Alice was paid $72k cash annualized once she asked to be paid in a cash salary rather than a compensation package like she signed up for originally.
The $100k youâre thinking of is the $72k cash annualized + the ~$36k per year she claimed her independent business was making. So if what she said about her business was true she was making over $100k, but we were not paying her over $100k. âJustâ $72k.
spend >80% of their income as travel
Where are you getting that number from? It was a mix of rent, food, medical, productivity tools, etc. Some quick math I did shows that only 6% of the money we spent on her was for travel.
Total spent on her when she was compensated with room, board, travel, and medical + stipend: 17,174
990/â17174 = 6%
(I didnât include the flight from the Bahamas to London because that was when she was picking her own cash salary, rather than the all expenses paid + stipend. Weâd just already booked it before sheâd switched to cash.
If you want to include that, itâs hard, because then should we include the cash comp or not?)
Itâs also important to emphasize that even though compensation is not the same as purely cash pay, she signed up for the compensation package that she got. When she asked to get compensated purely in cash, we said yes.
So itâs not like she was forced to spend money in a certain way. Itâs like if you signed up for a fellowship that covered room and board and a stipend. Later, you decide that you want to spend the money differently, so you talk to the person in charge and they say itâs fine for you to be purely compensated with cash. Thereâs no forcing you at any point in that process to spend your money in a particular way.
I will count lodging away from home as travel expenses. Board is debatable[2].
Iâm not sure what counts as productivity tools here. But for most immediately salient examples, I will not count productivity tools as compensation in the usual sense of the term at all. At most itâs a perk. In most American companies your employer will not count, say, office space or hardware or productivity software as part of your compensation package (and my understanding is that the IRS lets self-employed people deduct productivity tools from their taxes).
Iâm confused about the medical expenses. Looking online, I think medical benefits are generally considered a benefit, and it is reasonable and commonplace to include that in a âtotal compensationâ package[3]. However, my understanding is also that talking about âtotal compensationâ in that sense isnât very commonplace, and if youâre including medical benefits in your compensation package and comparing it to a $72k salary, youâre not comparing like-for-like (most companies that offer $72k/âyear will also separately pay for medical insurance!)
Itâs also important to emphasize that even though compensation is not the same as purely cash pay, she signed up for the compensation package that she got.
Iâm not sure why this is important to emphasize. If the claim is that she was forced into the work unwillingly, then the fact that a willing noncoerced adult willingly signed an employment agreement is strong evidence that there was consent involved. But AFAICT my comment did not say anything about consent; it was only a technical point about the number under dispute.
Historically, Iâve willingly decided to volunteer to do EA org work sometimes (in some cases theyâve offered and Iâve refused payment). But my consent for $0/âhour doesnât mean that my âcompensation packageâ is $X/âhour. (Even if they offered $X/âh, this doesnât mean my actual compensation package is $X/âh).
When she asked to get compensated purely in cash, we said yes.
So itâs not like she was forced to spend money in a certain way. Itâs like if you signed up for a fellowship that covered room and board and a stipend. Later, you decide that you want to spend the money differently, so you talk to the person in charge and they say itâs fine for you to be purely compensated with cash. Thereâs no forcing you at any point in that process to spend your money in a particular way.
I agree that this is some Bayesian evidence that she wouldâve in fact been one of the strange people who would in fact spend >80%(or >60%) of their income on travel, especially if it later turns out that after being purely compensated in cash, they ended up spending that money similarly with only tiny differences.
I still donât on balance buy it though. I would strongly guess that most people in Alice or Chloeâs shoes wouldâve preferred to be paid the equivalent cash amount, and Iâm at <50% that Alice and Chloe are sufficiently different from the general population.
Though Iâm slightly confused that nobody else corrected Rokoâs far more egregious errors in 4 days, while my âerrorsâ were corrected within an hour of posting.
My intuitive answer is to count it as the counterfactual cost of how much Iâd be willing to pay for the same food at home, but maybe other people have better ideas + there is already precedent for this type of calculation elsewhere.
In tech, when people say âtotal compensationâ they usually just mean monetary pay + stock, or occasionally monetary pay + stock + 401k matching. But I can imagine tech is an outlier here.
