the Survival and Flourishing Fund and the Open Philanthropy Project.
Wikipedia generally works fine, but occassionally problems happen. Sometimes obsessive editors are rewarded with power, which they sometimes abuse to win the debates on their pet topics. As long as other similarly powerful editors don't care, they are allowed to rule their little fiefdoms.
As an example, David Gerard, the admin of RationalWiki, is currently camping at the Wikipedia article on Less Wrong; most of his effort goes towards reducing the section on effective altruism and expanding the section on "Roko's basilisk"... which itself is known mostly because he previously popularized it on RationalWiki. (Also notice other subtle manipulation, like the fact that the page mentions the political opinion of 0.92% of 2016 survey participants, but the remaining 99.08% is not worth mentioning.) I mean, just make your own opinion on how much the content of Less Wrong as you see it here actually resembles the thing that is described at Wikipedia. -- One guy, with a strong grudge, willing to spend more time fighting wiki wars than all his opponents together. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The principles of LW... well, originally it was a shared blog by Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky, later (cca 10 ye...
Between people like Jaan Tallinn and OpenPhil there are billions of philantrophic money floating around. There are also a few EA individuals with who don't have access to 9/10-figures who are still willing to fund important projects.
This both provides for the actual funding of the LessWrong team and provides individuals without any traditional credentials a chance to prove themselves to be capable of making important intellectual contributions to rationality or AI safety and plausible get grants.
Providing billionaires a way to buy increased rationality in the world and decreased AI risk seems to be the strongest monetary consideration. Both things are hard to buy with money.
That said, currently most people who contribute on LessWrong don't do it with financial motivations.
Meta: I think "Where does LessWrong stand financially" is a very good question, and I never knew I wanted a clear answer to it until now (my model always was something like "It gets money from CFAR & MIRI, not sure how that is organized otoh"). However, the way you phrased the question is confusing to me, and you go into several tangents along the way, which causes me to only understand part of what you're asking about.
I can easily apologize for my tangents. I do tend to wander. However I can also easily blame my zen collapse from some years back. It used to be a 6-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon world, but now things too often seem to me to be only one or even zero degrees separated. It's the same thing when you look at it that way?
Not easy to figure out how to fix my question. And if I figured out how to improve it, then I'm not even sure I should fix it or just stay here in the comments, though I see it is possible to edit the original question.
So... Another way to word the question along your lines could be "How are the (visible) conversational flows affected by the (less visible) money flows?" (If I do modify the original, does it preserve old versions to clarify replies that will then seem out of context?)
Take the google as an example for the main topic? The google started with one set of goals and even had the motto of "Don't be evil." Then the money started flowing and the business mutated. I actually think the google's de-facto motto these days is "All your attentions is belong to us [so we can sell your eyeballs to the paying advertisers]." But there is a fundamental inconsistency there. Advertisers do not want to pay for the most critical thinkers reasoning based on the best data. Advertisers want obedient consumers who will obey the ads, whether they are selling deodorant or stinky politicians. (In another (still simplified) perspective on that subtopic of advertising (bridging to money), the costs are extremely high for the final increments of quality to produce the best products that can then be advertised as being the best. In contrast, the costs are much lower for advertising that portrays legally adequate products as the best.)
This looks kind of like a question, but actually it's you stating your opinions about what you'd prefer as funding for LW, and then randomly speculating about LW funding specifically, with almost no tie to anything that matters about LW. I think there are some valuable things to explore here, but you might want to start with smaller, distinctly contained concepts introduced in shortform or posts.
Also, it's not quite identical to https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-is-the-mind-killer, the recommendations apply to anything with personal impact on admins or posters of LW: be very careful to separate theoretical arguments from specific examples on sensitive topics.
Thank you for your reply. I looked at your link, but I am not clear about the relation of "politics" to my question as currently constrained. (Right now I see no reason to extend it in that direction unless the financial model is related to politics. I have so far seen no evidence to that effect. Maybe you could clarify how you see the relationship?)
I was trying to avoid expressing my opinions or suggestions, though if I didn't see the world (or some aspect of the world) as potentially different, maybe even better, then I would deny that there is any problem to be considered. A problem without a solution is not really a problem, but just part of the way things are and we have to live with it. To pretend that I have no opinion or perspective would be quite misleading.
Or I could remap it to the word "question" itself? If no answer exists, then where (or why) was the question?
