Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Why Altruists Can't Have Nice Things, published by lincolnq on June 21, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Gesturing at a thing to mostly avoid. My personal opinion.

This topic has been discussed on the EA Forum before, e.g. Free-spending EA might be a big problem (2022) and The biggest risk of free-spending EA is grift (2022). I also wrote What's Your Hourly Rate? in 2013, and Value of time as an employee in 2019. This piece mostly stands on its own.

There's a temptation, when solving the world's toughest and most-important problems, to throw money around.

Lattes on tap! Full-time massage team! Business class flights! Retreat in the Bahamas! When you do the cost/benefit analysis it comes out positive: "An extra four hours of sleep on the plane is worth four thousand dollars, because of how much we're getting paid and how tight the time is."

The problem, which we always underindex on, is that our culture doesn't stand up to this kind of assault on normalcy. No altruistic, mission-oriented culture can. "I have never witnessed so much money in my life." [1]

What is culture? I often phrase it as "lessons from the early days of an org." How we survive; how we make it work despite the tough times; our story of how we started with something small and ended up with something great. That knowledge fundamentally pervades everything we do. It needs upkeep and constant reinforcement. "It is always Day One" [2] refers to how Amazon is trying hard, even as they have grown huge, to preserve their culture of scrappiness and caring.

What perks say

Fancy, unusual, expensive perks are costly signals. They're saying or implying the following:

Your time is worth a lot of money

You are special and important, you deserve this

We are rich and successful; we are elite

We are generous and you are lucky to be in our orbit

You're in the inner ring; you're better than people who aren't part of this

We desperately want to keep you around

You are free from menial tasks

You would never pay for this on your own—but through us, you can have it anyway

We're just like Google!

Some of these things might be locally true, but when I zoom out, I get a villainous vibe: this story flatters, it manipulates, it promotes hubris, it tells lies you want to believe. It's a Faustian trade: in exchange for these perks you "just" have to distort your reality, and we're not even asking you to believe hard scary things, just nice ego-boosting things about how special, irreplaceable, on-the-right-track we all are.

Signals you might want to send instead

The work cultures I prefer would signal something like the following:

We're normal people who have chosen to take on especially important work

We have an angle / insight that most people haven't realized/acted on yet

We might be wrong, and are constantly seeking evidence that would change our minds

We should try to be especially virtuous whenever we find ourselves setting a moral example for others

(We aren't morally better by default, although we may have a bit more information; we are always learning as we go)

We are focused on the long term good for the world

Tons of people are suffering / will suffer in the future

We remind ourselves of this regularly

(We regularly acknowledge suffering in the world; we definitely don't do things that are cushy)

We invest a lot in our people and their relationships, and act to preserve that value

Everyone works hard, sometimes they have to do things they don't want to do

We are in it for the long haul so don't burn out

(We might use money in various ways—to make our work relationships stronger or stave off burnout—but we aren't profligate.)

Instantiations of this culture will vary a decent amount—but I expect that a lot of altruistic orgs have/want to promote at least some subset of these values. Fancy perks push (perniciously, te...