It isn’t just corruption that is a worry it is also the simple fact that if you are not corrupted, you will fit in really, really badly in your at-work social context. If you are obviously one of the righteous, and you are working at vampire squid headquarters, people are going to be rightly concerned that you may at any moment redo your utility calculations in the light of new data about just how vile they are and decide that the greatest net good you can accomplish is to, oh, copy every file you can lay your hands on, turn states evidence and in general pull a Samson in the temple on them. So, you know, perhaps not the most likely person to receive promotions.
More practically: Given the ability to get this sort of job you can almost certainly do much more net good by going into engineering, medicine or similar and working very hard at perfecting something which has broad use. The low-cost solar powered air-conditioner, the app that has a walkthrough on how to build the best possible house and outhouse given local ´materials, a shovel and lots of time (the third world has quite high smartphone penetration, and it will only go higher) Heck, even a humanities degree can be leveraged to outperform any plausible amount of giving if you laser down at producing something which makes the lives of enough people better. - Because in any given job, far more resources will pass through your hands than will be diverted into your bank account. It thus matters more what you do than what you earn. Pick a vocation. Be conscientious and diligent in executing it—this may result in personal wealth, or may not, but the mere act of doing a good job at a good task improves the world.
Earning to give doesn’t require working for companies that are actively evil with secret malicious blow-the-whistle-on plans, and I don’t think working for such organizations would be a good idea. But if you’re working in tech (ex: me) or finance (ex: Jason Trigg) you can still fit in fine with your coworkers. You don’t “ooze righteousness” or anything. (And I think trying to avoid coming off as “holier than thou” is very important if we don’t want effective altruism to appear arrogant and offputting.)
“you can almost certainly do much more net good by going into engineering, medicine or similar and working very hard at perfecting something which has broad use”
You’re making pretty strong claims (“outperform any plausible amount of giving”) but the only evidence you’re giving seems to be the claim that “in any given job, far more resources will pass through your hands than will be diverted into your bank account”. Each individual doesn’t have that much control over resources passing through their hands, while they have a lot of control over what they do with money they earn and can donate. But let’s look at an example.
As the tech lead for the pagespeed module I’m one of ~10 people working on open source web server software that speeds up ~0.5% of internet page views by ~0.1s. There are about 1M page views per second on the internet, so every second we save people about 500s, or 500 person-years of time every year. That’s 50-years per team member, so you could say through my work I save one life a year. Now for this work I get paid enough enough that I can donate about $100k/year. Donations to the AMF save a life for ~$2.5k but let’s say $5k to be safe. So that’s 20 lives. This is rough, but in my case at least my donations are going about 20x farther than my work. Add in replaceability and that shifts the balance even further in favor of donations.
LW runs on markup. That means quotes that are marked with a ( > ) at the beginning get formatted nicely while quotes that are just marked with ” at the start and end don’t.
Well, most jobs don’t save or destroy many lives, but if you are planning your career around doing the most good—And the earning to give argument has only limited applicability to people who are already on a career track—then you can pick a job that does.
It isn’t just corruption that is a worry it is also the simple fact that if you are not corrupted, you will fit in really, really badly in your at-work social context. If you are obviously one of the righteous, and you are working at vampire squid headquarters, people are going to be rightly concerned that you may at any moment redo your utility calculations in the light of new data about just how vile they are and decide that the greatest net good you can accomplish is to, oh, copy every file you can lay your hands on, turn states evidence and in general pull a Samson in the temple on them. So, you know, perhaps not the most likely person to receive promotions.
More practically: Given the ability to get this sort of job you can almost certainly do much more net good by going into engineering, medicine or similar and working very hard at perfecting something which has broad use. The low-cost solar powered air-conditioner, the app that has a walkthrough on how to build the best possible house and outhouse given local ´materials, a shovel and lots of time (the third world has quite high smartphone penetration, and it will only go higher) Heck, even a humanities degree can be leveraged to outperform any plausible amount of giving if you laser down at producing something which makes the lives of enough people better. - Because in any given job, far more resources will pass through your hands than will be diverted into your bank account. It thus matters more what you do than what you earn. Pick a vocation. Be conscientious and diligent in executing it—this may result in personal wealth, or may not, but the mere act of doing a good job at a good task improves the world.
“working at vampire squid headquarters...”
Earning to give doesn’t require working for companies that are actively evil with secret malicious blow-the-whistle-on plans, and I don’t think working for such organizations would be a good idea. But if you’re working in tech (ex: me) or finance (ex: Jason Trigg) you can still fit in fine with your coworkers. You don’t “ooze righteousness” or anything. (And I think trying to avoid coming off as “holier than thou” is very important if we don’t want effective altruism to appear arrogant and offputting.)
“you can almost certainly do much more net good by going into engineering, medicine or similar and working very hard at perfecting something which has broad use”
You’re making pretty strong claims (“outperform any plausible amount of giving”) but the only evidence you’re giving seems to be the claim that “in any given job, far more resources will pass through your hands than will be diverted into your bank account”. Each individual doesn’t have that much control over resources passing through their hands, while they have a lot of control over what they do with money they earn and can donate. But let’s look at an example.
As the tech lead for the pagespeed module I’m one of ~10 people working on open source web server software that speeds up ~0.5% of internet page views by ~0.1s. There are about 1M page views per second on the internet, so every second we save people about 500s, or 500 person-years of time every year. That’s 50-years per team member, so you could say through my work I save one life a year. Now for this work I get paid enough enough that I can donate about $100k/year. Donations to the AMF save a life for ~$2.5k but let’s say $5k to be safe. So that’s 20 lives. This is rough, but in my case at least my donations are going about 20x farther than my work. Add in replaceability and that shifts the balance even further in favor of donations.
I am reminded of an old Robin Hanson post on “helpful” professions.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2006/12/do_helping_prof.html
LW runs on markup. That means quotes that are marked with a ( > ) at the beginning get formatted nicely while quotes that are just marked with ” at the start and end don’t.
Well, most jobs don’t save or destroy many lives, but if you are planning your career around doing the most good—And the earning to give argument has only limited applicability to people who are already on a career track—then you can pick a job that does.