I don’t mean to imply that this party was one of the worst instances in EA of money being wasted, just that I was there, felt pretty uncomfortable, optics were particularly bad (compared to donating to something not very effective), and it made me concerned about how EAs are valuing cost-effectiveness and counterfactuals.
I agree that it’s important to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and it’d be bad to not criticize X just because X isn’t the literal most biggest issue in the movement. But otoh some sense of scale is valuable (at least if we’re considering the object level of resource misallocation and not just/primarily optics).
Like if 30 EAs are at a party, and their time is conservatively valued at $100/h, the party is already burning >$50/minute, just as another example. Hopefully that time is worth it.
Like if 30 EAs are at a party, and their time is conservatively valued at $100/h, the party is already burning >$50/minute, just as another example. Hopefully that time is worth it.
This is probably a bit of an aside, but I don’t think that is a valid way to argue about the value of time for people: It seems quite unlikely to me that instead of going to an EA party those people would actually have done productive work with a value of $100/h. You only have so many hours that you can actually do productive work and the counterfactual of going to this party would more likely be those people going to a (non-EA) party, going for dinner with friends, spending time with family, relaxing, etc than actually doing productive work.
Even free time has value: maybe people would by default talk about work in their free time, or relax in a more optimal way than partying, thus making them more productive. So a suboptimal party can still waste lots of value in ways other than taking hours away from work. Given this, there are many people whose free time should be valued at >$100/h.
Fair point, that’s a reasonable callout. I think elasticity here is likely between 0 and 1, so really you should apply some discount, say maybe 30% of the counterfactual is productive work time for example? So we get to >$30/h per person and >$15/min for the party, in the above Fermi.
(As an aside, at least for me, I don’t find EA parties particularly relaxing, except relatively small ones where I already know almost everybody)
Yeah I’d mostly agree with this framing.
I don’t mean to imply that this party was one of the worst instances in EA of money being wasted, just that I was there, felt pretty uncomfortable, optics were particularly bad (compared to donating to something not very effective), and it made me concerned about how EAs are valuing cost-effectiveness and counterfactuals.
I agree that it’s important to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and it’d be bad to not criticize X just because X isn’t the literal most biggest issue in the movement. But otoh some sense of scale is valuable (at least if we’re considering the object level of resource misallocation and not just/primarily optics).
Like if 30 EAs are at a party, and their time is conservatively valued at $100/h, the party is already burning >$50/minute, just as another example. Hopefully that time is worth it.
This is probably a bit of an aside, but I don’t think that is a valid way to argue about the value of time for people: It seems quite unlikely to me that instead of going to an EA party those people would actually have done productive work with a value of $100/h. You only have so many hours that you can actually do productive work and the counterfactual of going to this party would more likely be those people going to a (non-EA) party, going for dinner with friends, spending time with family, relaxing, etc than actually doing productive work.
Even free time has value: maybe people would by default talk about work in their free time, or relax in a more optimal way than partying, thus making them more productive. So a suboptimal party can still waste lots of value in ways other than taking hours away from work. Given this, there are many people whose free time should be valued at >$100/h.
Fair point, that’s a reasonable callout. I think elasticity here is likely between 0 and 1, so really you should apply some discount, say maybe 30% of the counterfactual is productive work time for example? So we get to >$30/h per person and >$15/min for the party, in the above Fermi.
(As an aside, at least for me, I don’t find EA parties particularly relaxing, except relatively small ones where I already know almost everybody)