The LessWrong Team is now Lightcone Infrastructure, come work with us!

Can I encourage you to write up a top-level post detailing what you think the ideal salary algorithm for non-profits is? 

I think you raise some valid points, and also can viscerally feel the punishment being inflicted on habryka for his forthrightness here (which is useful to everyone regardless of the specific salary), which is going to reduce similar efforts in the future in ways we will all be poorer for. My general solution for problems like this is to suggest people write up a top level post making their general case (which may link to the motivating example but has a scope beyond it). The advantages here are:

1. avoids punishing people who are taking steps in the right direction, although they may not have arrived at an optimum yet
2. Lets you, the OP, and everyone else focus on identifying the right general algorithm, instead of arbitrating one particular instance, where one participant has way more information than the others.
3. Your argument is seen by everyone who cares about the topic, rather than only people who click through an org announcement.

(Should I write up a top-level post arguing this rather than leave a comment? Probably eventually).

Lightcone Infrastructure is competing for talent not only with industry, but also with the rest of the nonprofit sector. You could also frame this pay rate as a way to attract people from other forms of lower-paying nonprofit work, where they may be getting, say, industry - 40% rather than Lightcone's pay rate of industry - 30%.

From that point of view, I think LI's approach makes more sense. First, attract talent from even lower-paying nonprofits, along with a view enthusiasts from industry. Once that resource is tapped out, then you start increasing your pay closer to that of industry. This pulls in people who are increasingly more driven by money than by mission.

There's a way to cast this as unfair. But I don't think that's your objection. You're more worried about whether there will be pernicious effects on the effectiveness of LC and the broader EA ecosystem by offering lower pay than you could get in industry. With this hypothesis that LC will first be primarily attracting talent from the even-lower-paying nonprofit sector in mind, here are my responses to your higher-order negative effects:

• The strategy is scalable. They can attract the talent they can get at industry -30%, then increase from there as necessary.
• The  pay -> status -> values hypothesis seems shaky to me. US Senators and House representatives make a salary of $174,000/year. Doctors make $200,000/year. Who has higher status and a greater ability to shape the values of the nation, an average doctor or an average congressperson/senator? Even if pay does cause status and value-spreading ability to increase, it's not clear that this is a primary factor relative to, say, the ability to put more people on the job of promoting ideas and value systems.
• The future pay issue is equally a virtue when we consider attracting people from lower-paying nonprofit jobs. Beyond that, I think your objection is that "industry -30%" doesn't illustrate the amount of money at stake clearly enough, and that decisions that seem reasonable when we underestimate the magnitude in this way would seem unreasonable when we considered the lifetime earnings amount. That's reasonable, and easy to test by displaying the expected lifetime earnings cut along with the percentage figure. Would this change our gut reaction?
• It sounds like you're worried that people can purchase an equal or larger amount of status by giving 10% of their income to charity as they can by giving up 30% of their income working for Lightcone. If this leads to an "overallocation" of EtG, then this comes with the tacit assumption that people are using altruism as a way to chase status, and that status isn't allocated by utilitarian efficiency. Quite plausible, and I have to admit I don't know what to do about that.
• I'm not convinced by the "perverse incentives" worry. Introducing jobs that did not previously exist is creating an incentive where none existed before. What if LI had been offering unpaid internships before, and then decided to start paying those interns industry -30% salaries? Would that be a perverse incentive?

These are just off the top of my head, and I'm glad you raised these issues. Definitely worth further thought as the rationality/EA ecosystem grows!

Man, all good points, I alas do not have the time to compose a thoughtful reply on this today. (This is not a commitment to get back later, nor a commitment not to.)

Yeah, but $150K...

(Maybe I don't understand just how expensive the Bay Area is, but $150K sounds like an awful lot.

FWIW that wasn't my interpretation of it when I read the draft and might be worth spelling out. 

Can you clarify whether you're talking about "30% of X" i.e. 0.3*X, or "30% off X", i.e. 0.7*X?

I think it's possible we'll have various programs where people are paid to write and research, though I'm not sure what they'd look like yet.

I guess maybe if you're buying a house? Or sending a kid to college?

Without taking a side on the overall policy: buying a house and raising children are extremely normal things to do and want to do, and it would be bad if people had to choose between working for Lightcone and doing them, especially if Lightcone could pay them more without affecting other programs.  I feel like we in the bay have been frogboiled to the point of not noticing a bunch of sacrifices we make to be here.

I haven't done the math on what the listed salaries actually produce in terms of lifestyle, I'm not saying these particular salaries actually preclude what I consider reasonable, I'm only claiming that "it's only low if you want a house and children" is not a good argument that a salary is sufficient.

[Full disclosure: I occasionally contract for LW/LC and benefit from them being freer with worker compensation]

Another EA/rationalist org I've worked at had a policy of "We don't want salary to be a major reason for people to want to work here, and we don't want it to be a reason for them to not want to work here." That makes a lot of sense to me, and I think it's probably what Lightcone is going for?

I think that having a blanket policy of “we aim to underpay you by 30% compared to what you would get on the open market” is making pay a reason to not work there. I don’t disagree that the salaries under discussion are massive, but I would never work for a place that openly brags about underpaying me by 30% as if that’s a moral high ground.

I don’t live on the west coast and can’t speak to how far different salaries go, but the rhetoric and strategy being employed here is a major red flag to me.

Note that this is being paid, like, way more than nonprofits normally pay.

Also, if someone is good at the job why does it matter if they don’t believe in the mission? If they’re a grifter looking for more money you can just fire them right?

People who aren't interested in the mission will optimize their actions not in favor of the mission but in favor of what advances their own power. Most institutions are disfunctional because of infighting and it's important that this one doesn't go that route.

Having an in-person campus that allows people to have really good high-bandwidth communication is a big component that I now think is a really useful thing to have in many worlds. 

On a higher level of abstraction, I have an internal model that suggests something like the following three components are things that are quite important for AGI (and some other x-risks) to go right: 

• The ability to do really good research and be really good at truth-seeking (necessary to solve various parts of the AI Alignment problem, and also in general just seems really important for a community to have for lots of reasons)
• The ability to take advantage of crises and navigate really quickly changing situations (as a concrete intuition pump, I currently believe that before something like AGI we will probably have something like 10 more years at least as crazy as 2020, and I have a sense that some of the worlds where things go well, are worlds where a bunch of people concerned about AI Alignment are well set-up to take advantage of them, and make sure to not get wiped out by them)
• The ability to have high-stakes negotiations with large piles of resources and people (like, I think it's pretty plausible that in order to actually get the right AI Alignment solution deployed, and to avoid us getting killed some other way before then, some people who have some of the relevant components of solutions will need to negotiate in some pretty high-stakes situations to actually make them happen. And in a much more coherent way than people are currently capable of.)

Though these are all pretty abstract and high-level, and I have a lot of concrete thoughts that are less abstract, though it would take me a while to write them up.