Lightcone then bought that table from Atlas a few months ago at the listing price, since Jonas thought the purchase seemed excessive, so Atlas actually didn’t end up paying anything. I am really glad we bought it from them, it’s probably my favorite piece of furniture in the whole venue we are currently renovating.
If you think it was a waste of money, I have made much worse interior design decisions (in-general furniture is really annoyingly expensive, and I’ve bought couches for $2000 that turned out to just not work for us at all and were too hard to sell), and I consider this one a pretty strong hit. (To clarify, the reason why it’s so expensive is because it’s a kinetic sculpture with a moving magnet and a magnetic ball that draws programmable patterns into the sand at the center of the table, so it’s not just like, a pretty coffee table)
The table is currently serving as a centerpiece of our central workspace social room, and has a pretty large effect on good conversations happening since it seems to hit the right balance of being visually interesting without being too distracting while also being functional, and despite this kind of sounding ridiculous, if for some reason it was impossible for Lightcone to pay for this table (which I don’t think it is since I think interior design matters), I would pay for it from my own personal funds.
In general, as someone who has now helped prepare on the order of 20 venues for workshops and conferences, it seems pretty obvious to me that interior design matters quite a bit for workshop venues. I think it would indeed be pretty crazy to pay $2000 for every coffee table in your venue, but a single central design piece can make a huge difference to a room, and I’ve spent hundreds of hours trying to design rooms to facilitate good conversations with my counterfactual earning rate being in the hundreds of dollars per hours, and I think it definitely is sometimes worth my time/money to buy an occasional expensive piece of furniture.
If you can earn hundreds of dollars per hour, why are you instead spending hundreds of hours doing interior design? Couldn’t you hire someone more skillful, at a lower rate, to do the same thing only better?
Turns out delegation is very hard and the ongoing costs of having a larger staff are enormous in many different dimensions, and especially on your ability to think clearly and update organizational strategy in response to evidence. If you are building in-person infrastructure, you need to have some design skills, otherwise you will repeatedly be blocked in external designers, and you won’t be able to tell which designers are good, and you will fail to communicate your design requirements to your designers.
I appreciate you clarifying your thinking but just wanted to flag some disagreement with aspects of your comment.
If you think it was a waste of money, I have made much worse interior design decisions (in-general furniture is really annoyingly expensive, and I’ve bought couches for $2000 that turned out to just not work for us at all and were too hard to sell), and I consider this one a pretty strong hit.
I find this a weird counterargument to the claim that “X was not a cost-effective use of money” as you’re essentially saying “You think X is bad? You should have seen Y and Z, they were much worse!”
(To clarify, the reason why it’s so expensive is because it’s a kinetic sculpture with a moving magnet and a magnetic ball that draws programmable patterns into the sand at the center of the table, so it’s not just like, a pretty coffee table)
Maybe I have too low an appreciation of art but a table that has programmable sand patterns does literally sound like “a pretty coffee table”. I’m not convinced that this additional benefit is worth the additional $1900 (or whatever is required to buy a reasonably nice coffee table that achieves 99% of the same benefit).
The table is currently serving as a centerpiece of our central workspace social room, and has a pretty large effect on good conversations happening since it seems to hit the right balance of being visually interesting without being too distracting while also being functional
I’m just extremely sceptical about this claim that the table has a pretty large effect on good conversations. In what way is it having a pretty large (positive) effect on conversations? And how can you even know that (say) a $300 dollar table wouldn’t have provided the same effect? This feels a lot like motivated reasoning to me e.g. “I will buy very nice things for myself/my team because it helps me/us be more productive, which is very important to making sure we do good in the world” when I would guess that the counterfactual impact on doing good is trivially small.
my counterfactual earning rate being in the hundreds of dollars per hours, and I think it definitely is sometimes worth my time/money to buy an occasional expensive piece of furniture.
Even by your own lights, I think your analysis seems wrong. I think it’s very reasonable that a $500 dollar would have achieved approximately the same (alleged) impact on improving conversations relative to your $2200 table. So since you don’t value your time at more than $1700 per hour, it would have been very reasonable to spend an hour finding a cheaper table (maybe ignoring the situation with Atlas), which is very doable. That said, I also think this kind of reasoning “My time is worth so much per hour I can make somewhat counter-intuitive trade-offs for very rational reasons” can sometimes be quite suspect, for similar motivated reasoning concerns. I agree it might be reasonable to use this logic sometimes, but I’m not sure this is a good example of it.
[comment no longer endorsed, though I still think it’s reasonable to value his time highly, just not quite as highly]
FWIW, I think Habryka should probably value his time at >$1700 per hour. Put differently, I think if longtermist funders could spend $3.4 million per year to get another Habryka, that seems like a good use of longtermist resources to me. I’m not totally confident in this judgment and have some uncertainty about this, but here some intuitions/examples: 1) having another Habryka could’ve reduced community exposure to FTX and fallout from the FTX collapse, which could easily be worth more than $3.4 million, 2) it’s generally really hard to find people who can run organizations competently, 3) if longtermism spends $250m/y and ~3x that amount in human labor, that’s roughly $1b per year, and I think it’s plausible that he’s improving the culture of the community and allocation of those resources by more than 0.34% via useful commenting on this forum and similar activities, 4) other people of an (in my view) similar caliber often have excellent earning-to-give opportunities with an expected value of >$5m/y.
