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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Positioning oneself to make a difference - Less Wrong
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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.
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".