I could never bring myself to accept the… salary cut you guys are taking in order to work [at SI]… SingInst should pay the salaries it needs to pay to recruit the kind of staff it needs to fulfill its mission; it’s harder to recruit if staff are expected to be defensive about demanding market salaries for their expertise...
So when I say “unnecessarily defensive”, I mean that all the stuff about the cost of taxis is after-the-fact defensive rationalization; it can’t be said about a single dollar you spend on having a life outside of SI. The truth is that even the best human rationalist in the world isn’t going to agree to giving those up, and since you have to recruit humans, you’d best pay the sort of salary that is going to attract and retain them. That of course includes yourself.
The same goes for saying “move to the Honduras”. Your perfectly utility-maximising AGIs will move to the Honduras, but your human staff won’t; they want to live in places like the Bay Area.
Yes, exactly.
So when I say “unnecessarily defensive”, I mean that all the stuff about the cost of taxis is after-the-fact defensive rationalization; it can’t be said about a single dollar you spend on having a life outside of SI. The truth is that even the best human rationalist in the world isn’t going to agree to giving those up, and since you have to recruit humans, you’d best pay the sort of salary that is going to attract and retain them. That of course includes yourself.
The same goes for saying “move to the Honduras”. Your perfectly utility-maximising AGIs will move to the Honduras, but your human staff won’t; they want to live in places like the Bay Area.