Hi Kat, sorry if my short comment came across as aggressive or inaccurate.
Thanks! And Iâm also sorry if I come across that way. Iâm trying to be as unemotional as possible, but as Iâm sure you can imagine, itâs been challenging, and I certainly havenât succeeded as much as I would like.
most people in Alice or Chloeâs shoes wouldâve preferred to be paid the equivalent cash amount
Alice did, and then when she asked she got it. Chloe never requested this.
Itâs really important that they signed up for this. If we had promised them $75,000 cash salary and then instead gave them this compensation package, I think that is indeed unethical and unfair. However if they knew what they were signing up for and it was clearly communicated and they said yes, then that is totally fine and an informed choice they made.
I donât see an alternative. I canât read minds. I couldnât change their comp package if I didnât know they wanted to. And when I did know, I said yes.
If they chose this compensation package when they could have applied for other jobs with a more standard package or could have asked for a standard package, then they did indeed choose this compensation package.
Additionally, we need to be able to distinguish between âthis was what they choseâ and âthis was what they would have preferred if they could have had anything in the world right away without having to askâ.
Like, imagine I applied the same standards to funders. âI asked for $50,000 and they gave me $50,000, but I would have preferred $75,000. Yes, I didnât ask for $75,000, but most people in my shoes would prefer $75,000 over $50,000.â (Or replace with whatever numbers make most sense to you)
This follows the same structure of the argument âAlice and Chloe signed up for a all-expenses-paid + stipend compensation package and they got that, but they would have preferred a cash salary of a similar value to the comp package. Yes, they didnât ask for that, but most people in their shoes would prefer a cash salary over the other comp package.â
Or maybe a better analogy is a charity applying for funding and the grantmaker donates but with earmarked funds. All orgs would prefer unearmarked funds (flexible funds are more useful than earmarked ones), but that doesnât mean itâs unethical for a donor to earmark their donations.
Is rent a travel expense?
Counting rent while traveling if this was a part-time travel experience seems reasonable. For example, if they usually live in the Bay area and theyâre expected to travel to London for EAG, the cost of the Airbnb in London is clearly a travel expense.
However, if they are always traveling and they do not have a permanent place anywhere, that does not seem like a travel expense but rather just regular rent. Neither of them had a permanent place. Alice had been nomadic before she even met us. Counting that as a travel expense in this context doesnât make sense and will lead to people getting the wrong idea.
Think about it. Otherwise then, for the last 4 years I have paid zero rent? Clearly, if you are a full-time nomad then airbnbs are just rent, not travel.
How to calculate total compensation
I quickly googled âwhen people describe a compensation package do they usually include medicalâ and the first result said:
âHealth Insurance Benefits are a huge piece of your overall compensation package. This can include Medical, Dental, Vision, as well as HSA/âFSA accounts. When calculating how much your benefits are worth, think about what percentage your employer is going to be covering. Is your employer covering 100% of the cost? 80%? Does that change if you were to include a spouse or dependents in the coverage? These are all important questions to ask when evaluating an offer package and figuring out how much your health benefits are worth.â
Since Google knows my history, I thought maybe itâs giving me a biased result. So I tried searching in incognito mode so it wasnât taking into account my recent posting, and it gave the same results.
Now, I do think that a compensation package is clearly different from cash salary. We say that right away at the almost the very beginning of our post. But we did not describe it to them or to anybody as a $75,000 salary cash. We described it as a compensation package that we estimated to be worth around $70,000.
Once, off hand, in a recorded interview. Every single other communication was just saying all expenses paid plus stipend.
They were informed about this beforehand and they signed up for it. If they had wanted something different, all they had to do was ask. Or they could have applied to a different job. When Alice did, she got it.
If people come away from reading this thinking that we said that we paid them both a cash salary of $75,000 or that itâs the same as a $75,000 cash salary, then they made the same mistake that Chloe seems to have made. Chloe kept on saying that we offered to pay her something equivalent to a $75,000 cash salary. We were saying that this was worth around $70,000. I think her interpreting it this way led to a lot of suffering. We tried to explain it to her a bunch of times that that was not what we were saying but she did not seem to be able to update. I do think people seem to struggle with this a lot.
