I’m not involved with EA funds, but some university group organizers have taken semesters of leave in the past to do group organizing full time for a semester. If you assume their term is 14 weeks, then that’s 14*40=560 hours of work. At $20/hr, that’s more than $10,000. And I think it is pretty reasonable to request more than $20/hr (various funding sources have previously offered something like $30/hr).
In general, nowadays, many group organizers are not volunteers and are paid for their part time work (if they are not full time, this shouldn’t amount to five figures for one semester though). I think this is a good thing, since many university students simply cannot afford to take a volunteer job with a commitment of 10+ hours per week, and I wouldn’t want EA groups only run by people who are rich enough that that’s feasible.
The numbers that I am confused about are in the high 5 figures and low 6 figures, about an order of magnitude bigger than $10,000. I don’t think assuming a salary of $30/hour helps me understand or explain these numbers. I brought up volunteering vs. paid work in the OP, and I think this was probably misleading—sorry about that.
However, on that point:
I agree that we don’t want EA groups to only be run by the financially privileged. But this concern needs to be balanced against the fact that EA in general, and EA university group organizing in particular (probably) already selects for high SES people, and there may be better ways of making participation in EA accessible to everyone. There is already some level of SES barrier for college students maneuvering themselves into a position to start receiving funding for this work, so you are already getting a filtered sample by the time the money starts flowing. This is a difficult problem to solve, but I hope people are conscientious of it.
Yeah I wasn’t sure which grants you were referring to (haven’t looked through them all), but indeed that doesn’t seem to be explained by what I said.
I agree that EA already selects for high SES people and that offering funding for them to organize a group doesn’t negate this problem. Other steps are also needed. However, I know quite a few anecdotal cases of group organizers being able to organize more than they otherwise would have because they were being paid, and so this policy does concretely make some difference.
I’m not involved with EA funds, but some university group organizers have taken semesters of leave in the past to do group organizing full time for a semester. If you assume their term is 14 weeks, then that’s 14*40=560 hours of work. At $20/hr, that’s more than $10,000. And I think it is pretty reasonable to request more than $20/hr (various funding sources have previously offered something like $30/hr).
In general, nowadays, many group organizers are not volunteers and are paid for their part time work (if they are not full time, this shouldn’t amount to five figures for one semester though). I think this is a good thing, since many university students simply cannot afford to take a volunteer job with a commitment of 10+ hours per week, and I wouldn’t want EA groups only run by people who are rich enough that that’s feasible.
The numbers that I am confused about are in the high 5 figures and low 6 figures, about an order of magnitude bigger than $10,000. I don’t think assuming a salary of $30/hour helps me understand or explain these numbers. I brought up volunteering vs. paid work in the OP, and I think this was probably misleading—sorry about that.
However, on that point:
I agree that we don’t want EA groups to only be run by the financially privileged. But this concern needs to be balanced against the fact that EA in general, and EA university group organizing in particular (probably) already selects for high SES people, and there may be better ways of making participation in EA accessible to everyone. There is already some level of SES barrier for college students maneuvering themselves into a position to start receiving funding for this work, so you are already getting a filtered sample by the time the money starts flowing. This is a difficult problem to solve, but I hope people are conscientious of it.
Yeah I wasn’t sure which grants you were referring to (haven’t looked through them all), but indeed that doesn’t seem to be explained by what I said.
I agree that EA already selects for high SES people and that offering funding for them to organize a group doesn’t negate this problem. Other steps are also needed. However, I know quite a few anecdotal cases of group organizers being able to organize more than they otherwise would have because they were being paid, and so this policy does concretely make some difference.