Does someone have a 100 word summary of the whole affair?
My impression is that two nonlinear employees were upset that they weren’t getting paid enough and had hurt feelings about some minor incidents like not getting a veggieburger, so they wrote some mean blog posts about the Nonlinear leadership, and the Nonlinear leadership responded that actually they were getting paid enough (seems to amount to something like $100k/yr all in) and that they’d mostly made it up.
(seems to amount to something like $100k/yr all in)
I don’t think anybody said any numbers like that; I think the highest anybody has claimed so far was $75k/year, assuming that you count travel, meals, lodging at expensive places etc to be worth 1:1 in compensation to the employee (which I think is dubious as ~nobody earning $75k/year will want to spend >80% of their income as travel).
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 you’re 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. “Just” $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
990/17174 = 6%
(I didn’t 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. We’d just already booked it before she’d switched to cash.
If you want to include that, it’s hard, because then should we include the cash comp or not?)
It’s 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 it’s not like she was forced to spend money in a certain way. It’s 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 it’s fine for you to be purely compensated with cash. There’s 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].
I’m 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 it’s 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).
I’m 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 “total compensation” package[3]. However, my understanding is also that talking about “total compensation” in that sense isn’t very commonplace, and if you’re including medical benefits in your compensation package and comparing it to a $72k salary, you’re not comparing like-for-like (most companies that offer $72k/year will also separately pay for medical insurance!)
It’s 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.
I’m 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, I’ve willingly decided to volunteer to do EA org work sometimes (in some cases they’ve offered and I’ve refused payment). But my consent for $0/hour doesn’t mean that my “compensation package” is $X/hour. (Even if they offered $X/h, this doesn’t mean my actual compensation package is $X/h).
When she asked to get compensated purely in cash, we said yes.
So it’s not like she was forced to spend money in a certain way. It’s 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 it’s fine for you to be purely compensated with cash. There’s 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 would’ve 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 don’t on balance buy it though. I would strongly guess that most people in Alice or Chloe’s shoes would’ve preferred to be paid the equivalent cash amount, and I’m at <50% that Alice and Chloe are sufficiently different from the general population.
Though I’m slightly confused that nobody else corrected Roko’s far more egregious errors in 4 days, while my “errors” were corrected within an hour of posting.
My intuitive answer is to count it as the counterfactual cost of how much I’d 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 “total compensation” 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 I’m also sorry if I come across that way. I’m trying to be as unemotional as possible, but as I’m sure you can imagine, it’s been challenging, and I certainly haven’t succeeded as much as I would like.
most people in Alice or Chloe’s shoes would’ve preferred to be paid the equivalent cash amount
Alice did, and then when she asked she got it. Chloe never requested this.
It’s 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 don’t see an alternative. I can’t read minds. I couldn’t change their comp package if I didn’t 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 “this was what they chose” and “this was what they would have preferred if they could have had anything in the world right away without having to ask”.
Like, imagine I applied the same standards to funders. “I asked for $50,000 and they gave me $50,000, but I would have preferred $75,000. Yes, I didn’t ask for $75,000, but most people in my shoes would prefer $75,000 over $50,000.” (Or replace with whatever numbers make most sense to you)
This follows the same structure of the argument “Alice 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 didn’t ask for that, but most people in their shoes would prefer a cash salary over the other comp package.”
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 doesn’t mean it’s 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 they’re 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 doesn’t 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 “when people describe a compensation package do they usually include medical” and the first result said:
“Health Insurance Benefits are a huge piece of your overall compensation package. This can include Medical, Dental, Vision, as well as HSA/FSA 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.”
Since Google knows my history, I thought maybe it’s giving me a biased result. So I tried searching in incognito mode so it wasn’t 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 it’s 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 don’t 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 1⁄2 months after she quit. And she could have gotten a regular dev job far faster if she wanted.
I don’t 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/fellowship/job 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 they’ve been working for at least a year.
Most people if they’re offered room and board + stipend never get the option of switching to cash only.
Most people don’t accept a compensation package and then later say they would have preferred a different compensation package and therefore they were financially controlled.
Most people don’t go to the EA Hotel and say that they’re being financially controlled because they got room and board and a stipend and couldn’t choose to spend the money on something else.
Most people don’t 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 they’re 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 can’t 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 can’t say “They told me I’d get paid $X and I got paid $X but I think $Y would be better, therefore we have to warn the community about the ‘predator’ in our midst, ‘chewing up and spitting out’ the youth of the community.”
They can say “They offered me $X and I got paid $X, and I would have preferred $Y, and when I asked for $Y, I got $Y.”
They can say “They 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.”
