Demandingness and Time/Money Tradeoffs are Orthogonal

This post is great, thanks for writing it.

I'm not quite sure about the idea that we should have certain demanding norms because they are costly signals of altruism. It seems to me that the main reason to have demanding norms isn't that they are costly signals, but rather that they are directly impactful. For instance, I think that the norm that we should admit that we're wrong is a good one, but primarily because it's directly impactful. If we don't admit that we're wrong, then there's a risk we continue pursuing failed projects even as we get strong evidence that they have failed. So having a norm that counteracts our natural tendency not to want to admit when we're wrong seems good.

Relatedly, and in line with your reasoning, I think that effective altruism should be more demanding in terms of epistemics than in terms of material resources. Again, that's not because that's a better costly signal, but rather because better epistemics likely makes a greater impact difference than extreme material sacrifices do. I developed these ideas here; see also our paper on real-world virtues for utilitarians.

current artificially low salaries in EA often lead to people making inefficient time/money tradeoffs.

I agree that this is common, so I agree with your central point, which is important.

But I'm not sure I like your suggestions to move towards other demanding costly signals, like encouraging workaholism.

Rather, a better solution, which seems to be the norm in the not-for-profit world, might be to simply pay slightly, but non-trivially, below market rates, so if someone could earn $500/h in the private sector for similarly pleasant work, EA orgs could just pay ~80%. This should deter people who only care about money, while employees who net >$800k/y (> than current current EA non-profits exec compensation) still don't need to penny pinch and be efficient (buy a house close to work in a city like SF, raise a family, live a solidly middle-class lifestyle, fly business class), if they just forgo high-end luxury goods. There could be a progressive 'EA tax' build into the salary, so if support staff only earn $50/h, EA orgs might want to pay ~95% or something and offer Google-like perks like a catered food and laundry service to make them more efficient. 

I think these are all more efficient costly signals than frugality, but my impression is that they tend to be regarded by people (both inside and outside EA) as worse signals of altruism, and I’m wondering why that is.

Some more random thoughts:

• People really don't like it when people earn very high amounts. Politicians often play up their frugality to the point where they're probably bad at their job (e.g. former Austrian chancellor who made a point of flying coach or José Mujica driving an old car)... people seem to like this though as evidenced by them being voted into office. Utilitarian arguments for higher salaries might come across as self-serving. 
• Also, in finance, costly signals are long hours and conspicuous consumption, as retaining employees is very valuable and frugal people could retire after a working for just a couple of years (maybe that's why EAs did so well in finance- they didn't have diminishing returns in utility to salary increases- all without the drug habit). 
• Long hours need not be cost-effective... maybe you could rather pay two EA org people $100k/y, than one person $250k/y. Especially because the nonprofit world is not as zero sum as the private sector where working very hard might pay off much more. Perhaps different work intensities lend themselves well to EtG in the for-profit world vs. say philosophy in the non-profit world. In the non-profit world, objectives are often much less clearly defined, and so it might not make sense to work very hard, but rather more deliberate... (see Bezos shifting from working very hard in the beginning of Amazon while in execution mode, to later saying he sleeps 8 hours a night because he's just making very high-level prioritization decisions (not unlike a philosopher).

Very minor note, but I love that you included "practice the virtue of silence" in your list.

This post is great. I have wondered whether there should be more emphasis in EA on 'warrior mindset' - working really hard to get important stuff done (discussed a bit here). A lot of highly effective people do seem to work very hard and that I think that is an important norm to spread in EA. 

Other than variations of working crazy hours (which I think is both higher impact and better signal of altruism than donations, at least within the movement), the other actions you suggest don't seem like very legible signals of people acting morally in a demanding way. So this weakens their value as a signal for altruism, though they may still be object-level great things to do, or good signaling for other reasons. 

Thanks Caroline for writing this! I think it's a really rich vein to mine because it pulls together several threads I've been thinking a lot about lately.

