Having a savings target seems important. (Not financial advice.) I sometimes hear people in/around EA rule out taking jobs due to low salaries (sometimes implicitly, sometimes a little embarrassedly). Of course, it's perfectly understandable not to want to take a significant drop in your consumption. But in theory, people with high salaries could be saving up so they can take high-impact, low-paying jobs in the future; it just seems like, by default, this doesn't happen. I think it's worth thinking about how to set yourself up to be able to do it if you do find yourself in such a situation; you might find it harder than you expect. (Personal digression: I also notice my own brain paying a lot more attention to my personal finances than I think is justified. Maybe some of this traces back to some kind of trauma response to being unemployed for a very stressful ~6 months after graduating: I just always could be a little more financially secure. A couple weeks ago, while meditating, it occurred to me that my brain is probably reacting to not knowing how I'm doing relative to my goal, because 1) I didn't actually know what my goal is, and 2) I didn't really have a sense of what I was spending each month. In IFS terms, I think the "social and physical security" part of my brain wasn't trusting that the rest of my brain was competently handling the situation.) So, I think people in general would benefit from having an explicit target: once I have X in savings, I can feel financially secure. This probably means explicitly tracking your expenses, both now and in a "making some reasonable, not-that-painful cuts" budget, and gaming out the most likely scenarios where you'd need to use a large amount of your savings, beyond the classic 3 or 6 months of expenses in an emergency fund. For people motivated by EA principles, the most likely scenarios might be for impact reasons: maybe you take a public-sector job that pays half your current salary for three years, or maybe you'

Looks like Mechanize is choosing to be even more irresponsible than we previously thought. They're going straight for automating software engineering. Would love to hear their explanation for this. "Software engineering automation isn't going fast enough" [1] - oh really? This seems even less defensible than their previous explanation of how their work would benefit the world. 1. ^ Not an actual quote

The EA Forum moderation team is going to experiment a bit with how we categorize posts. Currently there is a low bar for a Forum post being categorized as “Frontpage” after it’s approved. In comparison, LessWrong is much more opinionated about the content they allow, especially from new users. We’re considering moving in that direction, in order to maintain a higher percentage of valuable content on our Frontpage. To start, we’re going to allow moderators to move posts from new users from “Frontpage” to “Personal blog”[1], at their discretion, but starting conservatively. We’ll keep an eye on this and, depending on how this goes, we may consider taking further steps such as using the “rejected content” feature (we don’t currently have that on the EA Forum). Feel free to reply here if you have any questions or feedback. 1. ^ If you’d like to make sure you see “Personal blog” posts in your Frontpage, you can customize your feed.

Mini Forum update: Draft comments, and polls in comments Draft comments You can now save comments as permanent drafts: After saving, the draft will appear for you to edit: 1. In-place if it's a reply to another comment (as above) 2. In a "Draft comments" section under the comment box on the post 3. In the drafts section of your profile The reasons we think this will be useful: * For writing long, substantive comments (and quick takes!). We think these are the some of the most valuable comments on the forum, and want to encourage more of them * For starting a comment on mobile and then later continuing on desktop * To lower the barrier to starting writing a comment, since you know you can always throw it in drafts and then never look at it again ---------------------------------------- Polls in comments We recently added the ability to put polls in posts, and this was fairly well received, so we're adding it to comments (... and quick takes!) as well. You can add a poll from the toolbar, you just need to highlight a bit of text to make the toolbar appear: And the poll will look like this...  

As part of MATS' compensation reevaluation project, I scraped the publicly declared employee compensations from ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer for many AI safety and EA organizations (data here) in 2019-2023. US nonprofits are required to disclose compensation information for certain highly paid employees and contractors on their annual Form 990 tax return, which becomes publicly available. This includes compensation for officers, directors, trustees, key employees, and highest compensated employees earning over $100k annually. Therefore, my data does not include many individuals earning under $100k, but this doesn't seem to affect the yearly medians much, as the data seems to follow a lognormal distribution, with mode ~$178k in 2023, for example. I generally found that AI safety and EA organization employees are highly compensated, albeit inconsistently between similar-sized organizations within equivalent roles (e.g., Redwood and FAR AI). I speculate that this is primarily due to differences in organization funding, but inconsistent compensation policies may also play a role. I'm sharing this data to promote healthy and fair compensation policies across the ecosystem. I believe that MATS salaries are quite fair and reasonably competitive after our recent salary reevaluation, where we also used Payfactors HR market data for comparison. If anyone wants to do a more detailed study of the data, I highly encourage this! I decided to exclude OpenAI's nonprofit salaries as I didn't think they counted as an "AI safety nonprofit" and their highest paid current employees are definitely employed by the LLC. I decided to include Open Philanthropy's nonprofit employees, despite the fact that their most highly compensated employees are likely those under the Open Philanthropy LLC.