Yeah, a friend told me this was low—I’m just scared of asking for money rn I guess.
I do see people who seem very incompetent getting paid as consultants, so I guess I can charge for more. I’ll see how much my time gets eaten by this and how much money I need. I want to buy some gpus, hopefully this can help.
I’m not trying to be derisive; in fact, I relate to you greatly. But it’s by being on the outside that I’m able to levy a few more direct criticisms:
Were you not paid for the other work that you did, leading dev teams and getting frontier research done? Those things should be a baseline on the worth of your time.
If that, have you ever tried to maximize the amount of money you can get the) other people to acknowledge your time as worth (ie, get a high salary offer)?
Separately, do you know the going rate for consultants with approximately your expertise? Or any other reference class you cna make up. Consulting can cost an incredible amount of money, and that price can be “fair” in a pretty simple sense if it averts the need to do 10s of hours of labor at high wages. It may be one of the highest leverage activities per unit time that exists as a conventional economic activity that a person can simply do.
Aside from market rates or whatever, I suggest you just try asking for unreasonable things, or more money than you feel you’re worth (think of it as an experiment, and maybe observe what happens in your mind when you flinch from this).
Do you have any emotional hangup about the prospect of trading money for labor generally, or money for anything?
Separately, do you have a hard time asserting your worth to others (or maybe just strangers) on some baseline level?
Were you not paid for the other work that you did, leading dev teams and getting frontier research done? Those things should be a baseline on the worth of your time.
This was running AI Plans, my startup, so makes sense that I wasn’t getting paid, since the same hesitancy for asking for money leads to hesitancy to do that exaggeration thing many AI Safety/EA people seem to do when making funding applications. Also, I don’t like to make the funding applications, or long applications in general.
If that, have you ever tried to maximize the amount of money you can get the) other people to acknowledge your time as worth (ie, get a high salary offer)?
I think every time I’ve asked for money, I’ve tried to ask for the lowest amount I can.
Separately, do you know the going rate for consultants with approximately your expertise? Or any other reference class you cna make up. Consulting can cost an incredible amount of money, and that price can be “fair” in a pretty simple sense if it averts the need to do 10s of hours of labor at high wages. It may be one of the highest leverage activities per unit time that exists as a conventional economic activity that a person can simply do.
I don’t know—I have a doc of stuff I’ve done that I paste into LLMs when I need to make a funding applications and stuff—just pasted it into Gemini 2.5 Pro and asked what would be a reasonable hourly fee and it said $200 to $400 an hour.
Aside from market rates or whatever, I suggest you just try asking for unreasonable things, or more money than you feel you’re worth (think of it as an experiment, and maybe observe what happens in your mind when you flinch from this).
I’ll give it a go—I’ve currently put the asking price on my call link for $50 an hour, feel nervous about actually asking for that though. I need to make a funding application for AI Plans—I can ask for money on behalf of others on the team, but asking for money to be donated so I can get a high salary feels scary. Happy to ask for a high salary for others on the team though, since I want them to get paid what they need.
Do you have any emotional hangup about the prospect of trading money for labor generally, or money for anything?
Yeah, I do. Generally, I’m used to doing a lot of free work for family and getting admonished when I ask for money. And when I did get promised money, it was either wayyy below market price or wayy late or didn’t get paid at all. General experience with family was my work not being valued even when I put in extra effort. I’m aware that’s wrong and has taught me wrong lessons, but not fully learnt the true ones yet.
I do think that $200-$400 seem like reasonable consulting rates.
I think the situations with family are complicated, because sure, there are social/cultural reasons one might be expected to do those things for family. Usually people hold those cultural norms alongside a stronger distinction between the ingroup (family) and the outgroup (all other people by default), though, so letting your impressions from that culture teach you things about how to behave in a culture with a weaker distinction might be maladaptive.
(I actually was suggesting you try asking for objectively completely unreasonable things just to look at the flinch. For example, you could ask a stranger for $100 for no reason. They would say no, but no harm would be done.)
