Free-spending EA might be a big problem for optics and epistemics

One thing that bugged me when I first got involved with EA was the extent to which the community seemed hesitant to spend lots of money on stuff like retreats, student groups, dinners, compensation, etc. despite the cost-benefit analysis seeming to favor doing so pretty strongly. I know that, from my perspective, I felt like this was some evidence that many EAs didn't take their stated ideals as seriously as I had hoped—e.g. that many people might just be trying to act in the way that they think an altruistic person should rather than really carefully thinking through what an altruistic person should actually do.

This is in direct contrast to the point you make that spending money like this might make people think we take our ideals less seriously—at least in my experience, had I witnessed an EA community that was more willing to spend money on projects like this, I would have been more rather than less convinced that EA was the real deal. I don't currently have any strong beliefs about which of these reactions is more likely/concerning, but I think it's at least worth pointing out that there is definitely an effect in the opposite direction to the one that you point out as well.

1)  One way to see the problem is that in the past we used frugality as a hard-to-fake signal of altruism, but that signal no longer works.

I'm not sure that's an entirely bad thing, because frugality seems mixed as a virtue e.g. it can lead to:

• Not spending money on clearly worth it things (e.g. not paying to have a larger table at a student fair even when it would result in more sign ups; not getting a cleaner when you earn over $50/hour), which in turn can also make us seem not  serious about maximising impact (e.g. this comment).
• Even worse, getting distracted from the top priority by worrying about efforts to save relatively small amounts of money. Or not considering high upside projects that require a lot of resources, but where there's a good chance of failure, due to a fear of not being able to justify the spending.
• Feelings of guilt around spending and not being perfectly altruistic, which can lead to burn out.
• Filtering out people who want a normal middle class lifestyle & family, but could have had a big impact (and go work at FAANG instead). Filtering out people from low income backgrounds or with dependents.

However, we need new hard-to-fake signals of seriousness to replace frugality. I'm not sure what these should be, but here are some alternative things we could try to signal, which seem closer to what we most care about:

• That we nerd out hard about doing good.
• Intense focus on the top priority.
• Doing high upside things even if there's a good chance they might not work out and seem unconventional.
• Giving 10% (or more) (which is compatible with non-frugality)

The difficulty is to think of hard-to-fake and easy-to-explain ways to show we're into these.

2) Another way to see the problem is that in the past we've used the following idea to get people into EA: "you can save a life for a few thousand dollars and should maximise your donations to that cause". But this idea is obviously in tension with the activities that many see as the top priorities these days (e.g. wanting to convince top computer scientists to work on the AI alignment problem).

My view is that we should try to move past this way of introducing effective altruism, and instead focus more on ideas like:

• Let's do the most we can to tackle big, neglected global problems. (I'd probably start by introducing climate change and/or pandemics rather than global health.)
• Find high-upside projects that help tackle the biggest bottlenecks in those problems.
• If you want to do good, do it effectively, and focus on the highest-leverage ways you can help (but ~no-one is perfectly altruistic and it's fine to have a nice life too).

Thanks, I thought this was the best-written and most carefully argued of the recent posts on this theme.

Extra ideas for the idea list: 

• Altruistic perks, rather than personal perks. E.g.1. Turn up at this student event and got $10 donated to a charity of your choice. E.g.2. donation matching schemes mentioned in job adverts, perhaps funded by offering maybe slightly lower salaries. Anecdotally I remember the first EAish event I went to had money to charity for each attendee and free wine and it was the money to charity that attracted me to go, and free wine that attracted my friend, and I am still here and they are not involved.
• Frugality options, like an optional version of the above idea. E.g.1. when signing up to an EA event the food options could be: "[]vegan, []nut free, []gluten free, []frugal - will bring my own lunch please donate money saved to charity x". E.g.2. Jobs could advertise the organisation offers salary sacrifice schemes that some employees take. I don’t know how well this would work but would be interested to see a group try. Anecdotally I know some EAs in well paid jobs take lower salaries than they are offered but I don’t think this is well known.

