Thanks for the kind words :) and appreciate the concreteness of these suggestions.
I think many of these seem to have a common thread of: treating money as a valuable resource, viewing profligacy as costly (both financially and to the soul), seeing signals of dedication and altruism as especially valuable, and generally being pro transparency.
I agree with all of these, though I think it’s difficult to know how to weigh them against the things they sometimes trade-off against. For instance, if you’re deciding whether to fund a large and potentially very impactful grant opportunity that involves high salaries, where the details of the grant are sensitive, it feels unclear to me how much impact there has to be on the table to justify the high salaries and discretion the grant involves. I’m pulled towards posts like this, though I likewise feel some pull towards the ideas Will discussed in the EA and the current funding situation (or at least my memory of it, which is that in some cases it’s worth setting aside our preference for an ascetic aesthetic when resources are more plentiful and the world’s problems are urgent.)
The thing I’m especially curious about is exactly how power and influence can start corrupting one’s thinking, and what ways there are of avoiding that (to the extent there are any).
Yes, to be clear, I think you should treat profligacy as a cost. It can be worth paying costs, but it’s best to know you are paying it and can decide if it’s worth it.
For instance, if you’re deciding whether to fund a large and potentially very impactful grant opportunity that involves high salaries, where the details of the grant are sensitive, it feels unclear to me how much impact there has to be on the table to justify the high salaries and discretion the grant involves.
Then it better be a damn good grant, and your standards have to be a lot higher. I understand this answer will feel like a cop out since you are asking me to hopefully give you some kind of formula, which I can’t give.
The best piece of advice I can give on avoiding the corruption of one’s own thinking when you have power and influence is to talk with someone smart, whom you trust from earlier (before it was there) and them having no incentive to agree with you. From there, basically, they are there for grounding and as a sanity check and you explain the situation to them and its their job to call you out on it vs. you just hoping to yourself notice things.
One of my next posts is going to be about how I feel a lot of behaviours within the EA community have been externalizing costs (when people want their donors to be secret, not wanting a public association with EA, etc.)
Thanks for the kind words :) and appreciate the concreteness of these suggestions.
I think many of these seem to have a common thread of: treating money as a valuable resource, viewing profligacy as costly (both financially and to the soul), seeing signals of dedication and altruism as especially valuable, and generally being pro transparency.
I agree with all of these, though I think it’s difficult to know how to weigh them against the things they sometimes trade-off against. For instance, if you’re deciding whether to fund a large and potentially very impactful grant opportunity that involves high salaries, where the details of the grant are sensitive, it feels unclear to me how much impact there has to be on the table to justify the high salaries and discretion the grant involves. I’m pulled towards posts like this, though I likewise feel some pull towards the ideas Will discussed in the EA and the current funding situation (or at least my memory of it, which is that in some cases it’s worth setting aside our preference for an ascetic aesthetic when resources are more plentiful and the world’s problems are urgent.)
The thing I’m especially curious about is exactly how power and influence can start corrupting one’s thinking, and what ways there are of avoiding that (to the extent there are any).
Yes, to be clear, I think you should treat profligacy as a cost. It can be worth paying costs, but it’s best to know you are paying it and can decide if it’s worth it.
Then it better be a damn good grant, and your standards have to be a lot higher. I understand this answer will feel like a cop out since you are asking me to hopefully give you some kind of formula, which I can’t give.
The best piece of advice I can give on avoiding the corruption of one’s own thinking when you have power and influence is to talk with someone smart, whom you trust from earlier (before it was there) and them having no incentive to agree with you. From there, basically, they are there for grounding and as a sanity check and you explain the situation to them and its their job to call you out on it vs. you just hoping to yourself notice things.
One of my next posts is going to be about how I feel a lot of behaviours within the EA community have been externalizing costs (when people want their donors to be secret, not wanting a public association with EA, etc.)