I don’t think I have fully developed my opinions on compensation yet and very interested in hearing other people’s thoughts on the topic. I am surprised that it’s not being discussed more.

I think transparency about pay is great, and I hope I am not discouraging it with this post.

I feel like not many people really have "a job that can mostly be done from anywhere", and a lot hinges on that assumption here.

I am uncertain about this and it probably heavily depends on how you define “EAs”. My impression might be very biased. 

I think your piece treats being in a high COL place as solely an EA move; in reality EA hubs are not picked from a random list and are attractive places in themselves

Hm, I don't think it's solely an EA move. I do prefer London, mostly for the EA community, but also because of access to art, food, architecture, and other niche communities. But I would consider choosing to live there a luxury, similar to taking expensive holidays. It seems strange to me that some employers are willing to subsidise and in some cases even financially reward the former.

This heavily depends on how exactly the COL-adjustment is made, and many orgs are not transparent about how exactly they do it. In most cases it seems like the adjustment is proportionate to your base salary. This means that in some cases, COL-adjustments encourage junior people to live in cheaper places while encouraging more senior people to move to more expensive places (because other expenses like housing aren’t relative to their salary.)

I agree! It's not that surprising that big cities are natural hubs. I also think that people who work on policy are a great example of a group that can't really do their job from everywhere. So are people who earn-to-give in certain fields if they can get disproportionately high salaries in expensive cities. (Although the maths doesn't work out like that in every role.)

In the UK, we probably also have a self-fulfilling prophecy, where almost all community building investment seems to go into Loxbridge. EA UK has historically almost exclusively focused on London. At one point while I was there, EA Oxford had 3 paid organisers with multiple free retreats a year. It's not too surprising that you end up with lots of highly engaged EAs in places that get that kind of attention. 

(I don't think that all major cities and unis are completely equal in all ways, but I do think the differences are often overblown, at least in the UK.)

I recommend cross-posting this to the High Impact Engineers Forum, the Impact Forge. Good luck!

Thanks for flagging this! 

I should have double-checked this reference. Have made an edit to redirect people to this comment. 

I don't want to be overly dismissive of WFI here. They are trying to do something really difficult and important. They have spent years on this work. 

However, I think many have been overly confident in acting on their conclusions when they themselves highlight a need for more research. 

Thanks for engaging! 

Re: cage-free welfare estimates

As I say in the post, I think that the WFI analysis does not include some potentially significant harms (such as chronic stress/pain from violence or parasites - which are likely higher in cage-free systems). 

I also think that it's not obvious how to score pain from behavioural deprivation, which accounts for a majority of the difference: 

More generally, I think we currently just do not have enough data to make strong claims around the total cumulative pain chickens experience. Under "research gaps", WFI itself states the following: 

Surprisingly little research has been dedicated to the understanding of the impact of different welfare challenges at the individual level (where suffering occurs). Little is known about clinical evolution of the various welfare issues affecting commercial layers (e.g. healing times, duration of exposure), the likelihood of different clinical outcomes, rates of recurrence, and how adversely welfare harms are perceived by the individuals affected. Similarly, knowledge on case-fatality rates, comorbidity patterns and the prevalence of different conditions over the laying cycle is scant.

The independent assessment that Rethink Priorities organised only looked at two layer hen harms: peritonitis in conventional housing; and fractures during depopulation and transport in conventional housing. Neither was related to behavioural deprivation.

Additionally:

Raters were restricted to the references that Welfare Footprint Institute cited in the chapter where the original estimates appeared. Therefore, disagreement among raters is due to how different scientists use the same evidence, rather than which evidence they examine in the first place. 

Re: shrimp stunning

The review you link relies heavily on data from other species. My post addresses all the published evidence for Whiteleg shrimp.

Hi Madeleine, great to have you here! If you want to chat to other engineers, consider checking out the High Impact Engineers Forum: https://tinyurl.com/ImpactForge

I also expect that people voting for Oxford and Cambridge will be more likely to apply and get accepted to EAG London. So they may benefit less from an EAGx than others.