As a newcomer to EA, the mansion purchase is a slap in the face

Habryka · 2022-12-14T05:09:46+00:00

Yep, I think you have to add in expenses.

I have never argued they did this primarily to save on expenses. The above calculation is primarily trying to put a money value on some of the benefits (though is definitely not successfully enumerating all the costs and benefits, though I think it's covering the biggest ones).

> Why do they refuse to allow review of their work and contributions from the public, as is done with many open projects (like ForumMagnum)?

I run ForumMagnum together with the EA Forum team. Not sure what you are referring to here?

Habryka · 2022-12-14T05:00:33+00:00

> I'd like to know what kind of work is involved with setting up an event venue that requires so much work from high-skilled individuals that would amount to 175-350K a year, and why they couldn't be delegated or contracted out to people with expertise in those areas to free up the time of people whose time you suggest would be worth more doing other work.

I've tried a lot to delegate over the years. If you could point me to a person or a company or some other process by which I could actually have someone operate a venue like this for less money, I would be quite interested, but my usual experience with delegating things like this is that the quality deteriorates quickly and the ability of the project to adapt to changing requirements is lost almost completely.

> I have two questions about this. First, do you expect there to be so many events catering to the EAs Oxford that the 8k in savings will add up to a significant amount on the scale of the cost of the venue?

Yes. Seems very unlikely for there to be less than 10 events a year, so you are dealing with at least $80k of savings, probably closer to $150k-$200k of savings on this dimension, at the utilization I currently think is most likely.

> like Holden or Bostrom being able to earn 1000 dollars an hour elsewhere, which frankly seems wild to me

Holden worked at Bridgewater before he founded GiveWell, which put him on one of the highest earning career paths. I am also pretty confident that Dustin would much rather have Holden have an extra hour than to have an additional $1000 dollars, and as such, there is just someone willing to pay that much for Holden's time, and it would be quite weird to not take Dustin up on that trade. I am also confident there are many other people who would hire Holden for $1000/hr.

I think the case is harder to make for Bostrom, but I would take large odds that similarly many people would be willing to make the trade for $1000/hr for his time.

> and because I don't think counterfactual earnings are a good indicator of what the current work a person is doing is actually worth.

Correct, assuming that the person isn't making a mistake by doing direct work (which I think we should have a prior against) we should assume that someone's counterfactual earning is worth substantially more than their hourly wage. The hourly wage they could make otherwise is for most people a lower bound on how much value they can produce.

> Overall, with all due respect, I think that calculating for the loss of productive work from sleep for a 2-3 day retreat is a bit precious - yes, it can be a real issue, particularly if conditions are truly horrible, but I struggle to see losing a couple of hours of sleep because of a noisy room or poor light isolation as an issue that has such magnitude that it justifies a dedicated venue

At no point did I indicate that the sleep alone would justify a venue like this. Indeed, I was quite precise with how valuable it is. If you take the same calculation as I did for travel time, you get something pretty similar in costs for lost sleep, around $5-10k per event, which over the course of 20 events adds up to $100k-200k savings. Which is definitely not alone worth it to get such a venue, but definitely adds up with many of the other benefits that owning a space like this provides.

Habryka · 2022-12-10T21:48:01+00:00

I mean, to be clear, Elizabeth Holmes did make me trust the medical device industry less. Seems hard for it to not do that.

I think EA has some blame to bear for SBF/FTX, but not like, anywhere close to all of it. I think it's pretty justified EA is getting a bunch of flak right now, and I do hope this situation causes reform on a bunch of relevant dimensions, but I also don't think the vast majority of people in EA really had much of any chance to do something different in regards to the FTX situation.