One frame that might be useful to you is that in a way, it is imperative to at least sufficiently assert your value to others (if not overassert it the socially expected amount). An overly modest estimate is still a miscalibrated one, and people will make suboptimal decisions as a result. (Putting aside the behavior and surpluses given to other people, you are also a player in this game, and your being underallocated resources is globally suboptimal.)
Yes, you can ask for a lot more than that :)
Yeah, a friend told me this was low—I’m just scared of asking for money rn I guess.
I do see people who seem very incompetent getting paid as consultants, so I guess I can charge for more. I’ll see how much my time gets eaten by this and how much money I need. I want to buy some gpus, hopefully this can help.
I’m not trying to be derisive; in fact, I relate to you greatly. But it’s by being on the outside that I’m able to levy a few more direct criticisms:
Were you not paid for the other work that you did, leading dev teams and getting frontier research done? Those things should be a baseline on the worth of your time.
If that, have you ever tried to maximize the amount of money you can get the) other people to acknowledge your time as worth (ie, get a high salary offer)?
Separately, do you know the going rate for consultants with approximately your expertise? Or any other reference class you cna make up. Consulting can cost an incredible amount of money, and that price can be “fair” in a pretty simple sense if it averts the need to do 10s of hours of labor at high wages. It may be one of the highest leverage activities per unit time that exists as a conventional economic activity that a person can simply do.
Aside from market rates or whatever, I suggest you just try asking for unreasonable things, or more money than you feel you’re worth (think of it as an experiment, and maybe observe what happens in your mind when you flinch from this).
Do you have any emotional hangup about the prospect of trading money for labor generally, or money for anything?
Separately, do you have a hard time asserting your worth to others (or maybe just strangers) on some baseline level?
This was running AI Plans, my startup, so makes sense that I wasn’t getting paid, since the same hesitancy for asking for money leads to hesitancy to do that exaggeration thing many AI Safety/EA people seem to do when making funding applications. Also, I don’t like to make the funding applications, or long applications in general.
I think every time I’ve asked for money, I’ve tried to ask for the lowest amount I can.
I don’t know—I have a doc of stuff I’ve done that I paste into LLMs when I need to make a funding applications and stuff—just pasted it into Gemini 2.5 Pro and asked what would be a reasonable hourly fee and it said $200 to $400 an hour.
I’ll give it a go—I’ve currently put the asking price on my call link for $50 an hour, feel nervous about actually asking for that though. I need to make a funding application for AI Plans—I can ask for money on behalf of others on the team, but asking for money to be donated so I can get a high salary feels scary. Happy to ask for a high salary for others on the team though, since I want them to get paid what they need.
Yeah, I do. Generally, I’m used to doing a lot of free work for family and getting admonished when I ask for money. And when I did get promised money, it was either wayyy below market price or wayy late or didn’t get paid at all. General experience with family was my work not being valued even when I put in extra effort. I’m aware that’s wrong and has taught me wrong lessons, but not fully learnt the true ones yet.
I do think that $200-$400 seem like reasonable consulting rates.
I think the situations with family are complicated, because sure, there are social/cultural reasons one might be expected to do those things for family. Usually people hold those cultural norms alongside a stronger distinction between the ingroup (family) and the outgroup (all other people by default), though, so letting your impressions from that culture teach you things about how to behave in a culture with a weaker distinction might be maladaptive.
(I actually was suggesting you try asking for objectively completely unreasonable things just to look at the flinch. For example, you could ask a stranger for $100 for no reason. They would say no, but no harm would be done.)
One frame that might be useful to you is that in a way, it is imperative to at least sufficiently assert your value to others (if not overassert it the socially expected amount). An overly modest estimate is still a miscalibrated one, and people will make suboptimal decisions as a result. (Putting aside the behavior and surpluses given to other people, you are also a player in this game, and your being underallocated resources is globally suboptimal.)