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 you’re 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/yr 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/yr, the highest claimed number was ~$75k/year and b) saying someone is “getting paid” $75k/year 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 didn’t say anything about whether the deal was net good or bad. Note also that my original comment was exactly one sentence.
I’m 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 don’t appreciate you reframing my language imprecisely[1] and strongly implying things I didn’t say.
To be honest, your comments triggered “someone is wrong on the internet” 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 you’re in an emotionally tough spot right now, and I want to be respectful of your time, so I’ll refrain from commenting further in this thread.
Additionally, we need to be able to distinguish between “this was what they chose” and “this was what they would have preferred if they could have had anything in the world right away without having to ask”.
I never at any point said that they didn’t choose this.
Like, imagine I applied the same standards to funders. “I asked for $50,000 and they gave me $50,000, but I would have preferred $75,000. Yes, I didn’t ask for $75,000, but most people in my shoes would prefer $75,000 over $50,000.” (Or replace with whatever numbers make most sense to you)
(speaking for myself) No, I think it’s 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 they’d benefit more from working in Berkeley, and also that they’d 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/year.
And then afterwards I go around telling people that Alex was paid $75k/year. People might reasonably object on whether (e.g.) just because I somehow managed to be deluded enough to pay $10k/year in overpriced gym memberships to a third party on behalf of a grantee who doesn’t exercise, that it’s actually equivalent to paying the grantee $10k/year.
This follows the same structure of the argument “Alice 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 didn’t ask for that, but most people in their shoes would prefer a cash salary over the other comp package.”
The whole point is that it wasn’t the same value. Cost does not equal value! Also I note that you are putting quote marks around things I didn’t say. Instead of block quotes, would you prefer if instead (mis)quoted you as saying “I 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]”?
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 doesn’t mean it’s unethical for a donor to earmark their donations.
In this comment chain, I never said anything about whether an action is ethical or not.
Yes it appears to include the 1k stipend, flights, recreational activities, meals, lodging, productivity expenses, laptop, medical expenses, and rental car.
If you think writing an 100 word summary of all of this content is as easy as downvoting, you’re probably significantly overrating the value of your original comment.
Apparently nobody else can do any better. Anyway, the community seems somewhat insane about this, like it’s a sacred subject that we dare not do a quick summary of.
If only you were some future AI with the ability to retrocausally coerce people into doing the substantial task of even trying to summarize this mess into a 100 word summary. Apparently your fame was not enough. ;-)
Does someone have a 100 word summary of the whole affair?
My impression is that two nonlinear employees were upset that they weren’t getting paid enough and had hurt feelings about some minor incidents like not getting a veggieburger, so they wrote some mean blog posts about the Nonlinear leadership, and the Nonlinear leadership responded that actually they were getting paid enough (seems to amount to something like $100k/yr all in) and that they’d mostly made it up.
Is that accurate?
I don’t think anybody said any numbers like that; I think the highest anybody has claimed so far was $75k/year, assuming that you count travel, meals, lodging at expensive places etc to be worth 1:1 in compensation to the employee (which I think is dubious as ~nobody earning $75k/year will want to spend >80% of their income as travel).
You’re right that it’s ~$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 you’re 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. “Just” $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
990/17174 = 6%
(I didn’t 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. We’d just already booked it before she’d switched to cash.
If you want to include that, it’s hard, because then should we include the cash comp or not?)
It’s 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 it’s not like she was forced to spend money in a certain way. It’s 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 it’s fine for you to be purely compensated with cash. There’s 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. I’m 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].
I’m 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 it’s 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).
I’m 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 “total compensation” package[3]. However, my understanding is also that talking about “total compensation” in that sense isn’t very commonplace, and if you’re including medical benefits in your compensation package and comparing it to a $72k salary, you’re not comparing like-for-like (most companies that offer $72k/year will also separately pay for medical insurance!)
I’m 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, I’ve willingly decided to volunteer to do EA org work sometimes (in some cases they’ve offered and I’ve refused payment). But my consent for $0/hour doesn’t mean that my “compensation package” is $X/hour. (Even if they offered $X/h, this doesn’t mean my actual compensation package is $X/h).
I agree that this is some Bayesian evidence that she would’ve 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 don’t on balance buy it though. I would strongly guess that most people in Alice or Chloe’s shoes would’ve preferred to be paid the equivalent cash amount, and I’m at <50% that Alice and Chloe are sufficiently different from the general population.
Though I’m slightly confused that nobody else corrected Roko’s far more egregious errors in 4 days, while my “errors” were corrected within an hour of posting.
