I feel anxious that there is all this money around. Let's talk about it

I've spent time in the non-EA nonprofit sector, and the "standard critical story" there is one of suppressed anger among the workers. To be clear, this "standard critical story" is not always fair, accurate, or applicable. By and large, I also think that, when it is applicable, most of the people involved are not deliberately trying to play into this dynamic. It's just that, when people are making criticisms, this is often the story I've heard them tell, or seen for myself.

It goes something like this:

[Non-EA] charities are also primarily funded by millionaires and billionaires. But they're also run by independently wealthy people, who do it for the PR or for the fuzzies. They underpay, overwork, and ignore the ideas of their staff. They're burnout factories.

Any attempts to "measure the impact" of the charity are subverted by carelessness and the undirected dance of incentives to improve the optics of their organization to keep the donations flowing. Lots of attention on gaming the stats, managing appearances, and sweeping failures under the rug.

Missions are thematic, and there's lots of "we believe in the power of..."-type storytelling motivating the work. Sometimes, the storytelling is explicitely labeled as such, serving to justify charities that are secular, yet ultimately faith-based.

Part of the core EA thesis is that we want to have a different relationship with money and labor: pay for impact, avoid burnout, money is good, measure what you're doing, trust the argument and evidence rather than the optics. I expect that anybody reading this comment is very familiar with this thesis.

It's not a thesis that's optimized for optics or for warm fuzzies. So it should not be surprising that it's easy to make it look bad, or that it provokes anxiety.

This is unfortunate, though, because appearances and bad feelings are heuristics we rely on to avoid getting sucked into bad situations.

Personally, I think the best way to respond to such anxieties is to spend the energy you put into worrying to critically, carefully investigate some aspect of EA . We make constant calls for criticism, either from inside or outside. Part of the culture of the movement involves an unusual level of transparency, and responsiveness to the argument rather than the status of the arguer.

One way to approach this would simply be to make a hypothesis (i.e. the bar for grants is being lowered, we're throwing money at nonsense grants), and then see what evidence you can gather for and against it.

Another way would be to identify a hypothesis for which it's hard to gather evidence either way. For example, let's say you're worried that an EA org is run by a bunch of friends who use their billionaire grant money to pay each other excessive salaries and and sponsor Bahama-based "working" vacations. What sort of information would you need in order to support this to the point of being able to motivate action, or falsify it to the point of being able to dissolve your anxiety? If that information isn't available, then why not? Could it be made available? Identifying a concrete way in which EA could be more transparent about its use of money seems like an excellent, constructive research project.

The subquestion of high salaries at EA orgs is interesting to me. I think it pushes on an existing tension between  a conception of the EA community as a support network for people who feel the weight of the world's problems and are trying to solve them, vs. a conception of the EA community as the increasingly professional project of recruiting the rest of the world to work on those problems too. 

If you're thinking of the first thing, offering high salaries to people "in the network" seems weird and counterproductive. After all, the truly committed people will just donate the excess, minus a bunch of transaction costs,  and meanwhile you run the risk of high salaries attracting people who don't care about the mission at all, who will unhelpfully dilute the group.

Whereas if you're thinking of the second thing, it seems great to offer high salaries. Working on the world's biggest problems should pay as much as working at a hedge fund! I would love to be able to whole-heartedly recommend high-impact jobs to, say, college acquaintances who feel some pressure to go into high-earning careers, not just to the people who are already in the top tenth of a percentile for commitment to altruism. 

I really love the EA-community-as-a-support-network-for-people-who-feel-the-weight-of-the-world's-problems-and-are-trying-to-solve-them. I found Strangers Drowning a very moving read in part for its depiction of pre-EA-movement EAs, who felt very alone, struggled to balance their demanding beliefs with their personal lives, and probably didn't have as much impact as they would have had with more support. I want to hug them and tell them that it's going to be okay, people like them will gather and share their experiences and best practices and coping skills and they'll know that they aren't alone. (Even though this impulse doesn't make a lot of logical sense in the case of, say, young Julia Wise, who grew up to be a big part of the reason why things are better now!) I hope we can maintain this function of the EA community alongside the EA-community-as-the-increasingly-professional-project-of-recruiting-the-rest-of-the-world-to-work-on-those-problems-too. But to the extent that these two functions compete, I lean towards picking the second one, and paying the salaries to match. 

