Organsations can generally only scale at a certain rate. I’d be rather surprised if they fail to find candidates at the skill level that they’re looking for the rates that they’re offering.
But beyond this, there’s no shortage of things they could money on:
Lightcone has vague references to some kind of campus project—that sounds expensive?
EA funds community builders in major cities, but LW doesn’t. This might be something worth considering, although I know that they’re wary of making LW a movement.
They could take on paid interns to edit the Wiki
Funding community members or outside experts to produce research on topics deemed to be of particular importance
This is just off the top of my head. I’m sure there’s lots of other ideas of how many could be spent out there and we should be careful not to fixate on this one just because it’s most prominent in our minds.
In any case, if Lightcone decides to offer higher salaries it can’t exactly lower them very easily if it decides that the higher priority is spending money elsewhere. On the other hand, if it becomes clear that high-quality staff is the real bottleneck, then they can always raise salaries later.
Organsations can generally only scale at a certain rate. I’d be rather surprised if they fail to find candidates at the skill level that they’re looking for the rates that they’re offering.
But beyond this, there’s no shortage of things they could money on:
Lightcone has vague references to some kind of campus project—that sounds expensive?
EA funds community builders in major cities, but LW doesn’t. This might be something worth considering, although I know that they’re wary of making LW a movement.
They could take on paid interns to edit the Wiki
Funding community members or outside experts to produce research on topics deemed to be of particular importance
This is just off the top of my head. I’m sure there’s lots of other ideas of how many could be spent out there and we should be careful not to fixate on this one just because it’s most prominent in our minds.
In any case, if Lightcone decides to offer higher salaries it can’t exactly lower them very easily if it decides that the higher priority is spending money elsewhere. On the other hand, if it becomes clear that high-quality staff is the real bottleneck, then they can always raise salaries later.
While my post was prompted by the Lightcone announcement and subsequent comment thread, it’s really meant to be more general commentary in an environment where we seem to be in a funding overhang (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zA6AnNnYBwuokF8kB/is-effective-altruism-growing-an-update-on-the-stock-of).