My intuitive answer is to count it as the counterfactual cost of how much I’d 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 “total compensation” 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 I’m also sorry if I come across that way. I’m trying to be as unemotional as possible, but as I’m sure you can imagine, it’s been challenging, and I certainly haven’t succeeded as much as I would like.
Alice did, and then when she asked she got it. Chloe never requested this.
It’s 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 don’t see an alternative. I can’t read minds. I couldn’t change their comp package if I didn’t 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 “this was what they chose” and “this was what they would have preferred if they could have had anything in the world right away without having to ask”.
Like, imagine I applied the same standards to funders. “I asked for $50,000 and they gave me $50,000, but I would have preferred $75,000. Yes, I didn’t ask for $75,000, but most people in my shoes would prefer $75,000 over $50,000.” (Or replace with whatever numbers make most sense to you)
This follows the same structure of the argument “Alice 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 didn’t ask for that, but most people in their shoes would prefer a cash salary over the other comp package.”
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 doesn’t mean it’s 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 they’re 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 doesn’t 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 “when people describe a compensation package do they usually include medical” and the first result said:
“Health Insurance Benefits are a huge piece of your overall compensation package. This can include Medical, Dental, Vision, as well as HSA/FSA 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.”
“A total compensation package goes beyond your new hires’ base pay rate. It also includes items like health insurance, bonuses, and paid time off”
When I Google “how to calculate the value of your compensation package” these are the first results:
“To 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.”
“Total 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 perks—including your PTO—are actually parts of your total compensation package, and they can have just as much value as your salary.”
Since Google knows my history, I thought maybe it’s giving me a biased result. So I tried searching in incognito mode so it wasn’t 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 it’s 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 don’t 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 1⁄2 months after she quit. And she could have gotten a regular dev job far faster if she wanted.
I don’t 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/fellowship/job 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 they’ve been working for at least a year.
Most people if they’re offered room and board + stipend never get the option of switching to cash only.
Most people don’t accept a compensation package and then later say they would have preferred a different compensation package and therefore they were financially controlled.
Most people don’t go to the EA Hotel and say that they’re being financially controlled because they got room and board and a stipend and couldn’t choose to spend the money on something else.
Most people don’t 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 they’re 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 can’t 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 can’t say “They told me I’d get paid $X and I got paid $X but I think $Y would be better, therefore we have to warn the community about the ‘predator’ in our midst, ‘chewing up and spitting out’ the youth of the community.”
They can say “They offered me $X and I got paid $X, and I would have preferred $Y, and when I asked for $Y, I got $Y.”
They can say “They 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.”
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 you’re 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/yr, the highest claimed number was ~$75k/year and b) saying someone is “getting paid” $75k/year 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 didn’t say anything about whether the deal was net good or bad. Note also that my original comment was exactly one sentence.
I’m 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 don’t appreciate you reframing my language imprecisely[1] and strongly implying things I didn’t say.
To be honest, your comments triggered “someone is wrong on the internet” 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 you’re in an emotionally tough spot right now, and I want to be respectful of your time, so I’ll refrain from commenting further in this thread.
I never at any point said that they didn’t choose this.
(speaking for myself) No, I think it’s 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 they’d benefit more from working in Berkeley, and also that they’d 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/year.
And then afterwards I go around telling people that Alex was paid $75k/year. People might reasonably object on whether (e.g.) just because I somehow managed to be deluded enough to pay $10k/year in overpriced gym memberships to a third party on behalf of a grantee who doesn’t exercise, that it’s actually equivalent to paying the grantee $10k/year.
The whole point is that it wasn’t the same value. Cost does not equal value! Also I note that you are putting quote marks around things I didn’t say. Instead of block quotes, would you prefer if instead (mis)quoted you as saying “I 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]”?
In this comment chain, I never said anything about whether an action is ethical or not.
As the saying goes “anything is possible if you lie.”
ok. So the total comp really is 75k.
But it includes accommodation within that?
Yep.
Yes it appears to include the 1k stipend, flights, recreational activities, meals, lodging, productivity expenses, laptop, medical expenses, and rental car.
(No, that is very inaccurate)
In what way, specifically?
Apparently 77 people chose to downvote this without offering an alternative 100 word summary. .
If you think writing an 100 word summary of all of this content is as easy as downvoting, you’re probably significantly overrating the value of your original comment.
Apparently nobody else can do any better. Anyway, the community seems somewhat insane about this, like it’s a sacred subject that we dare not do a quick summary of.
If only you were some future AI with the ability to retrocausally coerce people into doing the substantial task of even trying to summarize this mess into a 100 word summary. Apparently your fame was not enough. ;-)