I want to commend Less Wrong Lightcone for making its salary ranges public. Public salary ranges are one of those things which makes the world a fairer place (but is also often difficult because many people have an vested interest in keeping the world unfair). This is a pro-women move.
The "generalist" description is basically my dream job right until
>The team is in Berkeley, California, and team members must be here full-time.
Just yesterday I was talking to a friend who wants to leave his finance job to work on AI safety and one of his main hesitations is that whichever organization he joins will require him to move to the Bay. It's one thing to leave a job, it's another to leave a city and a community (and a working partner, and a house, and a family...)
This also seems somewhat inefficient in terms of hiring. There are many qualified AI safety researchers and Lightcone-aligned generalists in the Bay, but there are surely even more outside it. So all the Bay-based orgs are competing for the same people, all complaining about being talent-constrained above anything else. At the same time, NYC, Austin, Seattle, London, etc. are full of qualified people with nowhere to apply.
I'm actually not suggesting you should open this particular job to non-Berkeley people. I want to suggest something even more ambitious. NYC and other cities are crying out for a salary-paying organization that will do mission-aligned work and would allow people to change careers into ...
I'd love to build campuses in other cities around the world. There's lots of incredible people with strong reasons to be in other places. When we talk in the team about what success looks like in the next 5-10 years, part of it is a major hub (e.g. 500 people) in the Bay, and growing hubs (200 people, 100 people, 50 people, etc) in multiple other places like the ones you mention.
You say "NYC and other cities are crying out for a salary-paying organization that will do mission-aligned work". I will point out there's a little chicken-and-egg problem here, in that the Bay already has several rationalist and longtermist orgs such that there's been a good way for us to get a foothold in starting an office. In some ways there's lots of low-hanging fruits of things to do, but in other ways it's a real challenge to find founding teams and help them execute on a project such that they can employ people.
But it certainly isn't a defeater, I do see paths to helping build the research and engineering projects for people to work on in these places.
And if we're successful, and are plotting to build in NYC, I look forward to talking with you (and many of the other excellent people in NYC) about it :)
Note: I decided to frontpage this post, despite it being more of an organizational announcement, because it does feel pretty relevant to everyone on the site, and I would feel bad if someone was a regular user of LessWrong and didn't know about this relatively large change in our operating structure.
Our current salary policy is to pay rates competitive with industry salary minus 30%.
What was the reasoning behind this? To me this would make sense if there was a funding constraint, but I was under the impression that EA is flush with cash.
If the following are the stated stakes:
If things go right, we can shape almost the full light cone of humanity to be full of flourishing life. Billions of galaxies, billions of light years across, for some 10^36 (or so) years until the heat death of the universe.
Then I would strongly advise against low balling or cheaping-out when it comes to talent acquisition and retention.
One part of the reasoning goes something like this. Suppose you and your neighbor would like a nice hedge placed between your properties. This is something that both of you want. Also, your neighbor is a landscaper, with an hourly rate of $100. You propose to pay your neighbor to do the work.
What price is fair? One answer is $100/hour, given that's their standard rate. But I think this is wrong, because this isn't just a job for them, it is also something they personally care about.
To actually figure out the price we'd need some estimate of the value of the good to each of them, and I'm not going to follow it through here. But this is one of the reasons why "less than market rate" seems like a fair price for this sort of work.
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:
Can I encourage you to write up a top-level post detailing what you think the ideal salary algorithm for non-profits is?
I think you raise some valid points, and also can viscerally feel the punishment being inflicted on habryka for his forthrightness here (which is useful to everyone regardless of the specific salary), which is going to reduce similar efforts in the future in ways we will all be poorer for. My general solution for problems like this is to suggest people write up a top level post making their general case (which may link to the motivating example but has a scope beyond it). The advantages here are:
(Should I write up a top-level post arguing this rather than leave a comment? Probably eventually).
This response confuses me.
Who is being punished here? I see people leaving feedback and discussing ideas, and have no idea who you are worried about.
I strongly agree with AI_WAIFU, but don’t have a useful general strategy for non-profit funding. My opposition is based on a simple heuristic: wealthy orgs should not systematically underpay their employees. Making a thread saying that seems extremely not useful.
Speaking to the general point, as AI_WAIFU points out, there is an extremely large amount of money apparently sitting around. The thread he links to implies that EA has about 5 million dollars per active member of the community and that cash is growing faster than membership. That’s an obscene amount of cash, and being stingy about pay doesn’t really make sense to me.
