Should you donate to Lightcone Infrastructure? If your goal is to spend money on improving the world the most: no. In short:

• The resources are and can be used in ways the community wouldn’t endorse; I know people who regret their donations, given the newer knowledge of the policies.
• The org is run by Oliver Habryka, who puts personal conflicts above shared goals, and is fine with being the kind of agent others regret having dealt with.
• (In my opinion, the LessWrong community has somewhat better norms, design taste, and standards than Lightcone Infrastructure.)
• The cost of running/supporting LessWrong is much lower than Lightcone Infrastructure’s spending.

Lightcone Infrastructure is fine with giving platform and providing value to those working on destroying the world

Lighthaven, a conference venue and hotel run by Lightcone Infrastructure, hosted an event with Sam Altman as a speaker.

When asked about it, Oliver said that Lightcone would be fine with providing Lighthaven as a conference venue to AI labs for AI capabilities recruiting, perhaps for a higher price as a tax.

While it’s fine for some to consider themselves businesses that don’t discriminate and platform everyone, Lighthaven is a venue funded by many who explicitly don’t want AI labs to be able to gain value from using the venue.

Some of my friends were sad and expressed regret donating to Lightcone Infrastructure upon hearing about this policy.

They donated to keep the venue existing, thinking of it as a place that helps keep humanity existing, perhaps also being occasionally rented out to keep being able to help good things. And it’s hard to blame them for expecting the venue to not host events that damage humanity’s long-term trajectory: the website of the venue literally says:

Lighthaven is a space dedicated to hosting events and programs that help people think better and to improve humanity's long-term trajectory

They wouldn’t have made the donations it if they understood it as more of an impartial business that provides value to everyone who pays for this great conference venue, including those antithetical to the expressed goals of Lightcone Infrastructure, only occasionally using it for actually important things.

I previously donated to Lightcone because I personally benefited from the venue and wanted to say thanks (in the fuzzies category of spending, not utilons category); but now I somewhat regret even that, as I wouldn’t donate to, say, an abstract awesome Marriott venue that hosted an EAG but also would be fine with hosting AI capabilities events.

Oliver Habryka is not a good counterparty

Lightcone Infrastructure is an organization run by Oliver Habryka.

My impression is that his previous experiences at CEA and Leverage taught him that secrets are bad: if you’re not propagating information about all the bad things someone’s doing, they’re gaining power and keep doing bad things, and that’s terrible.

I directionally agree: it’s very important to have norms about whistleblowing, about making sure people are aware of people who are doing low-integrity stuff, about criticisms propagating rather than being silenced.

At the same time, it’s important to separate (1) secrets that are related to opsec and being able to do things that can be damaged by being known in advance and (2) secrets related to some people doing bad stuff which they don’t want to be known.

One can have good opsec, and at the same time have norms on whistleblowing; about telling others or going public with what’s important to propagate and at the same time not share what people tell you because you might need to know it, with expectation that you don’t share it unless it’s related to some bad thing that someone’s doing that should be propagated.

I once came to Lighthaven to talk to Oliver about a project that me, him, and a third party were all helping with/related to; chatting about this project and related things; and sharing information about some related plans of that third party, to enable Oliver to coordinate with that third party. Oliver and that third party have identical declared goals related to making sure AI doesn’t kill everyone; but Oliver dislikes that third party, wants it to not gain power, and wouldn’t coordinate with it by default.

So: I shared information with Oliver about some plans, hoping it would enable coordination. This information was in no way of the kind that can be whistleblowed on; it was just of the kind that can be used to damage the plans relating to a common goal.

Immediately after the conversation, I messaged Oliver asking him to, just in case, only use this information to coordinate with the third party, as I shared this information to enable coordination between the two entities who I perceived as having basically common goals, except that one doesn’t want another to have much power, all else being equal (for reasons that I thought were misguided and hoped some of that could be solved if they talked; they did talk, but Oliver didn’t seem to change his mind):

(Also, apparently, just in case, please don’t act on me having told you that [third party] are planning to do [thing] outside of this enabling you to chat to/coordinate with them)

Oliver did not reply for a week. After a week, his reply started with “lol, no”, and he said he already  told some people and since he didn’t agree to the conditions before hearing the information, he can share it, even though wouldn’t go public with it.

