I’m not happy with how big Eliezer’s salary is either
What rational reasons do you have?
I can imagine two rational reasons for feeling that someone is overpaid. First and most commonly, if someone is overpaid relative to their productivity. For example, a programmer who writes buggy, poorly designed code and makes 130k for it is clearly overpaid, as is a CEO who makes zillions while driving their company into the ground. This objection could be bluntly phrased as “Eliezer is a hack”—if you think so, say so. I suspect that very few people on LW hold this opinion, especially if, as I said above, they agree that good-enough AI researchers are literally beyond value. (That is, if you subscribe to the basic logic that AI holds the potential to unleash a technological singularity that can either destroy the world or remake it according to our wishes, then EY’s approach is the way to go about doing the latter. Even if you disagree with the particulars, he is obviously onto something, and such insights have value.)
Second, your objection may be “someone who works for a nonprofit shouldn’t be richly compensated”. For example, you could probably go through Newsweek’s Fifteen Highest-Paid Charity CEOs, and pick one where you could say “yeah, that’s a well-run organization, but that CEO is paid way too much—why don’t they voluntarily accept a smaller, but still generous, salary, like a few hundred K?” I don’t believe that the second one applies to EY, because he works in an expensive area. More importantly, the fundamental root of this objection would be “if X accepted less money, the nonprofit would have more resources to spend elsewhere”. That’s pretty obvious when you’re talking about mega-zillion CEO salaries. What about Eliezer’s case? What if he handed back, say, 10k of his salary to SIAI? That’s a significant hit in income for someone whose income matches expenses and whose expenses aren’t unreasonable, and it would be much less significant to SIAI. Finally, EY is already working 60 hours a week for SIAI, and you would want him to donate a chunk of his current salary on top of that? Really?
On the other hand, I can think of an irrational reason to be unhappy with Eliezer’s salary, which I think I’ll be too polite to mention here.
What rational reasons do you have?
I can imagine two rational reasons for feeling that someone is overpaid. First and most commonly, if someone is overpaid relative to their productivity. For example, a programmer who writes buggy, poorly designed code and makes 130k for it is clearly overpaid, as is a CEO who makes zillions while driving their company into the ground. This objection could be bluntly phrased as “Eliezer is a hack”—if you think so, say so. I suspect that very few people on LW hold this opinion, especially if, as I said above, they agree that good-enough AI researchers are literally beyond value. (That is, if you subscribe to the basic logic that AI holds the potential to unleash a technological singularity that can either destroy the world or remake it according to our wishes, then EY’s approach is the way to go about doing the latter. Even if you disagree with the particulars, he is obviously onto something, and such insights have value.)
Second, your objection may be “someone who works for a nonprofit shouldn’t be richly compensated”. For example, you could probably go through Newsweek’s Fifteen Highest-Paid Charity CEOs, and pick one where you could say “yeah, that’s a well-run organization, but that CEO is paid way too much—why don’t they voluntarily accept a smaller, but still generous, salary, like a few hundred K?” I don’t believe that the second one applies to EY, because he works in an expensive area. More importantly, the fundamental root of this objection would be “if X accepted less money, the nonprofit would have more resources to spend elsewhere”. That’s pretty obvious when you’re talking about mega-zillion CEO salaries. What about Eliezer’s case? What if he handed back, say, 10k of his salary to SIAI? That’s a significant hit in income for someone whose income matches expenses and whose expenses aren’t unreasonable, and it would be much less significant to SIAI. Finally, EY is already working 60 hours a week for SIAI, and you would want him to donate a chunk of his current salary on top of that? Really?
On the other hand, I can think of an irrational reason to be unhappy with Eliezer’s salary, which I think I’ll be too polite to mention here.