I think the main thing though, and the way I think about it at least, is as a consequentialist. I donât think in terms of how much money is it worth etc. I tend to think of it as are you getting your needs met? What about your preferences? And I think the key is that she was living an exceptionally comfortable lifestyle. She was living the almost exactly the same lifestyle as myself.
She also had plenty of freedom and options. She publicly says she had savings and we covered everything so well that, as far as we can tell, all of her stipend went into savings as well. She got her dream job 2 and 1â2 months after she quit. And she could have gotten a regular dev job far faster if she wanted.
I donât know how she would have spent the money otherwise, But that seems irrelevant. It seems like if somebody got a scholarship that included room and board, and then they get upset, because they would have spent it on a different house. If they accept the scholarship, then that is how they would spend it. They would spend it on that house and that food, because that is what they chose. They could have just tried to get a different scholarship or a job. In fact, if you accept that scholarship, and then speak to the people who gave you it and say that you would prefer cash instead and they say yes, that is exceptionally generous and way outside the norm of what is expected.
If a scholarship/âfellowship/âjob offered you room and board and you accepted and then later asked for cash instead I suspect that 98% of them would say no.
She is trying to make it sound like a hardship and us being unreasonable when it is incredibly unreasonable to ask for your compensation package to be changed so quickly after you accepted it.
Most people do not ask for changes in compensation until theyâve been working for at least a year.
Most people if theyâre offered room and board + stipend never get the option of switching to cash only.
Most people donât accept a compensation package and then later say they would have preferred a different compensation package and therefore they were financially controlled.
Most people donât go to the EA Hotel and say that theyâre being financially controlled because they got room and board and a stipend and couldnât choose to spend the money on something else.
Most people donât say that a scholarship offering to pay for room and board is somehow bad because the student could have used that money to spend less on a room or paid for a different room.
Sure, everybody would prefer that. But they are not entitled to that.
Sure, some people might misinterpret a compensation package being estimated to be worth $X as being the same as a cash salary of $X. But as long as you clearly communicate what theyâre signing up for and they have other options and they choose the compensation package, then nothing wrong was done. If they later change their mind and want something different, they have to ask or quit and find a job that meets their criteria. They canât make a choice, later want to make a different choice, then try to pillory an person for not reading their mind and giving them everything they ask for right away.
People canât say âThey told me Iâd get paid $X and I got paid $X but I think $Y would be better, therefore we have to warn the community about the âpredatorâ in our midst, âchewing up and spitting outâ the youth of the community.â
They can say âThey offered me $X and I got paid $X, and I would have preferred $Y, and when I asked for $Y, I got $Y.â
They can say âThey offered me $X and I got paid $X. I would have preferred $Y, but I never asked for $Y and that made me sad. I guess I should learn from this and get better at asking people for things instead of expecting mind-reading and getting everything that I want immediately without asking.â
First of all, sympathies again. Having hundreds of comments piled on (twice) must be an exceedingly unpleasant experience, and I hope you find some time to practice self-care and enjoy the holidays.
I want to be respectful of your time and the very difficult emotional spot youâre going through, but it seems like your comment is rather afield of the original point I was making. Recall that Roko summarized the situation as:
Nonlinear leadership responded that actually they were getting paid enough (seems to amount to something liked $100k/âyr all in)...
Since nobody else tried to correct Roko in 4 days, I tried to explain that he was off on two fronts with that line: a) Nobody said $100k/âyr, the highest claimed number was ~$75k/âyear and b) saying someone is âgetting paidâ $75k/âyear will predictably give a misleading impression when said payment includes flights and lodging with your employer at expensive places.
That was it. I did not say anything about consent or agreement until you brought it up (and then only to deny that I took the contrary position). I didnât say anything about whether the deal was net good or bad. Note also that my original comment was exactly one sentence.
Iâm not sure how to say this politely, but you write rather long paragraphs arguing against a position I do not hold, and I clearly never did. I donât appreciate you reframing my language imprecisely[1] and strongly implying things I didnât say.
