I'm reminded about The Innovation Delusion (which I've mentioned a bit previously on the EA Forum: 1, 2), and ideas of credit, visibility, absence blindness, and maintenance work. An example of Thomas Edison is good enough that I will copy and paste it here:

Edison—widely celebrated as the inventor of the lightbulb, among many other things—is a good example. Edison did not toil alone in his Menlo Park laboratory; rather, he employed a staff of several dozen men who worked as machinists, ran experiments, researched patents, sketched designs, and kept careful records in notebooks. Teams of Irish and African American servants maintained their homes and boardinghouses. Menlo Park also had a boardinghouse for the workers, where Mrs. Sarah Jordan, her daughter Ida, and a domestic servant named Kate Williams cooked for the inventors and provided a clean and comfortable dwelling. But you won’t see any of those people in the iconic images of Edison posing with his lightbulb.

If I imagine being in a hypothetical role that is analogous to Mrs. Sarah Jordan's role, in which I support other people to accomplish things, am I okay with not getting any credit? Well, like everyone else I have ego and I would like the respect and approval of others. But I guess if I am well-compensated and my colleagues understand how my work contributes to our team's success I would be okay with somebody else being the public face and getting the book deals and getting the majority of the credit. How did senior people at Apple feel about Steve Jobs being so idolized in the public eye? I don't care too much if people in general don't acknowledge my work, as long as the people I care about most acknowledge it.

Of course it would be a lot nicer to be acknowledged widely, but that is generally not how we function. Most of us (unless we specifically investigate how people accomplished things) don't know who Michael Phelps's nutritionist was, nor do we know who taught Bill Gates about computers, nor who Magnus Carlsen's training partners are, nor who Oscar Wilde bounced around ideas with and got feedback from. I think there might be something about replaceability as well. Maybe there are hundreds of different people who could be (for example) a very good nutritionist for Michael Phelps or who could help Magnus Carlsen train, but there are only a handful of people who could be a world-class swimmer or a world class-chess player on that level?

Which of these two things do you mean?

• operations/management/doer careers should be higher status than they currently are within EA
• operations/management/doer careers should be higher status than research careers within EA

I don't know the true answer to this confusion, but I have some rough (untested, and possibly untestable) hypothesis I can share:

• It is really hard to estimate counterfactual scenarios. If you are the project manager (or head of people, or finance lead, or COO), it is really hard to have a good sense of how much better you are than the next-best candidate. Performance in general is hard to measure, but trying to estimate performance of a hypothetical other individual that you have never met strikes me as very challenging. Even if we were to survey 100 people in similar roles at other orgs, the context-specific nature of performance implies that we shouldn't be too confident about predicting how a person should perform at Org A simply from knowing their performance at Org B.
• I'm not quite sure how to phrase this, but it might be something like "the impact of operations work has high variance," or maybe "good operations results in limiting the downside a lot but does relatively little to increase the upside." Taking a very simplistic example of accounting, if our org has bad accounting them we don't know how much money we have, we don't keep track of accounts payable, and have general administrative sloppiness relating to money which makes decision-making hard. If we have very good accounting, then we have clarity about where our funds are flowing, what we own, and what we owe. Those upsides are nice, but they aren't as impactful (in a positive way) as the downsides are impactful (in a negative way). Phrased in a different way: many operations roles are a cost center rather than a profit center (although this will certainly vary depending on the role and the organization).
• It might just be a thing of marginal value, with non-operations roles being more impactful (overall, in general), but we still need more good operations people than we currently have.

I have a lot of uncertainty as to the reality of this, but I'm always interested in reading thoughts from people about these issues.

Do you have any ideas or suggestions (even rough thoughts) regarding how to make this change,  or for interventions that would nudge peoples' behavior?

Off the top of my head: A subsidized bootcamp on core operations skills? Getting more EAG speakers/sessions focused on operations-type topics? Various respected and well-known EAs publicly stating that Operations is important and valuable? A syllabus (readings, MOOCs, tutorials) that people can work their way through independently?

Thank you for sharing your reflections. As I read it I found various aspects that resonated with me, and I suspect that many other people on the EA Forum will feel the same. I'd love to see more of this type of writing (contemplative, reflective, critical/skeptical while being kind) on this forum.

Welcome to the EA Forum!

