How does crossposting something to nominate work? I tried with Thresholding and the system is tracking its date as the date I crossposted, not the date of the original. Reasonable but not great for my purposes. Is there something I'm supposed to do?

Hello and welcome! There's a few of us around who discuss things other than AI research, myself among them. I suggest looking at the filtering options for the front page; it's the gear next to Latest, Enriched, Recommended, and Bookmarks. I filter the AI tag pretty heavily down.

If you want to lean into voicing fringe ideas around here, I'd suggest reading the LessWrong Political Prerequisites and maybe Basics of Rationalist Discourse. They're not universally agreed upon, but I think they do make for a decent pointer to the local standards.

None of the essays I publish got written via stream of consciousness, though sometimes I do it to get ideas or to debug what I think is going wrong with a piece. 

Probably some authors are working in a genre where that works for them, or have such a well ordered stream that they can publish what comes out. (hi Scott.) I'm not one of 'em though :)

I think I've got substantial disagreement, but I want to agree that in general I think a 'pay your share' ticket is a good default. My one line advice on ticket pricing is something like "first add up the costs of venue, food, equipment, etc, second divide that by the number of people you expect to attend, third add 10% for your planning fallacy, and that's your one ticket price." If I get more lines of advice I add more of course.

I empathize a lot with wanting to be able to just pay ones fair portion of something. There also are some real horror stories of groups trying to pry more money loose from their memberships.

Still, substantial disagreements below:

This is the point I was trying to make when I said that not having a price marked as paying ones own way came off as a bit stealy - one possible reading of that is that the organizers think the software engineer should pay more than their fraction of the event, and if that reading is correct, it is an attempt at stealing from the software engineer and should absolutely not happen in a community of honest people.

(emphasis mine.)

I want to strongly push back against calling this stealing from the SWE. My central example of stealing is if Bob sneaks into Carla's house, riffles through her wallet, and takes some cash from it without permission. If instead Dean honestly offers a trade like "you give me money and I give you a seat at a concert" and Eve accepts the trade, gives Dean the money, and gets the seat at the concert she wanted, that's not stealing. Eve has a real choice, she can really decide not to go to the concert. 

That's still true even through at least 'normal'^[1] amounts of price discrimination. Dean could offer front row seats for a higher price than the nosebleed section, that seems fine. He could explicitly use student status, asking for student ID or a .edu email, and in a high-trust environment it seems mostly fine to just use the honour system. Seems reasonable.

That's still true even if community membership was contingent on paying, which it's not. Off the top of my head, Toastmasters and Rotary Club both have mandatory membership dues to be at a local chapter, every Friday Night Magic I've been to had an entrance fee of some kind, and the first choir that came to my mind has membership dues. (They even explicitly do variable options: ctrl+f for "Member dues are a core part of BCE's budget".)

I believe it is not an attempt at stealing anything and it is not dishonest to do price discrimination where you say upfront what the price points are and let people decide whether to pay or not.

It can also come off as a bit stealy - like the organizers think they are entitled to more money from the highly paid software engineers than is their fair share.

Speaking as one of the organizers who sometimes runs stuff without a clear pay-your-way price point (though the breakeven price point with a bit of margin is my default these days), I don't think I'm entitled to this in the current model, and if you want the market economy answer I think the arrow flips around. Like, I don't get paid out of hypothetical profits for East Coast Rationalist Megameetup or Boston Solstice.^[2] In the market economy version of ECRM, I'd add my expected time investment as a cost, and also I'd add more margin because I'd want to make a profit. 

Take airplane seats as an example; it seems like a category error of some kind to say 'United Airlines thinks they're entitled to more money from the highly paid professionals than is their fair share.' United Airlines wants as much of my money as they can get me to pay, I want them to fly me around for as little as I can pay. In a market economy they figure out how much they want to offer tickets at, I decide whether to buy from them or Delta or whether I want to call them up and try to negotiate with their representative or whether I want to stay home. They're probably not going to sell me a ticket for less than the opportunity cost of selling my seat to someone else. They very likely aren't going to sell me a ticket for less than the marginal cost of my weight^[3] but from a market economy perspective, the fair price isn't the marginal cost of all the passenger's collective seats, it's the price point where supply and demand curves cross.

