Day job: Cybersecurity
From England, now living in Estonia.
I’ve also been thinking about incentives at the senior end as well, how do these orgs decide to pay a small number of senior staff extremely well, like for example I’ve seen figures that Eliezer Yudkowsky is compensated $600k at MIRI alone (*just used as an example, don’t have anything against him personally),
$600k is not "extremely well" for the Bay Area, given the high taxes and ridiculous cost of living there. But the obvious next question is: why are so many EA organisations located in extremely-high-cost cities?
I don't think it's an EA-specific problem, because many other non-profits are also located in high-cost locations. For policy / lobbying / campaigning organisations there is an obvious reason to be close to the centres of power in capital cities, but that doesn't apply to direct-work orgs.
All open borders advocates support broadly similar policies (reducing barriers to migration).
There are going to be large differences in people's views about what (if any) other policies are going to be needed to avoid open borders turning into national suicide. For instance, a right-libertarian open borders advocate would say "open borders is incompatible with a generous welfare state, and closed borders is a moral abomination, therefore we must abolish the welfare state (or at least shrink payouts to a level where they are matched to incomes in the poorest country in the world)" whereas a leftist advocate would prefer to trust in migrants quickly becoming productive net taxpayers without any need for welfare restrictions.
The answer I would like to be true is "EA funders are avoiding associating themselves with Open Borders advocacy because it has become a politically partisan issue, and they want to be seen as non-partisan." However, given that e.g. GiveWell is calling the personal foundation of a controversial political figure "highly aligned", I don't think that is the case.
Please give the full names of organisations you refer to with acronyms (CHAI and PATH). That's particularly important for CHAI since there is also the "Centre for Human-compatible Artificial Intelligence" with the same acronym, so it can be confusing for readers who are familiar with one but not the other (like me until I read a similar article earlier this year).
When you only use the acronym "CHAI" I assumed you were talking about the "Center for Human Compatible Artificial Intelligence" ( https://humancompatible.ai/ ) since this has strong and obvious links to Effective Altruism. Then I followed the link and saw you meant the "Clinton Health Access Initiative". You should clarify to stop other people having the same misunderstanding.
The other problem I see is that there's no modifier here for "actually being correct". If person A presents a correct mathematical proof for X, and person B presents a mathematical proof for not X that is actually false, do they both get 20 points?
If you check the proofs yourself and you can see that one is obviously wrong and the other is not obviously (to you) wrong then you only give the not-obviously-wrong one 20 points. If you can't tell which is wrong then they cancel out. If a professor then comes along and says "that proof is wrong, because [reason that you can't understand], but the other one is OK" then epistemically it boils down to "tenured academic in field - 6 points" for the proof that the professor says is OK.
Thank you for explaining the "Big borderless workspace" concept. This is the first time I have seen a reasonable-looking argument in favour of company policies restricting employees' actions outside work, something which I had previously seen as a pure cultural-imperialist power grab by oppressive bosses.
I would define "extremely well" relative to the extremes of the income distribution rather than the median. However, according to https://statisticalatlas.com/metro-area/California/San-Francisco/Household-Income the "mean of top 5%" income is $563k so $600k would count as "extremely high" by my definition too.
Perhaps that also answers my other question. The reason so many orgs are based in high-cost cities is that there are lots of workers who are willing to eat that cost themselves, taking a big hit to everything I would include in a "quality of life" metric in order to get something that can only be had in the big city.