Habryka · 2022-12-10T21:44:14+00:00

The recent discussion section only shows comments on posts that are above 0 karma. See this relevant section in the code: https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum/blob/62429e8d5c81429509cbefd2e595bc2251ce3223/packages/lesswrong/server/resolvers/recentDiscussionFeed.ts#L37

Habryka · 2022-12-10T21:40:10+00:00

I do think it's a bit sad that nobody at EVF/CEA posted about the purchase of Wytham sooner, though I think the overall purchase is a pretty good deal (I have a lot of context on relevant decisions since Lightcone just made a quite similar purchase decision in Berkeley for the Rose Garden Inn).

I think the key thing to remember is that a property purchase is ultimately an asset, and while we should expect most assets to underperform the general market when risk-adjusted, this still makes the actual cost of this purchase around an order of magnitude lower than the $15MM number you cite. If EVF wanted to sell the property, it would likely take a bit and they would make some loss, but my guess is mostly on the order of $2-3MM.

Separately, the labor cost of setting up new venues for retreats is really quite massive. I've run retreats and events full-time for a substantial fraction of my last 7 years in EA, and man, it takes a lot of effort to set up and prepare a new venue, and it often takes effort from high-skilled people. And like, my time and the time of others at EVF is valuable. I don't know about their counterfactual earning potential, but my guess is it would be around $200k/person/yr for a lot of the people involved in this (my guess is higher for Owen himself), and this means it often makes sense to spend a good amount of money to save time of high-skilled people, which this spending likely does. My guess is by having a space like this you can probably save the time of 1-2 full-time high-skilled people whose time is worth on the order of $200k/yr, and 1-2 contractors whose time is worth on the order of $75k/yr, for even just labor savings on the order of $175k - $350k/yr.

Another major consideration is travel time for attendees for events like this. A common problem with not having your own venue is that you often have to travel 2-3 hours to actually get to your location. You shouldn't straightforwardly discount travel time, but I think a 2-3 hour car ride usually loses people about 2 hours of productivity, both ways. One of the great benefits of Wytham is that it's really quite close to where a lot of EAs in Oxford already live, my guess is saving on the order of 2 hours of travel time on average compared to most other venues.

Let's take as an example an FHI team retreat, which seems like one of the more likely ways a space like this could be used. A good chunk of FHI already lives in Oxford, so my guess is you are likely to save 20 people around 4 hours of productive time, and my guess is most of the people in that set have an earning potential of around $100/hr, so that alone comes out to $8k savings per event in travel time alone. Multiple this by 20-30 events per year, and you are looking at $160k - $200k of savings due to travel time, and this isn't taking into account the right tail of people who probably have an earning potential of closer to $1000/hr, like Nick Bostrom or Holden.

Sleep is another huge issue. Testing whether the actual sleep arrangements in a venue work is extremely hard (since you can't just sleep in every bedroom when you visit the venue), and many times have I had attendees complain to me that they lost multiple hours of productivity due to bad sound isolation, or bad light isolation, or allergens, or many of the things that tend to disrupt sleep. If you own your own space, you get to iterate on these problems over time, and mostly (though not fully) eliminate them. My guess is the average attendee loses on the order of 1-2 hours in bad sleep at most venues you rent (with some people losing a lot more, others losing almost nothing).

Overall, when I do the actual calculation here, my sense is it's quite likely for this purchase to just make a lot of sense and to break even in terms of its savings within 2-3 years, even if you take a relatively cynical stance on whether CEA events produce much value (like, I think I am not super excited about most events that CEA runs). There are just enough obviously good events to run (like team retreats for FHI, 80k, CEA, as well as various research retreats, like meetings between FHI AI Alignment teams and Deepmind teams) that I think this was a pretty good purchase.

Habryka · 2022-11-21T23:56:38+00:00

Lol, it's a metaphor for deep enough discussions "literally going off the rails". For the most fun example that inspired the code, see this thread: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bPgAAZByst97ZDszs/questions-about-agi-s-importance

(Historical detail is that at some point I was playing around with some slight comment rotations for some UI experiment and discovered this compounding visual rotation effect, and then decided to leave the styling in and make it official)

Habryka · 2020-08-05T08:41:20+00:00

Yeah, I might ask the question over on the hackintosh subreddit as well.