Also for what it is worth I was really impressed by the post. I it was an very well written, clear, and transparent discussion of this topic  with clear actions to take.

problems like malaria and extreme poverty still exist

I know this isn't the only thing to track here, but it's worth noting that funding to GiveWell-recommended charities is also increasing fast, both from Open Philanthropy and from other donors. Enough so that last year GiveWell had more money to direct than room for more funding at the charities that meet their bar (which is "8x better than cash transfers", though of course money could be donated to things less effective than that). They're aiming to move 1 billion annually by 2025.

I've seen the time-money tradeoff reach some pretty extreme, scope-insensitive conclusions. People correctly recognize that it's not worth 30 minutes of time at a multi-organizer meeting to try to shave $10 off a food order, but they extrapolate this to it not being worth a few hours of solo organizer time to save thousands of dollars. I think people should probably adopt some kind of heuristic about how many EA dollars their EA time is worth and stick to it, even when it produces the unpleasant/unflattering conclusion that you should spend time to save money.

Also want to highlight "For example, we should avoid the framing of ‘people with money want to pay for you to do X’ and replace this with an explanation of why X matters a lot and why we don’t want anyone to be deterred from doing X if the costs are prohibitive" as what I think is the most clearly correct and actionable suggestion here.

If a community claims to be altruistic, it's reasonable for an outsider to seek evidence: acts of community altruism that can't be equally well explained by selfish impulses, like financial reward or desire for praise. In practice, that seems to require that community members make visible acts of personal sacrifice for altruistic ends. To some degree, EA's credibility as a moral movement (that moral people want to be a part of) depends on such sacrifices. GWWC pledges help; as this post points out, big spending probably doesn't.

One shift that might help is thinking more carefully about who EA promotes as admirable, model, celebrity EAs. Communities are defined in important ways by their heroes and most prominent figures, who not only shape behaviour internally, but represent the community externally. Communities also have control over who these representatives are, to some degree: someone makes a choice over who will be the keynote speaker at EA conferences, for instance.

EA seems to allocate a lot of its prestige and attention to those it views as having exceptional intellectual or epistemic powers. When we select EA role models and representatives, we seem to optimise for demonstrated intellectual productivity. But our selections are not necessarily the people who have made the greatest personal altruistic sacrifices. Often, they're researchers who live in relative luxury -- even if they've taken a GWWC pledge. Perhaps we should be more conscious to elevate the EA profile of people like those in MacFarquhar's Strangers Drowning : people who have made exceptional sacrifices to make the world better, rather than people who have been most successful at  producing EA-relevant intellectual output. Maybe the keynote speaker at the next EA conference should be someone who once undertook an effective hunger strike, say. (Maybe even regardless of whether they have heard of EA, or consider themselves EA.)

There's an obvious reason to instead continue EA's current role model selection strategy: having a talk from a really clever researcher is helpful for internal community epistemics. We want to grant speaking platforms to those who might be able to offer the most valuable information or best thought-through view. And it's valuable for the external reputation of our community epistemics to have such people be the face of EA. We also don't want to promote the idea that the size of one's sacrifice is what ultimately matters.

But there are internal and external reasons to choose a role model based on the degree of inspiring altruistic sacrifice that person has made, too. Just as Will MacAskill can make me a little more informed, or guide my thinking in a slightly better direction, an inspiring story of personal sacrifice can make me a little more dedicated, a little more willing to work hard and sacrifice to make the world better. And externally, such a role model signals community focus on altruistic commitment. 

My low-confidence guess is that the optimum allocation of prestige still gives most EA attention and admiration to those with greatest demonstrated intellectual or epistemic power -- but not all. Those who've demonstrated acts of moral sacrifice should be held up as exemplars too, especially in external-facing contexts.

I was at an EA party this year where there was definitely an overspend of hundreds of pounds of EA money on food which was mostly wasted. As someone who was there, at the time, this was very clearly avoidable. 

It remains true that this money could have changed lives if donated to EA charities instead (or even used less wastefully towards EA community building!) and I think we should view things like this as a serious community failure which we want to avoid repeating.

At the time, I felt extremely uncomfortable / disappointed with the way the money was used. 

