Seems so wrong I cannot even come up with a simple explanation of how wrong it is.
I usually describe Luke with phrases like “insanely prolific”. I had preordered Robot Ethics and he managed to write this article before I managed to crack the book open—and I’m doing a dissertation on the subject...
I said 5 years ago that this Singularity business seems pretty important and so I should maybe think about moving to Silicon Valley to work on it… years later, Luke learned about the problem, did probably more research than I’ve done yet, moved out there, and became SIAI’s Executive Director...
I think I’ll go sputter incredulously elsewhere for a while.
Then it seems the average person you know is more productive than any person I know.
Or you just don’t count what Luke is doing as ‘productive’ for whatever reason. You did imply that Luke’s “essays” are not impressive—but I think they’re higher-quality than most of what I see in academic journals.
Then it seems the average person you know is more productive than any person I know.
This seems possible but unlikely.
Or you just don’t count what Luke is doing as ‘productive’ for whatever reason.
I think he is productive, just not exceptionally productive. I count his essays on LW are part of his job at SI, for which I believe he is paid a tiny salary. I have no reason to think that his output is higher than anyone else who makes the same amount of $ that he does, so I don’t think he is especially productive. Now, maybe his essays will multiply SI’s contributions by a large factor or he’ll get a sweet book deal or make $Millions on speaking tours or something, and in that case my estimate of the value of those essays will have been way off, but those things seem to have a low probability at this point.
Is that an unreasonable way to think about productivity? If so, where am I going awry?
Luke’s essays mostly contain synopses of rather large amounts of research he’s done, he does organizational and publicity work for the SIAI, and also, I’m led to understand, practically all the odd jobs around the SIAI which nobody else can be arsed to do.
Luke may not be raking it in, but his salary is by no means “tiny,” and the SIAI hired him because he appeared to be the most productive person they could get for the position.
also, I’m led to understand, practically all the odd jobs around the SIAI which nobody else can be arsed to do.
So, he works hard and does a lot of low value grunt work. LOTS of people do that. People who are truly productive figure out how to devote lots of time to the highest value work they can and minimize the time spent on crap work. Wouldn’t Luke do better to raise an extra $30K/year or whatever so he can hire someone to do the odd jobs and focus on whatever is the most valuable stuff he can do?
Luke may not be raking it in, but his salary is by no means “tiny,”
Maybe tiny is not a fair term but certainly unexceptional?
SIAI hired him because he appeared to be the most productive person they could get for the position.
That’s generally what organizations do, unless they have horrible agency problems. Are you saying that they had applications from really impressive candidates and turned them down for Luke? If the executive director of the Red Cross or the president of Harvard desperately wanted the job but Luke beat them out then that would be impressive.
So, he works hard and does a lot of low value grunt work. LOTS of people do that. People who are truly productive figure out how to devote lots of time to the highest value work they can and minimize the time spent on crap work. Wouldn’t Luke do better to raise an extra $30K/year or whatever so he can hire someone to do the odd jobs and focus on whatever is the most valuable stuff he can do?
He started soliciting people for that months ago.
Maybe tiny is not a fair term but certainly unexceptional?
The SIAI is a nonprofit organization. You know how on this site we often discuss how any money one devotes to unnecessary expenditures is money that could have gone into, say, saving lives? How we can think of money as measured in terms of dead children? And how a lot of people here think the SIAI is probably the most efficient charity in terms of expected utility?
If Luke conceives of himself as an altruist, then he’s not going to ask for as much money as he can get away with, because that’s simply taking more resources out of a highly efficient charity, which isn’t being repaid in additional work.
That’s generally what organizations do, unless they have horrible agency problems. Are you saying that they had applications from really impressive candidates and turned them down for Luke? If the executive director of the Red Cross or the president of Harvard desperately wanted the job but Luke beat them out then that would be impressive.
They sought Luke out for the position. They saw what he was doing and thought “this is a guy we should seriously hire.” Have you ever been offered an executive position at a workplace you didn’t apply to work at because they were that impressed by your productivity?
