I'm not trying to make a legal claim here, just using the word "stealing" in its colloquial sense, sorry for the confusion on that.

I think I want to taboo the phrase "price discrimination". It could refer to normal ok things like a price changing over time, or to things I want to call stealing. You seem to use it in both ways, and so I don't think it is carving reality at a joint that is useful for this conversation. I'll instead try to address the things airlines do that you pointed to individually.

The same product often does change price over time, for just about any product imaginable. So charging different prices for the same ticket based on when it is purchased seems fine.

There are also often economic reasons to sell things in bulk and charge a lower per-unit price for bulk purchases. That's all a frequent flier program is, so again, that is probably fine.

I'm honestly not sure what you are referring to by different payment methods.

But I would absolutely call charging different prices of different IP addresses stealing, and I think most people would agree that it is not ethical to do so. And when airlines are caught doing things like that, they sometimes are forced by public pressure to stop. This notion that you don't charge different people different prices for the same product is central to a fair and honest economy, and I think it is fair and important to call out violations of it as stealing.

Here's another thing airlines sometimes do: they charge more money for the ticket from city A to city B than for the ticket from city A to city C with a layover in city B. I'm not sure what the airlines think they are doing there, but it's clearly not a legitimate market transaction, as the second thing is just the first thing plus an extra things. So I have no qualms about buying the A->B->C ticket when I really just want to go from A to B. (For anyone else who wants to exploit this dishonest airline pricing, see skiplagged.com).

I agree that some things function as gifts rather than economic transactions, and some relationships have elements of both. Mixing the two can cause issues which are maybe out of scope for this conversation but are worth flagging as a reason to be hesitant to mix them. And when they are mixed, that seems like a point where it is especially important to explicitly demarcate how much money is market-based and how much is gift-based. But I think even in a gift economy, gifts are expected to be roughly proportional to other gifts, not to the giver's means. We don't expect the $500k software engineer to give gifts 10x the size of the $50k teacher. 

No real community is going to be perfectly bimodal like that, but in the hypothetical I think that is maybe fine? The events I am thinking of where this sort of thing has really bothered me had a ticket marked as "software engineer making $200k/yr" or something like that that cost hundreds of dollars, while other tickets that get you the same seats cost tens of dollars. When price differences are that dramatic, it becomes very obviously exploitation, not a student subsidy. 


I also think it is fine to do as bay solstice is doing, having a $2000k ticket marked as "patron" or something to that effect, because that makes it clear that nobody, no matter how rich, is expected to pay that, it is just an opportunity to making a charitable donation on top of the ticket price conveniently packaged in the same transaction. I don't know if they are sending such people letters documenting a $1965 tax deductible donation or not, but they probably should.

I want to strongly push back against calling this stealing from the SWE. My central example of stealing is if Bob sneaks into Carla's house, riffles through her wallet, and takes some cash from it without permission. If instead Dean honestly offers a trade like "you give me money and I give you a seat at a concert" and Eve accepts the trade, gives Dean the money, and gets the seat at the concert she wanted, that's not stealing. Eve has a real choice, she can really decide not to go to the concert. 

That is certainly the most central example of stealing, but we use the word to describe a lot of things that don't look too much like that in the specifics. We have words for whole categories of crime that we will colloquially call stealing, because they prompt the exact same moral revulsion for the same kinds of reasons, even though the specifics are rather different. I'm thinking of things like fraud, extortion, blackmail, and embezzlement. None of us would hesitate to call was SBF did stealing, for example. And what I'm trying to point at there is that charging higher rates based on income for the same product, even if enforced only by social pressure, falls into that same category.

With price discrimination, I think you are equating some rather different things under that label. Where a genuinely different product is being sold, and the customer can choose which product to buy, I don't think of that as price discrimination, at least not of the wrongful sort. The first class seat on an airplane is actually bigger and nicer than the economy seat. And when I was a software engineer I continued to fly economy and personal item only, and while the airlines may have tried to entice me with the luxuries of a more expensive ticket, they never once suggested that I ought to pay them more because I was making more. So I don't see anything wrong there. 


Another situation where I see a similar wrong occurring is haggling. The whole point of a haggling economy is to try to exploit people who have more money just because they have more money, by charging them more for the same product. That, to my mind, is theft too, and I would not participate in a space where it was practiced.


In the context of organizing a community event, I don't think we need to be as ruthlessly profit maximizing as a stereotypical for-profit corporation, but I also don't see anything wrong with paying organizers and aiming for some profit to build up the organization. I think that is what good organizers do when the community can support it. I don't know why you seem to want to treat it as something shameful. When I buy a ticket to an event at Lighthaven, I know very well that a fraction of that is going to pay the half dozen staff of Lightcone, and that is fine. Nobody seems to object to this.

I don't have any particular inside knowledge of the finances of bay area solstice either. (I do know that the after party is not included, that is a separate ticket). But if you are right that the $35 per person is not enough to pay for the venue and the equipment and such (I think the musicians might be volunteers?), then I think the organizers messed up and should have marked a higher price as the default price.

