My update from a case of fraud isn’t that money can’t be made ethically. This isn’t to dismiss the possibility of value drift etc, which we should take even more seriously than we have been.
Having said that , a few things:
I generally am in favor of moving away from a vibes/patronage based community to a more meritocratic professional-ish group. And the approach you suggested (ie not paying people well) doesn’t make it easy to hire people from the “outside world” whom we have a lot to learn from (like hmm corporate governance maybe? or accounting?)I think it’ll also make the diversity problem significantly worse—and continue selecting for privileged folks who can afford to actually do the work “purely altruistically”
Also, there are a bunch of ways in which labor can’t substitute for capital. I work in biosecurity and it seems like we can do significantly fewer things now , especially magaporjects that involve significant brick and mortar infrastructure. I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point down the road, AI Safety also requires significant spend on compute/data., not to say anything of the myriad neartermist stuff that’s almost infinitely scalable.
In general, my update is from the situation is more : we need money but we also need better ops , more interfacing with the real world, better corporate governance and generally fewer incentuousy lookign orgs.
Thanks for asking, Julia. Initially, we expect to accept a pretty wide range of people, across both age/experience levels and cause areas as we’re exploring how these consultations can be as impactful as possible. Having said that, we intend to use information gathered during this process, along with insights from the community & affiliate orgs around neglected segments/user groups, to inform if and how we ought to specialize.