Visiting London and kinda surprised by how there isn’t much of a rationality community there relative to the bay area (despite there being enough people in the city who read LessWrong, are aware of the online community, etc.?) Especially because the EA community seems pretty active there. The rationality meetups that do happen seem to have a different vibe. In the bay, it is easy to just get invited to interesting rationalist-adjacent events every week by just showing up. Not so in London.
Not sure how much credit to give to each of these explanations:
Berkeley just had a head start and geography matters more than I expected for communities
Berkeley has lightcone infrastructure but the UK doesn’t have a similar rationalist organisation (but has a bunch of EA orgs)
The UK is just different culturally from the bay area, people are less weird or differ in some other trait that makes having a good rationality community here harder
Visiting London and kinda surprised by how there isn’t much of a rationality community there relative to the bay area (despite there being enough people in the city who read LessWrong, are aware of the online community, etc.?) Especially because the EA community seems pretty active there. The rationality meetups that do happen seem to have a different vibe. In the bay, it is easy to just get invited to interesting rationalist-adjacent events every week by just showing up. Not so in London.
Not sure how much credit to give to each of these explanations:
Berkeley just had a head start and geography matters more than I expected for communities
Berkeley has lightcone infrastructure but the UK doesn’t have a similar rationalist organisation (but has a bunch of EA orgs)
The UK is just different culturally from the bay area, people are less weird or differ in some other trait that makes having a good rationality community here harder