1) wasting hundreds of pounds of money on food is multiple orders of magnitude away from the biggest misallocation of money within EA community building,
2) All misallocations of money within EA community building is lower than misallocations of money caused by donations that were wasted by donating to less effective cause areas (for context, Open Phil spent ~200M in criminal justice reform, more than all of their EA CB spending to date), and
3) it’s pretty plausible that we burned much more utility from failure to donate/spend enough rather than via donating too much to wasteful things, so looking at the “visible” waste is ignoring the biggest source of resource misallocation.
For what it’s worth, even though I prioritize longtermist causes, reading
Maybe it depends on the cause area but the price I’m willing to pay to attract/retain people who can work on meta/longtermist things is just so high that it doesn’t seem worth factoring in things like a few hundred pounds wasted on food.
made me fairly uncomfortable, even though I don’t disagree with the substance of the comment, as well as
2) All misallocations of money within EA community building is lower than misallocations of money caused by donations that were wasted by donating to less effective cause areas (for context, Open Phil spent ~200M in criminal justice reform, more than all of their EA CB spending to date), and
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)
I think another framing here is that:
1) wasting hundreds of pounds of money on food is multiple orders of magnitude away from the biggest misallocation of money within EA community building,
2) All misallocations of money within EA community building is lower than misallocations of money caused by donations that were wasted by donating to less effective cause areas (for context, Open Phil spent ~200M in criminal justice reform, more than all of their EA CB spending to date), and
3) it’s pretty plausible that we burned much more utility from failure to donate/spend enough rather than via donating too much to wasteful things, so looking at the “visible” waste is ignoring the biggest source of resource misallocation.
For what it’s worth, even though I prioritize longtermist causes, reading
made me fairly uncomfortable, even though I don’t disagree with the substance of the comment, as well as
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)