Some of what follows is similar to something I wrote on EA Forum a month or so ago.
Returns on meatspace are counterfactually important to different people to different degrees. I think it’s plausible that some people simply can’t keep their eye on the ball if they’re not getting consistent social rewards for trying to do the thing, or that the added bandwidth you get when you move from discord to meatspace actually provides game-changing information.
I have written that if you’re not this type who super needs to be in meatspace with their tribe, who can cultivate and preserve agentiness online, that it may be imperative for you to defect in the “everyone move to the bay game” specifically to guard against brain drain, because people who happen to live in non-bay cities really do, I think, deserve access to agenty/ambitious people working on projects. An underrated movement building theory of change is that someone fails out of the university entrance exam in Minneapolis, and we’re there to support them.
However, I’m decreasingly interested in my hypothesis about why brain drain is even bad. I’m not sure the few agenty people working on cool projects in Philly are really doing all that much for the not-very-agenty sections of the movement that happen to live in Philly, which is a conclusion I really didn’t want to draw, but I’ve had way too much of going to an ACX or EA meetup and meeting some nihilist-adjacent guy who informs me that via free will being fake trying to fix problems is pointless. People have to want to cultivate ambition/agentiness and epistemics before I can really add any value, I’m concluding. I read this as a point against heeding the brain drain concern. There’s a sense in which I can take PG’s post about cities very seriously then conclude that the nihilist-adjacent guy is a property of Philly, and conclude that it’s really important for me to try other cities since what I’m bringing to Philly is being wasted and Philly isn’t bringing a lot to me. There’s another sense in which I take PG’s post seriously but I think Philly isn’t unique among not-quite-top-5 US cities, and another sense in which I don’t take PG’s post seriously. The fourth sense, crucially, is that my personal exhaustion with nihilist-adjacent guy doesn’t actually relate to the value I can add if I’m there for someone when they flunk out of the university entrance exam (I want a shapley points allocation for saving a billion lives, dammit!).
Another remark is that a friend who used to live in the bay once informed me that “yeah you meet people working on projects very much all the time, but so many of the projects are kinda dumb”. So I may end up being just as frustrated with the Bay as I am with Philly if I tried living there. Uncertain.
Thank you for this detailed reply. It’s valuable, so I appreciate the time and effort you’ve put into it.
The thoughts I’ve got to respond with are EA-focused concerns that would be tangential to the rationality community, so I’ll draft a top-level post for the EA Forum instead of replying here on LW. I’ll also read your EA Forum post and the other links you’ve shared to incorporate into my later response.
Please also send me a private message if you want to set up continuing the conversation over email, or over a call sometime.
Some of what follows is similar to something I wrote on EA Forum a month or so ago.
Returns on meatspace are counterfactually important to different people to different degrees. I think it’s plausible that some people simply can’t keep their eye on the ball if they’re not getting consistent social rewards for trying to do the thing, or that the added bandwidth you get when you move from discord to meatspace actually provides game-changing information.
I have written that if you’re not this type who super needs to be in meatspace with their tribe, who can cultivate and preserve agentiness online, that it may be imperative for you to defect in the “everyone move to the bay game” specifically to guard against brain drain, because people who happen to live in non-bay cities really do, I think, deserve access to agenty/ambitious people working on projects. An underrated movement building theory of change is that someone fails out of the university entrance exam in Minneapolis, and we’re there to support them.
However, I’m decreasingly interested in my hypothesis about why brain drain is even bad. I’m not sure the few agenty people working on cool projects in Philly are really doing all that much for the not-very-agenty sections of the movement that happen to live in Philly, which is a conclusion I really didn’t want to draw, but I’ve had way too much of going to an ACX or EA meetup and meeting some nihilist-adjacent guy who informs me that via free will being fake trying to fix problems is pointless. People have to want to cultivate ambition/agentiness and epistemics before I can really add any value, I’m concluding. I read this as a point against heeding the brain drain concern. There’s a sense in which I can take PG’s post about cities very seriously then conclude that the nihilist-adjacent guy is a property of Philly, and conclude that it’s really important for me to try other cities since what I’m bringing to Philly is being wasted and Philly isn’t bringing a lot to me. There’s another sense in which I take PG’s post seriously but I think Philly isn’t unique among not-quite-top-5 US cities, and another sense in which I don’t take PG’s post seriously. The fourth sense, crucially, is that my personal exhaustion with nihilist-adjacent guy doesn’t actually relate to the value I can add if I’m there for someone when they flunk out of the university entrance exam (I want a shapley points allocation for saving a billion lives, dammit!).
Another remark is that a friend who used to live in the bay once informed me that “yeah you meet people working on projects very much all the time, but so many of the projects are kinda dumb”. So I may end up being just as frustrated with the Bay as I am with Philly if I tried living there. Uncertain.
Thank you for this detailed reply. It’s valuable, so I appreciate the time and effort you’ve put into it.
The thoughts I’ve got to respond with are EA-focused concerns that would be tangential to the rationality community, so I’ll draft a top-level post for the EA Forum instead of replying here on LW. I’ll also read your EA Forum post and the other links you’ve shared to incorporate into my later response.
Please also send me a private message if you want to set up continuing the conversation over email, or over a call sometime.