I think if this happened very early into my time affiliated with EA, it would have made me a lot less likely to stay involved - the optics were literally "rich kids who claim to be improving the world in the best way possible and tell everyone to donate lots of money to poor people are wasting hundreds of pounds on food that they were obviously never going to eat". 

I think this happened because the flow of money into EA has made the obligations to optimise cost-efficiency and to think counterfactually seem a lot weaker to many EAs. I don't think the obligations are any weaker than they were - we should just have a slightly lower cost effectiveness bar for funding things than before.

Thanks for this clear write-up and as many others, I definitely share some of your worries. I liked it that you wrote that the extra influx of money could make the CB-position accessible to people from different socioeconomic backgrounds, since this point seems to be a bit neglected in EA discussions.

I think it is true for many other impactful career paths that decent wages and/or some financial security (e.g. smoothening career transitions with stipends) could help to widen the pool of potential applicants, e.g. to more people from less fortunate socioeconomic backgrounds. Don't forget that many people in the lower and lower-middle income class are raised with the idea that it is important to take care of your own financial security. I have plenty of anecdotes from people in that group that didn't pursue an EA career in the past, because the wage gap and the worries about financial insecurity were just too large. I see multiple advantages coming from widening the pool to people from lower / lower middle socioeconomic classes:

1. Given that there is also a lot of talent in lower / lower middle socioeconomic classes, you will finally be able to attract more of them. This will increase the overall talent level in the community.
2. It could make the EA community less "elitist", which has many instrumental advantages as well, e.g. on the public perception. In my collaborations with third parties outside of the EA movement, I often receive questions on TFG's / EA's stance on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Having a less elitist movement would make it easier to collaborate with parties outside of the movement.
3. Diversity in terms of backgrounds could lead to a larger diversity of thought and this could potentially help us find new cause areas or improve our understanding of causes like poverty.

Thanks for writing this! Especially agree with: "We should be careful with how we advertise EA funding. For example, we should avoid the framing of ‘people with money want to pay for you to do X’ and replace this with an explanation of why X matters a lot and why we don’t want anyone to be deterred from doing X if the costs are prohibitive."

I've had a good experience with framing decisions around (reasonable) costs not getting in the way of high-impact work — not only from the perspective of optics, but also as a heuristic for where to draw boundaries (e.g. where to draw the line on what salaries to offer).

I think a lot of points in this post are very valid and concerning to me. I hope they will be taken seriously.

Concrete example affecting me right now: this summer I’m considering internships in mental health, x-risk or global health cause prioritisation, and I’m also considering just doing a bunch of Coursera courses and working on a start up.

I think ideally I would be choosing entirely based on what offers more career capital / is more impactful, but it’s difficult not to be influenced by the fact that one of the internships would pay me £11k more than the other 3.

Thank you very much for this post. I thought it was well-written and that the topic may be important, especially when it comes to epistemics.

I want to echo the comments that cost-effectiveness should still be considered. I have noticed  people (especially Bay Area longtermists) acting like almost anything that saves time or is at all connected to longtermism is a good use of money. As a result, money gets wasted because cheaper ways of creating the same impact are missed. For example, one time an EA offered to pay $140 of EA money (I think) for me for two long Uber rides so that we could meet up, since there wasn't a fast public transport link. The conversation turned out to be a 30-minute data-gathering task with set questions that worked fine when we did it on Zoom instead.

Something can have a very high value but a low price. I would pay a lot for potable liquid if I had to, but thanks to tap water that's not required, so I would be foolish to do so. In the example above, even if the value of the data were $140, the price  of getting it was lower than that. After taking into account the value of time spent finding cheaper alternatives, EAs should capture the surplus whenever possible.

As a default, I would like to see people doing a quick internal back-of-the-envelope calculation and scan for cheaper alternatives, which could take a minute or five. Not only do I think this is cost-effective; I think it helps with any issues of optics and alienation as well, because you only do crazy-expensive-looking things when there's not an obvious cheaper alternative.

It would also be nice to have a megathread of cheaper alternatives to common expenditures.

I'm worried that in some cases it might be the case that grant makers and grant receivers are friends who actively socialize with each other, and that might corrupt the grantmaking process. 