I don't think I agree with your nuances. For the engineer who doesn't enjoy the event but goes along as someone's date, I would still expect them to pay the $35, and would look down on them if they did not. If the date isn't worth $35 to someone making $500k, I think they've made bad dating choices.

In the case of the $500k engineer who enjoys solstice paying exactly $35, it actually seems very important to me that they be seen as having fulfilled their obligations, as having cooperated, not defected. If you apply social pressure to get them to pay more, you are essentially trying to use social pressure to commit a theft. That sets of very loud alarm bells for me. That is absolutely not an ok thing to do, and I do not want to be part of any community that operates that way. A community does not become entitled to my wealth just because I am part of it, it only becomes entitled to my wealth to the extent that I choose to draw on community resources. This is the point I was trying to make when I said that not having a price marked as paying ones own way came off as a bit stealy - one possible reading of that is that the organizers think the software engineer should pay more than their fraction of the event, and if that reading is correct, it is an attempt at stealing from the software engineer and should absolutely not happen in a community of honest people. The incentives at play here should also be obvious: if you try to exploit the financially well off by expecting them to pay more than their share, many of them will, with a great deal of justification, stop associating with you, and then you will have a smaller poorer community to spread the costs of your events over. Many other people who see the ethical problem will also stop associating with you.

edit: I'm not sure if this is our point of confusion or not, so I'll throw it out and you can tell me what you think. When I think of a price that constitutes "paying ones own way", I think it is fine for the organizers to include in that price things like informal financial aid (the subsidizing of the lower tear tickets), compensating the risk that the event incurs a loss, setting aside money for the next iteration of the event, etc. That can definitely result in a higher ticket price than simply taking the cost of the venue, the equipment, the musicians, etc, and dividing by the number of attendees. And that can create some amount of fuziness. And that is all fine. But it still seems important to me that the organizers pick a number that is within the range of that fuziness, publicly specify it as the price at which one is paying ones own way, and then treat everyone who pays that price, regardless of their income or wealth, as having fully cooperated. Is that similar to what you were trying to get at, or do we still have a genuine disagreement?

I want to make the case that the rationalist community is less of a gift economy than you make out, and that where it goes more gift economy that can be bad.

To start I'd like to compare to a university charging tuition. There is a clearly marked out rate that is standard tuition, the rate at which one is paying ones own way. Maybe it's $50k/yr. Some nontrivial fraction of students/parents are surely paying exactly that. Some are paying more. Maybe Sally's dad has been donating a few thousand a year to the university, which happens to be his alma mater, for decades, in the hope that it would help Sally's chances of admission. Maybe Joe Johnson's mom donated tens of millions, both earning Joe a place and getting her name on Johnson Hall. And there are surely people paying less than $50k/yr, maybe even nothing - they are relatively poor and attending on some kind of scholarship or financial aid. In short, the prices being paid range over several orders of magnitude, and everybody knows it. Yet this is not a gift economy. This is a market economy.

I would read bay area solstice tickets the same way. Yes there is a broad range that someone could contribute. But there is a price clearly marked as the price at which one is paying ones own way, $35. If someone doesn't have much money it is fine to pay less, but this is essentially informal financial aid. If one of those highly paid software engineers paid less than $35, I expect this would be viewed as reflecting rather negatively on them. I'd certainly be less inclined to invite such a person to my parties. And some people do pay more than $35, because they have plenty of money and want to contribute, and that is great, but not particularly expected of anyone, even the highly paid software engineer. This is all fine and good and how it should be, but it is also very much like university tuition, not particularly giftish. 

By contrast, I have occasionally seen rationalist events in other cities that have a range of prices you could pay for the same thing, but don't have a price clearly marked as the price where one is paying ones own way. This is bad. It makes it impossible for people like me, who have enough money to pay their own way but not enough to throw it around, to know what to pay. The ambiguity makes signing up for these events very aversive. It can also come off as a bit stealy - like the organizers think they are entitled to more money from the highly paid software engineers than is their fair share. This does look more like a gift economy, and it does not look desirable.

It is also worth noting that a nontrivial fraction of our community tries to make a virtue of betting on things. I don't like this practice, but it is there, and it is kindof the opposite of a gift economy.

The masks you link to have an exhaust valve, which makes sense for the intended non-medical use cases, but in a pandemic scenario that means the mask will protect the wearer from infected others, but will not protect others from a (potentially unaware) infected wearer. Aside from the ethical implications of that, if one lives in a place like Massachusetts or California or New York, it is not likely to satisfy masking requirements. Do you have an alternative suggestion without the valve?

Conflict of interest 

• Medical professionals - that endorse themselves to do procedures like surgery and convince patients to pay them to do it.

A salesperson who doesn't endorse their own product is in the wrong job. The weird thing to me is that a doctor is the only kind of salesperson who expects to get paid when they don't make a sale. You go to a car dealership and don't buy a car, the salesperson doesn't get paid for that. You walk into a Best Buy, play with some of the computers on display, and ask the salesperson some questions, but leave without buying anything, Best Buy doesn't get paid for that. Yet if you go to a doctor, and the doctor fails to diagnose your condition, or to prescribe a treatment you will consent to, somehow the doctor still expects you to pay. That seems wrong to me.