One issue it raises is should we care about the "altruist" in effective altruists? If someone is doing really useful things because they think FTX will pay them a lot of money or fund their political ambitions, is this good because useful things happen or bad because they won't be a trustworthy agent for EA when put into positions of power? My instinct is to prefer giving people good incentives than selecting people who are virtuous: I think virtue tends to be very situationally dependent and that very admirable people can do bad things and self-deceive if it's in their interest to do so. But it's obviously not either-or. I also tend to have fairly bourgeois personal preferences and think EA should aspire to universality such that lots of adherents can be materially prosperous and conventionally successful and either donate ~20% of their income or work/volunteer for a useful cause (a sort of prosperity gospel form of EA amenable to wide swathes of the professional and working class rather than a self-sacrifice form that could be more pure). 

A separate issue is one of community health. So on an individual level maybe it could be fine if people join EA because the retreats are lit and the potential for power and status is high, but as a group there may be some like tipping point where people's self-identity changes as the community in fact prizes the perks and status over results. This could especially be a concern insofar as 1. goals that are far off make it easy to self-deceive about progress and 2. building the EA community can be seen as an end in itself in a way that risks circularity and self-congratulation. You can say the solution here is to really elevate people who do in fact achieve good results (because achieving good things for the world is what we care about), but lots of results take a long time to unfold (even for "near-termist" causes) and are uncertain (e.g. Open Phil's monetary policy and criminal justice reform work, both of which I admire and think have been positive). For example, while I've been in the Bahamas, people have been very complementary of 1Day Sooner (where I work and which I think EAs tend to see as a success story). I'm proud of my work at 1Day and hopeful what we've already done is expanding the use of challenge studies to develop better vaccines, but despite achieving some intermediate procedural successes (positive press coverage, some government buy-in and policy choices, some academic and bioethics work), I think the jury is very much still out on what our impact will end up being and most of our impact will likely come from future work. 

The point about self-identity and developing one's moral personhood really drives me in a direction of wanting to encourage people to make altruist choices that  are significant and legible to themselves and others. For example, becoming a kidney donor made me identify myself more with the desire to have an impact which led me further into doing EA types of work. I think the norm of donating a significant portion of your income to charity is an important one for this reason, and I've been disappointed to see that norm weaken in recent years. I do worry that some of the types of self-sacrificing behavior you mention aren't legible enough or state change-y enough to have this permanent character/self-identity building effect. 

There's an obvious point here about PR and I do think committing to behavior that we're proud to display in public is an important principle (though not one that I think necessarily cuts against paying EAs a lot). First, public display is epistemically valuable because (a) it unearths criticisms and ideas an insular community won't necessarily generate and (b) views that have overlapping consensus among diverse audiences are more likely to be true. Second, hiding things isn't a sustainable strategy and also looks bad on its own terms. 

Last thought that is imperfectly related is I do think there may be a bit of a flaw in EA considering meta-level community building on the same plane as object-level work and this might be a driving a bit of inflation in meta-level activities that manifests itself in opulent EA college resources (and maybe some other things) that are intuitively jarring even as they can seem intellectually justified. So if you consider object and meta-level stuff on the same plane, the $1 invested in recruiting EAs who then eventually spend $10 and recruit more EAs seems like an amazing investment (way better than spending that $1 on an actual EA object level activity). But this seems intuitively to me like it's missing something and discounting the object level $ for the $ spent on the meta-level needed for fundraising doesn't seem to satisfy the problem. I'm not sure but I think the issue (and this also applies to other power-seeking behavior like political fundraising) is that the community building is self-serving (not "altruistic") and from an  view outside of EA does not seem morally praiseworthy. We could take the position that that outside view is simply wrong insofar as it doesn't take into the account the possibility that we are in fact right about our movement being right. The Ponzi-ishness of the whole thing doesn't quite sit well, but I haven't come to a well-reasoned view.

I think these are all more efficient costly signals than frugality, but my impression is that they tend to be regarded by people (both inside and outside EA) as worse signals of altruism, and I’m wondering why that is.

(This reply addresses only some of your bullet points) If someone works crazy hours, that could be for altruism, but it could also be for higher status. Many people in the private sector selfishly choose to work long hours to be promoted, so it wouldn't be that surprising that in non-profits people would as well, even if the monetary payoffs were lower.

Very much agree with this post. It reminds me of a problem we see in certain other fields (entry-level journalism, congressional staff, etc.)--the salaries are so low that it's as if the job is selecting for people who are either 1) independently wealthy (or heavily supported by parents), or 2) eager for some other job benefit (such as access to power).  Neither characteristic is likely to make an employee . . . effective. Passion about EA might be good for some things, but in many roles, there is no reason to think that personal passion equates to skill, knowledge, personal productivity, etc. 