I'm not sure if this perspective is helpful but this issue reminds me of a somewhat analogous situation in the  Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) movement.  Originally the focus was on drastically limiting spending, increasing the savings rate to as high as possible, and retiring shockingly young.  Then, as time passed some people realized they didn't want to live in such austerity.  Other people found that they could move things along faster by focusing on earning more, instead of spending less.  Then there were people who didn't really want to retire but more like get enough income to be comfortable and then downshift their lifestyles.  There were folks who just focused on making as much money as possible and remained in the community even though they were just about getting rich.  Then some people sort of stumbled into the movement having made a ton of money on cryptocurrency or Tesla options or whatever...they never really applied any of the principles but still retired early.

With all these changes in the demographics and mindsets of the community I've noticed that the subjects discussed and the behavior encouraged has notably changed over the years.  It does not look much like what I saw 15 years ago.

Part of the change I've seen is that people with different flavors in mind self-select to associate with others that are similar.  /r/leanfire separates from /r/fatfire etc.  I'm guessing that drift and fragmentation like this are very likely for any group/movement that gets big enough.  I don't know if it is a good or bad thing.

A few thoughts on how we could mitigate some of these risks:

1. Have generous reimbursement policies at EA orgs but don't pay exorbitant salaries. 
   1. I think most EAs should value their time higher and be willing to trade money for time, and in these cases, I think you can justify a business expense. I think this will help clarify which spending choices are meant to actually boost productivity and which are just for fun. To be clear, I think spending some fraction of your income on just "fun" things like vacations, concerts, and eating out is fine in moderation. But to me at least, the shallow pond thought experiment is still basically true and there is plenty of need left in the world, even with the current funding situation. 
   2. I think we systematically overestimate how much spending more on personal consumption will make us happy/productive. I know plenty of people in finance/consulting/tech who have convinced themselves that they "need" to spend hundreds of thousands on personal consumption every year. I've lived in NYC on <$50K after taxes and donating for 4 years and feel like I've been able to do basically everything I want to do.
2. Emphasize costly signals of altruism. 
   1. We should encourage people to take the GWWC pledge and go vegetarian/vegan because they're probably good things to do on their merits and because they signal a commitment to making a sacrifice to help others. 

Consider the analogy with food production and food waste in relation to global hunger. We can grow enough food to feed the planet. Our ability to solve world hunger is not constrained by food production, but, in my understanding, by logistical issues involving waste, transportation, warfare, and governance problems.

Likewise, in EA, our ability to address the problems with which we are concerned may be increasingly unconstrained by funding. Instead, it's bottlenecked by similar logistics problems: waste, governance, coordination within and between organizations, the challenges of vetting grants, finding talent, building new organizations, and, as you are pointing out, optics. Can't blame lack of funding for your failures when you're no longer bottlenecked by funding!

It's important to understand that these optics and logistical problems are not a fluke, or the consequence of something we did wrong, but a natural consequence of growing to a certain size. It's just the next set of problems for us to solve.

Going forward, I would advocate for basing perceptions issues on legible evidence. I have no problem with this post, which does a good job of furthering a meaningful conversation. I notice, however, that it's full of uncited and possibly exaggerated opinion aggregation and andecdata:

• "The influx of EA funding is brilliant news, but it has also left many EAs feeling uncomfortable." is representing two blog posts, plus the mixed reactions in the comments, as the unified opinion of "many" EAs.
• "I’ve heard critical comments about a range of spending decisions. Several people asked me whether it was really a good use of EA money to pay for my transatlantic flights for EAG. Others challenged whether EAs seriously claim that the most effective way to spend money is to send privileged university students to an AirBNB for the weekend. And that’s before they hear about the Bahamas visitor programme…"
• "Anecdotally, I’ve spoken to several organisers who aren’t convinced of longtermism but default to following the money nevertheless. I’ve even heard (joking?) conversations about whether it’s worth 'pretending' to be EA for the free trip. "

If this is the best we've got, then so be it - anecdata > no data! Not a criticism of you or your post. But I think it would be valuable to run a more careful formal survey to understand what insiders, newcomers, leadership, allies, and people outside the movement think.