To be honest, your comments triggered âsomeone is wrong on the internetâ feelings from me, and I have to actively resist my natural instincts to fight back line-by-line. Like dude if you want to win a fight by writing overly long and nitpicky EA forum comments you sure picked the wrong person to mess with.
I understand that youâre in an emotionally tough spot right now, and I want to be respectful of your time, so Iâll refrain from commenting further in this thread.
Additionally, we need to be able to distinguish between âthis was what they choseâ and âthis was what they would have preferred if they could have had anything in the world right away without having to askâ.
I never at any point said that they didnât choose this.
Like, imagine I applied the same standards to funders. âI asked for $50,000 and they gave me $50,000, but I would have preferred $75,000. Yes, I didnât ask for $75,000, but most people in my shoes would prefer $75,000 over $50,000.â (Or replace with whatever numbers make most sense to you)
(speaking for myself) No, I think itâs more like if I did active grantmaking, saw Alex who might be a good independent researcher, but was worried that they were doing too much theory and not enough computational work, and also think theyâd benefit more from working in Berkeley, and also that theyâd be more productive if they exercised more (no offense to them of course). So I arranged for them to be paid $10k in stipend, $15k in housing subsidies for Berkeley, and bought $25k in compute credits for them, and arranged $15k worth of office space in Berkeley, and bought an expensive gym membership from FAR for $10k/âyear.
And then afterwards I go around telling people that Alex was paid $75k/âyear. People might reasonably object on whether (e.g.) just because I somehow managed to be deluded enough to pay $10k/âyear in overpriced gym memberships to a third party on behalf of a grantee who doesnât exercise, that itâs actually equivalent to paying the grantee $10k/âyear.
This follows the same structure of the argument âAlice and Chloe signed up for a all-expenses-paid + stipend compensation package and they got that, but they would have preferred a cash salary of a similar value to the comp package. Yes, they didnât ask for that, but most people in their shoes would prefer a cash salary over the other comp package.â
The whole point is that it wasnât the same value. Cost does not equal value! Also I note that you are putting quote marks around things I didnât say. Instead of block quotes, would you prefer if instead (mis)quoted you as saying âI think approving a grant should have the exact same responsibilities and norms as employing someone under your direct care and instruction. Also I hate Taylor Swift and I like pineapple on pizza[2]â?
Or maybe a better analogy is a charity applying for funding and the grantmaker donates but with earmarked funds. All orgs would prefer unearmarked funds (flexible funds are more useful than earmarked ones), but that doesnât mean itâs unethical for a donor to earmark their donations.
In this comment chain, I never said anything about whether an action is ethical or not.
Youâre right that itâs ~$75k total comp.
Alice was paid $72k cash annualized once she asked to be paid in a cash salary rather than a compensation package like she signed up for originally.
The $100k youâre thinking of is the $72k cash annualized + the ~$36k per year she claimed her independent business was making. So if what she said about her business was true she was making over $100k, but we were not paying her over $100k. âJustâ $72k.
Where are you getting that number from? It was a mix of rent, food, medical, productivity tools, etc. Some quick math I did shows that only 6% of the money we spent on her was for travel.
Math from this doc
Flights:800+190=990
Total spent on her when she was compensated with room, board, travel, and medical + stipend: 17,174
990/â17174 = 6%
(I didnât include the flight from the Bahamas to London because that was when she was picking her own cash salary, rather than the all expenses paid + stipend. Weâd just already booked it before sheâd switched to cash.
If you want to include that, itâs hard, because then should we include the cash comp or not?)
Itâs also important to emphasize that even though compensation is not the same as purely cash pay, she signed up for the compensation package that she got. When she asked to get compensated purely in cash, we said yes.
So itâs not like she was forced to spend money in a certain way. Itâs like if you signed up for a fellowship that covered room and board and a stipend. Later, you decide that you want to spend the money differently, so you talk to the person in charge and they say itâs fine for you to be purely compensated with cash. Thereâs no forcing you at any point in that process to spend your money in a particular way.
Hi Kat, sorry if my short comment came across as aggressive or inaccurate. Iâm just trying to be precise here.
And thanks for the speedy and detailed reply.[1]
I will count lodging away from home as travel expenses. Board is debatable[2].