Perhaps you could clarify what you mean by "question" in the context of a question that is suitable input for the "New Question" prompt? Would that be a better way to approach it?
Looking (yet again) at the "Default comment guidelines", the explanation for my phrasing of the question was because my initial reading of LW seemed to indicate that money is not supposed to influence the discussions and I am skeptical of that. I am asking for clarification, but that may be a request to be persuaded LW has a viable financial model? My previous reply included a more concrete example. As a prediction? Hmm... I guess there must be some topics which are not suitable for discussion on LW and therefore I could predict that some of them may be unsuitable for reasons related to the financial models? I still don't see anything that I disagree with and I am already curious about what y'all are thinking (but that is part of my general theory of communication as a two-way process).
Say oops? Not yet, but it happens all the time. I hope I change my mind frequently as I learn new things, but I also try to minimize logical contradictions. I am usually trying to extend my mental frameworks so that apparent contradictions can be resolved or diverted. (I've gotten old enough that I think most of my positions have substantial data underlying them.)
Meta:
It's not exactly politics, but has some of the same characteristics, in that many participants will have strong emotional reactions that interfere with exploring rationality or general lessons. It's not that it should never be discussed, but it's more important than usual to be careful to distinguish between when you're theorizing about general concepts and when you're identifying near-mode personal beliefs and actions.
For that reason, you should keep your posts/questions small and self-contained. Asking "is LW influenced by the financing mechanisms of the site" is very reasonable. And you should point out some site features or behaviors that make it look like finance influence is happening. Personally, I don't see it. Asking "how is LW financed" or "how much does LW cost to run" is maybe reasonable, depending on your reasoning for asking. Exploring the general fact that financing can affect the behavior or operation of message boards is ALSO very reasonable, but should be a separate post (it's not a question), and should use examples other than LW itself.
Object:
For myself, I frequent a WHOLE lot of groups that are minimally influenced by the funding mechanism. Pre-internet, I ran a BBS and frequented a number of others, which were entirely hobbies and only influenced by our parents rules for use of their paid phone lines. I see no reason to believe that LW is very much different - it's much more professional, and has way better operators than I ever was or could hope to be. But I don't think they're motivated by getting rich. I know that at least one frequent poster doesn't derive any income from participating.
strong emotional reactions
I expect being part of one's identity is key, and doesn't require notable emotional reactions.
Only processing this now, and I'd like to understand your model more deeply. I think that beliefs being part of one's identity is highly correlated with strong emotions for things that challenge or support those beliefs.
There are other things which engender strong emotional reactions, as well, so I think of "part of identity" as a subset of things which are difficult contexts in which to discuss rationality. For instance, one's livelihood (even when it's not particularly part of identity) is likely a difficult topic to explore well in this forum.
Identity colors the status quo in how the world is perceived, but the process of changing it is not aligned with learning (it masks the absence of attempting to substantiate its claims), thus a systematic bias resistant to observations that should change one's mind. There are emotions involved in the tribal psychological drives responsible for maintaining identity, but they are not significant for expressing identity in everything it has a stance on, subtly (or less so) warping all cognition.
There's some clarification of what I'm talking about in this comment and references therein.
Is your [Dogon's] reference to "your model" a reference to 'my [shanen's] preferred financial model' (obliquely referenced in the original question) or a reference to Vladimir_Nesov's comment?
In the first case, my "preferred financial model" would involve cost recovery for services shared. An interesting example came up earlier in this discussion in relation to recognizing consistency in comments. One solution approach could involve sentiment analysis. In brief, if you change your sentiment back and forth as regards some topic, then that would indicate negative "consistency", whereas if your sentiment towards the same topic is unchanged, then it indicates positive consistency. (If your sentiment changes rarely, then it indicates learning?) So in the context of my preferred (or fantasy) financial model, the question becomes "Are enough people willing to pay for that feature?"
Now things get more complicated and interesting in this case, because there are several ways to implement the feature in question. My hypothesis is that the solution would use a deep neural network trained to recognize sentiments. The tricky part is whether we yet know how to create such a neural network that can take a specific topic as an input. As far as I know, right now such a neural network needs to be trained for a specific domain, and the domain has to be narrowly defined. But for the sake of linking it to my financial model, I'm going to risk extending the hypothesis that way.
