AnnaSalamon comments on POSITION: Design and Write Rationality Curriculum - Less Wrong

54 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 19 January 2012 06:50AM

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Comment author: bbarth 19 January 2012 03:38:37PM *  5 points [-]

I guess my points were a little too obtuse. People with even a handful of these skills get paid a lot more than you're offering (e.g. school teachers have curriculum design and teaching experience, and generally make much more than $36k/yr). Clearly, stating the salary is "upfront" about the salary, but that wasn't my complaint. My complaint was that it appears that by offering a well below market salary you're looking for a fellow traveler/true believer/movement participant who is so highly dedicated to the cause that they are willing to sacrifice a good chunk of their potential earnings to advance SIAI's goals. If that's the case, then you should state it directly. If it's not the case, then another possibility that comes to mind is that you're hoping to exploit the passion of a young person who feels strongly about the cause but doesn't realize what they're worth on the open market.

My concern is that by not stating anything about this obviously (to me) below market salary, you're leaving your motivations open to serious question. I think it better to lay out some sort of reasoning behind it than to leave it ambiguous.

Comment author: AnnaSalamon 19 January 2012 05:51:35PM *  12 points [-]

The motivation is simply that we need help now, that we do not have budget now, that SingInst's experience suggests that at least some skilled people are willing to work for such money (e.g. me, Carl, Michael Anissimov, Lukeprog), and if rationality org's efforts are successful we will probably have more money for skilled people in the future.

There are several reasons someone might apply, given that. The ones that spring to my mind are:

  1. This sounds like a fun job where they could learn a lot over the next year. (I've learned a huge amount, working here.)
  2. At their present stage in life, they don't need all that much money. (No kids, etc.; I've been living comfortably on the SI standard salary, and am probably happier here than I would be making more money doing something less varied where I didn't get to learn from the folks here)
  3. Someone may be passionate about rationality education (either for itself, or because they expect it to help with existential risk) (this is the possible reason you list)
  4. Someone may think we have a good chance at creating, over the next year or two, the sort of "rationality org" that could afford to pay people market wages, and may be willing to take a risk for the next couple years in order to be part of that.

However, our current low salaries are not a sneaky attempt to obtain only dedicated idealists; they are just an attempt to launch a rationality training effort with the budget we currently have, making the best use we can of our donors' dollars. I'm a little confused as to why this caused so much offense. The job is surely not right for some people, such as people who care a lot about present salaries, or who have high current income needs; but we posted the salary so that people could see for themselves whether it might work for them, and so that folks it might be right for could contact us.

Nonprofit salaries are typically lower than salaries for comparable work outside of nonprofits; start-up salaries are typically low with the potential for more later on. Rationality org at the moment is perhaps somewhere in between.

Comment author: bbarth 19 January 2012 06:41:23PM 5 points [-]

I'm sorry if I came across as overly critical. I had a flashback to the job ad that EY promoted in September of '10 which came off in a similar way to me (though, clearly, this one has much more detail), and that probably drove the tone of my posts. I'm certainly not offended.

Now, that being said, I've noticed that there are a number of young idealists in this community, and I think it would be good if we could help them understand what they're getting into. We have a responsibility to help the up and coming among us to make good decisions. Making it clear that the SIAI "standard" salary is way under market for skillful people and that applicants should understand the opportunity costs associated with working for a non-profit for a period of time should be part of the job description when it comes a rationalist source to this audience. I presume that EY knows this, and so I attribute the lack of it to something being fishy. If nothing's fishy, then this discussion let us clear the air.

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