Thanks for writing this. I share some of this uneasiness - I think there are reputational risks to EA here, for example by sponsoring people to work in the Bahamas. I'm not saying there isn't a potential justification for this but the optics of it are really pretty bad. 

This also extends to some lazy 'taking money from internet billionaires' tropes. I'm not sure how much we should consider bad faith criticisms like this if we believe we're doing the right thing, but it's an easy hit piece (and has already been done, e.g. a video attacked someone from the EA community running for congress about being part-funded by Sam Bankman-Fried - I'm deliberately not linking to it here because it's garbage).

Finally, I worry about wage inflation in EA. EA already mostly pays at the generous end of nonprofit salaries, and some of the massive EA orgs pay private-sector level wages (reasonably, in my view - if you're managing $600m/year at GiveWell, it's not unreasonable to be well-paid for that). I've spent most of my career arguing that people shouldn't have to sacrifice a comfortable life if they want to do altruistic work - but it concerns me that entry level positions in EA are now being advertised at what would be CEO-level salaries at other nonprofits. There is a good chance, I think, that EA ends up paying professional staff significantly more to do exactly the same work to exactly the same standard as before, which is a substantive problem; and there is again a real reputational risk here.

One thing you didn't mention is grant evaluation. I personally do not mind grants being given out somewhat quickly and freely in the beginning of a project. But before somebody asks for money again, they should need to have their last grant evaluated to see whether it accomplished anything. My sense is that this is not common (or thorough) enough, even for bigger grants. I think as the movement gets bigger, this seems pretty likely to lead to unaccountability.

Maybe more happens behind the scenes than I realize though, and there actually is a lot more evaluation than I think.

For me the reputational risks that Jack Lewars mentioned worry me a lot. Like how will the media portray effective altruism in the future? We're definitely going be seen as less sympathetic in leftist circles, being funded by billionaires and all.

Another concern for me is how this will change what type of people we'll attract to the movement. In the past the movement attracted people who were willing to live on a small amount of money because they care so much about others in this world. Now I'm worried that there will be more people who are less aligned with the values, who are in it at least partly for the money.

In another way it feels unfair. Why do I get to ask for 10k with a good chance of success, while friends of mine struggling with money who aren't EA aligned can't? I don't feel any more special or deserving than them in a way. I feel unfairly privileged somehow.

There's also this icky feeling I get with accepting money: what if my project isn't better than cash transfers to the extreme poor? Even if the probabilities of success are high enough, the thought of just "wasting money" while it could have gone to extremely poor people massively improving their lives just saddens me.

I'm not trying to make logical arguments here for or against something, I'm just sharing the feelings and worries going through my head.

I think it's good that this is being discussed publicly for the world to see. Then it at least doesn't seem to non-EA's who read this that we're all completely comfortable with it. I'm still of the opinion that all this money is great and positive news for the world and I'm very grateful for the FTX Future Fund, but it does come with these worries.

I generally feel that "reputational risk" explains far too much. You can say it all the time. I'd prefer we had a better sense of how damaging different sizes of scandal can be. 

I think openly and transparently discussing EA money and its use is the opposite of a reputational risk. The more money there is, the more dangerous handling it behind curtains becomes, and even being perceived like that is bad for EA.

Reputational risks are maybe in sharing ideas that would be perceived as immoral in the general society, or being jerks to people. Not being open about our points of uncertainty.

Here are the consensus statements on the polis poll. 