More worrying about optics at this level of the evidential pyramid seems to me to risk creating an optics issue.

• One way it can create an optics issue is by selectively amplifying a few casual comments on one side of an issue into a perceived social consensus.
• Another way is by putting effort into identifying ways that bad-faith criticism could make more damaging, meritless attacks on EA organizations and programs, an infohazard of sorts.
• A third way is by making newcomers in EA, who are disproportionately the sort of people who lack evidence of having  personally done something effectively altruistic, doubt themselves and feel guilty for ways they've indulged themselves in conferences and free food, or thought about applying for jobs and grants.

I would welcome more focused attention on this issue, but I think that there's a burden of epistemic rigor that falls on an analysis of optics issues facing the EA movement.

Thanks for writing this post, this is an area I've also sometimes felt concerned about so it's great to see some serious discussion.

A related point that I haven't seen called out explicitly is that monetary costs are often correlated with other more significant, but less visible, costs such as staff time. While I think the substantial longtermist funding overhang really does mean we should spend more money, I think it's still very important that we scrutinize where that money is being spent. One example that I've seen crop up a few time is retreats or other events being organized at very short notice (e.g. less than two weeks). In most of these cases there's not been a clear reason why it needs to happen right now, and can't wait a month or so. There's a monetary cost to doing things last minute (e.g. more expensive flights and hotel rooms) but the biggest cost is the event will be less effective than if the organizers and attendees had more time to plan for it.

More generally I'm concerned that too much funding can have a detrimental effect on organisational culture. It's often possible to make a problem temporarily go away just by throwing money at it. Sometimes that's the right call (focus on core competencies), but sometimes it's better off fixing the structural problem, before an organisation scales and it gets baked in. Anecdotally it seems like many of the world's most successful companies do try to make frugality part of their culture, e.g. it's one of Amazon's leadership principles.

In general, being inefficient at a small scale can still end up being very impactful if you work on the right problem. But I think to make a serious dent on the world's problems, we're likely going to need some mega-projects, spending billions of dollars with large headcount. Inefficiency at that scale is likely to result in project failure: oversight and incentives only get harder. So it seems critical that we continue to develop the ability in EA to execute on projects efficiently, even if in the short-term we might achieve more by neglecting that.

I do feel a bit confused about what to do in practice to address these problems, and would love to see more thinking on it. For individual decisions, I've found figuring out what my time (in some context) is worth and sticking to it for time-money tradeoffs is helpful. In general I'd be suspicious if someone is always choosing to spend money when it saves time, or vice-versa. For funding decisions, these concerns are one of the reasons I lean towards keeping the bar for funding relatively high even if that means we can't immediately deploy funding. I also support vetting people carefully to avoid incentivizing people pretending to be longtermists (or just having very bad epistemics).

My thoughts on this:

1. I think because of the flow of money into EA, it feels like some people have updated towards cost-effectiveness and counterfactual reasoning being less important than before.
2. I disagree with that view - I think that cost-effectiveness and counterfactual reasoning are exactly as important as they were before, the only change should be that our cost-effectiveness bar for funding things should be slightly lower. It remains true that small amounts of money from people in rich countries can dramatically raise someone's income via GiveDirectly, save a life through AMF or improve someone's subjective wellbeing via StrongMinds, so the obligation to be cost-effective remains very strong.
3. I think not enough effort seems to go into estimating and optimising the cost-effectiveness of the community building side of EA, probably in part because this is difficult to do, highly uncertain and thus prone to motivated reasoning.
4. But I think much more effort should go into estimating and optimising the cost-effectiveness of EA community building anyway. Some concrete examples I'd like to see - do we think we overspent / underspent on EAGxs and EAGs this year?

