I agree that things tend to get tricky and loopy around these kinds of reputation-considerations, but I think at least the approach I see you arguing for here is proving too much, and has a risk of collapsing into meaninglessness.
I think in the limit, if you treat all speech acts this way, you just end up having no grounding for communication. “Yes, it might be the case that the real principles of EA are X, but if I tell you instead they are X’, then you will take better actions, so I am just going to claim they are X’, as long as both X and X’ include cost-effectiveness”.
In this case, it seems like the very people that the club is trying to explain the concepts of EA to, are also the people that OP is worried about alienating by paying the organizers. In this case what is going on is that the goodness of the reputation-protecting choice is directly premised on the irrationality and ignorance of the very people you are trying to attract/inform/help. Explaining that isn’t impossible but it does seem like a particularly bad way to start of a relationship, and so I expect consequences-wise to be bad.
“Yes, we would actually be paying people, but we expected you wouldn’t understand the principles of cost-effectiveness and so be alienated if you heard about it, despite us getting you to understand them being the very thing this club is trying to do”, is IMO a bad way to start off a relationship.
I also separately think that optimizing heavily for the perception of low-context observers in a way that does not reveal a set of underlying robust principles, is bad. I don’t think you should put “zero” weight on that (and nothing in my comment implied that), but I do think it’s something that many people put far too much weight on (going into detail of which wasn’t the point of my comment, but on which I have written plenty about in many other comments).
There is also another related point in my comment, which is that “cost-effectiveness” is of course a very close sister concept to “wasting money”. I think in many ways, thinking about cost-effectiveness is where you end up if you think carefully about how you can avoid wasting money, and is in some ways a more grown-up version of various frugality concerns.
When you increase the total cost of your operations (by, for example, reducing the cost-effectiveness of your university organizers, forcing you to spend more money somewhere else to do the same amount of good) in order to appear more frugal, I think you are almost always engaging in something that has at least the hint of deception.
Yes, you might ultimately be more cost-effective by getting people to not quite realize what happened, but when people are angry at me or others for not being frugal enough, I think it’s rarely appropriate to ultimately spend more to appease them, even if doing so would ultimately then save me enough money to make it worth it. While this isn’t happening as directly here as it was with other similar situations, like whether the Wytham Abbey purchase was not frugal enough, I think the same dynamics and arguments apply.
I think if someone tries to think seriously and carefully through what it would mean to be properly frugal, I don’t think they would endorse you sacrificing the effectiveness of your operations causing you to ultimately spend more to achieve the same amount of good. And if they learned that you did, and they think carefully about what this implies about your frugality, they would end up more angry, not less. That, I think, is a dynamic worth avoiding.
I think it’s fair enough to caution against purely performative frugality. But I’m not sure the OP even justifies the suggestion that the organizers actually are more cost effective (they concluded the difference between paid and unpaid organizers’ individual contributions were “substantive, not enormous”; there’s a difference between paid people doing more work than volunteers and it being more cost effective to pay...). That’s even more the case if you take into account that the primary role of an effective university organizer is attracting more people (or “low context observers”) to become more altruistic and this instance of the “weirdness” argument is essentially that paying students undercut the group’s ability to appeal to people on altruistic grounds, even if individual paid staff put in more effort. And they were unusually well paid by campus standards for tasks almost every other student society use volunteers for.[1] And that there’s no evidence that the other ways CEA proposes spending the money instead are less effective.
one area we might agree is that I’m not sure if OpenPhil considered alternatives like making stipends needs-based or just a bit lower and more focused as a pragmatic alternative to just cancelling them altogether.
Note that the currently quoted pay for part-time organizers is somewhat lower than the linked comment, which quoted a then-current version of the OP website.
Current version reads:
Part-time/student organizers
Undergraduates organizing part-time typically receive a stipend that generally equates to $21-27/hr in the US and £15-19/hr in the UK.
Non-undergraduates organizing part-time typically receive a stipend that generally equates to $25-32/hr in the US and £18-23/hr in the UK.
I agree that this is an inference. I currently think the OP thinks that in the absence of frugality concerns this would be among the most cost-effective uses of money by Open Phil’s standards, but I might be wrong.
University group funding was historically considered extremely cost-effective when I talked to OP staff (beating out most other grants by a substantial margin). Possibly there was a big update here on cost-effectiveness excluding frugality-reputation concerns, but currently think there hasn’t been (but like, would update if someone from OP said otherwise, and then I would be interested in talking about that).
They do specifically say that they consider other types of university funding to have greater cost-benefit (and I don’t think it makes sense to exclude reputation concerns from cost-benefit analysis, particularly when reputation boost is a large part of the benefit being paid for in the first place). Presumably not paying stipends would leave more to go around. I agree that more detail would be welcome.
I agree that all-things-considered they say that, but I am objecting to “one of the things to consider”, and so IMO it makes sense to bracket that consideration when evaluating my claims here.
