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).
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).