I don’t know if this is right, but I take Lincoln to be (a bit implicitly but I see it throughout the post) taking the default cultural norm as a pretty strong starting point, and aiming to vary from that when you have a good reason (I imagine because variations from what’s normal is what sends the most salient messages), rather than think about what a perk is from first principles, which explains the dishwashing and toilet cleaning.
The Christian rule of chastity must not be confused with the social rule of ‘modesty’ (in one sense of that word); i.e. propriety, or decency. The social rule of propriety lays down how much of the human body should be displayed and what subjects can be referred to, and in what words, according to the customs of a given social circle. Thus, while the rule of chastity is the same for all Christians at all times, the rule of propriety changes. A girl in the Pacific islands wearing hardly any clothes and a Victorian lady completely covered in clothes might both be equally ‘modest’, proper, or decent, according to the standards of their own societies: and both, for all we could tell by their dress, might be equally chaste (or equally unchaste). Some of the language which chaste women used in Shakespeare’s time would have been used in the nineteenth century only by a woman completely abandoned.
I wonder if another way of saying what Lincoln is trying to get at is something like “it’s about the work, not you”, a message of “happy to invest in your work” can have all the same outward features of “happy to invest in you” but with different effects, but not sure he’d endorse this.
I take your disagreement with Lincoln to be something of the form “Lincoln wants and gestures at a certain vibe change that is underspecified”—“Halstead is like “is that even a consistent thing to want / does it make sense in reality”″ which feels like a really common conversational dynamic and can be frustrating for everyone involved.
The default cultural norm varies a lot across offices within countries. Should we anchor to Google, hedge funds, Amazon, academia, Wave, Trajan House, the nonprofit sector, the local city council etc? So I don’t understand which cultural norm the post is anchoring to, and so I don’t understand the central claim of the post.
One of the examples given in the post is the implicit judgement that EA doesn’t want to be like Google—Google is an extremely successful company that people want to work for. I don’t get why it is an example of excessive perk culture. It’s true that FTX had excessive perks and also committed fraud. Google has nice perks but hasn’t committed fraud.
While there may be some perks in EA, it is also the case that work in EA is (a) extremely competitive and (b) highly precarious. Most people struggle to get jobs or get by on one year contracts, and have to compete for jobs with assorted Stakhanovite super-geniuses. This is very different to the rest of the comparably cushy nonprofit sector.
While at times it appears the OP is arguing for the default cultural norm, he also says various things which seem/are inconsistent with that such as that we can’t have nice things and we must not be free from menial tasks. There is a big gap between the extravagance of FTX and standard office perks and the post provides no criterion on which to decide between these different perk cultures.
Re your last paragraph, that might be some of what is driving my disagreement, but I think my disagreement is:
I don’t understand what the central claim of the post is and that seems to be common among commenters eg see Richard Ngo’s comment, the first sentence in your reply to me. There appears to be widespread confusion about the post means—should we have wine at conferences, should offices serve free coffee, what type of coffee is permitted etc?
Some of the supporting arguments for the central claim seem unsound
Some of the supporting claims in the post seem inconsistent.
At present, the section on what EA salaries should be has no substantive content. By definition, we don’t want to underpay or overpay: these are tautologies. Similarly, what does ‘pay well’ mean?
I don’t know if this is right, but I take Lincoln to be (a bit implicitly but I see it throughout the post) taking the default cultural norm as a pretty strong starting point, and aiming to vary from that when you have a good reason (I imagine because variations from what’s normal is what sends the most salient messages), rather than think about what a perk is from first principles, which explains the dishwashing and toilet cleaning.
Reminds me of C.S. Lewis’s view on modesty
I wonder if another way of saying what Lincoln is trying to get at is something like “it’s about the work, not you”, a message of “happy to invest in your work” can have all the same outward features of “happy to invest in you” but with different effects, but not sure he’d endorse this.
I take your disagreement with Lincoln to be something of the form “Lincoln wants and gestures at a certain vibe change that is underspecified”—“Halstead is like “is that even a consistent thing to want / does it make sense in reality”″ which feels like a really common conversational dynamic and can be frustrating for everyone involved.
The default cultural norm varies a lot across offices within countries. Should we anchor to Google, hedge funds, Amazon, academia, Wave, Trajan House, the nonprofit sector, the local city council etc? So I don’t understand which cultural norm the post is anchoring to, and so I don’t understand the central claim of the post.
One of the examples given in the post is the implicit judgement that EA doesn’t want to be like Google—Google is an extremely successful company that people want to work for. I don’t get why it is an example of excessive perk culture. It’s true that FTX had excessive perks and also committed fraud. Google has nice perks but hasn’t committed fraud.
While there may be some perks in EA, it is also the case that work in EA is (a) extremely competitive and (b) highly precarious. Most people struggle to get jobs or get by on one year contracts, and have to compete for jobs with assorted Stakhanovite super-geniuses. This is very different to the rest of the comparably cushy nonprofit sector.
While at times it appears the OP is arguing for the default cultural norm, he also says various things which seem/are inconsistent with that such as that we can’t have nice things and we must not be free from menial tasks. There is a big gap between the extravagance of FTX and standard office perks and the post provides no criterion on which to decide between these different perk cultures.
Re your last paragraph, that might be some of what is driving my disagreement, but I think my disagreement is:
I don’t understand what the central claim of the post is and that seems to be common among commenters eg see Richard Ngo’s comment, the first sentence in your reply to me. There appears to be widespread confusion about the post means—should we have wine at conferences, should offices serve free coffee, what type of coffee is permitted etc?
Some of the supporting arguments for the central claim seem unsound
Some of the supporting claims in the post seem inconsistent.
At present, the section on what EA salaries should be has no substantive content. By definition, we don’t want to underpay or overpay: these are tautologies. Similarly, what does ‘pay well’ mean?