There do exist rationalist (or at least adjacent) events that get run like this, paying organizers and/or staff for their time and charging enough that there's a decent return on investment. I want to be careful about using non-public information here, so I'll stop for the moment at just saying they exist, they're great, and also they're a minority.

I mildly think the $35 ticket for California Bay Solstice is not actually a market price. I don't have any inside information on the budget for Berkeley Solstice, but I could ask and I'd be pretty surprised (p(5%)) if everyone paying $35 means that the musicians and organizers all get paid market rate for their time, or pays for the afterparty food and venue and ops time. I hear they sold out last year; in a market, if you sell out all copies, the obvious thing is to keep raising prices until that stops happening.

1. ^{^}

   "Normal" is not well defined here and I don't expect I could give a good principled definition without working on it for a while.

2. ^{^}

   In the past, the net profit got paid forward to the next year. It did rest on my accounts for the year and I didn't account for interest earned; I would have if I thought it'd be more money than the cost of my time take to track the interest.

3. ^{^}

   Though they might if they have some clever reason, like they think it'll make me a more loyal customer and that's worth it? But afaik the actual marginal cost of an extra ~200lbs of flesh blood and luggage is way cheaper than any airline ticket I'll ever buy.

I have more substantial disagreement, but I want to do a quick check;

I think it is fine for the organizers to include in that price things like informal financial aid (the subsidizing of the lower tear tickets),...

This seemed to me like one of the central examples of things you were against. Was I misreading? 

If the cost (that is, the at-cost price of the venue space, food, etc) of an event is $50 per person, and the audience is totally bimodal (there's fifty students who can only afford $25, and fifty SWEs making $500k a year) do you think it's fine to have a student ticket for $25 and a SWE ticket for $75, with the SWEs cross-subsidizing the students? 

(By my read you'd prefer there be three tickets; a $25, a $50, and a $75. I'm asking if you'd be fine with the subsidy in the two-ticket example.)

n=1, I think reading Atlas Shrugged in my mid teens was the approximately correct amount of push I needed to wind up the right amount moderated. (After a couple of years of being a little bit of an obnoxious Objectivist before mellowing anyway, but the confounder there is I was in my late teens.)

I mostly agree with all of that.

• I think the way it's embedded in the larger social setting and economy is a pretty good strength.
• OSS is a good comparison. I'm curious how OSS handles rivalrous goods? Sharing HPMOR and other stories and songs scales for close-to-free much like most OSS libraries, but I don't know the OSS community well enough to comment on how scalable services (e.g. AO3, which I'd guess is comparable to the LessWrong site) or attendance at events (e.g. Open Source Summit, vaguely comparable to LessOnline?) work.
• Splitting "extractive" for a moment; in some parts, the answer is it's fine, we don't care, not that much can be extracted via this angle. There's only so much damage the one person eating all the chips at the open invite potluck can usually do, and if needed the mechanisms there are more around asking them to stop or disinviting specific people. More extractive behavior does exist but I think usually has other mechanisms providing friction.
• I think 'pass it forward' and 'make the world and community I want to live in' are similar. I usually notice them getting a little distinct when someone's being specific about one area; to use myself as an example, I entered the IRL community via the East Coast Rationalist Megameetup, and I correspondingly prioritize ECRM higher than other things with that rough shape
• Yep. 'Give good advice to college students and cross subsidize events a bit, plus gentle pressure via norms to be chill about the wealth differences' is my best current answer. Kinda wish I had a better one.

No idea. The handwriting was not great.

Okay, links to all the ones I know the link for have been added.

You know, reasonable, I've been hearing all month that people mostly don't click hyperlinks but this post would benefit from them. I'll add as many as I can find when I get a chance to sit down properly.