Is the Bay area rationalist community really all that great as a social group compared to just meeting the smart nice sane people who live in every town?
I’ll say the one big advantage here is pre-existing shared context. I can walk into a rationalist or EA party or other space and just already have a ton in common with the other people there. We have natural things to talk about, and there’s some useful amount of pre-vetting that happens via a self-selection process that seems to shed many of the “smart nice sane people” would are otherwise fairly incompatible with much of rationality and EA (for example, high contextualizers who are uncomfortable talking about ideas in isolation from the social consequences of talking about those ideas).
Haha, I guess if I liked parties that would be a draw. As it is, I’ve been collecting people like this for years and have a solid friend group who I can have these conversations with regularly. But maybe post-pandemic I’ll take a turn at being a rationalist socialite down in San Fran and see if I like it.
I honestly have no idea what non-college, non-rationalist parties are like, but if I just compare the two, rationalist parties have significantly less drinking, often have more accommodations for people with sensory processing issues, and almost always have waaaay more conversations about AI alignment.
I’ll say the one big advantage here is pre-existing shared context. I can walk into a rationalist or EA party or other space and just already have a ton in common with the other people there. We have natural things to talk about, and there’s some useful amount of pre-vetting that happens via a self-selection process that seems to shed many of the “smart nice sane people” would are otherwise fairly incompatible with much of rationality and EA (for example, high contextualizers who are uncomfortable talking about ideas in isolation from the social consequences of talking about those ideas).
Haha, I guess if I liked parties that would be a draw. As it is, I’ve been collecting people like this for years and have a solid friend group who I can have these conversations with regularly. But maybe post-pandemic I’ll take a turn at being a rationalist socialite down in San Fran and see if I like it.
I honestly have no idea what non-college, non-rationalist parties are like, but if I just compare the two, rationalist parties have significantly less drinking, often have more accommodations for people with sensory processing issues, and almost always have waaaay more conversations about AI alignment.