(That said, I agree with your other points and I personally think the coffee table is excessive.)
Atlas at some point bought this table, I think: https://sisyphus-industries.com/product/metal-coffee-table/. At that link it costs around $2200, so I highly doubt the $10,000 number.
Lightcone then bought that table from Atlas a few months ago at the listing price, since Jonas thought the purchase seemed excessive, so Atlas actually didn’t end up paying anything. I am really glad we bought it from them, it’s probably my favorite piece of furniture in the whole venue we are currently renovating.
If you think it was a waste of money, I have made much worse interior design decisions (in-general furniture is really annoyingly expensive, and I’ve bought couches for $2000 that turned out to just not work for us at all and were too hard to sell), and I consider this one a pretty strong hit. (To clarify, the reason why it’s so expensive is because it’s a kinetic sculpture with a moving magnet and a magnetic ball that draws programmable patterns into the sand at the center of the table, so it’s not just like, a pretty coffee table)
The table is currently serving as a centerpiece of our central workspace social room, and has a pretty large effect on good conversations happening since it seems to hit the right balance of being visually interesting without being too distracting while also being functional, and despite this kind of sounding ridiculous, if for some reason it was impossible for Lightcone to pay for this table (which I don’t think it is since I think interior design matters), I would pay for it from my own personal funds.
In general, as someone who has now helped prepare on the order of 20 venues for workshops and conferences, it seems pretty obvious to me that interior design matters quite a bit for workshop venues. I think it would indeed be pretty crazy to pay $2000 for every coffee table in your venue, but a single central design piece can make a huge difference to a room, and I’ve spent hundreds of hours trying to design rooms to facilitate good conversations with my counterfactual earning rate being in the hundreds of dollars per hours, and I think it definitely is sometimes worth my time/money to buy an occasional expensive piece of furniture.
If you can earn hundreds of dollars per hour, why are you instead spending hundreds of hours doing interior design? Couldn’t you hire someone more skillful, at a lower rate, to do the same thing only better?
I have also spent dozens of hours doing that!
Turns out delegation is very hard and the ongoing costs of having a larger staff are enormous in many different dimensions, and especially on your ability to think clearly and update organizational strategy in response to evidence. If you are building in-person infrastructure, you need to have some design skills, otherwise you will repeatedly be blocked in external designers, and you won’t be able to tell which designers are good, and you will fail to communicate your design requirements to your designers.
I appreciate you clarifying your thinking but just wanted to flag some disagreement with aspects of your comment.
I find this a weird counterargument to the claim that “X was not a cost-effective use of money” as you’re essentially saying “You think X is bad? You should have seen Y and Z, they were much worse!”
Maybe I have too low an appreciation of art but a table that has programmable sand patterns does literally sound like “a pretty coffee table”. I’m not convinced that this additional benefit is worth the additional $1900 (or whatever is required to buy a reasonably nice coffee table that achieves 99% of the same benefit).
I’m just extremely sceptical about this claim that the table has a pretty large effect on good conversations. In what way is it having a pretty large (positive) effect on conversations? And how can you even know that (say) a $300 dollar table wouldn’t have provided the same effect? This feels a lot like motivated reasoning to me e.g. “I will buy very nice things for myself/my team because it helps me/us be more productive, which is very important to making sure we do good in the world” when I would guess that the counterfactual impact on doing good is trivially small.
Even by your own lights, I think your analysis seems wrong. I think it’s very reasonable that a $500 dollar would have achieved approximately the same (alleged) impact on improving conversations relative to your $2200 table. So since you don’t value your time at more than $1700 per hour, it would have been very reasonable to spend an hour finding a cheaper table (maybe ignoring the situation with Atlas), which is very doable. That said, I also think this kind of reasoning “My time is worth so much per hour I can make somewhat counter-intuitive trade-offs for very rational reasons” can sometimes be quite suspect, for similar motivated reasoning concerns. I agree it might be reasonable to use this logic sometimes, but I’m not sure this is a good example of it.
[comment no longer endorsed, though I still think it’s reasonable to value his time highly, just not quite as highly]
FWIW, I think Habryka should probably value his time at >$1700 per hour. Put differently, I think if longtermist funders could spend $3.4 million per year to get another Habryka, that seems like a good use of longtermist resources to me. I’m not totally confident in this judgment and have some uncertainty about this, but here some intuitions/examples: 1) having another Habryka could’ve reduced community exposure to FTX and fallout from the FTX collapse, which could easily be worth more than $3.4 million, 2) it’s generally really hard to find people who can run organizations competently, 3) if longtermism spends $250m/y and ~3x that amount in human labor, that’s roughly $1b per year, and I think it’s plausible that he’s improving the culture of the community and allocation of those resources by more than 0.34% via useful commenting on this forum and similar activities, 4) other people of an (in my view) similar caliber often have excellent earning-to-give opportunities with an expected value of >$5m/y.
(That said, I agree with your other points and I personally think the coffee table is excessive.)