Thanks for these thoughts. It’s nice to get such detailed engagement. I’m going to try to respond point by point.
(2) - I’m not particularly worried about value drift, and I think there are more effective ways to guard against this than earning to give (e.g. living with people who share your values, talking about EA stuff regularly with people you care about). I think I have quite a lot of evidence in favour of me being pretty resilient to value drift (though I often change my mind about what is important intentionally).
(3) I think this is interesting, though I don’t think that I share this view re being taken seriously. I think that I, and many people I know, have taken actions that they found much harder than donating (e.g. I live in a different country than my partner and in a pretty suboptimal timezone because I think I can do my work better from my current location, I work a lot of hours, I spend a lot of time doing tasks that I find emotionally challenging, I’ve been in situations that I found extremely stressful for ~0 credit). To be clear, I don’t think that I am particularly worthy of praise—but I do think that I score reasonably well on “moral credibility”. Also, I have concerns about this kind of signalling and think it often leads to concerning dynamics—I don’t want EA Funds grantees to feel pressured into taking shoestring salaries. When I was at CE, I remember there being a lot of pressure to take extremely low salaries despite many successful charity founders thinking this was a bad idea. It also led to weird epistemic effects (though I hear things have improved substantially).
(4) I don’t think that runway and grants from EA funders are as fungible as you do. I can talk a bit more about this if that’s useful. I guess that this general point (3) is where we have substantive disagreement. It seems likely to me that I can have much more impact through my career than through my donations—and that having more runway could substantially increase the value of my career. If it doesn’t increase the value of my career and I am wrong, then I can donate later (which I don’t think incurs much in the way of losses from a NTist perspective, but it’s more confusing from a LTist one). To be clear, I think that I’d like to build up 12-24 months of runway, and right now, I have substantially less than that—I am not talking about being able to retire in 10 years or anything.
(5) I think for me, the comparison stuff doesn’t really lead to resentment/unhappiness. It wasn’t clear from my post, but one of the reasons that I made this comparison was because many of my friends do very altruistically valuable work and earn substantially more than I do. They are extremely talented and hard-working (and lucky), and whilst this doesn’t mean that I could get a highly-paying job that generated a lot of altruistic value, I think talking to them regularly has given me an understanding of the kind of work that they do and what it might take to enter a similar role, and it feels doable for me to enter similar roles in a relatively short amount of time (on my inside view). I also have friends that I think are similarly smart/hardworking etc., who earn a lot more money than me in purely for-profit roles. Again, I don’t resent any of these people, and the comparison seems pretty useful to me.
For what it’s worth, I think saving up runway is a no brainer.
During my one year as a tech consultant, I put aside half each month and donated another 10%. The runway I built made the decision for me to quit my job and pursue direct work much easier.
In the downtime between two career moves, it allowed me to spend my time pursuing whatever I wanted without worrying about how to pay the bills. This gave me time to research and write about snakebites, ultimately leading to Open Phil recommending a $500k investment into a company working on snakebite diagnostics.
I later came upon great donation opportunity to a fish welfare charity, which I gave a large part of my runway to and wouldn’t have been able to support if I had given all my money away two years prior.
Had I given more away sooner I think it would be clearer to myself and others that I was in fact altruistically motivated. I also think my impact would have been lower. Impact over image.
EDIT: Actually it’s probably a some-brainer a lot of the time, seeing as I currently have little runway and am taking a shoestring salary. The reason I take a shoestring salary is to increase my organization’s runway, which is valuable for the same reasons that increasing one’s personal runway is. You don’t have to spend as much time worrying about how your org is going to pay the bills and you can instead focus on impact.
Thanks for these thoughts. It’s nice to get such detailed engagement. I’m going to try to respond point by point.
(2) - I’m not particularly worried about value drift, and I think there are more effective ways to guard against this than earning to give (e.g. living with people who share your values, talking about EA stuff regularly with people you care about). I think I have quite a lot of evidence in favour of me being pretty resilient to value drift (though I often change my mind about what is important intentionally).
(3) I think this is interesting, though I don’t think that I share this view re being taken seriously. I think that I, and many people I know, have taken actions that they found much harder than donating (e.g. I live in a different country than my partner and in a pretty suboptimal timezone because I think I can do my work better from my current location, I work a lot of hours, I spend a lot of time doing tasks that I find emotionally challenging, I’ve been in situations that I found extremely stressful for ~0 credit). To be clear, I don’t think that I am particularly worthy of praise—but I do think that I score reasonably well on “moral credibility”. Also, I have concerns about this kind of signalling and think it often leads to concerning dynamics—I don’t want EA Funds grantees to feel pressured into taking shoestring salaries. When I was at CE, I remember there being a lot of pressure to take extremely low salaries despite many successful charity founders thinking this was a bad idea. It also led to weird epistemic effects (though I hear things have improved substantially).
(4) I don’t think that runway and grants from EA funders are as fungible as you do. I can talk a bit more about this if that’s useful. I guess that this general point (3) is where we have substantive disagreement. It seems likely to me that I can have much more impact through my career than through my donations—and that having more runway could substantially increase the value of my career. If it doesn’t increase the value of my career and I am wrong, then I can donate later (which I don’t think incurs much in the way of losses from a NTist perspective, but it’s more confusing from a LTist one). To be clear, I think that I’d like to build up 12-24 months of runway, and right now, I have substantially less than that—I am not talking about being able to retire in 10 years or anything.
(5) I think for me, the comparison stuff doesn’t really lead to resentment/unhappiness. It wasn’t clear from my post, but one of the reasons that I made this comparison was because many of my friends do very altruistically valuable work and earn substantially more than I do. They are extremely talented and hard-working (and lucky), and whilst this doesn’t mean that I could get a highly-paying job that generated a lot of altruistic value, I think talking to them regularly has given me an understanding of the kind of work that they do and what it might take to enter a similar role, and it feels doable for me to enter similar roles in a relatively short amount of time (on my inside view). I also have friends that I think are similarly smart/hardworking etc., who earn a lot more money than me in purely for-profit roles. Again, I don’t resent any of these people, and the comparison seems pretty useful to me.
For what it’s worth, I think saving up runway is a no brainer.
During my one year as a tech consultant, I put aside half each month and donated another 10%. The runway I built made the decision for me to quit my job and pursue direct work much easier.
In the downtime between two career moves, it allowed me to spend my time pursuing whatever I wanted without worrying about how to pay the bills. This gave me time to research and write about snakebites, ultimately leading to Open Phil recommending a $500k investment into a company working on snakebite diagnostics.
I later came upon great donation opportunity to a fish welfare charity, which I gave a large part of my runway to and wouldn’t have been able to support if I had given all my money away two years prior.
Had I given more away sooner I think it would be clearer to myself and others that I was in fact altruistically motivated. I also think my impact would have been lower. Impact over image.
EDIT: Actually it’s probably a some-brainer a lot of the time, seeing as I currently have little runway and am taking a shoestring salary. The reason I take a shoestring salary is to increase my organization’s runway, which is valuable for the same reasons that increasing one’s personal runway is. You don’t have to spend as much time worrying about how your org is going to pay the bills and you can instead focus on impact.