This post clearly articulates a lot of the related thoughts I've been having and discussing with other organizers; well done. I will add my quickly dashed off thoughts, coming in particular from the perspective of a EA group organizer:

1. The time/ money trade off is real, particularly for mostly volunteer-led groups where volunteer capacity is our main bottleneck.  Nonetheless, in my view being cognizant of trade offs when allocating resources is core to EA, and it is a real loss when we just vaguely gesture at the time/money trade off and spend money without really thinking deeply about its best use. I advocate taking a rule utilitarian approach to this -- even if in any given situation it might be more time that it is "worth" to really think hard about whether  spending funds on something is the best use of those funds--even within a more narrow framework like a group's overall goals--it is still worth doing as a rule. This also reinforces the norms of talking explicitly about trade offs, cause prioritization,  and thinking strategically.

2. This is anecdotal of course, but I have directly seen people express discomfort when our group spends money on, e.g., paying for food and drinks or renting a "nice" space for an event.  Attendees have directly said in feedback following these events that they are uncomfortable spending this money, and it doesn't seem to align with our EA values.  Is this discomfort enough to have tangible consequences like they stop being engaged? Unclear.  Moreover, I think it is quite possible that having a "nicer" event may still be justified by attracting more people, more types of people, and/or having the people there have a better time.  I've advocated collecting data about, for instance, how many people come to similar events, one that is catered and one that is not.  Such data collection of course also takes time and energy. In general I am pretty skeptical that the marginal dollar spent on food and particularly alcohol at an event is doing much good but without any data this view is very loosely held.  

3. FWIW,  Matt Yglesias has expressed something in this vein on the 80k podcast:  

Matthew Yglesias: I was interested when I started hearing about people I know going to effective altruism conferences. I thought to myself, that actually doesn’t sound very effective altruism-y. I always associate effective altruism with ideas like, “Maybe don’t do the conference, just give the money — that airfare could do a lot of good in the world.” 

Because of Evan's comment, I think that the signaling consideration here is another example of the following pattern:

Someone suggests we stop (or limit) doing X because of what we might signal by doing X, even though we think X is correct. But this person is somewhat blind to the negative signaling effects of not living up to our own stated ideals (i.e. having integrity). It turns out that some more rationalist-type people report that they would be put off by this lack of honesty and integrity (speculation: perhaps because these types have an automatic norm of honesty).

The other primary example of this I can think of is with veganism and the signaling benefits (and usually unrecongnized costs).

A solution is that when you find yourself saying “X will put off audience Y” to ask yourself “but what audience does X help attract, and who is put off by my alternative to X?”

Warren Buffett called his private jet 'The Indefensible' — then renamed it 'The Indispensable' after realizing it was worth the money.
Source

Following the academic research closely as EAs often do produces many perspectives that are surprising to traditional activists. I'm a student at University of California Davis. Here my frugality is essential to getting my peers to take my perspectives on effectiveness seriously. If it wasn't for the frugality, they would dismiss me as not altruistic because I'm a moderate democrat instead of a socialist. I'm frugal because I believe it's the right thing to do (for me at least), not because of the optics. I don't know what the best answer is overall, but believe we should be particularly cautious about abandoning frugality in very left wing environments. Perhaps very different levels of frugality will be best in different communities.  

Even before a cost-benefit analysis, I'd like to see an ordinal ranking of priorities. For organizations like the CEA,  what would they do with a 20% budget increase? What would they cut if they had to reduce their budget by 20%? Same thing for specific events, like EAGs. For a student campus club, what would they do with $500 in funding? $2,000? $10,000? I think this type of analysis would be helpful for determining if some of the spending that appears more frivolous is actually the least important.

My suggestion would be that more people interested in Effective Altruism infrastructure donate to Giving What We Can instead of the E.A. Infrastructure Fund or CEA Community Building Fund. A community organized around effective giving is 1) better for optics; 2) better for us; 3) anecdotally, I was inducted into E.A. through global poverty, and then later got into longtermism and animal welfare by extension. Without good infrastructure and a strong culture of effective giving, E.A. will cease to be an excited and exciting (and growing) community working to solve the world's biggest problems, and will become simply a few eccentric billionaires weird AI risk pet project. 

FWIW, I think it'd be pretty hard (practically and emotionally) to fake a project plan that EA funders would be willing to throw money at. So my prior is that cheating is rare and an acceptable cost to being a high-risk funder. EA is not about minimising crime, it's about maximising impact, and before we crack down on funding we should check our motivations. I don't want anyone to change their high-risk strategy based on hearsay, but I do want our top funders to be on the lookout so that they might catch a possible problem before it becomes rampant.

