Yeah, it’s sounding like this is probably going to end up being the right answer (insofar as there is a ‘right answer’).
Over the years there have been quite a few ‘secondary hubs’ centered around strong local groups, including:
NYC
Seattle
Boston
Oxford
Berlin
Melbourne
Ontario?
But things have shifted a bunch and many of those people ended up moving to Berkeley. My rough sense now is that we have:
Prague
draw: Czech EA
type: big city , continental Europe
Blackpool
draw: the EA Hotel
type: small town
Oxford?
draw: FHI
type: university town
London?
draw: 80000 Hours is there
type: big city
I notice that all of these are in Europe, and three of them are in England. (Moscow also has a strong community but I didn’t count them because most of their stuff is conducted in Russian, which makes it a bad option for the median rationalist looking to move somewhere new.) Perhaps it would be better to diversify away from England and the US, like maybe some of us should move (back) to Australia.
But more importantly, there already are other options for hubs, they’re just not as well-known. Maybe we should focus on developing these hubs that we already have, rather than trying to find new ones?
While COVID-19 did make a dent in our community in Berlin and resulted in us not running LWCW in person we still had monthly meetups (in a park with distance) in the last months and I see no reason why our community won’t be healthy once we can again meet more freely.
Out of hand I can only think of one person who left the Berlin rationalist community to go to Berkely (OpenAI) but multiple people who moved to Berlin because of the existing rationalist hub.
Yeah, it’s sounding like this is probably going to end up being the right answer (insofar as there is a ‘right answer’).
Over the years there have been quite a few ‘secondary hubs’ centered around strong local groups, including:
NYC
Seattle
Boston
Oxford
Berlin
Melbourne
Ontario?
But things have shifted a bunch and many of those people ended up moving to Berkeley. My rough sense now is that we have:
Prague
draw: Czech EA
type: big city , continental Europe
Blackpool
draw: the EA Hotel
type: small town
Oxford?
draw: FHI
type: university town
London?
draw: 80000 Hours is there
type: big city
I notice that all of these are in Europe, and three of them are in England. (Moscow also has a strong community but I didn’t count them because most of their stuff is conducted in Russian, which makes it a bad option for the median rationalist looking to move somewhere new.) Perhaps it would be better to diversify away from England and the US, like maybe some of us should move (back) to Australia.
But more importantly, there already are other options for hubs, they’re just not as well-known. Maybe we should focus on developing these hubs that we already have, rather than trying to find new ones?
While COVID-19 did make a dent in our community in Berlin and resulted in us not running LWCW in person we still had monthly meetups (in a park with distance) in the last months and I see no reason why our community won’t be healthy once we can again meet more freely.
Out of hand I can only think of one person who left the Berlin rationalist community to go to Berkely (OpenAI) but multiple people who moved to Berlin because of the existing rationalist hub.