Alfredo Parra 's Quick takes

Edit: I see your point. Still, I'll leave the below comment as-is, because from my (3rd world, generational financial instability, no health insurance, filial obligations etc.) point of view I think the perspective of a broke person ought to be represented.

But what counts as "numerous", though? How many EAs are actually working in AI - fifty people? A hundred people? Who's collecting data on this subgroup versus the larger EA group?

I agree that the question itself is appropriate and there's nothing wrong with it. I was saying this question doesn't benefit from public speculation, because, for one thing, there isn't any reliable data for objective analysis, and for another, the logistics of an individual's personal finance are a bigger factor in how or how much a person donates, at the non-millionaire level (in this subclass and the broader population).

I disagree and think that b is actually totally sufficient justification. I'm taking as an assumption that we're using an ethical theory that says people do not have an unbounded ethical obligation to give everything up to subsistence and that it is fine to set some kind of a boundary and fraction of your total budget of resources that you spend on altruistic purposes. Many people doing well paying altruistic careers (eg technical AI safety careers) could earn dramatically more money eg at least twice as much, if they were optimising for the highest paying career they could. I'm fairly sure I could be earning a lot more than I currently am if that was my main goal. But I consider the value of my labour from an altruistic perspective to exceed the additional money I could be donating and therefore do not see myself to have a significant additional ethical obligation to donate (though I do donate a fraction of my income anyway because I want to)

By foregoing a large amount of income for altruistic reasons, I think such people are spending a large amount of their resource budget on altruistic purposes, and that if they still have an obligation to donate more money that people in higher paying careers should be obliged to donate far more. Which is a consistent position, but not one I hold

I feel quite confused about the case where someone earns much less than their earning potential in another altruistically motivated but less impactful career doing work that uses a similar skillset (e.g. joining a think tank after working on policy at an AI company). This seems somewhere between A and B.

I think the right stance here is a question of “should EA be praising such people or get annoyed they’re not giving up more if it wants to keep a sufficient filter for who it calls true believers”, and the answer there is obviously both groups are great & true believers and it seems dumb to get annoyed at either.

The 10% number was notably chosen for these practical reasons (there is nothing magic about that number), and to back-justify that decision with bad moral philosophy about “discharge of moral duty” is absurd.

But I think a practical moral philosophy wherein donation expectations are based on your actual material resources (and constraints), not your theoretical maximum earning potential, seems more justifiable. 

It's complicated, I think. Based on your distinguishing (a) and (b), I am reading "salary sacrifice" as voluntarily taking less salary than was offered for the position you encumber (as discussed in, e.g., this post). While I agree that should count, I'm not sure (b) is not relevant.

The fundamental question to me is about the appropriate distribution of the fruits of one's labors ("fruits") between altruism and non-altruism. (Fruits is an imperfect metaphor, because I mean to include (e.g.) passive income from inherited wealth, but I'll stick with it.) 

We generally seem to accept that the more fruit one produces, the more (in absolute terms) it is okay to keep for oneself. Stated differently -- at least for those who are not super-wealthy -- we seem to accept that the marginal altruism expectation for additional fruits one produces is less than 100%. I'll call this the "non-100 principle." I'm not specifically defending that principle in this comment, but it seems to be assumed in EA discourse.

If we accept this principle, then consider someone who was working full-time in a "normal" job and earn a salary of 200 apples per year. They decide to go down to half-time (100-apple salary) and spend the half of their working hours producing 100 charitable pears for which they receive no financial benefit. ^[1]The non-100 principle suggests that it's appropriate for this person to keep more of their apples than a person who works full-time to produce 100 apples (and zero pears). Their total production is twice as high, so they aren't similarly situated to the full-time worker who produces the same number of apples. The decision to take a significantly less well-paid job seems analogous to splitting one's time between remunerative and non-remunerative work. One gives up the opportunity to earn more salary in exchange for greater benefits that flow to others by non-donation means.

I am not putting too much weight on this thought experiment, but it does make me think that either the non-100 principle is wrong, or that the foregone salary counts for something in many circumstances even when it is not a salary sacrifice in the narrower sense.

1. ^{^}

   How to measure pear output is tricky. The market rate for similar work in the for-profit sector may be the least bad estimate here.

Ah sorry, I read your post too quickly :-)