I sometimes argue against certain EA payment norms because they feel extractive, or cause recipients to incur untracked costs. E.g. “it’s not fair to have a system that requires unpaid work, or going months between work in ways that can’t be planned around and aren’t paid for”. This was the basis for some of what I said here. But I’m not sure this is always bad, or that the alternatives are better. Some considerations
if it’s okay for people to donate money I can’t think of a principled reason it’s not okay for them to donate time → unpaid work is not a priori bad.
If it would be okay for people to solve the problem of gaps in grants by funding bridge grants, it can’t be categorically disallowed to self-fund the time between grants.
If partial self-funding is required to do independent, grant-funded work, then only people who can afford that will do such work. To the extent the people who can’t would have done irreplaceably good work, that’s a loss, and it should be measured. And to the extent some people would personally enjoy doing such work but can’t, that’s sad for them. But the former is an empirical question weighed against the benefits of underpaying, and the latter is not relevant to impact.
I think the costs of blocking people who can’t self-fund from this kind of work are probably high, especially the part where it categorically prevents segments of society with useful information from participating. But this is much more relevant for e.g. global development than AI risk.
A norm against any unpaid work would mean no one could do anything unless they got funder approval ahead of time, which would be terrible.
A related problem is when people need to do free work (broadly defined, e.g. blogging counts) to get a foot in the door for paid work. This has a lot of the same downsides as requiring self-funding, but, man, seems pretty stupid to insist on ignoring the information available from free sources, and if you don’t ban it there will be pressure to do free work.
To me, “creating your own projects, which people use to inform their opinions of you” feels pretty different from “you must do 50 hours of task X unpaid before we consider a paying position”, but there are ambiguous cases.
it’s pretty common for salaried EAs to do unpaid work on top of their normal job. This feels importantly different to me from grant-funded people funding their own bridge loans, because of the job security and predictability. The issue isn’t just “what’s your take home pay per hour?”, it’s “how much ability to plan do you have?”
Any money you spend on one independent can’t be spent on someone else. To the extent EA is financially constrained, that’s a big cost.
It feels really important to me that costs of independence, like self-bridge-funding or the headache of grant applications, get counted in some meaningful sense, the same as donating money or accepting a low salary.
I sometimes argue against certain EA payment norms because they feel extractive, or cause recipients to incur untracked costs. E.g. “it’s not fair to have a system that requires unpaid work, or going months between work in ways that can’t be planned around and aren’t paid for”. This was the basis for some of what I said here. But I’m not sure this is always bad, or that the alternatives are better. Some considerations
if it’s okay for people to donate money I can’t think of a principled reason it’s not okay for them to donate time → unpaid work is not a priori bad.
If it would be okay for people to solve the problem of gaps in grants by funding bridge grants, it can’t be categorically disallowed to self-fund the time between grants.
If partial self-funding is required to do independent, grant-funded work, then only people who can afford that will do such work. To the extent the people who can’t would have done irreplaceably good work, that’s a loss, and it should be measured. And to the extent some people would personally enjoy doing such work but can’t, that’s sad for them. But the former is an empirical question weighed against the benefits of underpaying, and the latter is not relevant to impact.
I think the costs of blocking people who can’t self-fund from this kind of work are probably high, especially the part where it categorically prevents segments of society with useful information from participating. But this is much more relevant for e.g. global development than AI risk.
A norm against any unpaid work would mean no one could do anything unless they got funder approval ahead of time, which would be terrible.
A related problem is when people need to do free work (broadly defined, e.g. blogging counts) to get a foot in the door for paid work. This has a lot of the same downsides as requiring self-funding, but, man, seems pretty stupid to insist on ignoring the information available from free sources, and if you don’t ban it there will be pressure to do free work.
To me, “creating your own projects, which people use to inform their opinions of you” feels pretty different from “you must do 50 hours of task X unpaid before we consider a paying position”, but there are ambiguous cases.
it’s pretty common for salaried EAs to do unpaid work on top of their normal job. This feels importantly different to me from grant-funded people funding their own bridge loans, because of the job security and predictability. The issue isn’t just “what’s your take home pay per hour?”, it’s “how much ability to plan do you have?”
Any money you spend on one independent can’t be spent on someone else. To the extent EA is financially constrained, that’s a big cost.
It feels really important to me that costs of independence, like self-bridge-funding or the headache of grant applications, get counted in some meaningful sense, the same as donating money or accepting a low salary.