I have hang-ups about money in general. For several years after university I lived on about $12k a year (which is low by UK standards, though high by world ones). It's pretty surreal to be able to even consider applying for say 5x this as a salary. It's like going to a fancy restaurant for the first time ("the waiters bring the food to the table?") I just can't shake how surreal this all is.

I grow up in a relatively poor family in Italy. I learned English from scratch at 21. I graduated at 26 (way above the UK/US standards). I was able to survive at uni thanks to scholarships and sacrifices. Exactely one year ago I used to eat everyday in a desolate university canteen in Milan because I didn't have the money to afford to eat out more than twice per month. 

Now I am seriously reasoning about 7 digits funds, renting an office for my project's HQ in central London, and having a salary that is much higher than the sum of all my family's salaries. 

Long story short: yes, that could definitely make someone pretty anxious.

For several years after university I lived on about $12k a year (which is low by UK standards, though high by world ones). It's pretty surreal to be able to even consider applying for say 5x this as a salary. It's like going to a fancy restaurant for the first time ("the waiters bring the food to the table?") I just can't shake how surreal this all is.

While I do not have anything to contribute to the conversation, I want to comment under my real name that I have experienced this same financial history and these same feelings. It is emotionally overwhelming to see how far one has come, it's socially confusing to suddenly be in a new socioeconomic class, and it's a computational burden to learn how to manage an income that is far greater than required for bare survival (a US standard for bare survival, not a global standard). I have actually sought therapy for this specific topic. There are people who specialize in this. It is my opinion that the absolute first priority if you can possibly help it is to get a "lay of the land" in regards to the scope and detail of your own emotions and subsequent biases, and take concrete action toward regulating your emotions in any potentially highly consequential areas. (Some of your feelings around this may actually constitute trauma. Being poor and the instability it induces trains one to stay constantly alert for danger, dissociates one from one's unpleasant surroundings, etc. In my observation, trauma is the single most dangerous inter/personal force on the planet.) It is not only okay, but desirable, to slow down one's decision-making and regulate oneself, even if there is opportunity cost. Reasoning under both ambiguity and (subjective) pressure is a very dangerous situation to be in, and I have concluded that it is best to address this psychological milieu before doing anything else, since impaired judgement has high and broad potential for negative impact. 

If you want to talk about this in private, I am willing to do that as well. I know the reason that I don't like to discuss this publicly it that there is a "preferential attachment" (networks sense) effect where resources are concerned in many social settings, and I am reluctant to stigmatize myself as having ever been poor-- perhaps when I am further into my career and have been extremely financially secure for longer than I was financially insecure, I will not have the same concerns regarding any signaling that could disrupt my acceptance within a higher social class. I encourage persons who are already in that position to take on this burden, which will endanger you much less.

I have long and often complained about the cowardice of people who would not respond to a true and vulnerable call from another in public, even when the person is trying to help the demographic of the silent person. I don't AT ALL want to post this comment and frankly dread this being a search result for my name, but I don't see a reason that I should be exempt from this moral duty to undersign your experience as being at least twice-anecdotal: a product (at least partially) of external factors that bear consideration, not something generated from within you alone. 

Currently the visualisation on the pol.is questions looks like this. Anyone feel free to write a summary.

And the full report is here:

https://pol.is/report/r8rhhdmzemraiunhbmnmt

I have seen little evidence that FTX Future Fund (FFF) or EA Infrastructure Fund (EAIF) have lowered their standards for mainline grants

FFF is new, so that shouldn't be a surprise.

If the forum had a private section that only members could read, I would post this there. 

Just a short comment: I liked your Polis poll in this post a lot! I would like to  see more polls like this in order to get a better understand of what "the EA community" thinks about certain topics, instead of having to rely on annecdotes by EAs who are willing and motivated enough to write a EAF post. Adding a Polis poll might even become a good practice for EAF posts where someone annecdotally describes their opinion. As soon as some enough results for the poll come in, the author could even add some findings into their post  (e.g. "[Poll Result: XYZ]"). 

