I'm not sure if you are giving us accolades for putting this information in the job ads or missed that specific salary information is in the job ads. But we definitely believe in salary transparency for all the reasons you mentioned and if there's anything we can do to be more transparent, please let us know!

I suspect having publicly available data points on compensation also helps ensure pay equity and levels some of the inherent knowledge imbalance between employers and job-seekers, reducing variance in the job search process. This all feels particularly true for EA, which is too young to have standardized roles and compensation across a lot of organizations.

Eh....

If I was writing a similar comment, I think I would choose to consider writing instead of “reducing variance” instead something like “improving efficiency and transparency, so organizations and candidates can maximize impact”. 

Maybe instead of “standardized roles and compensation across a lot of organizations” I would say something like “mature market arising from impactful organizations so that candidates have a useful expectation of wage”. (E.g. The sense that a seasoned software developer knows what she could get paid in the Bay Area and it’s not just some uniform prior between $50k and $10M).

So the main perspective for why this is relevant is shown by this comment chain where Gregory Lewis has a final comment, and his comment seems correct.

Uh.

The rest of this comment is low effort and a ramble, isn’t on anyone to know, but I think I will continue to write because it’s just good to know about, or something. Why I think someone would care about this:

• Depending on the cruxes of whether you accept the relevant worldview/cause area/models of talent, I think the impact and salaries being talked about here, driven by tails (e.g. “400k to 4M”) would make it unworkable to have “standardized” salaries or “ensure pay equity” that most people would mean. Like, salary caps wouldn’t work out, people would just create new entities or something, and it would just add a whole layer of chicanery.
   
• Credibility of the EA movement seems important, so it’s good to be aware of things like “anti-trust”, “fiduciary duty” and as Gregory Lewis puts it, “colourably illegal”. Knowing what these do would be useful if you are trying to build institutions and speak to institutions to edit AI policy and literally stop WW3.

But wait there’s more! 

While the above is probably true, here’s some facts that make it even more awkward:

• The count of distinct funders for AI and longtermist EA initiatives is approximately one and a half. So creating a bunch of entities (consultancies, think tanks) that have a pretty “normalized” price of labor is probably justified in some theoretical, practical and virtuous sense.
   
• The salary issue is not academic. Right now, an EA org seems to be flat out willing to pay 70% of US tech sector wages, lifted by the historic FAANG event (e.g. “we would be open to paying $315k for someone who would make $450k in industry”). This seems right and virtuous in this worldview. At the same time, there is a segment of EA with a strong frugal aesthetic that is also virtuous, and importantly, older with many staff. So, despite dismissing both central planning and “equity” above, a laissez faire sort of approach is going to be unwieldy. What will happen is that the comp gradient will create structural issues. 
   

Well, so anyways this is all a thing for these CEOs, executive directors and grant makers to work out. 

It’s why they pay them the big bucks...except for the founders of Rethink Priority and their officers, with mean salaries being about $33K according to their 2020 Form 990.

I think the takeaway is that I think there is a problem here that can be resolved completely by at least tripling the current salaries of RP officers and founders.
 

(All views are my own. I'm not entirely sure how Marcus and Peter, and other people at RP, thinks about RP's impact; I know I've had at least one major disagreement before).

Oooh asking the tough questions here! The short answer is that you should probably just apply and learn about your own fit, RP as an institution, and what you think about stuff like our theory of change through the application process! 

The longer answer is that I don't have a good sense of how good your counterfactual is. My understanding is that QURI's work is trying to do revolutionary change in epistemics, while RP's work* is more tightly scoped. 

In addition, my best guess is that at this stage in your career, direct impact is likely less important than other concerns like career capital and personal motivation.

Still, for the sake of having some numbers to work with (even if the numbers are very loose and subjective, etc), here is a very preliminary attempt to estimate impact at RP, in case it's helpful for you or other applicants:

The easiest way to analyze RP impact is looking at our projects that aims to improve funder priorities, and guesstimating how much it improves decision quality.

When I do some back of the envelope calculations on the direct impact of an RP researcher, I get something like mid 6 figures to high 7 figures** in terms of improving decision quality for funders, with a (very not robust) median estimate in the 1-2M range. 

