Model: major cities (like Austin or NYC) are fun to live in without belonging to a relatively close-knit community. This is much less the case for most other places. As a result, there’s a big difference between Austin/NYC area vs the other top-5 options. Austin and NYC are both places I’d be happy to move to on their own merits; they’re fun places to live even without a small community to be with. If a hub started to form in such a place, 80% I’d move there pretty quickly. I’d still be happy with the other top-5 places (>50% I’d move there), but that’s more conditional on rationalist community formation. I expect Southern NH or Bellingham or even Reno would be pretty boring without the community.
Unpacking this model a bit more… Austin or NYC are big enough that there’s lots of stable sub-communities, like stable communities for various immigrant groups, or groups around various hobbies like dancing or makerspaces. That creates a lot of cultural variety, e.g. in food options, and makes it likely that whatever particular thing you’re interested in is represented—like blues/swing dance for me.
Freedom to Build Things
Another model: living in less-dense areas seems to make people independently-do-things more. Making radvac is a good example; living in less-dense places seems to induce a mindset which makes that sort of project more likely to happen. Here’s a completely made-up story about why this happens, based on having lived in both high-density and low-density places myself: suppose one day the build-something mood strikes me, and I want to go make a trebuchet. In a lower-density place, with a few acres of land around the house, I can just go out in the backyard and do that. (I grew up low-density, and did this sort of thing pretty regularly as a teenager.) In the middle of San Francisco, the project is entirely out of the question; the only way to do it within the city at all would probably involve getting a bunch of permits and buy-in from lots of people. In between those two extremes, if I live in an apartment complex with some space out back, I can probably build the thing, but I’ll want to be careful about bothering the neighbors (e.g. with loud powertools).
From personal experience, this sort of thing happens a lot. There’s all sorts of stuff which would be fun to just-go-build in the backyard if I had a few acres and my own house, but which I probably won’t build at all in a city. And that feeds back on how one thinks about making things: in a place where building-a-thing requires buy-ins and permits, the default mental reaction to “I’d like to build a Thing” becomes “I need to get buy-in and permission”, rather than “I need to run to the store for supplies”.
Yudkowsky sometimes says there’s things which we think of in the same category as going to the store to buy milk, and then there’s everything else. Living in low-density places tends to make building-things live more in the category of going to the store to buy milk. It creates an affordance for independent action and building things.
Upshot of all this: MIRI’s already looking for a place near nature with hiking trails and whatnot. I think low density has important mental benefits in its own right; just having dense housing near a nature reserve is not as good as having low-density housing. This argues more in favor of the more-remote areas.
Cars
There’s already some comments here about needing a car as a downside. I think having a car and a license has some not-very-legible but very valuable benefits to one’s mindset. It’s similar to the previous section: having a car creates an affordance for going places, whenever and wherever one wants. I think the very large majority of people who have not ever had a car/license drastically underestimate the value of this affordance—i.e. I’d expect that if such people did get a car and license, >90% would think in hindsight that they drastically underestimated the value. (I’ve seen this happen to my girlfriend.)
My main message here is for people who have never had a car/license: there is a large illegible value here which you are probably underestimating, and I strongly recommend that you don’t rule out places just because they require a car.
Some random thoughts...
Cities With Variety
Model: major cities (like Austin or NYC) are fun to live in without belonging to a relatively close-knit community. This is much less the case for most other places. As a result, there’s a big difference between Austin/NYC area vs the other top-5 options. Austin and NYC are both places I’d be happy to move to on their own merits; they’re fun places to live even without a small community to be with. If a hub started to form in such a place, 80% I’d move there pretty quickly. I’d still be happy with the other top-5 places (>50% I’d move there), but that’s more conditional on rationalist community formation. I expect Southern NH or Bellingham or even Reno would be pretty boring without the community.
Unpacking this model a bit more… Austin or NYC are big enough that there’s lots of stable sub-communities, like stable communities for various immigrant groups, or groups around various hobbies like dancing or makerspaces. That creates a lot of cultural variety, e.g. in food options, and makes it likely that whatever particular thing you’re interested in is represented—like blues/swing dance for me.
Freedom to Build Things
Another model: living in less-dense areas seems to make people independently-do-things more. Making radvac is a good example; living in less-dense places seems to induce a mindset which makes that sort of project more likely to happen. Here’s a completely made-up story about why this happens, based on having lived in both high-density and low-density places myself: suppose one day the build-something mood strikes me, and I want to go make a trebuchet. In a lower-density place, with a few acres of land around the house, I can just go out in the backyard and do that. (I grew up low-density, and did this sort of thing pretty regularly as a teenager.) In the middle of San Francisco, the project is entirely out of the question; the only way to do it within the city at all would probably involve getting a bunch of permits and buy-in from lots of people. In between those two extremes, if I live in an apartment complex with some space out back, I can probably build the thing, but I’ll want to be careful about bothering the neighbors (e.g. with loud powertools).
From personal experience, this sort of thing happens a lot. There’s all sorts of stuff which would be fun to just-go-build in the backyard if I had a few acres and my own house, but which I probably won’t build at all in a city. And that feeds back on how one thinks about making things: in a place where building-a-thing requires buy-ins and permits, the default mental reaction to “I’d like to build a Thing” becomes “I need to get buy-in and permission”, rather than “I need to run to the store for supplies”.
Yudkowsky sometimes says there’s things which we think of in the same category as going to the store to buy milk, and then there’s everything else. Living in low-density places tends to make building-things live more in the category of going to the store to buy milk. It creates an affordance for independent action and building things.
Upshot of all this: MIRI’s already looking for a place near nature with hiking trails and whatnot. I think low density has important mental benefits in its own right; just having dense housing near a nature reserve is not as good as having low-density housing. This argues more in favor of the more-remote areas.
Cars
There’s already some comments here about needing a car as a downside. I think having a car and a license has some not-very-legible but very valuable benefits to one’s mindset. It’s similar to the previous section: having a car creates an affordance for going places, whenever and wherever one wants. I think the very large majority of people who have not ever had a car/license drastically underestimate the value of this affordance—i.e. I’d expect that if such people did get a car and license, >90% would think in hindsight that they drastically underestimated the value. (I’ve seen this happen to my girlfriend.)
My main message here is for people who have never had a car/license: there is a large illegible value here which you are probably underestimating, and I strongly recommend that you don’t rule out places just because they require a car.