After a while in a conversation that involved me repeatedly referring to Lawfulness of the kind exhibited by Keltham from Yudkowsky’s planecrash, he said that he didn’t actually read planecrash. (A Keltham, met with a request like that relating to a third party with very opposite goals, would sigh, saying the request should’ve been made in advance, and then not screw someone over, if they’re not trying to screw you over and it’s not an incredibly important thing.)

My impression of him is that he had no concept of being the kind of entity that others- even enemies with almost opposite goals- are not worse off by having dealt and coordinated with; has no qualms about doing this to those who perceive him as being generally friendly. I think he just learned that keeping secrets is bad in general, and so he doesn’t by default, unless explicitly agrees to.

My impression is that he regrets being told the information, given the consequences of sharing it with others. But a smart enough agent—a smart enough human—should be able to simply not use the information in ways that make you regret hearing it. Like, you’re not actually required to share information with others, especially if this information is not about someone doing bad stuff and is instead about someone you dislike doing good stuff that could be somewhat messed up by being known in advance.

I am very sympathetic to the idea that people should be able to whistleblow and not be punished for it (I think gag orders should not exist, I support almost everything that FIRE is doing, etc.); yet Oliver’s behavior is not the behavior of someone who’s grown-up and can be coordinated with on the actually important stuff.

Successful movements can do opsec when coordinating with each other, even if they don’t like each other; they can avoid defecting when coordination is useful, even if it’s valuable to screw the other part of the movement over.

There are people at Lightcone I like immensely; and I agree with a lot of what Oliver is saying and plausibly the person who upvoted the most of his EA Forum comments; and yet I would be very wary of coordinating with him in the future.

It’s very sad to not feel safe to share/say things that are useful to people working on preventing extinction, when being around Oliver.

(A friend is now very worried that his LessWrong DMs can be read and used by Oliver, who has admin access.

I ask Oliver to promise that he’s not going to read established users’ messages without it being known to others at Lightcone Infrastructure and without a justification such as suspected spam, and isn’t going to share the contents of the messages. I further ask Lightcone to establish policies about situations in which DMs and post drafts can be looked at, and promise to follow these policies.)

(Lightcone Infrastructure’s design taste is slightly overrated and the spending seems high)

This is not a strongly held view; I greatly enjoy the LessWrong interface, reactions, etc., but I think the design taste of the community as a whole is better than Lightcone Infrastructure’s.

One example: for a while, on Chrome on iOS, it was impossible to hold a link on the frontpage to open it in a new tab, because the posts opened on the beginning of the tap to reduce delays.

While processing events on the beginning of taps and clicks and loading the data to display on hovers is awesome in general, it did not work in this particular case because people (including me) really want to be able to open multiple tabs with many posts from the frontpage.

It took taking this to the Slack and other people agreeing to change this design decision.

Lightcone Infrastructure seems to be spending much more than would’ve been sufficient to keep the website running. My sense, though I could be wrong here, is that it shouldn’t cost many hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep a website running and moderated and even to ship new features with the help from the community.

Have I personally derived much value from Lightcone Infrastructure? 

The website’s and community’s existence is awesome, and has been dependent first on Yudkowsky and later on LW 2.0. I have derived a huge amount of value from it; found friends; engaging and important conversations; and incredible amount of fun. Even though now I wouldn’t feel particularly good about donating to Lightcone to support Lighthaven, I wouldn’t feel particularly bad about donating to the part of their work which is supporting the website, as a thanks, from the fuzzies budget.

But is it an effective donation?

I really doubt that and would not donate to Lightcone Infrastructure from the budget of donations to improve the world.