Increasing Demandingness in EA

Following a bit of back and forth debate, the EA organiser looked disappointed and said “I’m confused.”, then turned his back on my friend.

I don't like analogizing EA to a religious movement, but I think such an analogy is appropriate in this instance. If I went to a Christian gathering, accompanying a devout friend, and someone came up to me and asked, "Oh, I haven't seen you before, which church do you attend?" I would reply, "Oh, I'm not Christian." Then if, after a bit of discussion, that person chose to turn and walk away, I wouldn't be offended. In fact, them turning and walking away is one of the better outcomes. Far better than them attempting to continue proselytize at me for the rest of the event.

In this case, the organizer encountered a person who was clearly not bought into EA, ascertained that they were not bought into EA after a short discussion, and then chose to walk away. While that's not the friendliest response, it's hardly the worst thing in the world.

Some components of my own models, here:

1. I think most of the better-funded EA organizations would not prefer most LWers working there for $1M/yr, nor for a more typical salary, nor for free.
   
   (Even though many of these same LW-ers are useful many other places.)
    
2. I think many of the better-funded EA organizations would prefer (being able to continue employing at least their most useful staff members) to (receiving an annual donation equal to 30x what that staff member could make in industry).
    
3. If a typical LWer somehow really decided, deep in themselves, to try to do good with all their heart and all their mind and creativity… or to do as much of this as was compatible with still working no more than 40 hrs/week and having a family and a life… I suspect this would be quite considerably more useful than donating 10% of their salary to some already-funded-to-near-saturation EA organization.  (Since the latter effect is often small.)  (Though some organizations are not that well-funded!  So this varies by organization IMO.)

2 and 3 are as far as I can get toward agreeing with the OPs estimated factor of 300.  It doesn’t get me all the way there (well, I guess it might for the mean person, but certainly not for the median; plus also there're assumptions implicit in trying to use a multiplier here that I don't buy or can't stomach.).  But it makes me sort of empathize with how people can utter sentences like those.

In terms of what to make of this:

Sometimes people jam 1 and 2 together, to get a perspective like “most people are useless compared to those who work at EA organizations.”  I think this is not quite right, because “scaling an existing EA organization’s impact” is not at all the only way to do good, and my guess is that the same people may be considerably better at other ways to do good than they are at adding productivity to an [organization that already has as many staff as it knows how to use].

One possible alternate perspective:

“Many of the better funded EA organizations don’t much know how to turn additional money, or additional skilled people, into doing their work faster/more/better.  So look for some other way to do good and don’t listen too much to them for how to do it.  Rely on your own geeky ideas, smart outside friends who've done interesting things before, common sense and feedback loops and experimentation and writing out your models and looking for implications/inconsistencies, etc. in place of expecting EA to have a lot of pre-found opportunities that require only your following of their instructions.”

Great use of logic to try to force us to have models, and to make those models explicit!

From the perspective of the EA org, there are hires for whom this would be a good decision (I've heard >1M pay numbers thrown around for critical software engineering roles that are disconnected from EA strategy, or Terence Tao). But it's not obviously good in every case. Here's some of the reasoning I've heard:

• People often do better work if they're altruistically motivated than if they're mercenaries-- there's a "human alignment problem". When you underpay, you don't attract top talent. When you overpay, you attract more top talent but also more mercenaries. The optimum seems to be somewhere around top industry pay (in other industries, employees often provide the companies far more value than their salary, and the equilibrium for companies is to match median industry pay adjusting a bit for their circumstances). EA orgs are currently transitioning away from the underfunded nonprofit regime, but I think the equilibrium is still lower than top industry pay in many cases (e.g. when EA work is more interesting or saliently meaningful than industry work, and top talent differentially seeks out interesting or saliently meaningful work). Due to the factors below, I don't see the optimum being substantially more than industry.
• People (even altruists) don't like being paid less than someone else for more impact. Your slightly more talented or harder-working colleague might demand to be paid $1.2 million. If not, this sets up weird dynamics where selfish people are paid 5x more than altruists
• People (even altruists) don't like getting pay cuts, and often expect pay raises. Paying someone $1M often raises their expectations so they expect $1M * 1.04^n in year n until they retire. This can sometimes be fixed with workplace culture.

edit: the below thing is wrong

The last two factors are especially large because EA has much more human capital than financial capital (edit: as measured by valuation)-- I would guess something like a 5x ratio. If we paid everyone at EA orgs 41% of what they're worth, and they spend it selfishly, this would kill >30% of the surplus from employing all the EAs, force EA funders (who are invested in high-risk, high-EV companies like FTX) to derisk to pay consistent salaries.

GiveWell still estimates it can save a life for ~$6K on the margin

Not really? In 2021 they announced that (a) they were lowering their funding bar from 8x GiveDirectly to 5x essentially because they are pessimistic long-term about finding things that meet the 8x bar, and (b) that even with the lower bar they still had more money than they could cost effectively direct right now. This is really great news, but it means that the marginal impact of money is now much lower.

seems to imply that 66K EAs would be sufficient to ... I would guess something closer to 5-10X impact relative to industry salary

Then instead of 66K EAs you need 300K EAs. Is that much more plausible? I think arguments in the form of your "seems to imply..." don't work very well.

unless you're very optimistic about X-risk charities being effective?

I don't know if I would say very optimistic, but I do think work here is extremely important (more).

My guess is that it's something like "the impact of mitigating x-risks is probably orders of magnitude greater than public health interventions" (which might be what you meant by "unless you're very optimistic about X-risk charities being effective").

Nate's blog is down, but here's an archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20151108052120/https://mindingourway.com/not-because-you-should/

Main part:

This is a big part of where guilt-free effective altruism comes from, I think: instead of forcing yourself to give to charities sporadically when the guilt overcomes you, promise yourself that you won't give sporadically due to guilt, and then listen to the part of you that says "but then when will I help others!?" Don't force yourself to be an altruist — instead, commit to never forcing yourself, and then work with the part of you that protests, and become an altruist if and only if you want to help.

I think this is probably a good post for many people, but it's not a good post for me or likely others with obligation-derived EA motivation. I participate in EA because I think it's the right thing to do. If I didn't, there are lots of things I'd be excited to do instead.