I’ve been interested in joining the rationalist community in person for years, but the cost of living in the Bay Area (and NYC) is a big turn-off. So like mingyuan, I think we should pick a secondary Schelling point, most likely in the U.S., with a tertiary non-U.S. destination for non-American aspiring rationalists, a place where (i) English is common, (iii) cost of living is low-ish, and (iii) immigration to there tends to be easier than immigration to the U.S. (with extra points for pleasant climate, good infrastructure, etc.). Ideas for the new location have included cadillion’s plan to move to a U.S. county where we’d have major voting power, or to just follow MIRI if it moves, except actually they’re not moving. On the other hand, it tends to be easier for people to move shorter distances or not at all, so I’d like to know where everyone lives right now.
Please answer either (1) by upvoting your city of residence (short click) or (1) by creating a new answer with your city of residence, if no one has mentioned it yet. Please don’t vote for places you don’t live; instead, give your opinion in a reply.
Also: LW user profiles have a location field, but is there a way to get tallies of locations of all users? Bonus points if it can be filtered to active users.
Edit: if you identify as EA, consider adding your info to EAHub.org: they have a map! See also: tagmap of “rationalist” and “slatestarcodex”. Notably, slatestarcodex has three large clusters in Texas.
I’d also like to see links/information on immigration laws in various countries (as comments, not answers).
Berlin.
What the heck did I do wrong, why are you downvoting me, guys?
I suspect that either (1) someone misclicked or (2) someone unscrupulous took a dislike to something else you wrote and decided to downvotes lots of your comments. If it’s just this one, it’s probably #1. If you suddenly lost a lot of karma, it’s probably #2. That sort of bulk-downvoting is not supposed to be a thing that happens here, but sometimes people do it (in my experience, usually for political reasons; they’ve decided that some other person is The Enemy and must be punished and their voice suppressed); if you have good reason to suspect it’s happened, you might consider contacting the site admins.
[EDITED to add: I (weak-)upvoted seed’s answer even though I do not live in Berlin, because I can think of no reason why it should have been downvoted.]
In my opinion Malta is the best country to live in because it shares no land border with any other country and has always been peaceful, have no conflict with any other country, high standard of living, better educational facilities than most of the developing countries.
Cambridge, UK.
Strictly, I’m a few miles out of Cambridge.
In and around Cambridge, (i) English is common, (ii) cost of living is not low and in particular housing is annoyingly expensive, and (iii) immigration is I think easier than to the US, though for inhabitants of the rest of Europe it recently became more difficult than it had been before.
Also relevant: Cambridge has a world-class university and a pretty strong (though not Bay-Area-strong) ecosystem of technology companies.
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Hm, somebody strong-upvoted this (and Calgary—I wonder who)
San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Technically part of the US, if you move here as a US citizen you get 0% capital gains tax rates which is really good if you’re investing/trading/etc. Would love if more people moved here.
Calgary, AB, Canada (north of Idaho)
Seattle, WA, USA for me.
But I think the premise behind the question is flawed. Trying to pick a Schelling point for your proposal that is an anti-Schelling point (not subject to the costs and pressures of current population centers) for very similar communities is not feasible, unless you can identify distinct attributes of this community that lead to different needs.
Tucson, Arizona, USA
Pittsburgh, PA