Iâm not sure what counts as productivity tools here. But for most immediately salient examples, I will not count productivity tools as compensation in the usual sense of the term at all. At most itâs a perk. In most American companies your employer will not count, say, office space or hardware or productivity software as part of your compensation package (and my understanding is that the IRS lets self-employed people deduct productivity tools from their taxes).
Iâm confused about the medical expenses. Looking online, I think medical benefits are generally considered a benefit, and it is reasonable and commonplace to include that in a âtotal compensationâ package[3]. However, my understanding is also that talking about âtotal compensationâ in that sense isnât very commonplace, and if youâre including medical benefits in your compensation package and comparing it to a $72k salary, youâre not comparing like-for-like (most companies that offer $72k/âyear will also separately pay for medical insurance!)
Iâm not sure why this is important to emphasize. If the claim is that she was forced into the work unwillingly, then the fact that a willing noncoerced adult willingly signed an employment agreement is strong evidence that there was consent involved. But AFAICT my comment did not say anything about consent; it was only a technical point about the number under dispute.
Historically, Iâve willingly decided to volunteer to do EA org work sometimes (in some cases theyâve offered and Iâve refused payment). But my consent for $0/âhour doesnât mean that my âcompensation packageâ is $X/âhour. (Even if they offered $X/âh, this doesnât mean my actual compensation package is $X/âh).
I agree that this is some Bayesian evidence that she wouldâve in fact been one of the strange people who would in fact spend >80%(or >60%) of their income on travel, especially if it later turns out that after being purely compensated in cash, they ended up spending that money similarly with only tiny differences.
I still donât on balance buy it though. I would strongly guess that most people in Alice or Chloeâs shoes wouldâve preferred to be paid the equivalent cash amount, and Iâm at <50% that Alice and Chloe are sufficiently different from the general population.
Though Iâm slightly confused that nobody else corrected Rokoâs far more egregious errors in 4 days, while my âerrorsâ were corrected within an hour of posting.
My intuitive answer is to count it as the counterfactual cost of how much Iâd be willing to pay for the same food at home, but maybe other people have better ideas + there is already precedent for this type of calculation elsewhere.
In tech, when people say âtotal compensationâ they usually just mean monetary pay + stock, or occasionally monetary pay + stock + 401k matching. But I can imagine tech is an outlier here.
Thanks! And Iâm also sorry if I come across that way. Iâm trying to be as unemotional as possible, but as Iâm sure you can imagine, itâs been challenging, and I certainly havenât succeeded as much as I would like.
Alice did, and then when she asked she got it. Chloe never requested this.
Itâs really important that they signed up for this. If we had promised them $75,000 cash salary and then instead gave them this compensation package, I think that is indeed unethical and unfair. However if they knew what they were signing up for and it was clearly communicated and they said yes, then that is totally fine and an informed choice they made.
I donât see an alternative. I canât read minds. I couldnât change their comp package if I didnât know they wanted to. And when I did know, I said yes.
If they chose this compensation package when they could have applied for other jobs with a more standard package or could have asked for a standard package, then they did indeed choose this compensation package.
Additionally, we need to be able to distinguish between âthis was what they choseâ and âthis was what they would have preferred if they could have had anything in the world right away without having to askâ.
Like, imagine I applied the same standards to funders. âI asked for $50,000 and they gave me $50,000, but I would have preferred $75,000. Yes, I didnât ask for $75,000, but most people in my shoes would prefer $75,000 over $50,000.â (Or replace with whatever numbers make most sense to you)
This follows the same structure of the argument âAlice and Chloe signed up for a all-expenses-paid + stipend compensation package and they got that, but they would have preferred a cash salary of a similar value to the comp package. Yes, they didnât ask for that, but most people in their shoes would prefer a cash salary over the other comp package.â
Or maybe a better analogy is a charity applying for funding and the grantmaker donates but with earmarked funds. All orgs would prefer unearmarked funds (flexible funds are more useful than earmarked ones), but that doesnât mean itâs unethical for a donor to earmark their donations.
Is rent a travel expense?
Counting rent while traveling if this was a part-time travel experience seems reasonable. For example, if they usually live in the Bay area and theyâre expected to travel to London for EAG, the cost of the Airbnb in London is clearly a travel expense.