I agree that things tend to get tricky and loopy around these kinds of reputation-considerations, but I think at least the approach I see you arguing for here is proving too much, and has a risk of collapsing into meaninglessness.
I think in the limit, if you treat all speech acts this way, you just end up having no grounding for communication. “Yes, it might be the case that the real principles of EA are X, but if I tell you instead they are X’, then you will take better actions, so I am just going to claim they are X’, as long as both X and X’ include cost-effectiveness”.
In this case, it seems like the very people that the club is trying to explain the concepts of EA to, are also the people that OP is worried about alienating by paying the organizers. In this case what is going on is that the goodness of the reputation-protecting choice is directly premised on the irrationality and ignorance of the very people you are trying to attract/inform/help. Explaining that isn’t impossible but it does seem like a particularly bad way to start of a relationship, and so I expect consequences-wise to be bad.
“Yes, we would actually be paying people, but we expected you wouldn’t understand the principles of cost-effectiveness and so be alienated if you heard about it, despite us getting you to understand them being the very thing this club is trying to do”, is IMO a bad way to start off a relationship.
I also separately think that optimizing heavily for the perception of low-context observers in a way that does not reveal a set of underlying robust principles, is bad. I don’t think you should put “zero” weight on that (and nothing in my comment implied that), but I do think it’s something that many people put far too much weight on (going into detail of which wasn’t the point of my comment, but on which I have written plenty about in many other comments).
There is also another related point in my comment, which is that “cost-effectiveness” is of course a very close sister concept to “wasting money”. I think in many ways, thinking about cost-effectiveness is where you end up if you think carefully about how you can avoid wasting money, and is in some ways a more grown-up version of various frugality concerns.
When you increase the total cost of your operations (by, for example, reducing the cost-effectiveness of your university organizers, forcing you to spend more money somewhere else to do the same amount of good) in order to appear more frugal, I think you are almost always engaging in something that has at least the hint of deception.
Yes, you might ultimately be more cost-effective by getting people to not quite realize what happened, but when people are angry at me or others for not being frugal enough, I think it’s rarely appropriate to ultimately spend more to appease them, even if doing so would ultimately then save me enough money to make it worth it. While this isn’t happening as directly here as it was with other similar situations, like whether the Wytham Abbey purchase was not frugal enough, I think the same dynamics and arguments apply.
I think if someone tries to think seriously and carefully through what it would mean to be properly frugal, I don’t think they would endorse you sacrificing the effectiveness of your operations causing you to ultimately spend more to achieve the same amount of good. And if they learned that you did, and they think carefully about what this implies about your frugality, they would end up more angry, not less. That, I think, is a dynamic worth avoiding.
I think it’s fair enough to caution against purely performative frugality. But I’m not sure the OP even justifies the suggestion that the organizers actually are more cost effective (they concluded the difference between paid and unpaid organizers’ individual contributions were “substantive, not enormous”; there’s a difference between paid people doing more work than volunteers and it being more cost effective to pay...). That’s even more the case if you take into account that the primary role of an effective university organizer is attracting more people (or “low context observers”) to become more altruistic and this instance of the “weirdness” argument is essentially that paying students undercut the group’s ability to appeal to people on altruistic grounds, even if individual paid staff put in more effort. And they were unusually well paid by campus standards for tasks almost every other student society use volunteers for.[1] And that there’s no evidence that the other ways CEA proposes spending the money instead are less effective.
one area we might agree is that I’m not sure if OpenPhil considered alternatives like making stipends needs-based or just a bit lower and more focused as a pragmatic alternative to just cancelling them altogether.
Note that the currently quoted pay for part-time organizers is somewhat lower than the linked comment, which quoted a then-current version of the OP website.
Current version reads:
Part-time/student organizers
Undergraduates organizing part-time typically receive a stipend that generally equates to $21-27/hr in the US and £15-19/hr in the UK. Non-undergraduates organizing part-time typically receive a stipend that generally equates to $25-32/hr in the US and £18-23/hr in the UK.
https://www.openphilanthropy.org/open-philanthropy-university-organizer-fellowship/
I agree that this is an inference. I currently think the OP thinks that in the absence of frugality concerns this would be among the most cost-effective uses of money by Open Phil’s standards, but I might be wrong.
University group funding was historically considered extremely cost-effective when I talked to OP staff (beating out most other grants by a substantial margin). Possibly there was a big update here on cost-effectiveness excluding frugality-reputation concerns, but currently think there hasn’t been (but like, would update if someone from OP said otherwise, and then I would be interested in talking about that).
They do specifically say that they consider other types of university funding to have greater cost-benefit (and I don’t think it makes sense to exclude reputation concerns from cost-benefit analysis, particularly when reputation boost is a large part of the benefit being paid for in the first place). Presumably not paying stipends would leave more to go around. I agree that more detail would be welcome.
I agree that all-things-considered they say that, but I am objecting to “one of the things to consider”, and so IMO it makes sense to bracket that consideration when evaluating my claims here.