Others in this thread have brought up the fact that many non-profit underpay, but that’s not because there’s some kind of virtue in underpaying (quite the opposite: it’s exploitive), it’s because they’re poor. EA is apparently are swimming in cash, so that comparison doesn’t make much sense here. Additionally, many non-profits compensate for underpaying with extremely generous benefits, which this post mak...
“We pay less than you’re worth because we only want people who really care about the mission” is typically a lie HR tells people, not an actual thing people believe. Reading that it’s a thing that Lightcone believes worries me, as it makes me feel like you’re drinking your own Kool-Aide too hard.
Lightcone seems to be the kind of organization that wants members who might donate to it if they wouldn't work there. Startup XYZ usually isn't a place where it's employees would donate if they wouldn't work there so it's a HR lie in those cases.
Why do you think well paid people take jobs as ministers or other influencial political roles that pay significantly less then their previous jobs?
Personally, I don't pick up any vibe of "punishing" of habryka from reading these comments. And his post is highly upvoted, along with yours praising the transparency of the hiring decision. But this is very hard to tell from blog comments, and I agree that it's something to watch out for.
Lightcone Infrastructure is competing for talent not only with industry, but also with the rest of the nonprofit sector. You could also frame this pay rate as a way to attract people from other forms of lower-paying nonprofit work, where they may be getting, say, industry - 40% rather than Lightcone's pay rate of industry - 30%.
From that point of view, I think LI's approach makes more sense. First, attract talent from even lower-paying nonprofits, along with a view enthusiasts from industry. Once that resource is tapped out, then you start increasing your pay closer to that of industry. This pulls in people who are increasingly more driven by money than by mission.
There's a way to cast this as unfair. But I don't think that's your objection. You're more worried about whether there will be pernicious effects on the effectiveness of LC and the broader EA ecosystem by offering lower pay than you could get in industry. With this hypothesis that LC will first be primarily attracting talent from the even-lower-paying nonprofit sector in mind, here are my responses to your higher-order negative effects:
I'm a little curious how that ends up working for senior candidates who could be getting 450k (which is basically standard comp at those tech companies for senior engineers) - do you just assume that they'd be capable of passing an interview at one of those places if they clear your bar, assuming they don't work somewhere like that already?
I am not fully sure yet what the right algorithm here will be, since we haven't run into that problem yet. My guess is I would try to call in a third party to give me a guess of how much they could make in industry, or we just negotiate a bit back-and-forth and they just tell me the evidence they have for how much they could make in industry if they tried. I can also imagine this turning out to be harder, and I would have to think more about how to best get a fair assessment here.
I think if you start asking people to, say, provide offer letters demonstrating their "market value", you run the risk of someone looking at their options and then changing their mind.
This seems like a fine outcome to me. Indeed, in the past I have told past LW/Lightcone employees to really try to look for other options and take them seriously, even after I made them an offer, so that if they do decide to take the offer we both felt confident that working at LW/Lightcone is the best choice for them.
If the hedge benefits a lot more people than just you and the neighbor, it seems unfair to make the neighbor bear a high percentage of the cost. Maybe it makes more sense to imagine a two-step process: everyone who cares about the hedge puts in some money, then someone is hired to do the work at market rate. If the person hired wants to also donate, that's up to them.
I feel like a lot of this depends on what Oliver meant by "competitive", and people are making different assumptions in the comments. I indeed think 70% of average local programmer wage would be too low, because I expect the people LC hires to be better than that average. OTOH, if it means "30% off literally the highest offer you can get", which this comment implies, that seems pretty reasonable to me (contingent on market rate coming into it at all). The highest offer you can get probably comes with a bunch of unpleasantness they have to pay people to tolerate. People who could work at FAANGs choose to accept lower pay elsewhere for lots of reasons all the time, so I don't think there's a moral imperative to match them.
You can make separate arguments about whether market value should enter into LC compensation at all, but if it does, I don't think "70% of the highest amount you could possibly earn, for a job you will find more enjoyable on a variety of levels" is unreasonable.
[Full disclosure: I occasionally contract for LW/LC and benefit from them being freer with worker compensation]
30% of literally the highest offer you can get
This is roughly the sense in which I meant "competitive" (I think there are some edge-cases here, where for example I don't expect we will be able to fully cover the right tail of outcomes. Like, if Sam Bankman-Fried had decided to work with us instead of found FTX, we of course couldn't have paid him 10 billion dollars, or similar situations).
I share this impression. I also just... am confused about why anyone would consider a starting salary of $150k/year + healthcare insufficient. I guess maybe if you're buying a house? Or sending a kid to college? I mean, I live in the Bay and have never made anywhere close to $150k/year, and I am far from financially insecure.
