Thanks for this write up, Will! I hope it changes the minds of people who are skeptical/unhappy about our massive funding influx.
I think a lot of EAs are not motivated to seek personal financial rewards, instead they find themselves seeking truth in graduate school/academia or trying to improve the world via non-profits. They see their similarly intelligent, well educated peers go into industry, optimizing for “make as much money as possible” and they just fundamentally do not relate to that value function. I wonder if this kind of personality type (if you can call it that) lies at the root of a lot of people’s discomfort with EA non-profit jobs suddenly paying really well.
Maybe we could offer special community building grants with the option that you will work in a basement, subsisting only on baguettes and hummus? ;)
I agree (and have formerly resembled this type...) This is quite embedded in a lot of nonprofit culture. Part of it is what motivates the individual and their personality, part of it is the concept of supporters’ money. ‘Would the person who gave you £5 a month want you to be spending your money on that?’ In practice this leads to counterproductive underspending. I remember waiting weeks to get maybe £100 worth of extra memory so I could crunch numbers at a reasonable speed without crashing the computer. The concept of taxpayers’ money works similarly.
There’s probably a good forum post in there somewhere about how the psychology of charity affects perceptions of EA...
Thanks for this write up, Will! I hope it changes the minds of people who are skeptical/unhappy about our massive funding influx.
I think a lot of EAs are not motivated to seek personal financial rewards, instead they find themselves seeking truth in graduate school/academia or trying to improve the world via non-profits. They see their similarly intelligent, well educated peers go into industry, optimizing for “make as much money as possible” and they just fundamentally do not relate to that value function. I wonder if this kind of personality type (if you can call it that) lies at the root of a lot of people’s discomfort with EA non-profit jobs suddenly paying really well.
Maybe we could offer special community building grants with the option that you will work in a basement, subsisting only on baguettes and hummus? ;)
I agree (and have formerly resembled this type...) This is quite embedded in a lot of nonprofit culture. Part of it is what motivates the individual and their personality, part of it is the concept of supporters’ money. ‘Would the person who gave you £5 a month want you to be spending your money on that?’ In practice this leads to counterproductive underspending. I remember waiting weeks to get maybe £100 worth of extra memory so I could crunch numbers at a reasonable speed without crashing the computer. The concept of taxpayers’ money works similarly.
There’s probably a good forum post in there somewhere about how the psychology of charity affects perceptions of EA...