SIAI Fundraising

Hm. $95K still sounds too high, but if I recall correctly, owing to a screwup in our payments processor at that time, my salary for the month of January 2010 was counted into the 2009 tax year instead of 2010.

No apology is required; you wrote without malice.

Wow, my intuition was rather off on what $95,550 in compensation means for someone living in the Bay Area. Here's some actual calculations for others who are similarly curious. (There are apparently quite a few of us, judging from the votes on my comment.)

Assuming salary is 75% of compensation, that comes to $71662. $4557 in CA state tax. $11,666 federal income tax. $5,482 FICA tax. So $49957 after tax income.

For comparison, my wife and I (both very frugal) spend about $35000 (excluding taxes and savings) per year. Redwood City's rent is apparently double the rent in our city, which perfectly accounts for the additional $15000.

Eliezer, you might want to consider getting married, in which case you can file your taxes jointly, and save about 6 thousand dollars per year (assuming your girlfriend has negligible income).

You're not saving for retirement because you think that, one way or another, it's unlikely you'll be collecting that money?

Is the Singularity Institute supporting her through your salary?

I hope you're not too put out by the rudeness of this question. I've decided that I'm allowed to ask because I'm a (small) donor. I doubt your answer will jeopardize my future donations, whatever it is, but I do have preferences about this.

(Also, it's very good to hear that you're taking health seriously! Not that I expected otherwise.)

Quiz: Who said it?

I would be asking for more people to make as much money as possible if they’re the sorts of people who can make a lot of money and can donate a substantial amount fraction, never mind all the minimal living expenses, to the Singularity Institute. This is crunch time. This is crunch time for the entire human species. […] and it’s crunch time not just for us, it’s crunch time for the intergalactic civilization whose existence depends on us. I think that if you’re actually just going to sort of confront it, rationally, full-on, then you can’t really justify trading off any part of that intergalactic civilization for any intrinsic thing that you could get nowadays

So in December 2009, Alicia Isaac was arrested for stealing from SIAI. One year later, she was hired by the Lifeboat Foundation, where she apparently still works.. On the finance board, no less!

Was she vindicated in 2010, or is the Lifeboat Foundation just stupid?

Thanks. I guess the followup questions are:

• Is the legal action still pending, or can the situation be talked about openly now?
• Has SIAI been able to recover the money?
• Was it a mistake to trust a contractor with access to >$100k of funds? Do they still do that?

http://lesswrong.com/user/Zvi

Come now, it's probably a different Zvi Mowshowitz.

Birthday paradox? Given a set of donor-list-readers and another set of donors, there's a better chance than one would expect that there's a commonality. :)

Did he retire since last year?

Can you email me your name so I can check our records, confirm the donation, and list it? Did you check the box that said "list my name"?

Sounds great from a weather perspective :)

Alas, folk need to see collaborators, arrange Singularity Summits, interact with donors, board members, and media in the US, Constant travel to and fro would be an imperfect substitute, and flight costs (including time and jet lag) would claw back the cost-of-living gains and more.

I'm given to understand this is why the Visiting Fellows program is being temporarily moved to Bali.

Oops, missed that. Thanks.

It seems a little on the high side to me - and $180,000 (when you combine his salary and the Sequences money) in 2009 is ludicrous. I mean, if that's what people want to spend their money on, fair enough, but it's a big chunk of the total funds raised by SIAI that year. So when people talk about the marginal utility of donating a dollar to the SIAI, an equally valid way to phrase it might be "the marginal utility of increasing the salary of someone who earned $180,000 in 2009 by 28 cents".

But I'm not wanting to dissuade anyone from spending their money if that's what they want to spend it on...

Where did you think the money was going?!

They thought it wasn't going to paying me $180K. Correctly. +1 epistemic point to everyone who expressed surprise at this nonfact, -1 point for hindsight bias to anyone who claimed not to be shocked by it.

OK.

Thinking about it more, I am uncomfortable with linking LW social status so officially with support for SIAI.

I agreement-upvoted this when I thought it read the exact opposite; I would be less likely to donate if this occured. Selling CEV shares is all very well, but that idea sounds crass and diversive.

Can you elaborate? I don't understand my proposal as related to signaling at all; it's about measuring EY's (and others') effectiveness, rather than taking it for granted. Yes, it's costly in the event it's unnecessary, but corruption/ineffectiveness/selfishness (where EY and Vassar are primarily building a career and a niche for themselves, consciously or unconsciously) is also costly.

A policy of downvoting posts that you disagree with will, over time, generate a "Unison" culture, driving away / evaporatively cooling dissent.

Though you're correct about interruptions and sub-day splitting, in my experience it is entirely feasible to split your time X days vs Y days without suffering context-switch overhead - that is, since we're presumably sleeping, we're already forced to "boot up" in the morning. I agree it's harder to coordinate a team some of whom are full time, some are half time, and some are the other half time - but you'd have 40k to make up the lost team productivity.

I'm not happy with how big Eliezer's salary is either

What rational reasons do you have?

I can imagine two rational reasons for feeling that someone is overpaid. First and most commonly, if someone is overpaid relative to their productivity. For example, a programmer who writes buggy, poorly designed code and makes 130k for it is clearly overpaid, as is a CEO who makes zillions while driving their company into the ground. This objection could be bluntly phrased as "Eliezer is a hack" - if you think so, say so. I suspect that very few people on LW hold this opinion, especially if, as I said above, they agree that good-enough AI researchers are literally beyond value. (That is, if you subscribe to the basic logic that AI holds the potential to unleash a technological singularity that can either destroy the world or remake it according to our wishes, then EY's approach is the way to go about doing the latter. Even if you disagree with the particulars, he is obviously onto something, and such insights have value.)

Second, your objection may be "someone who works for a nonprofit shouldn't be richly compensated". For example, you could probably go through Newsweek's Fifteen Highest-Paid Charity CEOs, and pick one where you could say "yeah, that's a well-run organization, but that CEO is paid way too much - why don't they voluntarily accept a smaller, but still generous, salary, like a few hundred K?" I don't believe that the second one applies to EY, because he works in an expensive area. More importantly, the fundamental root of this objection would be "if X accepted less money, the nonprofit would have more resources to spend elsewhere". That's pretty obvious when you're talking about mega-zillion CEO salaries. What about Eliezer's case? What if he handed back, say, 10k of his salary to SIAI? That's a significant hit in income for someone whose income matches expenses and whose expenses aren't unreasonable, and it would be much less significant to SIAI. Finally, EY is already working 60 hours a week for SIAI, and you would want him to donate a chunk of his current salary on top of that? Really?

On the other hand, I can think of an irrational reason to be unhappy with Eliezer's salary, which I think I'll be too polite to mention here.