Thanks for writing this post, this is an area I’ve also sometimes felt concerned about so it’s great to see some serious discussion.
A related point that I haven’t seen called out explicitly is that monetary costs are often correlated with other more significant, but less visible, costs such as staff time. While I think the substantial longtermist funding overhang really does mean we should spend more money, I think it’s still very important that we scrutinize where that money is being spent. One example that I’ve seen crop up a few time is retreats or other events being organized at very short notice (e.g. less than two weeks). In most of these cases there’s not been a clear reason why it needs to happen right now, and can’t wait a month or so. There’s a monetary cost to doing things last minute (e.g. more expensive flights and hotel rooms) but the biggest cost is the event will be less effective than if the organizers and attendees had more time to plan for it.
More generally I’m concerned that too much funding can have a detrimental effect on organisational culture. It’s often possible to make a problem temporarily go away just by throwing money at it. Sometimes that’s the right call (focus on core competencies), but sometimes it’s better off fixing the structural problem, before an organisation scales and it gets baked in. Anecdotally it seems like many of the world’s most successful companies do try to make frugality part of their culture, e.g. it’s one of Amazon’s leadership principles.
In general, being inefficient at a small scale can still end up being very impactful if you work on the right problem. But I think to make a serious dent on the world’s problems, we’re likely going to need some mega-projects, spending billions of dollars with large headcount. Inefficiency at that scale is likely to result in project failure: oversight and incentives only get harder. So it seems critical that we continue to develop the ability in EA to execute on projects efficiently, even if in the short-term we might achieve more by neglecting that.
I do feel a bit confused about what to do in practice to address these problems, and would love to see more thinking on it. For individual decisions, I’ve found figuring out what my time (in some context) is worth and sticking to it for time-money tradeoffs is helpful. In general I’d be suspicious if someone is always choosing to spend money when it saves time, or vice-versa. For funding decisions, these concerns are one of the reasons I lean towards keeping the bar for funding relatively high even if that means we can’t immediately deploy funding. I also support vetting people carefully to avoid incentivizing people pretending to be longtermists (or just having very bad epistemics).
Anecdotally it seems like many of the world’s most successful companies do try to make frugality part of their culture, e.g. it’s one of Amazon’s leadership principles.
Google, by contrast, is notoriously the opposite—for example emphasizing just trying lots of crazy, big, ambitious, expensive bets (e.g. their “10x” philosophy). Also see how Google talked about frugality in 2011.
Making bets on new ambitious projects doesn’t seem necessarily at odds with frugality: you can still execute on them in a lean way, some things just really do take a big CapEx. Granted whether Google or any major tech company really does this is debatable, but I do think they tend to at least try to instill it, even if there is some inefficiency e.g. due to principal-agent problems.
Thanks for writing this post, this is an area I’ve also sometimes felt concerned about so it’s great to see some serious discussion.
A related point that I haven’t seen called out explicitly is that monetary costs are often correlated with other more significant, but less visible, costs such as staff time. While I think the substantial longtermist funding overhang really does mean we should spend more money, I think it’s still very important that we scrutinize where that money is being spent. One example that I’ve seen crop up a few time is retreats or other events being organized at very short notice (e.g. less than two weeks). In most of these cases there’s not been a clear reason why it needs to happen right now, and can’t wait a month or so. There’s a monetary cost to doing things last minute (e.g. more expensive flights and hotel rooms) but the biggest cost is the event will be less effective than if the organizers and attendees had more time to plan for it.
More generally I’m concerned that too much funding can have a detrimental effect on organisational culture. It’s often possible to make a problem temporarily go away just by throwing money at it. Sometimes that’s the right call (focus on core competencies), but sometimes it’s better off fixing the structural problem, before an organisation scales and it gets baked in. Anecdotally it seems like many of the world’s most successful companies do try to make frugality part of their culture, e.g. it’s one of Amazon’s leadership principles.
In general, being inefficient at a small scale can still end up being very impactful if you work on the right problem. But I think to make a serious dent on the world’s problems, we’re likely going to need some mega-projects, spending billions of dollars with large headcount. Inefficiency at that scale is likely to result in project failure: oversight and incentives only get harder. So it seems critical that we continue to develop the ability in EA to execute on projects efficiently, even if in the short-term we might achieve more by neglecting that.
I do feel a bit confused about what to do in practice to address these problems, and would love to see more thinking on it. For individual decisions, I’ve found figuring out what my time (in some context) is worth and sticking to it for time-money tradeoffs is helpful. In general I’d be suspicious if someone is always choosing to spend money when it saves time, or vice-versa. For funding decisions, these concerns are one of the reasons I lean towards keeping the bar for funding relatively high even if that means we can’t immediately deploy funding. I also support vetting people carefully to avoid incentivizing people pretending to be longtermists (or just having very bad epistemics).
Google, by contrast, is notoriously the opposite—for example emphasizing just trying lots of crazy, big, ambitious, expensive bets (e.g. their “10x” philosophy). Also see how Google talked about frugality in 2011.
Making bets on new ambitious projects doesn’t seem necessarily at odds with frugality: you can still execute on them in a lean way, some things just really do take a big CapEx. Granted whether Google or any major tech company really does this is debatable, but I do think they tend to at least try to instill it, even if there is some inefficiency e.g. due to principal-agent problems.