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80,000 Hours has some research on this. They do have a lot of caveats, but they may help! https://80000hours.org/2019/05/why-do-organisations-say-recent-hires-are-worth-so-much/
Curated and popular this week
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This is a crosspost from the new Animal Welfare Alignment Newsletter by Anima International. You can subscribe on Substack if you are interested in following these efforts. Audio reading also available on Substack.
The goals of this post are to:
1. Raise a question I see as crucially important to the goal of aligning AI to animal welfare...
“How long have you been v*g*n?”
This is one of the most common icebreakers at animal protection events. It’s a baseline assumption, and it mostly holds true: if you’re out advocating for animals not to be tortured or abused, realistically these days you are v**n, or close. And it makes for good conversation. It seems fairly safe to assume when you meet strangers.
But this assumption is hurting the movement in a way which we don’t always notice: someone new comes into the sp...
Summary
Back in November 2023 I posted here to launch Spiro and raise our first $198k. Two and a half years later this is an update and a fundraiser for the next step.
The short version: we've now reached over-5,900 people with TB preventive medicine, including over 3,000 children under five years old. Our early results have held up well an...
Recent opportunities to take action
I'm currently writing a post on monetary valuations of various things in EA. Core questions like "how much is all EA labor worth" are tricky to answer, because you need to value things in terms of the marginal (last) dollar, but we don't have any concrete plans to spend FTX or OpenPhil's last dollar.
In this particular case, impact is heavy-tailed so it also depends exactly how ambitious/talented the person is. That said, I'd rather have an aligned median Google quality software engineer working on AI safety than $1M/year in the FTX Future Fund's pocket, but I'd rather they have $10M/year than the engineer. This is based on the median of a couple of extremely uncertain Fermi estimates which need to be cleaned up before posting. Great engineers are often worth more than $10M/year on the right project.
There are a few people who I'd rather have than $100M/year: either people who directly generate >100M/year of funding (like Sam Bankman-Fried), or are nearly irreplaceable in their field. These definitely include some founders, the very best engineers and AI alignment researchers, and likely various people in biosecurity and policy too.
Note that this doesn't mean we should fund a project that recruits engineers for $1M/year! There are often hidden costs to such policies.
Just wanted to nudge that I would find this write up very valuable. Even if the ranges are very wide, I often want to reference some sort of monetary estimate of the value of labor, and having a post like this to reference would be quite useful.