We could pick a second hub instead of a new first hub. We don’t need consensus or even a plurality. We just need critical mass in a location other than Berkeley. Preferably that new location would cater to a group that’s not well-served by Berkeley so we can get more total people into a hub. If we’re being careful, we should worry about Berkeley losing its critical mass as a result of the second hub, however, I don’t think that’s a likely outcome.
There’s some loss from splitting people across two hubs rather than getting everyone into one hub. However, I suspect indecision is causing way more long-term loss than the split would. I would recommend first trying to get more people into some hub, then worry about consolidation later.
I think NYC was long a ‘second hub’, and there were a bunch of third-tier hubs, but I think the relationships between the hubs never really worked out to make a happy global community. Here’s a post about some previous context. I also suspect that the community has never really had enough people or commitment to have ‘critical mass’ for multiple hubs, and this is part of the problem.
I think there are some systems that have successfully figured this out. I am optimistic about a bunch of current EA student groups at top universities, many of which I visited on the SSC road trip, where there’s both 1) natural recruitment and 2) natural outflow. If someone graduates from Yale and doesn’t stay in New Haven, this is not a surprise; if someone who works as a professional in Austin moves to the Bay Area, this is more of a surprise. This does have a succession problem, where it may be the case that a particular student organizer is great, and once they graduate the group falls apart, but I think at least one university has gone through a few ‘generations’ of organizers, and there’s probably more we can do to support future organizers.
I also think the Mormons have figured this out, where ‘Salt Lake’ controls a bunch of distribution and publishing and so on and is definitely the ‘cultural capital’ of the Mormon world. My sense is that in most places, rather than a weekly sermon cooked up by the local pastor you get a high-production values (in all senses) DVD from the central office. I think our version of that is popular blogs and podcasts, where a global community can be reading SSC and listening to the 80k hours podcast and so mostly be in sync with each other, but this only really works for the “excitement about cool topics” and “gradually fleshing out your world model” dimensions, and is not as good for local community norms or building pairwise relationships or so on.
I think a problem here is that while we have lots of features that are religion-like, I think we don’t really prioritize the “cultural center” aspects, and so there aren’t really people who want to be rationalist pastors / bishops / etc.; Eliezer mostly wants to work on AI safety instead of community-building, my sense is that CFAR mostly wants to work on skilling up / recruiting x-risk thinkers instead of community-building, and so on. For example, when I look at plans to make secondary hubs that seem likely to actually happen to me, most of them are parents trying to make good neighborhoods for themselves and their kids, where they are actually taking on the ‘burden of cultural ownership’ or w/e; I think a lot of orgs that people hope will be Community orgs are instead mostly interested in being Craft orgs.
That was a fascinating post about the relationship with Berkeley. I wonder how the situation has changed in the last two years since people became more cognizant of the problem. Note that some of the comments there refute your idea that the community never had enough people for multiple hubs. NYC and Melbourne in particular seemed to have plenty of people, but they dissipated after core members repeatedly got recruited by Berkeley.
It seems like Berkeley was overtly trying to eat other communities, but EA did it just by being better at a thing many Rationalists hoped the Rationality Community would be. The “competition” with EA seems healthy, so perhaps that one should be encouraged more explicitly.
I’ll note that for all the criticisms leveled at Berkeley in that post, I get the same impression of LW that Evan_Gaensbauer had of Berkeley. The sensible posts here (per my arrogant perspective) are much more life- and community-oriented. Jan_Kulveit in your link gave a tidy explanation of why that is, and I think it’s close to spot-on. Your observations about practical plans for secondary hubs are exactly what I’d expect.
We could pick a second hub instead of a new first hub. We don’t need consensus or even a plurality. We just need critical mass in a location other than Berkeley. Preferably that new location would cater to a group that’s not well-served by Berkeley so we can get more total people into a hub. If we’re being careful, we should worry about Berkeley losing its critical mass as a result of the second hub, however, I don’t think that’s a likely outcome.
There’s some loss from splitting people across two hubs rather than getting everyone into one hub. However, I suspect indecision is causing way more long-term loss than the split would. I would recommend first trying to get more people into some hub, then worry about consolidation later.
I think NYC was long a ‘second hub’, and there were a bunch of third-tier hubs, but I think the relationships between the hubs never really worked out to make a happy global community. Here’s a post about some previous context. I also suspect that the community has never really had enough people or commitment to have ‘critical mass’ for multiple hubs, and this is part of the problem.
I think there are some systems that have successfully figured this out. I am optimistic about a bunch of current EA student groups at top universities, many of which I visited on the SSC road trip, where there’s both 1) natural recruitment and 2) natural outflow. If someone graduates from Yale and doesn’t stay in New Haven, this is not a surprise; if someone who works as a professional in Austin moves to the Bay Area, this is more of a surprise. This does have a succession problem, where it may be the case that a particular student organizer is great, and once they graduate the group falls apart, but I think at least one university has gone through a few ‘generations’ of organizers, and there’s probably more we can do to support future organizers.
I also think the Mormons have figured this out, where ‘Salt Lake’ controls a bunch of distribution and publishing and so on and is definitely the ‘cultural capital’ of the Mormon world. My sense is that in most places, rather than a weekly sermon cooked up by the local pastor you get a high-production values (in all senses) DVD from the central office. I think our version of that is popular blogs and podcasts, where a global community can be reading SSC and listening to the 80k hours podcast and so mostly be in sync with each other, but this only really works for the “excitement about cool topics” and “gradually fleshing out your world model” dimensions, and is not as good for local community norms or building pairwise relationships or so on.
I think a problem here is that while we have lots of features that are religion-like, I think we don’t really prioritize the “cultural center” aspects, and so there aren’t really people who want to be rationalist pastors / bishops / etc.; Eliezer mostly wants to work on AI safety instead of community-building, my sense is that CFAR mostly wants to work on skilling up / recruiting x-risk thinkers instead of community-building, and so on. For example, when I look at plans to make secondary hubs that seem likely to actually happen to me, most of them are parents trying to make good neighborhoods for themselves and their kids, where they are actually taking on the ‘burden of cultural ownership’ or w/e; I think a lot of orgs that people hope will be Community orgs are instead mostly interested in being Craft orgs.
That was a fascinating post about the relationship with Berkeley. I wonder how the situation has changed in the last two years since people became more cognizant of the problem. Note that some of the comments there refute your idea that the community never had enough people for multiple hubs. NYC and Melbourne in particular seemed to have plenty of people, but they dissipated after core members repeatedly got recruited by Berkeley.
It seems like Berkeley was overtly trying to eat other communities, but EA did it just by being better at a thing many Rationalists hoped the Rationality Community would be. The “competition” with EA seems healthy, so perhaps that one should be encouraged more explicitly.
I’ll note that for all the criticisms leveled at Berkeley in that post, I get the same impression of LW that Evan_Gaensbauer had of Berkeley. The sensible posts here (per my arrogant perspective) are much more life- and community-oriented. Jan_Kulveit in your link gave a tidy explanation of why that is, and I think it’s close to spot-on. Your observations about practical plans for secondary hubs are exactly what I’d expect.
Similar point: it seems to me that having multiple hubs makes sense.
a single second hub that specifically optimizes for the second largest cluster of desirable traits that the first hub misses seems optimal to me.