Now we get to an interesting branch point in the implementation of this feature for measuring consistency. Where do we do the calculations? As my financial model works, it would depend on which approach the users of the feature wanted to donate money for. I'm going to split it into three projects that could be funded:
(If there are enough donors, then both 2 and 3 could be supported. However, deciding which one to implement first could be determined by which project proposal attracts enough donors first.)
In the second case, I'm afraid I don't understand what part of Vladimir_Nesov's comment was about a "model". And you weren't talking to me, anyway. And I should also apologize for my longish and misdirected response?
Oh, I meant the mental model behind
I expect being part of one's identity is key, and doesn't require notable emotional reactions.
As this is the opposite of my intuition (emotional reaction is the salient feature, part of one's identity is one way to generate that emotional reaction).
I do appreciate the further exposition of your financing model, though.
Okay and you're welcome, though I wish I had understood that part of the discussion more clearly. Can I blame it on the ambiguity of second-person references where many people are involved? (An advantage of the Japanese language in minimizing pronoun usage?)
Interesting reply, and again I thank you for your thoughts. Still not seeing how "politics" figures in. I'm not trying to provoke any emotional reactions. (Nor do I perceive myself as having any strong emotional reactions to anything I've seen on LW so far.)
The part about your BBS especially hits a nerve. I created and operated a BBS in my youth. I did include a financial model in the design of my BBS, but my primary motivation at the time was to create a real cost for abuse of the BBS and secondarily to recover some of the costs. (Dedicated hardware and an extra phone line (I think).) I did not include my programming time as a cost because I mostly regarded that as a learning experience that was also improving my own market value as a programmer. Looking back, I actually think the deficiencies in my financial model greatly limited the success of the system, and if I had done it again, then I would have changed the priorities so that the funding model of the BBS put priority on the main objectives of the users. I even see how I could have arranged the model to align my personal philosophy more closely to the users' objectives. (But I don't have a time machine to go back and fix it now and I got busy with other stuff for many years after that...)
I also sympathize (?) or partially concur with the idea of keeping things small and self-contained. However I also see that as part of the financial model. I think the Diaspora fiasco on Kickstarter is a good example of how such things can go wrong. If they had just gotten the first increment of money and started by implementing the kernel server, then maybe the project could have succeeded step by step. Instead, the project hit the jackpot, and they tried to refactor and redesign for the grand new budget, and things mostly went bad after that.
Another relevant example I could use would be Slashdot, though I don't know how many of the people on LW are familiar with it. My perception is that the rolling ownership indicates a portable nuisance status, though the nuisance status may be some form of non-pressing debt rather than anything that threatens the existence of the website. Whatever the cause, it seems that Slashdot lacks the resources to fix even the oldest and best-known limitations of the system. (In particular, the moderation system of Slashdot would seem to need some adjustments.)
Hmm... I feel like my use of examples is diverging from the guidelines' intended meaning for "concrete models".
"You must be new around here."
Guilty as charged. But the financial model is usually one of my first areas of meta-interest when I start looking (or relooking) at a website. What are the motivations? "Follow the money," said the detective. But in the worst cases, unsustainable financial models usually disappear.
It always seems to me that the money matters and that systems (including websites and companies) adjust their various behaviors to reflect where the money is coming from and how it is flowing through the system. LessWrong clearly has ongoing costs for servers and support (and I hope the helpful person in the Intercom chat room was duly compensated for the time). I also read about the big karma project in the last quarter of 2019. Nothing there about the development and evaluation costs, but it sure sounded like a lot of work was done. Somewhere in the FAQ it said that LessWrong doesn't make money, which is fine, but it did mention donations. (My observations indicate that big donors usually like to call the shots and small donors generally don't get to (which bothers me (but that might be simple projection since I'm strictly a small donor)).)
My own preference would be cost recovery, but mostly based on benefits received. Would you believe "Basically anything that people are willing to pay for should be allowed to happen?" My fantasy funding mechanism usually flies under the handle of CSB (for Charity Share Brokerage), but before speculating farther I'd like to understand more about how things work now on LessWrong. (Even more than this financial question, my primary confusion right now is how to detect the current flow of activity. But maybe I should be most focused on figuring out which parts of the old activity are most worth reading? That side seems overwhelming.)
Better clarify that I don't think that everything should be reduced to monetary values, but money is a helpful metric. Even sustainable. I actually think economics is mostly bogus because time is not equal to money, even approximately. The proper relationship is time >> money. (But ekronomics is another one of my favorite cans for worms.)