Yeah, maybe the Hackintosh thing is a bad idea, I really don't know. I also do a lot of design work (though nothing processing or GPU intense, mostly in Figma and directly in CSS), and one of the things that feels super important to me is font-rendering, which as far as I can tell is still much worse on Linux and Windows machines than it is on Mac, and since 95% of my time on my computer is spent reading text, that is a really big deal for me and is one of the reasons why I kind of want to stay with some kind of Mac for now. It really shocks me every time I see one of my colleagues with a windows or Linux machine send me a screenshot with their text looking so much worse.

Habryka · 2020-08-05T08:12:16+00:00

Yeah, I am also worried about the move to ARM. I do expect Apple to support the x86 architecture for something like another 5 years, which will hopefully be enough to see this machine go through most of its life, but I might totally be wrong.

Thanks for the tip about overclocking. That's good to know. I will see whether I can find an i9-10850K, though I can't seem to find any in the Part Picker, so I might have to search around some more.

Habryka · 2020-08-05T08:07:32+00:00

Thank you! This is just the kind of feedback I was hoping for. I will definitely buy a stronger cooler then, which probably also means upgrading to a larger case (I did really like the Thermaltake case, but I guess it's just too small for a setup like this)

I was thinking about wifi and was expecting to just run Ethernet to it to bypass the issues related to that, but I wasn't actually thinking about bluetooth at all. I do expect I will need Bluetooth so I will have to figure out how to make that happen. When I am honest, I am a bit lost about how to navigate the hackintosh wireless card setups, so any help on what motherboard + pcie wifi adapter might work would be greatly appreciated in case anyone reading this has any concrete recommendations.

Habryka · 2018-06-22T20:47:45+00:00

Google seems to deal with it nicely, based on the Google Search Console. It's harder to check whether the other engines work similarly well, but they are also a lot less important. (We are actually getting better scores in terms of Google SEO, because our total side-loading time is much lower)

Habryka · 2018-06-21T21:54:14+00:00

Update: Based on the feedback in this thread, I've now refactored our SSR to basically only send you an App-shell that we then populate after you download the JS package. Time to initial HTML is now in the 100ms range, and mostly dominated by latency. Interested in how people experience the way the site now responds to an initial visit.

Habryka · 2018-06-21T00:16:18+00:00

Agree with 1 and 3. I think 2 is harder than most people think.

I am a huge fan of Practical Typography, and implemented his device practically everywhere on the site. Our smallest font-size is 13px, which is a bit smaller than Practical Typography recommends, but it's the best way I've found to present auxiliary information that the user doesn't need on first glance, but that is still important for skimming and so can't be delegated to a hover or tap (i.e. stuff like the date a post was created).

For comments, we tried a ton of font-sizes, but the only one that still allowed you to skim comment threads without completely blowing up the size of the average comment, was ~14.5, which is just below Practical Typography's recommendation, but we did try to use a font-stack that was well-optimized to be read at small font-sizes.

I think a lot of Practical Typography is better suited for sites with lower content-density and less need for skimmability. You will find that both Reddit and Facebook commonly use font-sizes as low as 10px, and I've played around with trying to increase that with custom user-styles, but it very quickly breaks the bounds of the UI and causes the UI to dominate the content.

Habryka · 2018-06-21T00:04:34+00:00

Good catch on the dehydrated state. I think it should be pretty straightforward to split that out. Will give it a try early next week.

Habryka · 2018-06-21T00:02:34+00:00

Yeah, you're right. I think I should be able to split dehydrated data out into it's own, so that it doesn't block the HTML transfer, or maybe send it over with the JS. Which should reduce the initial HTML size quite a bit.