Programmer salaries are insane, and most people (e.g. me) are not programmers, and manage to survive. I just feel like, if your objection is, "Well I'm worth more than that on the free market," then just... go work somewhere else, if that's what you care about? Nobody needs a salary of $450k/year!!!
Another EA/rationalist org I've worked at had a policy of "We don't want salary to be a major reason for people to want to work here, and we don't want it to be a reason for them to not want to work here." That makes a lot of sense to me, and I think it's probably what Lightcone is going for?
I don't know, like, I can sort of see where the other side is coming from. But it also still seems crazy to me.
I guess maybe if you're buying a house? Or sending a kid to college?
Without taking a side on the overall policy: buying a house and raising children are extremely normal things to do and want to do, and it would be bad if people had to choose between working for Lightcone and doing them, especially if Lightcone could pay them more without affecting other programs. I feel like we in the bay have been frogboiled to the point of not noticing a bunch of sacrifices we make to be here.
I haven't done the math on what the listed salaries actually produce in terms of lifestyle, I'm not saying these particular salaries actually preclude what I consider reasonable, I'm only claiming that "it's only low if you want a house and children" is not a good argument that a salary is sufficient.
[Full disclosure: I occasionally contract for LW/LC and benefit from them being freer with worker compensation]
At least to me, it sounds like a way to filter out people who believe in the mission but don't want to be intentionally underpaid.
"Funding constraints" are almost always fake. Givedirectly can double their pay and just give less to recipients if they wanted to, for example.
Institutions also usually have the option to just hire less people or fire more people.
I feel like treating fake constraints as a clear decision boundary is silly; what happened here is that Lightcone+ surrounding ecosystems chose to make the fake constraints less of a constraint and more of a visible choice.
Also, if someone is good at the job why does it matter if they don’t believe in the mission? If they’re a grifter looking for more money you can just fire them right?
People who aren't interested in the mission will optimize their actions not in favor of the mission but in favor of what advances their own power. Most institutions are disfunctional because of infighting and it's important that this one doesn't go that route.
Why is this problem better solved by systematically underpaying everyone as opposed to firing people who act “in favor of what advances their own power” or who promote infighting?
Thank you for all your work so far! It's been great seeing LW come back to life again.
Here's to hoping we'll have many local LessWrongs all over the future lightcone.
The lightcone is such a great symbol. It also kind of looks like an hourglass, evoking (to me) the image of time (and galaxies) slipping away. Kudos!
many of our colleagues and friends (including GPT-3)
So, which is it—is GPT-3 a colleague, or a friend? (I know my answer)
I experience an entirely absurd glee seeing the word infrastructure as part of the actual name.
May I suggest indicating in this post already that it's in Berkeley? Lot of job goes remote, and I'd expect other people to want to find this information quickly as it's an easy decision factor.
Also, if I may ask "no longer seems sufficient". Did you thought it was? The sentence seems really strange to be honest, or otherwise I'd be curious if you have a text where you explained why you thought that, as it seems quite surprising
Also, if I may ask "no longer seems sufficient". Did you thought it was? The sentence seems really strange to be honest, or otherwise I'd be curious if you have a text where you explained why you thought that, as it seems quite surprising
I do think something like this is kind of correct. It's not that I thought that nothing else had to happen between now and then for humanity to successfully reach the stars, but I did meaningfully think that there were a good number of universes where my work on LessWrong would make the difference (with everyone else of course also doing things), and that I was really moving probability mass.
I still think I moved some probability mass, but I further updated that in order to realize a bunch of that probability mass that I was hoping for, I need to get some other pieces in place. Which is something I didn't think was as necessary, and I used to think more that the online component of things would itself be sufficient to realize a lot of that probability mass.
I definitely didn't believe that if I were to just make LessWrong great, existential risk would be solved in most worlds.
Having an in-person campus that allows people to have really good high-bandwidth communication is a big component that I now think is a really useful thing to have in many worlds.
On a higher level of abstraction, I have an internal model that suggests something like the following three components are things that are quite important for AGI (and some other x-risks) to go right:
Looking forward to seeing projects that come out of this, the LW UX is certainly the most impressive thing about it and one of the few examples of "modern web design" done well that I've seen.
Not being remote seems really weird given the economics of it, but to each their own, I guess.
I like the light cone as a symbol, because it represents the massive scale of opportunity that humanity is presented with. If things go right, we can shape almost the full light cone of humanity to be full of flourishing life.
This is good to know. When I first heard "lightcone" I thought it referred to a siloed organizational structure i.e. one subsidiary tree cannot affect the others.
You want "to build a thriving in-person rationality and longtermism community in the Bay Area." That sounds great. How do you plan to do it, at any level of generality? 'Thriving community' can mean a lot of different things.