They sought Luke out for the position. They saw what he was doing and thought “this is a guy we should seriously hire.”
By the time he was appointed Exec Director, Luke had been working for SingInst at least eight months and had helped organize the minicamp and summit. It’s a big credit to Luke that he proved himself this quickly, but it wasn’t exactly out of the blue like you make it sound.
Well, I wasn’t aware that Luke had been working for the SIAI in any official capacity before Eliezer made the “Help Fund Lukeprog at SIAI” post, so consider me corrected.
The executive assistant, I think it’s called, has been hired for a while. (I forget who it was, I know I saw their name somewhere.) Research-wise, I started 25 January 2012, and we all saw the big ad Luke posted for more research assistants, which will probably have people up and running in 2 weeks or so (although I don’t know how far that’s gotten).
Do you really think that you can evaluate someone’s productivity simply by looking at their salary?
For instance, imagine an exceptionally intelligent and hard-working individual who leaves a high-paying job in finance or tech to work on a startup. Have they suddenly become unproductive because they have switched to a role that pays less (in the short term)?
Conversely, imagine a similar individual who is working at a startup for 16 hours every day, but grows burnt out and leaves to take a job at a normal tech company, where he works for only 8 hours a day but makes a much higher salary. Can this person really be said to have become more productive?
By economic definition, he’s more productive in the latter position… unless you are smuggling in unstated axioms about positive externalities about the former position overwhelming the revealed preference of the economy for his work in the latter position, which I rather hope you aren’t, since that would be begging the question.
I’m not talking about positive externalities, I’m talking about actual work being done. Some structures—early-stage startup companies generally included—tend to involve disproportionately large amounts of work relative to others, which is made up for by the potential for very high, if delayed, payoffs.
The “revealed preference of the economy” is difficult to actually determine in such cases given the uncertainties involved, though it could likely be estimated using reference class forecasting and similar predictive techniques.
For instance, imagine an exceptionally intelligent and hard-working individual who leaves a high-paying job in finance or tech to work on a startup. Have they suddenly become unproductive because they have switched to a role that pays less (in the short term)?
This is a very uncharitable interpretation of what I said. Their productivity in the startup has to be based on an expected value calculation. If the startup accomplishes nothing and goes under, then I think it is fair to say that all their hard work was unproductive and they would have been more productive selling their labor to someone who knew how to do something useful with it. If their startup makes $Billions then all the work they did to bring it to fruition was very productive. Ahead of time you have to guess at the distribution of possible outcomes and base expected productivity on that.
I said that if lukeprog’s current activities somehow yield big dividends in the future then I will have been wrong about his current productivity. I just don’t think that is very likely.
Ah, we seem to be using different definitions of productive. I was using “productive” in the sense of “effective at performing tasks,” while you seem to be using it in the sense of “producing economic value—” my mistake. I think I was confused by your statement
I have no reason to think that his output is higher than anyone else who makes the same amount of $ that he does, so I don’t think he is especially productive.
which seems to conflate “output” with productivity.
Do you think you can evaluate the productivity of a group of people by looking at their combined $ output? There is this measure called GDP that does that and it is pretty popular.
I think that $ output should be the starting point of evaluating productivity and adjustments from that point should require some justification. Salary is not the same as $ output but it should be roughly proportional. People can’t really be paid 100% of their output, so maybe on average salary is like 50% of $ output, and for some people it is only 25% and for some people it is 75%. That already creates a lot of potential error, but again there needs to be some reason to believe that a person is overpaid or underpaid relative to their $ output.
Do you think you can evaluate the productivity of a group of people by looking at their combined $ output? There is this measure called GDP that does that and it is pretty popular.
But also extremely bad as a measure of wealth generation. The economists who came up with the concept in the first place basically said “by no means should this be used as a measure of wealth generation,” but then we went and did it anyway for lack of an obviously better measure.
