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Habryka

17929 karmaJoined Sep 2014

Bio

Project lead of LessWrong 2.0, often helping the EA Forum with various issues with the forum. If something is broken on the site, it's a good chance it's my fault (Sorry!).

Comments
1117

Yep, totally, it's a pretty shitty proxy. I think the obvious analogy at least for the EA Forum would be that the organizations who are hiring people from the EA Forum are in a comparable position to advertisers, but it's not amazing.

I am not sure what you mean by the first. Facebook makes almost all of its revenue with ads. It also does some stuff to do better ad-targeting, for which it uses cookies and does some cross-site tracking, which I do think drives up profit, though my guess is that isn't responsible for a large fraction of the revenue (though I might be wrong here). 

But that doesn't feel super relevant here. The primary reason why I brought up FB is to establish a rough order-of-magnitude reference class for what normal costs and revenue numbers are associated with internet platforms for a primarily western educated audience.

My best guess is the EA Forum could probably also finance itself with subscriptions, ads and other monetization strategies at its current burn rate, based on these number, though I would be very surprised if that's a good idea.

Yeah, that seems like the right comparison? Revenue is a proxy for value produced, so if you are arguing about whether something is worth funding philanthropically, revenue seems like the better comparison than costs. Though you can also look at costs, which I expect to not be more than a factor 2 off.

Habryka
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$500/monthly user is actually pretty reasonable. As an example, Facebook revenue in the US is around $200/user/year, which is roughly in the same ballpark (and my guess is the value produced by the EA Forum for a user is higher than for the average Facebook user, though it's messy since Facebook has such strong network effects). 

Also, 4000 users is an underestimate since the majority of people benefit from the EA Forum while logged out (on LW about 10-20% of our traffic comes from logged-in users, my guess is the EA Forum is similar, but not confident), and even daily users are usually not logged in. So it's more like $50-$100/user, which honestly seems quite reasonable to me.

No subreddit is free. If there is a great subreddit somewhere, it is probably the primary responsibility of at least one person. You can run things on volunteer labor but that doesn't make them free. I would recommend against running a crucial piece of infrastructure for a professional community of 10,000+ people on volunteer labor.

Just as a piece of context, the EA Forum now has about ~8x more active users than it had at the beginning of those few years. I think it's uncertain how good growth of this type is, but it's clear that the forum development had a large effect in (probably) the intended direction of the people who run the forum, and it seems weird to do an analysis of the costs and benefits of the EA Forum without acknowledging this very central fact. 

(Data: https://data.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/) 

I don't have data readily available for the pre-CEA EA Forum days, but my guess is it had a very different growth curve (due to reaching the natural limit of the previous forum platform and not getting very much attention), similar to what LessWrong 1.0 was at before I started working on it.

(Just for the record, I don't think METR would be accurately described as an independent organization, but also I don't see any other candidate organization that is better placed. But in as much as Anthropic promised it would find an independent organization, METR, in my opinion, does not qualify)

It's unrepresentative of the degree to which people believe that corollaries like neuron count and brain size and behavior complexity are an indicator of moral relevance across species (which is the question at hand here). 

Come on, you know you are using a hilariously unrepresentative datapoint here. Within humans the variance of neuron count only explains a small fraction of variance in experience and also we have strong societal norms that push people's map towards pretending differences like this don't matter.

I think "animals that have more neurons or are more complex are morally more important" is not a "nontrivial philosophical assumption". 

It indeed strikes me as a quite trivial philosophical assumption the denial of which would I think seem absurd to almost anyone considering it. Maybe one can argue the effect is offset by the sheer number, but I think you will find almost no one on the planet who would argue that these things do not matter. 

This is a nitpick, but somehow someone "being an individual" reads to me as implying a level of consciousness that seems a stretch for shrimps. But IDK, seems like a non-crazy choice under some worldviews.

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