I like the culture-aligning suggestions for other reasons, though. I think the long-term future will benefit from the EA community remaining aligned with actually caring about people.

I'm not sure if there's any data on this, but I think EAs do actually tend to come from well-off backgrounds. 

Because of that, I think a share (I'd guess like 15%?) of EA funding for career building for students and recent graduates doesn't actually have counterfactual impact and just provides funding for people to do stuff which they would have spent their own money on anyway. More money in EA will mean more money being used in this way.

Obviously, this wasted money is bad, because it's still important for us to be cost-effective and the counterfactual use is still AMF.

So I think we'd benefit from a strong norm against using EA funding for career building activities which people would have spent their own money on anyway.

I don't think we should retire the "do you think this would be a better use of money than giving it to AMF?" type thinking, we should keep it alongside "actually, yes, flow through effects could mean that this is a better use of money than giving it to AMF".

There's also probably a case for experimenting with means-testing for grants, which a lot of social initiatives use to focus their money on people who need it the most, which improves counterfactual cost-effectiveness.

With Asana's stock down 82% in the past six months, Meta down 43%,  and SBF's net worth cut in half in the past month, maybe the bigger worry should be a period of austerity and cutbacks?

This is a great post, and I'm glad these points are being raised. I share a lot of the same concerns (basically, what happens to EA long term when it's just a good deal to join it?).

A big and small personal win from these changes in funding:

1. I decided to launch a magazine reporting on what matters in the long-term in large part because of the change in funding situation and related calls for more ambition. I had the idea for doing this more than 3 years ago, but didn't pursue it. (We're aiming to launch in Mar 2023).
2. In August, I quit my job at GiveDirectly to pursue freelance journalism full time, and planned to make basically no money for possibly 1-2 years. I cut a lot of costs to maximize my runway. A few months later, I got a job with an EA org that paid better than any job I had in the past. Now my time was scarce and money was not. I bought a free-standing dishwasher for ~$1000, which bought back ~45 minutes a day. I think this decision, and other smaller ones like it, were very good. 

But it's easy to get into self-serving territory where you value your time so highly that you can justify almost any expense (or don't think of cheaper ways to meet the same goals). This can also move us into territory where, to do ostensibly altruistic work, we don't give anything up, and, in fact, argue that others should give things to us. 

This feels fundamentally different from the movement that attracted me 5 years ago (though the reasoning is very consistent, and may well be right). 

Like others, I really appreciate these thoughts, and it resonates with me quite a lot. At this point, I think the biggest potential failure mode for EA is too much drift in this direction. I think the "EA needs megaprojects" thing has generated a view that the more we spend, the better, which we need to temper. Given all the resources, there's a good chance EA is around for a while and quite large and powerful. We need to make sure we put these tools to good use and retain the right values.

EA spending is often perceived as wasteful and self-serving

It's interesting here how far this is from the original version of EA and its criticisms; e.g. that EA was an unrealistic standard that involved sacrificing one's identity and sense of companionship for an ascetic universalism.

I think the old perception is likely still more common, but it's probably a matter of time (which means there's likely still time to change it). And I think you described the tensions brilliantly.

Congrats on having the most upvoted EA Forum post of all time!

Free food and free conferences are things that are somewhat standard among various non-EA university groups. It's easy to object to whether they're an effective use of money, but I don't think they're excessive except under the EA lens of maximizing cost-effectiveness. I think if we reframe EA universities groups as being about empowering students to tackle pressing global issues through their careers, and avoid mentioning effective donations and free food in the same breath, then it's less confusing why there is free stuff being offered. (Besides apparently being more appealing to students, I also genuinely think high-impact careers should be the focus of EA university groups.)

I'm in favor of making EA events and accommodation feel less fancy.

There are other expenses that I'd be more concerned about from an optics perspective about than free food and conferences.

You find out that if you build a longtermist group in your university, EA orgs will pay you for your time, fly you to conferences and hubs around the world and give you all the resources you could possibly make use of. This is basically the best deal that any student society can currently offer. Given this, how much time are you going to spend critically evaluating the core claims of longtermism?

