On (2), I’ll say something I’ve said a few times before on the Forum: I like and respect people who donate money. It seems like a very good character trait to be willing to make sacrifices to help others much more than you could help yourself.
And feeling any less good about someone’s donations because they could be working on a “better” career makes little sense to me — I don’t dislike myself for being less than maximally productive in my own career, so extending dislike to someone who (like me, like almost everyone) has chosen a “less-than-maximal-impact” path seems foolish.
Whether someone focuses on donations vs. career may affect certain practical decisions — I think the average donation-focused person will get relatively less out of EA Global than most career-focused people — but it shouldn’t affect “status” in the sense of clearly belonging to this community. If someone is behaving in a way that makes others feel lower-status in this situation, they should stop.
(I work at CEA, and while I don’t speak for my colleagues, I think that almost all of them would endorse almost everything I’ve said here.)
On (2), I’ll say something I’ve said a few times before on the Forum: I like and respect people who donate money. It seems like a very good character trait to be willing to make sacrifices to help others much more than you could help yourself.
And feeling any less good about someone’s donations because they could be working on a “better” career makes little sense to me — I don’t dislike myself for being less than maximally productive in my own career, so extending dislike to someone who (like me, like almost everyone) has chosen a “less-than-maximal-impact” path seems foolish.
Whether someone focuses on donations vs. career may affect certain practical decisions — I think the average donation-focused person will get relatively less out of EA Global than most career-focused people — but it shouldn’t affect “status” in the sense of clearly belonging to this community. If someone is behaving in a way that makes others feel lower-status in this situation, they should stop.
(I work at CEA, and while I don’t speak for my colleagues, I think that almost all of them would endorse almost everything I’ve said here.)