However, if they are always traveling and they do not have a permanent place anywhere, that does not seem like a travel expense but rather just regular rent. Neither of them had a permanent place. Alice had been nomadic before she even met us. Counting that as a travel expense in this context doesnât make sense and will lead to people getting the wrong idea.
Think about it. Otherwise then, for the last 4 years I have paid zero rent? Clearly, if you are a full-time nomad then airbnbs are just rent, not travel.
How to calculate total compensation
I quickly googled âwhen people describe a compensation package do they usually include medicalâ and the first result said:
âHealth Insurance Benefits are a huge piece of your overall compensation package. This can include Medical, Dental, Vision, as well as HSA/âFSA accounts. When calculating how much your benefits are worth, think about what percentage your employer is going to be covering. Is your employer covering 100% of the cost? 80%? Does that change if you were to include a spouse or dependents in the coverage? These are all important questions to ask when evaluating an offer package and figuring out how much your health benefits are worth.â
âA total compensation package goes beyond your new hiresâ base pay rate. It also includes items like health insurance, bonuses, and paid time offâ
When I Google âhow to calculate the value of your compensation packageâ these are the first results:
âTo calculate total compensation for an employee, take the sum of their base salary and the dollar value of all additional benefits. Additional benefits include insurance benefits, commissions and bonuses, time-off benefits, and perks.â
âTotal compensation is the combined value of your salary, bonuses, a 401(k) match, free office coffee, and more. All those freebies or conveniences that feel like work perksâincluding your PTOâare actually parts of your total compensation package, and they can have just as much value as your salary.â
Since Google knows my history, I thought maybe itâs giving me a biased result. So I tried searching in incognito mode so it wasnât taking into account my recent posting, and it gave the same results.
Now, I do think that a compensation package is clearly different from cash salary. We say that right away at the almost the very beginning of our post. But we did not describe it to them or to anybody as a $75,000 salary cash. We described it as a compensation package that we estimated to be worth around $70,000.
Once, off hand, in a recorded interview. Every single other communication was just saying all expenses paid plus stipend.
They were informed about this beforehand and they signed up for it. If they had wanted something different, all they had to do was ask. Or they could have applied to a different job. When Alice did, she got it.
If people come away from reading this thinking that we said that we paid them both a cash salary of $75,000 or that itâs the same as a $75,000 cash salary, then they made the same mistake that Chloe seems to have made. Chloe kept on saying that we offered to pay her something equivalent to a $75,000 cash salary. We were saying that this was worth around $70,000. I think her interpreting it this way led to a lot of suffering. We tried to explain it to her a bunch of times that that was not what we were saying but she did not seem to be able to update. I do think people seem to struggle with this a lot.
I think the main thing though, and the way I think about it at least, is as a consequentialist. I donât think in terms of how much money is it worth etc. I tend to think of it as are you getting your needs met? What about your preferences? And I think the key is that she was living an exceptionally comfortable lifestyle. She was living the almost exactly the same lifestyle as myself.
She also had plenty of freedom and options. She publicly says she had savings and we covered everything so well that, as far as we can tell, all of her stipend went into savings as well. She got her dream job 2 and 1â2 months after she quit. And she could have gotten a regular dev job far faster if she wanted.
I donât know how she would have spent the money otherwise, But that seems irrelevant. It seems like if somebody got a scholarship that included room and board, and then they get upset, because they would have spent it on a different house. If they accept the scholarship, then that is how they would spend it. They would spend it on that house and that food, because that is what they chose. They could have just tried to get a different scholarship or a job. In fact, if you accept that scholarship, and then speak to the people who gave you it and say that you would prefer cash instead and they say yes, that is exceptionally generous and way outside the norm of what is expected.
If a scholarship/âfellowship/âjob offered you room and board and you accepted and then later asked for cash instead I suspect that 98% of them would say no.
She is trying to make it sound like a hardship and us being unreasonable when it is incredibly unreasonable to ask for your compensation package to be changed so quickly after you accepted it.
Most people do not ask for changes in compensation until theyâve been working for at least a year.
Most people if theyâre offered room and board + stipend never get the option of switching to cash only.
