Fwiw I disagree with this. I’m a LW mod. Other LW mods haven’t talked through this post yet and I’m not sure if they’d all agree, but, I think people sharing their feelings is just a straightforwardly reasonable thing to do.
I think this post did a reasonable job framing itself as not-objective-truth, just a self report on feelings. (i.e. it’s objectively true about “these were my feelings”, which is fine).
I think the author was straightforwardly wrong about Rose Garden Inn being $500 a night, but that seems like a simple mistake that was easily corrected. I also think it is straightforwardly correct that EA projects in San Francisco spend money very liberally, and if you’re in the middle of the culture shock of realizing how much money people are spending and haven’t finished orienting, $500/night is not an unbelievable number.
(it so happens that there’s been at least one event with lodging that I think averaged $500/person/night (although this was including other venue expenses, and was a pretty weird edge case of events that happened for weird contingent reasons. Meanwhile in Berkeley there’s been plenty of $230ish/night hotel rooms used for events, which is not $500 but still probably a lot more than Sam was expecting)
I do agree with you that the implied frame of:
“After a while I work out why: every penny I’ve pinched, every luxury I’ve denied myself, every financial sacrifice, is completely irrelevant in the face of the magnitude of this wealth. I expect I could have easily asked for an extra 20%, and received it.”
is, in fact, an unhelpful frame. It’s important for people to learn to orient in a world where money is available and learn to make use of more money. (Penny-pinching isn’t the right mindset for EA – even before longtermist billionaires flooding the ecosystem I still think it was generally a better mindset for people to look for strategies that would get them enough surplus money that they didn’t have to spend cognition penny pinching)
But, just because penny-pinching isn’t the right mindset for EA in 2022, doesn’t mean that that the amount of wealth isn’t… just a pretty disorienting situation. I expect lots of people to experience cultural whiplash about this. I think posts like this are a reasonable part of processing it. I also think there are issues not articulated here that come from a sudden influx of money that are potentially pretty bad (i.e. attracting grifters trying to scam us, reducing signal/noise, etc).
I think people writing up their emotional experiences (flagging them as such) is an important source of information about this.
I do of course want people to write posts about this from other perspectives as well. And I think it’d be bad if the implied frame of this post became the default frame.
(that all said, after some reflection I did weak downvote the OP because I thought 98 karma felt a bit too high. ((I’m someone who thinks it’s fine to vote based on the total karma, not just on whether I thought it was overall good or bad)). I would feel like the site-karma-health was off if this got like 200 karma, and IMO an emotional report like this should get, like, a respectable 40-80-ish karma, but if it’s getting over 100 I expect that’s largely coming from people who are applauding the general concept of wealth-is-sinful or something, and I do worry about the cultural effects of that)
Fwiw I disagree with this. I’m a LW mod. Other LW mods haven’t talked through this post yet and I’m not sure if they’d all agree, but, I think people sharing their feelings is just a straightforwardly reasonable thing to do.
I think this post did a reasonable job framing itself as not-objective-truth, just a self report on feelings. (i.e. it’s objectively true about “these were my feelings”, which is fine).
I think the author was straightforwardly wrong about Rose Garden Inn being $500 a night, but that seems like a simple mistake that was easily corrected. I also think it is straightforwardly correct that EA projects in San Francisco spend money very liberally, and if you’re in the middle of the culture shock of realizing how much money people are spending and haven’t finished orienting, $500/night is not an unbelievable number.
(it so happens that there’s been at least one event with lodging that I think averaged $500/person/night (although this was including other venue expenses, and was a pretty weird edge case of events that happened for weird contingent reasons. Meanwhile in Berkeley there’s been plenty of $230ish/night hotel rooms used for events, which is not $500 but still probably a lot more than Sam was expecting)
I do agree with you that the implied frame of:
is, in fact, an unhelpful frame. It’s important for people to learn to orient in a world where money is available and learn to make use of more money. (Penny-pinching isn’t the right mindset for EA – even before longtermist billionaires flooding the ecosystem I still think it was generally a better mindset for people to look for strategies that would get them enough surplus money that they didn’t have to spend cognition penny pinching)
But, just because penny-pinching isn’t the right mindset for EA in 2022, doesn’t mean that that the amount of wealth isn’t… just a pretty disorienting situation. I expect lots of people to experience cultural whiplash about this. I think posts like this are a reasonable part of processing it. I also think there are issues not articulated here that come from a sudden influx of money that are potentially pretty bad (i.e. attracting grifters trying to scam us, reducing signal/noise, etc).
I think people writing up their emotional experiences (flagging them as such) is an important source of information about this.
I do of course want people to write posts about this from other perspectives as well. And I think it’d be bad if the implied frame of this post became the default frame.
(that all said, after some reflection I did weak downvote the OP because I thought 98 karma felt a bit too high. ((I’m someone who thinks it’s fine to vote based on the total karma, not just on whether I thought it was overall good or bad)). I would feel like the site-karma-health was off if this got like 200 karma, and IMO an emotional report like this should get, like, a respectable 40-80-ish karma, but if it’s getting over 100 I expect that’s largely coming from people who are applauding the general concept of wealth-is-sinful or something, and I do worry about the cultural effects of that)