EA - Shutting Down the Lightcone Offices by Habryka

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Shutting Down the Lightcone Offices, published by Habryka on March 15, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Lightcone recently decided to close down a big project we'd been running for the last 1.5 years: An office space in Berkeley for people working on x-risk/EA/rationalist things that we opened August 2021.We haven't written much about why, but I and Ben had written some messages on the internal office slack to explain some of our reasoning, which we've copy-pasted below. (They are from Jan 26th). I might write a longer retrospective sometime, but these messages seemed easy to share, and it seemed good to have something I can more easily refer to publicly.Background dataBelow is a graph of weekly unique keycard-visitors to the office in 2022.The x-axis is each week (skipping the first 3), and the y-axis is the number of unique visitors-with-keycards.Members could bring in guests, which happened quite a bit and isn't measured in the keycard data below, so I think the total number of people who came by the offices is 30-50% higher.The offices opened in August 2021. Including guests, parties, and all the time not shown in the graphs, I'd estimate around 200-300 more people visited, for a total of around 500-600 people who used the offices.The offices cost $70k/month on rent , and around $35k/month on food and drink, and ~$5k/month on contractor time for the office. It also costs core Lightcone staff time which I'd guess at around $75k/year.Ben's AnnouncementClosing the Lightcone Offices @channelHello there everyone,Sadly, I'm here to write that we've decided to close down the Lightcone Offices by the end of March. While we initially intended to transplant the office to the Rose Garden Inn, Oliver has decided (and I am on the same page about this decision) to make a clean break going forward to allow us to step back and renegotiate our relationship to the entire EA/longtermist ecosystem, as well as change what products and services we build.Below I'll give context on the decision and other details, but the main practical information is that the office will no longer be open after Friday March 24th. (There will be a goodbye party on that day.)I asked Oli to briefly state his reasoning for this decision, here's what he says:An explicit part of my impact model for the Lightcone Offices has been that its value was substantially dependent on the existing EA/AI Alignment/Rationality ecosystem being roughly on track to solve the world's most important problems, and that while there are issues, pouring gas into this existing engine, and ironing out its bugs and problems, is one of the most valuable things to do in the world.I had been doubting this assumption of our strategy for a while, even before FTX. Over the past year (with a substantial boost by the FTX collapse) my actual trust in this ecosystem and interest in pouring gas into this existing engine has greatly declined, and I now stand before what I have helped built with great doubts about whether it all will be or has been good for the world.I respect many of the people working here, and I am glad about the overall effect of Lightcone on this ecosystem we have built, and am excited about many of the individuals in the space, and probably in many, maybe even most, future worlds I will come back with new conviction to invest and build out this community that I have been building infrastructure for for almost a full decade. But right now, I think both me and the rest of Lightcone need some space to reconsider our relationship to this whole ecosystem, and I currently assign enough probability that building things in the space is harmful for the world that I can't really justify the level of effort and energy and money that Lightcone has been investing into doing things that pretty indiscriminately grow a...