So when I say "unnecessarily defensive", I mean that all the stuff about the cost of taxis is after-the-fact defensive rationalization; it can't be said about a single dollar you spend on having a life outside of SI. The truth is that even the best human rationalist in the world isn't going to agree to giving those up, and since you have to recruit humans, you'd best pay the sort of salary that is going to attract and retain them. That of course includes yourself.

The same goes for saying "move to the Honduras". Your perfectly utility-maximising AGIs will move to the Honduras, but your human staff won't; they want to live in places like the Bay Area.

Re-reading, the whole thing is pretty unclear!

As katydee and thomblake say, I mean that working for SingInst would mean a bigger reduction in my salary than I could currently bring myself to accept. If I really valued the lives of strangers as a utilitarian, the benefits to them of taking a salary cut would be so huge that it would totally outweigh the costs to me. But it looks like I only really place direct value on the short-term interests of myself and those close to me, and everything else is purchase of moral satisfaction. Happily, purchase of moral satisfaction can still save the world if it is done efficiently.

Since the labour pool contains only human beings, with no true altruistic utility maximizers, SingInst should hire and pay accordingly; the market shows that people will accept a lower salary for a job that directly does good, but not a vastly lower salary. It would increase SI-utility if Luke accepted a lower salary, but it wouldn't increase Luke-utility, and driving Luke away would cost a lot of SI-utility, so calling for it is in the end a cheap shot and a bad recommendation.

I live in London, which is also freaking expensive - but so are all the places I want to live. There's a reason people are prepared to pay more to live in these places.

So why not relocate SIAI somewhere with a more reasonable cost of living?

Hmm... Perhaps you don't know that "salary cut" above means taking much less money?

Perhaps that's why he's saying he wouldn't be willing to live there on a low salary?

In your comment above, you said:

...I can't afford to take a taxi to and from the eye doctor, which means I spend 1.5 hrs each way changing buses to get there, and spend less time being productive on x-risk. That is totally not worth it. Future civilizations would look back on this decision as profoundly stupid.

You also quoted Eliezer saying something similar.

This outlook implies strongly that whatever SIAI is doing is of such monumental significance that future civilizations will not only remember its name, but also reverently preserve every decision it made. You are also quite fond of saying that the work that SIAI is doing is tantamount to "saving the world"; and IIRC Eliezer once said that, if you have a talent for investment banking, you should make as much money as possible and then donate it all to SIAI, as opposed to any other charity.

This kind of grand rhetoric presupposes not only that the SIAI is correct in its risk assessment regarding AGI, but also that they are uniquely qualified to address this potentially world-ending problem, and that, over the ages, no one more qualified could possibly come along. All of this could be true, but it's far from a certainty, as your writing would seem to imply.