It's worth noting that these perks are available for new EA groups in general, not even particularly longtermist EA groups. That said, I think there are plenty of additional perks to being a longtermist (career advising from 80,000 Hours, grants from the Long-Term Future Fund or the FTX Future Fund to work on projects, etc.) that you might want to be one even if you're intellectually unsure about it. I think another incentive pushing university organizers in favor of a longtermist direction is: it doesn't make sense to be spending this much money on free food and conferences from a neartermist perspective, at least in my opinion.

Maybe I missed this in a previous comment (or even the text itself, I just ctrl+f'ed it after skimming it) but one thing I think it could be worth spending more on is better working conditions (I think several EA orgs already to this well, but I would be surprised if there are no "laggards"). Think staffing projects properly so there is no burn-out, paid parental leave for both parents, childcare facilities near bigger offices,  properly paid internships, etc. Burn-out plagues the "making the world better" industry and I think we can attract a lot of talent who might be skeptical of expensive retreats, but who actually value much more being able to have good mental health and invest in their families. And do all this with a global hat on on so that in geographies with e.g. limited holidays, that it is increased to 3-6 weeks paid holidays each year no matter your seniority. Even here in Sweden we would benefit from well staffed projects/organizations (despite having decent holiday policies etc. by law). 

A lot of good points here.

A few thoughts on the benefits of a frugal community:

• norms of frugality can help people avoid some of the consumeristic rat race of broader society. I don’t want EAs caught up in “keeping up with the Jones’s.” I want EAs keeping up with good ideas and good actions.
• I think we want a community where someone who uses careful reasoning to take an impactful role for $60K/yr feels just as welcome in EA as someone who uses careful reasoning to take an impactful role for $160k/yr.

Not sure if this is in any way a valid perspective of looking at it:

I wonder how the big spending looks in the perspective of a small donor. Say, a person with a median income within a rich country who gives a 1-10 percent of their salary away.

I used to "earn-to-give" with a after-tax salary of 11 euros/hour. That's  a lot compared to the global average! This was enough to donate >10 percent. But my past self's hour worked could fund maybe a few minutes (?)  of a researcher (I don't know what EA researchers earn) - and it might have been worth it. 

It makes me think of this comment. Again, not sure if it's a valid point.

Thank you for writing this post; I know these take a lot of time and I think this was a really valuable contribution to the discourse/resonated strongly with me. 

I find it helpful get clearer about who the audience is in any given circumstance, what they most want/value and how money might help/hurt in reaching them. When you have a lot of money, it's tempting to use it as an incentive without noticing it's not what your audience actually most values. (And creates the danger of attracting the audience that does most value money, which we obviously don't want.) 

For example, I think two critical audiences include both 'talented  people who really want to do good' and 'talented  people who mostly just like solving hard problems.' We're competing with different kinds of entities/institutions in each case, but I think money is rarely the operative thing for the individuals I'd most like to see involved in EA. 

• For e.g. young people who really want to do good:
  • Many of them already know they could go work in finance/consulting and get lots of money and travel and perks, but choose not to. I was in this situation, and all the free stuff made me assume that there was nothing intrinsically motivating/valuable about the work,  since they had to dangle so many extrinsic rewards to get me to do it. EA is competing for those people with other social movements/nonprofits, and I suspect the more EA starts looking like the finance career option in terms of extrinsic rewards, the more those people might end up dismissing it/feel like they're being "bought."
• For people who really like solving hard problems:
  • I'm thinking here of people I know who are extremely smart and have chosen to do ethically neutral to dubious work because they got nerdswiped/enjoyed the magnitude of the challenge/felt like it was a good fit for their brain/etc.
  • My sense is that money was a factor for them but more as a neutral indicator of value/signal that they were working on something hard and valuable than because of a desire to live a specific lifestyle (many still live with roommates/don't spend much). I think the best way to get these people is emphasizing that we have even harder and more interesting problems they could be solving (though offering reasonably comparable salaries so that the choice to switch is less disruptive also seems good).