This is a tricky scenario, because most of the jobs that will allow large donations are also jobs that require at least four years of higher education. But the idea of 'personal fit' is also pretty important. Have you read through some of the guidance from 80,000 Hours on choosing a career?

If you could realistically get a bachelor's degree, that would likely open up higher earning paths for you, and a college degree does tend to pay off very well over time (although the difference might not be visible in the first few years after college). But if you are confident that you could earn plenty of money and be satisfied with the work doing HVAC (or something similar), that could get you a larger amount of money sooner. There are some careers that offer good earnings that don't require a college degree, but they tend to be some combination of A) requiring lots of work, and B) only allowing a small percentage of people to succeed, such as self-taught software engineers.

In the end, I think it really depends on two factors: your personal preferences/affinities for different types of work, and how confident you are in your timelines. 

I agree, what you write makes sense. I suppose that like so many financial things, it depends a lot on the details of how we define "disposable" (or "reasonable" or "acceptable"). I strongly endorse the general principle of people donating money if it causes only minor decrease in their quality of life, such as shifting from a super expensive house to a very comfortable house.

Most people without children who rent could probably spend much less money on rent by finding lower quality housing, sharing rooms, etc. There are certain lower limits that people aren't willing to go below (most of us probably wouldn't want to live in an apartment with concrete floors, no shower, and lots of cockroaches, even if that allowed us to donate extra money). But there is probably plenty of realistic conceptual space between the millionaire who spends lots of money on an expensive house and the impoverished person living with multiple roommates in low-quality housing.

A somewhat meandering follow-up: I have an idea that isn't fully clear in my head, but I want to share the rough idea of it. I think that one of the difficulties is that when we use our own life examples there are often many hidden benefits that don't get calculated clearly/directly into the income. Some things can be roughly calculated if we put some effort (health insurance, the quality of housing, how stably is the job, the length of commute), and some things are really really hard to put a price on (having a family support network, local knowledge of which shops sell cheap vegetables that are still good quality, speaking the local language well-enough to make friends).

Maybe an economist would think of these as "investments in human capital." If a person has these things, it is really easy to forget how hard it is to exist without them. I think of the cliché of a millionaire pretending to slum around as a homeless person. But to be serious: if a person has a university education, and a strong professional network, healthy emotional relationships with family, and good physical health, and professional stability, and a well-funded retirement account, it can be really hard to imagine life without those things. If a person hasn't had all these "investments in human capital" then it is really really challenging to make a good life situation for yourself. When I think about a person living in an expensive city on $15,000 or $20,000 per year, I wonder how much has been invested in these people so that they are able to live so frugally. How different does it look if a person lacks that investment?

Could I live on 40k in NYC if I had all of the above-listed "investments?" Probably, yeah. Could I do it if I had none of them? I bet that I wouldn't be able to.

Maybe we should base the norm/standard on something like disposable income rather than income? The suggestions for how much to donate based on income can serve as rough guidance, but probably shouldn't be interpreted very strictly, since the same income in different places ends up looking very different.

I've never lived in New York on $40,000/year, but I imagine that I would be constantly stressed and unable to think of other people's needs. That might be more than what 95% of the human population earns, but expenses are also higher for people in New York than for 99% (a guess) of the human population.

Assuming no sort of family/support network, that would be really hard. What sort of housing/medicine/food/clothing/lifestyle can a person afford in New York on 40k per year?^[1] $40,000/year in Oklahoma City might be fairly comfortable, and in Chengdu or Chennai or Cairo it might be a very comfortable lifestyle, but in New York it would be... quite a bit less comfortable. It might not even be a living wage.^[2]

I'm guessing that many of the people who are able to donate 10% (or more) while having good salaries would find it really hard to keep doing that if they lived at that standard (the standard of living that a 40,000 USD pre-tax income in New York City allows). Is it possible, and would some do it? Yes, there are some paragons of virtue who would be able to make that work. But for most of us, I think that would be too challenging.

1. ^{^}

   In this scenario, if we aren't crashing on a friend's/relative's sofa, and we can't afford university education or similar training, and we don't know about the local networks (like Buy Nothing Facebook groups or Freecycle communities)

2. ^{^}

   Although depending on the sacrifices you are willing to make, you would probably live on it. There are certainly people in New York City that survive on that amount or less per year.