As for the relation of salary to productivity, an incompetent CEO who runs their company into the ground (and thus has a negative wealth output) can make orders of magnitude more money than, say, a highly productive academic. Salary is not a good proxy either for the usefulness of the work one produces or the amount of time and effort one spends being productive (the hardest and longest working people in the country are often among the worst paid.)
I would characterize GDP as “obviously wrong” as a measure of actual productivity.
That being said, one good reason to assume that someone is underpaid relative to their output is that they work in the nonprofit sector, where salaries are typically lower for equivalent levels of work.
Both things are possible, but among the people I know who have been to grad school, written books or both, I wouldn’t say that the average, or even any of them are as productive as Luke.
Calling lukeprog “not productive”...
Seems so wrong I cannot even come up with a simple explanation of how wrong it is.
I usually describe Luke with phrases like “insanely prolific”. I had preordered Robot Ethics and he managed to write this article before I managed to crack the book open—and I’m doing a dissertation on the subject...
I said 5 years ago that this Singularity business seems pretty important and so I should maybe think about moving to Silicon Valley to work on it… years later, Luke learned about the problem, did probably more research than I’ve done yet, moved out there, and became SIAI’s Executive Director...
I think I’ll go sputter incredulously elsewhere for a while.
Maybe lukeprog is very productive compared to you and not very productive compared to the average person I know? Aren’t both things possible?
Then it seems the average person you know is more productive than any person I know.
Or you just don’t count what Luke is doing as ‘productive’ for whatever reason. You did imply that Luke’s “essays” are not impressive—but I think they’re higher-quality than most of what I see in academic journals.
This seems possible but unlikely.
I think he is productive, just not exceptionally productive. I count his essays on LW are part of his job at SI, for which I believe he is paid a tiny salary. I have no reason to think that his output is higher than anyone else who makes the same amount of $ that he does, so I don’t think he is especially productive. Now, maybe his essays will multiply SI’s contributions by a large factor or he’ll get a sweet book deal or make $Millions on speaking tours or something, and in that case my estimate of the value of those essays will have been way off, but those things seem to have a low probability at this point.
Is that an unreasonable way to think about productivity? If so, where am I going awry?
Luke’s essays mostly contain synopses of rather large amounts of research he’s done, he does organizational and publicity work for the SIAI, and also, I’m led to understand, practically all the odd jobs around the SIAI which nobody else can be arsed to do.
Luke may not be raking it in, but his salary is by no means “tiny,” and the SIAI hired him because he appeared to be the most productive person they could get for the position.
So, he works hard and does a lot of low value grunt work. LOTS of people do that. People who are truly productive figure out how to devote lots of time to the highest value work they can and minimize the time spent on crap work. Wouldn’t Luke do better to raise an extra $30K/year or whatever so he can hire someone to do the odd jobs and focus on whatever is the most valuable stuff he can do?
Maybe tiny is not a fair term but certainly unexceptional?
That’s generally what organizations do, unless they have horrible agency problems. Are you saying that they had applications from really impressive candidates and turned them down for Luke? If the executive director of the Red Cross or the president of Harvard desperately wanted the job but Luke beat them out then that would be impressive.
He started soliciting people for that months ago.
The SIAI is a nonprofit organization. You know how on this site we often discuss how any money one devotes to unnecessary expenditures is money that could have gone into, say, saving lives? How we can think of money as measured in terms of dead children? And how a lot of people here think the SIAI is probably the most efficient charity in terms of expected utility?
If Luke conceives of himself as an altruist, then he’s not going to ask for as much money as he can get away with, because that’s simply taking more resources out of a highly efficient charity, which isn’t being repaid in additional work.
They sought Luke out for the position. They saw what he was doing and thought “this is a guy we should seriously hire.” Have you ever been offered an executive position at a workplace you didn’t apply to work at because they were that impressed by your productivity?