Imagine there's a top CEO who earns $10 million currently, and who knows MacKenzie Scott well. If paid $20 million, he would leave his job, and spend a year designing and implementing a strategy to convince MacKenzie Scott to take an EA approach with 25% of her yearly giving.  Wouldn't that be worth it, if it worked? 

Love this post! I’d build on this question by slightly re-framing it. Instead of asking “should EA be more demanding?”, I’d ask:

1. What should we promote as a general norm about demandingness?
2. What should you personally aspire to in terms of demandingness?

I usually have completely different answers to these questions. General norms have to be simpler and work for a larger number of people. Personal aspirations can be tailor-made to your particular circumstances, personality, and goals.

Of course, you could make the general norm for each person to think specifically about what they should personally aspire to, and maybe we should just do that. One of my favorite things about EA is that we don’t tend to oversimplify things for people, but rather push people to really engage with the complexities and nuances of ideas.

I've written a blog post relating to this article, arguing that while levels of demandingness are conceptually separate from such trade-offs, what kinds of resources we most demand may empirically affect the overall level of demandingness.

In most situations I doubt we should care about costly signals of altruism at all. Effectiveness in the work should be all that matters. If I'm hiring, all else being equal I will naturally prefer the person who will work 7 days a week for a lower salary vs the one who will only work 5 days and demand more. I don't need any signal here, other than making them the job offer on my preferred terms and seeing if they take it. But if the lazier, greedier one is 10x as effective per unit time, I should obviously prefer them despite them being a worse person in some philosophical sense. 

Perhaps in extremely critical positions where people could put important projects at risk by making selfish decisions there should be more of a need for people to prove the altruism part. But ultimately if people reliably do the right thing I don't care if they're doing it for selfish or altruistic motives. That's between them and their conscience. 

I quite like this idea, and many of the most frugal people I know also do a ton of these things as well. I think a bunch of them pretty clearly signal altruism. Interestingly, I would say that things that make EA soft and cushy financially seem to cross apply to non-financial areas as well. E.g. I am not sure the average EA is working more hours compared to what they worked 5 years ago; even with the increases in salary, PAs and time to money tradeoffs.

I also agree there are a lot more that could be listed. I think "leave a fun and/or high-status job for an unpleasant and/or low-status one" hints at the idea of decisions that need to be made with competing values. I think this is maybe the biggest way more dedicated EAs have really different impacts vs less dedicated ones, e.g. it may not be the biggest part of someones impact if someone works 5% more or takes 5% less salary but it correlates (due to selection effect) with when hard choices come up with impact on one side and personal benefit on the other. The person is more likely to pick impact and this can lead to huge differences in impact. E.g. The charity research I find most fun to do might have ~0 impact whereas research I think is the highest impact might be considerably less fun, but significantly more valuable.

Thanks for writing this Caroline, really interesting post! I think it's probably true that having talented people doing important things work really hard is higher impact than having people donate a little bit more money. 

However, I am concerned about the idea that one should prioritize their impact over relationships with family, friends, romantic partners, or children, for two reasons: 

1. I think it's important to note that, personally, donating 10-20% of my income to effective charities literally makes zero difference to my life enjoyment.* But neglecting relationships would significantly  reduce my life enjoyment. If lots of EAs are less happy (and potentially also their partners, friends, and family), that means the corresponding increase in impact from working hard would need to outweigh their reduction in happiness to provide net benefit. 
2. If lots of EAs are less happy, it would presumably be harder to attract new people and also increase burnout. There might also be diminishing marginal returns to work in many cases (e.g. once GiveWell has analysed a charity for 100 hours, the 101st hour probably doesn't provide that much more information). But returns to donations are probably linear, unless you are dealing with large amounts of money such that you run out of equally cost-effective opportunities. 

I am unsure whether this means EAs shouldn't work 7-day weeks and de-prioritze relationships, but I don't think it's clear they should. Of course, this might work for some people but not others! 

* I may be in a particularly priveledged position here, as I currently live with my parents and do not pay rent or have kids, but I suspect a high proportion of EAs would make a roughly similar conclusion.