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Johnicholas comments on Positioning oneself to make a difference - Less Wrong
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Comments (46)
If you accept funding to do something to help the world, you're not helping the world unless you're underpaid, and the degree you're helping the world is proportional to the degree you're underpaid.
I'd advocate that you become self-funding ASAP, in a peripherally related field. This has a couple benefits. Firstly, your paid work will require you to obtain some real skills and provide some reality checks - countering ivory-tower-ish tendencies to some extent. Second, the ideas you bring to the table from your paid work will add diversity to the SIAI/LessWrong/existential risks community. Third, you will have fewer structural incentives to defend SIAI/LessWrong's continued existence.
This is not remotely true. The implicit assumption is that life is a zero-sum game, and payment constitutes the annihilation of wealth. In reality, payment constitutes the transfer of wealth: when you spend your money, you're providing income to the people who provide you with goods and services, and enabling them to purchase goods and services from their own suppliers, etc. Economics is a positive-sum game.
Okay - I grant you that economics is a positive-sum game, but charitable work is not different from other work in this way.
Drawing a salary from working for a nonprofit organization isn't (by your argument) more benevolent than drawing a salary from working at a for-profit organization.
Of course. The only reason to prefer working for a nonprofit organization is if it happens to be the case that the job where you think you can make the largest positive difference, is only being done by nonprofit organizations (or if only that kind has an opening for you).
OR, you manage to secure funding from people or sources that would otherwise have been wasted or used inefficiently.
I don't understand. Surely someone who volunteers as a grant-getter is being more benevolent than someone who accepts a wage to work as a grant-getter. Unpaid volunteering is exactly analogous to accepting a wage and then turning around and donating it, which is surely praiseworthy.
I don't disagree with either of those statements, or your overall position. Indeed, I'm actually taking your suggested approach myself. I would go as far as to say that any direct participation that I have in research in my chosen field is less benevolent than a pure focus on wealth creation (and harvesting).
I should have included disclaimers to that effect when exploring, as I was, a technical curiosity.
I guess you mean "paid less than you want" or "paid less than the industry standard", rather than "not paid enough". Obviously, to do a job you need to be paid enough to do the job. I have been genuinely poor my whole life and it makes everything difficult. It was a late and horrifying discovery when I saw that people with PhDs had an annual income greater than my decadal income, and realized what a difference that would have made. Essentially, I have always done the bare minimum necessary to keep myself alive, and then tried to work directly on whatever seemed the most important at the time. I have had no academic career to speak of; if I had published papers, rather than just writing emails and blog comments, my situation would be completely different.
Therefore, you can provide unlimited help to the world by refusing to be paid at all.
Was this facetious? Surely someone who donates all of their time is donating a finite value equivalent to the cost of replacing them.
You are conflating work and money donation. You can implicitly donate money to a cause by accepting less payment, but it's not related to how well you are furthering the cause through your work.
I think Johnicholas is assuming a model where your pay comes from an organization that would otherwise use the money to help the world in other ways, and you're "underpaid" if and only if the work you are paid to do is more helpful than the alternative uses of the money would have been.
Of course, if you're being paid by an organization that would not otherwise use the money well, it's extremely easy to be "underpaid" in this sense.
In this sense, all useful work is "underpaid".
This comment puzzled me at first. I agree with the principle behind it, but I don't think the conclusion follows.
The principle seems to be: if everyone had full knowledge of the utility they owed to every other person's actions, and there were a mechanism for frictionlessly negotiating a sort of blackmail (I'll stop doing it unless I get compensated exactly for the utility I give others, out of principle), then what people end up getting paid is in some ideal sense the proper amount. I feel like this probably represents some sort of optimality under an implied expressed utility. I may have mangled my economics significantly here.
So, saying that someone is receiving money to do charitable work ought to be underpaid if they want to feel any part of the charity is morally due to them, just means underpaid in the highly theoretical sense I tried to outline above. Their moral credit should probably equal the amount by which they're underpaid.
I don't think it makes sense to argue that you should avoid being funded (well enough to be comfortable financially) if you do work that's thought of as charitable. But I suppose you should be suspicious of your own self-serving bias about how much good you're doing, the higher your stipend.
Why? Are you using Marx's theory of labor value (fair wage = added value)?