There's currently a donation matching drive via the EA forums, which prompted some questions I didn't see answered in this announcement.
According to this post from 2019:
The LessWrong team operates legally as part of the Center for Applied Rationality while retaining full autonomy over both internal decision-making and decisions concerning the LessWrong website.
Is Lightcone Infrastructure still part of CFAR, or is it now an independent legal entity?
If the latter, is it a for-profit or a nonprofit? If nonprofit, is there a way to donate to it?
If it's still p...
I would love to work on this. I applied through your website. Commenting here in case you get a huge flood of random resumes, then maybe my comment will help me stand out. Here's my LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/max-pietsch-1ba12ba7/
We’re reading them all. Please don’t also leave a comment just to stand out, that’s not a good race to the bottom. (Thanks for your application!)
I really appreciate the work the team is doing and I hope that you will grow to a successful organization. Although I would consider myself a software engineer, I am not seeing myself in the offered roles. Best luck in your endeavors!
tl;dr: The LessWrong team is re-organizing as Lightcone Infrastructure. LessWrong is one of several projects we are working on to ensure the future of humanity goes well. We are looking to hire software engineers as well as generalist entrepreneurs in Berkeley who are excited to build infrastructure to ensure a good future.
I founded the LessWrong 2.0 team in 2017, with the goal of reviving LessWrong.com and reinvigorating the intellectual culture of the rationality community. I believed the community had great potential for affecting the long term future, but that the failing website was a key bottleneck to community health and growth.
Four years later, the website still seems very important. But when I step back and ask “what are the key bottlenecks for improving the longterm future?”, just ensuring the website is going well no longer seems sufficient.
For the past year, I’ve been re-organizing the LessWrong team into something with a larger scope. As I’ve learned from talking to over a thousand of you over the last 4 years, for most of you the rationality community is much larger than just this website, and your contributions to the future of humanity more frequently than not route through many disparate parts of our sprawling diaspora. Many more of those parts deserve attention and optimization than just LessWrong, and we seem to be the best positioned organization to make sure that happens.
I want to make sure that that whole ecosystem is successfully steering humanity towards safer and better futures, and more and more this has meant working on projects that weren't directly related to LessWrong.com:
As our projects outside of the LessWrong.com website multiplied, our name became more and more confusing when trying to explain to people what we were about.
This confusion reached a new peak when we started having a team that we were internally calling the "LessWrong team", which was responsible for running the website, distinct from all of our other projects, and which soon after caused me to utter the following sentence at one of our team meetings:
As one can imagine, the reaction from the rest of the team was confusion and laughter and at that point I knew we had to change our name and clarify our organizational mission.
So, after doing many rounds of coming up with names, asking many of our colleagues and friends (including GPT-3) for suggestions, we finally decided on:
I like the light cone as a symbol, because it represents the massive scale of opportunity that humanity is presented with. If things go right, we can shape almost the full light cone of humanity to be full of flourishing life. Billions of galaxies, billions of light years across, for some 10^36 (or so) years until the heat death of the universe.
Separately, I am excited about where Lightcone Infrastructure is headed as an organization. I really enjoy working with the team, and I feel like there is a ton of low-hanging fruit in doing more end-to-end community optimization. This community of rationalists, effective altruists and longtermists has achieved an enormous amount, both in scale of impact, and in coming to a deeper understanding about the world, and I think our work in reviving LessWrong and our other infrastructure projects have already made a big difference in that success.
LessWrong will have a dedicated team within Lightcone Infrastructure. Ruby will be taking the lead on that, and he already has a number of great plans for the website that I expect he will tell you about in the near future. The current team and structure is:
Jim Babcock is also paid by us as an independent Open Source contributor to the LessWrong website, and helps a lot with development. I also still fix bugs, answer support requests and write code, though I primarily spend my time on management these days.
If you want to work with us on these projects, we are hiring for three positions:
We are also open to hiring people who don't fit into any of these positions, so err on the side of applying if you want to work with us. If you have thoughts on how to build a successful rationality and longtermism community, want to build a 1000-person strong campus, or have a pitch for a different infrastructure project we should run, reach out to us, and we would be excited to talk to you about working here.
Our current salary policy is to pay rates competitive with industry salary minus 30%. Given prevailing salary levels in the Bay Area for the kind of skill level we are looking at, we expect salaries to start at $150k/year plus healthcare (but we would be open to paying $315k for someone who would make $450k in industry). We also provide a generous relocation package if you aren't currently located in the Bay Area.
Apply here: https://airtable.com/shrdqS6JXok99f6EX