Which group office, if I can ask?

Yea, I guess this is one of those things where American being composed of states maybe makes things weird. A corporation (or LLC or whatever) is a creation of state law. When you form a corporation, you file paperwork with the secretary of state of one of the states, not even necessarily one you are particularly closely connected to, and then your corporation is controlled by the corporate law of that particular state. Many businesses famously incorporate in the state of Delaware because its corporate law is very friendly to businesses. Whereas 501c3 is a tax status that the federal government confers on an organization that has the right kind of purpose.

I think what Andrew may have been referring to is a 990. A 990 is a form that non-church 501c3s have to file with the federal government every year. Churches don't have to, but that exemption is statutory law, not constitutional law. I've never thought of the form 990 as "snooping". It's just reporting what the major programs are, what money is coming in and flowing around at a high level, who the directors and officers are, etc. The idea is that in exchange for these tax advantages, the public ought to have access to this information. But I guess if you have a stronger notion of privacy or something you might regard it as snooping.

I don't want to give too strong an impression about CEOs being board chairs. There definitely are organizations that do that, and no real legal constraints on it. And I'm sure there are Americans who think it is just fine. There has been a bit written on the EA forum about how different people seem to have rather different conceptions of what a board is for. But on the boards where I served, we understood the board's most important role as being the CEO's boss, and we saw that as incompatible with having the CEO on the board, or even present for the portions of board meetings where we discussed the CEO's performance. And yes, when I look at OpenAI and see Sam Altman on the board, that does not look great to me, though it would not be my first point of concern about OpenAI.

There is a concept in American nonprofit law that board members and staff members shouldn't be paid too much, but there is no clearly defined threshold of what constitutes too much, and little enforcement in practice. It's more a matter of looking at what similar nonprofits are doing, and not being too out of line with that. And in the case where the top staff person was on the board, that board status wouldn't prevent paying them like a top staff person.

I'm an American ex-lawyer and have served on nonprofit boards in the past, though it is not the area of law I practiced. I think there are some mistakes here, so I'll go through point by point.

Governance structure - there are churches with all kinds of governance structures in America. Some have a hierarchy in which the bishops or whomever effectively own everything (Catholics and Mormons for example). Some have much more collective governance by local congregations. Not only does law not dictate a governance structure, there is a principle in American constitutional law called the Ecclesiastical Abstention Doctrine that says that the government cannot interfere in the governance of a church.

Liability - I'm not sure what is meant here. In America, the question of liability is actually kindof orthogonal to the question of churchness. To get limited liability (meaning you can't go after one leader's personal assets when another leader screws up) you file paperwork with your state to become a corporation or LLC or something. 501c3 status is a matter of federal law. An organization can have either or both or neither. I'm also not sure what is meant by "full liabilty" for the French case.

Purpose - 501c3 describes a pretty broad class of nonprofits. A religious purpose is one kind of purpose that qualifies an organization for 501c3 status. And churches always have a religious purpose. So basically churches are a subset of religious organization, which are in turn a subset of 501c3s. Once you are a church, there's no additional purpose requirement. All 501c3s are tax exempt and donations to them are tax deductible. So this sounds similar to the French case.

Constitutional protection - There's no actual need to incorporate to get constitutional protection. The US constitution protects the free exercise of religion, which can be done as part of a religious organization, incorporated or not, or can be done individually. An individual can even get constitutional protection for something their church does not endorse (see Thomas v. Review Board, 450 US 707 (1981)). That said, I can't think of any cases or principles that deal with "snooping" in particular. There are constitutional limits on searches and seizures that derive from the Fourth Amendment, but those wouldn't be any different for a church versus any other organization. There are also some limits that derive from the Freedom of Association, which is part of the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment, and which again would not be any different for a church versus a secular organization. Here I'm thinking of NAACP v. Alabama, note that the NAACP is not a religious organization.

Lobbying - technically a church could give up its 501c3 status, still be a church in other respects (like constitutional protections), and lobby as much as it wants. I don't know of any actually doing this. What would be the point? Just form a lobbying organization with a different tax status. So this isn't really a restriction on what a group of people who might also be a church can do, it is just a requirement that they form a separate corporate entity with a different status to do the lobbying, which in turn has tax implications. Lobbying groups, 501c4 is the status I am most familiar with, are also tax exempt, but donations to them are not tax deductable. It sounds like this deductability of donations is the real difference betweeen Amercan and French lobbying.

I'm also not sure why you would frame making the leader an employee rather than a board member as a workaround. It's true this is not required in American nonprofits, but it is definitely the best practice. The core purpose of a nonprofit board is to supervise the top level of staff, and a board cannot do that effectively if the leader of the organization is a member of the board. You shouldn't want your leader on your board even if it were legally permissible.