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by Emrik
1 min read20th Aug 20221 answerNo comments

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SlackWorld Optimization
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I worry a lot about the inefficiencies created by preventing competent researchers from allocating their time according to their own judgment of what is optimal. I think researchers can be several times more effective with financial freedom. There's a steep cost paid by forcing researchers to compromise between optimising for what they care about and what their money cares about. Value of information is relative to the brain computing it, so competent people will usually best be able to estimate it on their own, even if the results are illegible to everybody else. They'll find their path much faster if they can search through and abandon projects speedily, and don't have to have their attention toted about by anyone or anything other than themselves--as if the harness isn't going to chafe, as if anyone knows their own use better than they do.

But enough of my motivation. Do you feel like you are working on the most important thing you could work on? And if not, are you bottlenecked by being paid to do a different thing? Even if you are allocated optimally atm, how easy would it be for you to switch paths right now if that's what you wanted? How costly would it be for you personally to just abandon your current project and hop to a new one if you thought it was a better use of your time?

I'm trying to get a sense of how much self-judged inefficiency is caused by a lack of financial slack among LW/EA-reading researchers. Feel free to answer here or admonymously (you don't need to share your name, but if you do, I promise not to share it on).

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Mitchell_Porter

Aug 22, 2022

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It's about thirty years since I started aiming at truth and transhumanity, I think my achievements are a small fraction of what they might have been under different circumstances, and a very prominent reason for that is lack of money. But I don't know if the details quite fit your paradigm. 

You seem to assume that from the beginning, one is in a world in which you do things only if you're paid to do them, and things get done only if someone is being paid to do them, and everything is about negotiating one's position within that framework. Whereas for me, coming to awareness of the world as a young adult, the fact that most people spent most of their lives doing jobs that they would rather not do, seemed a calamity comparable to the fact that everyone dies, and something that also needed to be resisted and changed. This attitude was possible because I had the Internet, and at that time it was still a potlatch of shared ideas and projects (today's e-commerce infrastructure didn't exist at all). To the extent that I could pursue the important things, it was all taking place in a completely non-monetary environment. 

Eventually enough time passed that I would sometimes actually seek financial support for something that mattered to me, and I also slowly understood more about how the world of money and jobs - "the economy" - works. But in general, I have never been able to obtain direct support for the important things at all; if I want anything to happen, I have to do it myself, using my own resources, no matter how meager they are. 

[-]Emrik1y10

Oh, I think may have miscommunicated. But I emphatically get what you're saying.

the fact that most people spent most of their lives doing jobs that they would rather not do, seemed a calamity comparable to the fact that everyone dies, and something that also needed to be resisted and changed.

This is exactly what I'm pointing at. I think we can have a lot more impact if we aren't paid to do specific things, but we still need money in order to buy food. I advocate "EA tenure" for promising altruists, so that they don't have to waste their time trying to impress their funders and can just get on doing what they think is best.

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