This is a great post, and I’m glad these points are being raised. I share a lot of the same concerns (basically, what happens to EA long term when it’s just a good deal to join it?).
A big and small personal win from these changes in funding:
I decided to launch a magazine reporting on what matters in the long-term in large part because of the change in funding situation and related calls for more ambition. I had the idea for doing this more than 3 years ago, but didn’t pursue it. (We’re aiming to launch in Mar 2023).
In August, I quit my job at GiveDirectly to pursue freelance journalism full time, and planned to make basically no money for possibly 1-2 years. I cut a lot of costs to maximize my runway. A few months later, I got a job with an EA org that paid better than any job I had in the past. Now my time was scarce and money was not. I bought a free-standing dishwasher for ~$1000, which bought back ~45 minutes a day. I think this decision, and other smaller ones like it, were very good.
But it’s easy to get into self-serving territory where you value your time so highly that you can justify almost any expense (or don’t think of cheaper ways to meet the same goals). This can also move us into territory where, to do ostensibly altruistic work, we don’t give anything up, and, in fact, argue that others should give things to us.
This feels fundamentally different from the movement that attracted me 5 years ago (though the reasoning is very consistent, and may well be right).
This is a great post, and I’m glad these points are being raised. I share a lot of the same concerns (basically, what happens to EA long term when it’s just a good deal to join it?).
A big and small personal win from these changes in funding:
I decided to launch a magazine reporting on what matters in the long-term in large part because of the change in funding situation and related calls for more ambition. I had the idea for doing this more than 3 years ago, but didn’t pursue it. (We’re aiming to launch in Mar 2023).
In August, I quit my job at GiveDirectly to pursue freelance journalism full time, and planned to make basically no money for possibly 1-2 years. I cut a lot of costs to maximize my runway. A few months later, I got a job with an EA org that paid better than any job I had in the past. Now my time was scarce and money was not. I bought a free-standing dishwasher for ~$1000, which bought back ~45 minutes a day. I think this decision, and other smaller ones like it, were very good.
But it’s easy to get into self-serving territory where you value your time so highly that you can justify almost any expense (or don’t think of cheaper ways to meet the same goals). This can also move us into territory where, to do ostensibly altruistic work, we don’t give anything up, and, in fact, argue that others should give things to us.
This feels fundamentally different from the movement that attracted me 5 years ago (though the reasoning is very consistent, and may well be right).