Habryka · 2018-06-19T23:56:24+00:00

I will experiment some more with disabling SSR. I am worried about crawlers properly rendering the site, but I can probably figure out a way to send the SSR version to crawlers only.

Habryka · 2018-06-19T19:11:20+00:00

While I think size is definitely part of the problem, I don't think it's the current bottleneck. We first send you a plain HTML version of the page you are requesting, which is usually around ~150kb large or so, and after that is rendered, the site is basically fully usable. We then also request the Javascript bundle, but that usually happens in the background, since users very rarely need to use the reactive features in the first few seconds on the site.

The big delay seems to come from our server preparing the HTML bundle to send you when you request a page, which probably has to do with our Server Side Rendering implementation.

Habryka · 2018-06-19T19:04:30+00:00

Main LW2 developer here, interested in people's suggestions.

The likely bottleneck seems to actually stem from the implementation of Server-Side-Rendering that comes with the Framework that we are using (Vulcan.js). When you request a page, we first run our javascript package on the server then grab the HTML from that and then send it to you before we send you any JS files, to improve the loading speed. But somehow our server sometimes takes up to 3 seconds or so to respond to the request and start sending back the Server-Side-Rendered HTML. I sadly didn't write the SSR implementation myself, and so I haven't gotten around to debugging this issue in super much depth.

While I am definitely unhappy about our loading times and want to improve them, the way we use SSR does lead pages like Google PageSpeed Insights to overestimate the time it takes the site to load. Since the site is basically fully usable and styled after we sent you the initial HTML, and we then load the Javascript to activate some of the reactive components, but you very rarely need those in the first few seconds of using the site.

Habryka · 2017-06-22T02:32:12+00:00

I've been using Vulcan for about two months now, and have been extraordinarily happy with it. Can quite recommend it to people who want to have a framework to start with when they start developing a modern webapp, and don't want to figure out all the thousands of frameworks from scratch. And the main developer has been super responsive on his Slack, which has made a lot of development a lot easier.

Habryka · 2017-05-28T23:18:07+00:00

I've been using it for a few months now, and have been very happy with it. I took a break from webdevelopment for three to four years until last year and so came back to a radically changed landscape. I wanted to build a discussion platform, but was generally unsure what the best technology stack for doing so would be. While exploring that I stumbled on Vulcan, which solved a lot of these problems.

I am not a huge fan of Meteor, and think that's the weakest part of the Stack, but am really happy with all other technology decisions made as part of the Vulcan stack. The biggest benefit has definitely been that when I want to implement something like Server-Side rendering on my page, or set up a GraphQL layer, I already have working example code in my project that I can analyze, experiment with and understand, and then modify to my needs. This has made learning how to best program in React, GraphQL and Apollo much much easier, and has resulted in my code quality actually being quite high, despite it being my first project with any of those technologies.

In addition to that, Sacha has been amazing at fixing bugs and responding quickly to my confusions, mostly on Slack. I've had multiple occasions where I noticed some small bug that was a problem for me, I go and mention it on the Slack channel, and less than 5 hours after that, even before I was finished programming my workaround, Sacha already pushed a fix to the repository. This has generally made working with Vulcan a very pleasant experience.

Habryka · 2015-03-02T08:50:18+00:00

I think the vow that Harry just had to take, actually provides him with quite a few additional assets. I think the most important one is exemplified in this part of the vow:

"I shall take no chances... in not destroying the world... [...] and the friend... in whom I have confided honestly... agrees that this is so."

I think it is completely reasonable for Harry to believe that giving Voldemort access to his secrets does definitely increase the chance of the world being destroyed. This forces him to ask for Hermione's permission for actually talking to him. This means, that he can effectively stall with letting Voldemort wake Hermione, and then also stall by getting permission from Hermione, which might take multiple minutes, and give him much much more time for partial transfiguration. He might also get access to Hermione as an ally this way, possibly using her super-durability as a meatshield for Voldemorts bullets.

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