I’m not convinced. Especially if this sort of underpay is a common policy across multiple orgs across the rationalist and EA communities. In a closed system with 2 people a “fair” price will balance the opportunity cost to the person doing the work and the value both parties assign to the fence.
But this isn’t a closed system. I expect that low balling pay has a whole host of higher order negative effects. Off the top of my head:
This strategy is not scaleable. There’s a limited pool of talent willing to take a pay cut because they value the output of their own work. There are probably better places to put that talent, and it’s probably put to better use than on something like generic software engineering, which is essentially a commodity.
Pay is closely associated with social status, and status influences the appeal of ideas and value systems. If working in an sector pays less then industry, then it will lose support on the margin.
Future pay is a function current pay, individuals deciding to take a pay cut from industry rates are not only temporarily losing money, but are foregoing potentially very large sums over their careers.
Orgs like lightconeinfrastructure compete for talent not just with other EA orgs, but with earning to give, which pays industry rates, comes with big wads of status, and the option to pocket the money if for whatever reason an individual decides to leave EA, which I would expect to create to an over-allocation of manpower to earning to give and an under-allocation to actual EA work.
This line of reasoning creates perverse incentives. Essentially you end up paying people less the more they share your values, which given that people have malleable values systems, means that your incentivizing them to not share your values or lie about sharing your values.
I can also see some benefits of the policy, such as filtering and extra runway, but there are other arguably better ways of doing the former, and the latter isn’t all that important if you can maintain a 30% yoy growth rate.
That’s great and all, but with all due respect:
Fuck. That. Noise.
Regardless of the odds of success and what the optimal course of action actually is, I would be very hard pressed to say that I’m trying to “help humanity die with dignity”. Regardless of what the optimal action should be given that goal, on an emotional level, it’s tantamount to giving up.
Before even getting into the cost/benefit of that attitude, in the worlds where we do make it out alive, I don’t want to look back and see a version of me where that became my goal. I also don’t think that if that was my goal, that I would fight nearly as hard to achieve it. I want a catgirl volcano lair not “dignity”. So when I try to negotiate with my money brain to expend precious calories, the plan had better involve the former, not the latter. I suspect that something similar applies to others.
I don’t want to hear about genre-saviness from the defacto-founder of the community that gave us HPMOR!Harry and the Comet King after he wrote this post. Because it’s so antithetical to the attitude present in those characters and posts like this one.
I also don’t want to hear about second-order effects when, as best as I can tell, the attitude present here is likely to push people towards ineffective doomerism, rather than actually dying with dignity.
So instead, I’m gonna think carefully about my next move, come up with a plan, blast some shonen anime OSTs, and get to work. Then, amongst all the counterfactual worlds, there will be a version of me that gets to look back and know that they faced the end of the world, rose to the challenge, and came out the other end having carved utopia out of the bones of lovecraftian gods.