I think this approach survives reasonable external validity checks, some of which will be in the higher end (Michael Aird has been working part-time as an EAIF guest manager, he's approximately indifferent between marginal time doing RP work vs marginal EAIF work, and amortizing his time on that would get you to the upper ends of that range) and some of which will be in the lower end (RP has had ~12 FTE researchers 6 months ago, EA overall is deploying 400M per year, saying RP's responsible for ~1.5% of the decision-quality of deployed capital feels much more intuitively defensible than saying we're responsible for ~$8M/researcher-year x 12 ~=25% of deployed capital***). 

There are out-of-model reasons to go lower than say 1-2M, like replaceability arguments, and reasons to go higher, like RP is trying to expand in the future, so joining earlier is more helpful than later as you can help us while in the early stages to scale well while maintaining/improving culture and research quality. My current guess is that the reasons to go higher are slightly stronger.

So my very very loose and subjective guess is that you should maybe be indifferent between working at RP now as a junior longtermism researcher for a year vs say ~$2.2M**** of increase in EA capital on impact grounds. So one approach is considering whether ~$2.2M growth in EA capital is better or worse than your counterfactual, though again it's reasonably likely that career capital and motivation concerns might dominate. 

*or at least the direct impact of our specific projects, I think one plausible good future/goal for "RP" as an institution is roughly trying to be a remote-first megaproject in research, which doesn't have close analogues (though "thinktank during covid" is maybe closest). 
** Note that this is a range of different possible averages using different assumptions rather than a real 90% credible interval. I do think it's >5% likely that our work is net negative. 
*** This is pretty loose, not all RP projects are meant to advise funders, also some of what's going on is that I'm forecasting that RP's research will impact 2-5 years of funding rather than 1 year of funding in some cases, like Neil's EU farmed legislation work. 
**** Precision of estimates do not imply greater confidence.

FYI - the link looking for/pursuing a solution goes to https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/bit.ly/unjournal which gives me a 404 Not Found

Yeah, fwiw, I personally feel I've had a lot of flexibility at Rethink (though I'll probably have somewhat less going forward, partly because I myself think that that'd be better), and I personally see "low interest in publishing papers/academia" as either irrelevant or mildly a pro for me personally. Though I do expect both of those things would vary between people. 

This has inspired me to write another comment with my own personal list of pros and cons of working at RP. 

It’s definitely the case that we can hire people in most countries (though some countries have additional considerations we have to account for, like whether the person has working hours that will overlap with their manager, some financial / logistical constraints, etc), and we are happy to review any candidate’s specific questions about their particular location on a case by case basis if folks want to reach out to info@rethinkpriorities.org. For reference, we currently have staff in the US, Canada, Mexico, Spain, UK, Switzerland, Germany, and New Zealand.

One thing I'd add: It seems likely to me that if a call is worth the person's time + Linch's time, then it's actually a better move to just apply. The initial application stage takes 2 hours or less, and people will learn through the application process, and at each stage a substantial fraction of people don't proceed (cutting down the total time cost and making the question "Is this job a good fit for me?" less relevant to ask). If a 30 min call is worthwhile, it seems like the conclusion will probably be "may as well apply", in which case I'd just skip to "may as well apply".

I'm still very happy for people to reach out to me, but mainly so I can encourage them to go ahead and apply! (Assuming they indeed think a 30 min call would be worth their time. I obviously don't think every single person in EA should apply.)

Also, to be clear, I don't say this just for Rethink specifically or for orgs I work at specifically. E.g., yesterday I said roughly the same thing to someone who was interested in working at the Center on Long-Term Risk and wanted to know what working there was like for me - I encouraged them to probably just apply to work there instead of spending more time thinking about whether they'd want to accept an offer in the unlikely event they receive one, and to focus our call on other things. 

(I think one actually check whether that argument seems sound by laying out the various time costs, learning benefits, and probabilities, and I haven't done this, but I'd guess this is basically correct.)

The short answer is that I don't actually miss having coworkers more than I like having no commute etc. 

Though I've considered WeWorking with Ozzie from QURI etc but never got around to it. 

Something that makes coordination a bit harder is that the Lightcone team in Berkeley has set up a pretty good space for AI alignment people so many of the people I might want to cowork with already have a really good BATNA. 

I think this might change if RP hires longtermists from the Bay Area and we can have a nucleus of actual coworkers here, or alternatively if people congregate in Oxford I might move to join Michael A et al.