By the time he was appointed Exec Director, Luke had been working for SingInst at least eight months and had helped organize the minicamp and summit. It’s a big credit to Luke that he proved himself this quickly, but it wasn’t exactly out of the blue like you make it sound.
Well, I wasn’t aware that Luke had been working for the SIAI in any official capacity before Eliezer made the “Help Fund Lukeprog at SIAI” post, so consider me corrected.
The executive assistant, I think it’s called, has been hired for a while. (I forget who it was, I know I saw their name somewhere.) Research-wise, I started 25 January 2012, and we all saw the big ad Luke posted for more research assistants, which will probably have people up and running in 2 weeks or so (although I don’t know how far that’s gotten).
Do you really think that you can evaluate someone’s productivity simply by looking at their salary?
For instance, imagine an exceptionally intelligent and hard-working individual who leaves a high-paying job in finance or tech to work on a startup. Have they suddenly become unproductive because they have switched to a role that pays less (in the short term)?
Conversely, imagine a similar individual who is working at a startup for 16 hours every day, but grows burnt out and leaves to take a job at a normal tech company, where he works for only 8 hours a day but makes a much higher salary. Can this person really be said to have become more productive?
By economic definition, he’s more productive in the latter position… unless you are smuggling in unstated axioms about positive externalities about the former position overwhelming the revealed preference of the economy for his work in the latter position, which I rather hope you aren’t, since that would be begging the question.
I’m not talking about positive externalities, I’m talking about actual work being done. Some structures—early-stage startup companies generally included—tend to involve disproportionately large amounts of work relative to others, which is made up for by the potential for very high, if delayed, payoffs.
The “revealed preference of the economy” is difficult to actually determine in such cases given the uncertainties involved, though it could likely be estimated using reference class forecasting and similar predictive techniques.
This is a very uncharitable interpretation of what I said. Their productivity in the startup has to be based on an expected value calculation. If the startup accomplishes nothing and goes under, then I think it is fair to say that all their hard work was unproductive and they would have been more productive selling their labor to someone who knew how to do something useful with it. If their startup makes $Billions then all the work they did to bring it to fruition was very productive. Ahead of time you have to guess at the distribution of possible outcomes and base expected productivity on that.
I said that if lukeprog’s current activities somehow yield big dividends in the future then I will have been wrong about his current productivity. I just don’t think that is very likely.
Ah, we seem to be using different definitions of productive. I was using “productive” in the sense of “effective at performing tasks,” while you seem to be using it in the sense of “producing economic value—” my mistake. I think I was confused by your statement
which seems to conflate “output” with productivity.
Do you think you can evaluate the productivity of a group of people by looking at their combined $ output? There is this measure called GDP that does that and it is pretty popular.
I think that $ output should be the starting point of evaluating productivity and adjustments from that point should require some justification. Salary is not the same as $ output but it should be roughly proportional. People can’t really be paid 100% of their output, so maybe on average salary is like 50% of $ output, and for some people it is only 25% and for some people it is 75%. That already creates a lot of potential error, but again there needs to be some reason to believe that a person is overpaid or underpaid relative to their $ output.
But also extremely bad as a measure of wealth generation. The economists who came up with the concept in the first place basically said “by no means should this be used as a measure of wealth generation,” but then we went and did it anyway for lack of an obviously better measure.
As for the relation of salary to productivity, an incompetent CEO who runs their company into the ground (and thus has a negative wealth output) can make orders of magnitude more money than, say, a highly productive academic. Salary is not a good proxy either for the usefulness of the work one produces or the amount of time and effort one spends being productive (the hardest and longest working people in the country are often among the worst paid.)
I would characterize GDP as “obviously wrong” as a measure of actual productivity.
That being said, one good reason to assume that someone is underpaid relative to their output is that they work in the nonprofit sector, where salaries are typically lower for equivalent levels of work.
Both things are possible, but among the people I know who have been to grad school, written books or both, I wouldn’t say that the average, or even any of them are as productive as Luke.