Most people donât accept a compensation package and then later say they would have preferred a different compensation package and therefore they were financially controlled.
Most people donât go to the EA Hotel and say that theyâre being financially controlled because they got room and board and a stipend and couldnât choose to spend the money on something else.
Most people donât say that a scholarship offering to pay for room and board is somehow bad because the student could have used that money to spend less on a room or paid for a different room.
Sure, everybody would prefer that. But they are not entitled to that.
Sure, some people might misinterpret a compensation package being estimated to be worth $X as being the same as a cash salary of $X. But as long as you clearly communicate what theyâre signing up for and they have other options and they choose the compensation package, then nothing wrong was done. If they later change their mind and want something different, they have to ask or quit and find a job that meets their criteria. They canât make a choice, later want to make a different choice, then try to pillory an person for not reading their mind and giving them everything they ask for right away.
People canât say âThey told me Iâd get paid $X and I got paid $X but I think $Y would be better, therefore we have to warn the community about the âpredatorâ in our midst, âchewing up and spitting outâ the youth of the community.â
They can say âThey offered me $X and I got paid $X, and I would have preferred $Y, and when I asked for $Y, I got $Y.â
They can say âThey offered me $X and I got paid $X. I would have preferred $Y, but I never asked for $Y and that made me sad. I guess I should learn from this and get better at asking people for things instead of expecting mind-reading and getting everything that I want immediately without asking.â
First of all, sympathies again. Having hundreds of comments piled on (twice) must be an exceedingly unpleasant experience, and I hope you find some time to practice self-care and enjoy the holidays.
I want to be respectful of your time and the very difficult emotional spot youâre going through, but it seems like your comment is rather afield of the original point I was making. Recall that Roko summarized the situation as:
Since nobody else tried to correct Roko in 4 days, I tried to explain that he was off on two fronts with that line: a) Nobody said $100k/âyr, the highest claimed number was ~$75k/âyear and b) saying someone is âgetting paidâ $75k/âyear will predictably give a misleading impression when said payment includes flights and lodging with your employer at expensive places.
That was it. I did not say anything about consent or agreement until you brought it up (and then only to deny that I took the contrary position). I didnât say anything about whether the deal was net good or bad. Note also that my original comment was exactly one sentence.
Iâm not sure how to say this politely, but you write rather long paragraphs arguing against a position I do not hold, and I clearly never did. I donât appreciate you reframing my language imprecisely[1] and strongly implying things I didnât say.
To be honest, your comments triggered âsomeone is wrong on the internetâ feelings from me, and I have to actively resist my natural instincts to fight back line-by-line. Like dude if you want to win a fight by writing overly long and nitpicky EA forum comments you sure picked the wrong person to mess with.
I understand that youâre in an emotionally tough spot right now, and I want to be respectful of your time, so Iâll refrain from commenting further in this thread.
I never at any point said that they didnât choose this.
(speaking for myself) No, I think itâs more like if I did active grantmaking, saw Alex who might be a good independent researcher, but was worried that they were doing too much theory and not enough computational work, and also think theyâd benefit more from working in Berkeley, and also that theyâd be more productive if they exercised more (no offense to them of course). So I arranged for them to be paid $10k in stipend, $15k in housing subsidies for Berkeley, and bought $25k in compute credits for them, and arranged $15k worth of office space in Berkeley, and bought an expensive gym membership from FAR for $10k/âyear.
And then afterwards I go around telling people that Alex was paid $75k/âyear. People might reasonably object on whether (e.g.) just because I somehow managed to be deluded enough to pay $10k/âyear in overpriced gym memberships to a third party on behalf of a grantee who doesnât exercise, that itâs actually equivalent to paying the grantee $10k/âyear.
The whole point is that it wasnât the same value. Cost does not equal value! Also I note that you are putting quote marks around things I didnât say. Instead of block quotes, would you prefer if instead (mis)quoted you as saying âI think approving a grant should have the exact same responsibilities and norms as employing someone under your direct care and instruction. Also I hate Taylor Swift and I like pineapple on pizza[2]â?
In this comment chain, I never said anything about whether an action is ethical or not.
As the saying goes âanything is possible if you lie.â