I find this framing a bit confusing. It doesn’t to me seem that there is any obligation between EAs who are pursuing direct work and EA funders than there is between EA funders and any other potentially effective program that needs money.
Consider:
Alice gives up a lucrative career in order to go work in global health and development. However, Alice ends up just working for an ineffective organisation.
Bob is not an EA and never was in line for a high paying career, but ends up working for GiveDirectly.
Do we want to say that we should try and fund Alice more because we made some kind of implicit deal with her even though that money won’t produce effective good in the world? And if the money is conditional on the person doing good work… how is that different from the funders just funding good work without consideration for who’s doing it?
If I were going to switch to direct work the deal I would expect is “There is a large group of value-aligned funders, so insofar as I do work that seems high-impact, I can expect to get funded”. I would not expect that the community was going to somehow ensure I got well above median outcomes for the career area I was going into.
I’m not sure why you would expect more than that? Is this a talking point that I missed where people argued that there’s a deal? Is this some kind of clever “act as though you made the deals you would have wanted to have made, even if you actually didn’t” thing?
I think in an ideal world this balance of funds and power would be made more explicit by having something like impact-certificate markets with evaluations from current donors
I absolutely agree that altruistic labour is under-paid and a system like impact certificates would be great, what confuses me is the idea that people got into direct work today with the expectation that the community was committing to make something like that happen today.
I find this framing a bit confusing. It doesn’t to me seem that there is any obligation between EAs who are pursuing direct work and EA funders than there is between EA funders and any other potentially effective program that needs money.
Consider:
Alice gives up a lucrative career in order to go work in global health and development. However, Alice ends up just working for an ineffective organisation.
Bob is not an EA and never was in line for a high paying career, but ends up working for GiveDirectly.
Do we want to say that we should try and fund Alice more because we made some kind of implicit deal with her even though that money won’t produce effective good in the world? And if the money is conditional on the person doing good work… how is that different from the funders just funding good work without consideration for who’s doing it?
If I were going to switch to direct work the deal I would expect is “There is a large group of value-aligned funders, so insofar as I do work that seems high-impact, I can expect to get funded”. I would not expect that the community was going to somehow ensure I got well above median outcomes for the career area I was going into.
I’m not sure why you would expect more than that? Is this a talking point that I missed where people argued that there’s a deal? Is this some kind of clever “act as though you made the deals you would have wanted to have made, even if you actually didn’t” thing?
I absolutely agree that altruistic labour is under-paid and a system like impact certificates would be great, what confuses me is the idea that people got into direct work today with the expectation that the community was committing to make something like that happen today.