I would prefer that I'd put each of my points in the article as a separate comment. But I think the article would have had much less traction that way.

Yes, you need to measure value drift by other standards than live on little money. It may make sense that college students think that they can live on [12k/20k] forever but then they realize that 100k is also good, plus they can donate like 25% and still feel so achieved and have so many various services that enable them to focus on work and self-care they can just inspire others to also study hard/get outside of their comfort zones and maybe, after a few years of learning/interning/helping out, they can get to some 50/60k and even then they can donate if they feel like it and get used to getting the basic efficiency-improving services, which other people are happy to do, since it's a job [in the UK/paid in GBP]. [I may be confusing £ and $.] So, it may be optimal to pay people skilled in EA-related disciplines a slight decrease from what they would gain if instead of developing capacity to work commercially they spend substantial less-paid/unpaid time gaining EA-related capabilities, because they can focus, inspire, and also donate while not feeling bad about 'taking too much.'

There are different people and if you can 'legally/in an accepted way' pay for the change of institutional focus, you pay for the connections at the institutions. For example, if you'd like Harvard to become more interested in impact, you hire some people from Harvard, who could otherwise gain maybe $200k and they influence the institution through networks. This is great because academia influences the world order. You have also people who develop solutions and work for much less, such as the charity entrepreneurs, especially in nations with higher PP than the UK. Then you have the officers who run the solutions and work for very little, maybe someone can distribute nets for $2k/year or gladly liaise with local institutions for $0.2/hour in places of very high PP and especially poor other opportunities. You still need someone to coordinate them who can live in a relative peace, having some personal security/stability paid. So, not everyone is getting large sums.

The funds are welcoming with applications but try applying: your project needs to be especially promising in impact to gain funding. For example, if you want to roller blade, this can constitute a reputational loss risk for yourself (not really but may reduce the ability of fund managers in evaluating grants or not really but there may be other colleagues who can help you develop your project before you apply for funding) - of course it is a joke but the general reasoning applies. The funds' scopes enables self-selection of persons who have the ability to relatively independently solve some of the world's most important problems - it may be just a coincidence a lot are in EA (or just the thinking about effective impartial impact making is less prominent elsewhere). Thus, funds are highly selective.

You need some deference to established desiderata to not shove it into the faces of private and public companies that eh yes we just want to reduce your traditional power we think it is more enjoyable even for you but also importantly for everyone, because impact is just very cool and enjoyable: you would get blacklisted or incur reputational loss. Instead, you need to fund some companies that even contribute to the issues so that people focus on these, especially if they are controversial or/and aggressive in gaining attention, at least as a way to entertain the donors in the community who would otherwise think well it is dope to go to Mars and think what a shame even talk about poverty efficient solutions and inclusion, just every time someone brings up the topic I leave since I dislike momentum loss. Of course, there would be an issue if the money 'flies to Mars' year after year not only early on then just not so fun anymore. Therefore, it may be necessary to have fun giving to attention-captivating causes likeable by powerful individuals because it captivates their attention and participation.

The fund managers to an extent reflect the spirit of the community, so if you have an issue, it is probably due to a spirit in the community, which you should feel free to either bring up or consider brought up otherwise. Thus, fund managers are held accountable by the community to make good decisions so as to fly the money where they make the most positive inclusive impact.

EA should not be about giving away money to charities, it is work and affordable food what dignified the life of less fortunate people. EA should be about investing in descent profitable projects passionate about solving million of people problems, projects that may define present and coming generations way of life by building a sustainable future. We have a technology for real clean affordable food grown sustainably anywhere in the world, a result of 6 years of research, designs and pilot construction all of that self funded and the system has made it very difficult to get the capital to continue. I wonder how many of us are out there with solutions but no capital or connections to make it happen. EA should focus on providing the tools to fish and solve the problem at once instead of giving away the fish as a short time duration band-aid.