You should think of paying for your EAG ticket as equivalent to making a donation to EA community-building.
If we adopt this line of thought, wouldn’t basically no-one end up paying?
Most people do not donate to community-building.
Personally attending doesn’t significantly increase the cost-effectiveness of community-building from an impartial point of view.
Even if you were donating to EA community building anyway, you were probably donating more than the ticket price, so you are already ‘covered’.
If you are going to donate, you should do so directly, because of the tax advantages. For higher income people this could effectively almost double the cost of buying the ticket directly.
It might actually make sense that the outcome would be that no one would end up paying. E.g, there could be enough money in community building so that it’d actually be better if people give to causes with more room for funding and have the entire thing subsidized.
I don’t expect that to be the case, but this doesn’t feel like a reductio ad absurdum.
The tax point is particularly relevant. I felt obliged to pay for a ticket previously as a high earner, but it felt odd and somewhat performative to do so when the net effect of donating directly to movement building instead seemed clearly better because the donation could be increased by doing so.
In hindsight I should have elaborated on the “cooperativeness” part more; I’ve edited the post to do so. The key point is made in this post about how donating only to what seems like the most neglected priority to you is partially a form of free-riding, because it means that others who have different values need to spend their resources on things that you both care about. So in order to have healthier relationships with other altruists, you should agree to both partially cover shared priorities, even when that is a less effective use of money in the short term.
Now, you might have stronger or weaker intuitions about how important this type of cooperation is. I think my intuition is that we should aim for cooperative norms that are strong enough that we can cooperate even across large value differences. But cooperative norms which are this strong will then weigh heavily in favour of cooperation between altruists with much smaller value differences, like CEA and EAG attendees (especially because CEA and/or big EA funders have thought about this and decided that the benefits of having people pay for their own tickets by default are more important, from their perspective, than downsides like tax inefficiency).
It also seems reasonable to disagree with this; it’s something of a judgement call. But I claim that this is the right judgement call to be making.
If we adopt this line of thought, wouldn’t basically no-one end up paying?
Most people do not donate to community-building.
Personally attending doesn’t significantly increase the cost-effectiveness of community-building from an impartial point of view.
Even if you were donating to EA community building anyway, you were probably donating more than the ticket price, so you are already ‘covered’.
If you are going to donate, you should do so directly, because of the tax advantages. For higher income people this could effectively almost double the cost of buying the ticket directly.
It might actually make sense that the outcome would be that no one would end up paying. E.g, there could be enough money in community building so that it’d actually be better if people give to causes with more room for funding and have the entire thing subsidized.
I don’t expect that to be the case, but this doesn’t feel like a reductio ad absurdum.
The tax point is particularly relevant. I felt obliged to pay for a ticket previously as a high earner, but it felt odd and somewhat performative to do so when the net effect of donating directly to movement building instead seemed clearly better because the donation could be increased by doing so.
In hindsight I should have elaborated on the “cooperativeness” part more; I’ve edited the post to do so. The key point is made in this post about how donating only to what seems like the most neglected priority to you is partially a form of free-riding, because it means that others who have different values need to spend their resources on things that you both care about. So in order to have healthier relationships with other altruists, you should agree to both partially cover shared priorities, even when that is a less effective use of money in the short term.
Now, you might have stronger or weaker intuitions about how important this type of cooperation is. I think my intuition is that we should aim for cooperative norms that are strong enough that we can cooperate even across large value differences. But cooperative norms which are this strong will then weigh heavily in favour of cooperation between altruists with much smaller value differences, like CEA and EAG attendees (especially because CEA and/or big EA funders have thought about this and decided that the benefits of having people pay for their own tickets by default are more important, from their perspective, than downsides like tax inefficiency).
It also seems reasonable to disagree with this; it’s something of a judgement call. But I claim that this is the right judgement call to be making.