Reductio ad absurdum: Why we should give any money to organizations like Givewell, that then turn around and pay that money to their globally rich employees who are doing EA research work?
Paying Givewell employees a solid salary lets them focus on EA stuff full-time while not having to expend a lot of stress & energy making sure their needs get met. It’s effectiveness that matters, not overhead. Providing virtual assistants to independent EAs seems like it could do much the same thing—giving them a free virtual assistant exoskeleton lets them spend more of their time on nonreplaceable EA work and less on menial, outsourceable tasks that arise during the course of their EA work.
The counterargument would be that many EAs have full-time earning-to-give jobs, so they could just deduct the funding necessary for their independent EA projects from whatever their normal charitable donations would be. So I think funds like this make sense for EAs who don’t have full-time earning-to-give jobs: students who want to do effective activism (say for pandemic risks?) in their spare time, someone who quits their job and lives off savings in order to research EA-related topics full-time, someone who thinks earning to give is oversubscribed and is focusing on an EA project instead of advancing their career, etc.
That’s all reasonable. I think the strongest point Alasdair could be making is the claim that even those people could afford to spends $10s or even $100s themselves. (I agree that that claim isn’t obviously true though, depending on what you mean by ‘afford’.) By contrast, most GiveWell staff couldn’t afford to work for no salary whatsoever.
Even if they could, that may be demanding a higher level of self-sacrifice from volunteers than we want to… consider that giving 10+% of your time/income qualifies you for EA status, so if someone is giving 20% of their time and living paycheck to paycheck, asking for more money on top of that feels like it will set the bar too high for some worthy volunteers.
Reductio ad absurdum: Why we should give any money to organizations like Givewell, that then turn around and pay that money to their globally rich employees who are doing EA research work?
Paying Givewell employees a solid salary lets them focus on EA stuff full-time while not having to expend a lot of stress & energy making sure their needs get met. It’s effectiveness that matters, not overhead. Providing virtual assistants to independent EAs seems like it could do much the same thing—giving them a free virtual assistant exoskeleton lets them spend more of their time on nonreplaceable EA work and less on menial, outsourceable tasks that arise during the course of their EA work.
The counterargument would be that many EAs have full-time earning-to-give jobs, so they could just deduct the funding necessary for their independent EA projects from whatever their normal charitable donations would be. So I think funds like this make sense for EAs who don’t have full-time earning-to-give jobs: students who want to do effective activism (say for pandemic risks?) in their spare time, someone who quits their job and lives off savings in order to research EA-related topics full-time, someone who thinks earning to give is oversubscribed and is focusing on an EA project instead of advancing their career, etc.
That’s all reasonable. I think the strongest point Alasdair could be making is the claim that even those people could afford to spends $10s or even $100s themselves. (I agree that that claim isn’t obviously true though, depending on what you mean by ‘afford’.) By contrast, most GiveWell staff couldn’t afford to work for no salary whatsoever.
Even if they could, that may be demanding a higher level of self-sacrifice from volunteers than we want to… consider that giving 10+% of your time/income qualifies you for EA status, so if someone is giving 20% of their time and living paycheck to paycheck, asking for more money on top of that feels like it will set the bar too high for some worthy volunteers.