I wrote a post listing reasons why I would not move to Manchester. Since writing it I’ve gotten more confident about the ‘bad culture fit’ conclusion by reading bendini’s blog. I would also add that the part of the community with the best gender ratio (rationalist tumblr) and the adjacent community with the best gender ratio (Alicorn’s fan community) are also the ones with the norms that the founders of this project seem to find most objectionable, and the ones who seem to be the worst culture fit for the project. I think things like ‘culture fit with existing parts of the community that are gender-balanced’ end up predicting gender ratio much more than degree of prioritization of attracting women, so I predict Manchester will have significantly (10% or greater) worse gender balance than the Bay in five years, and less strongly expect it to have worse gender balance than the community as a whole.
I’d rather not lose this exchange to Tumblr’s archiving system, so I’ll respond to relevent bits here:
I like the people I work with in the Bay. I and most of my social circle work at startups, and there are genuinely a lot of really nice things about working at startups (flexibility, meaningful work, knowing everyone in the company, lack of bureaucracy) which make people willing to take a major paycut compared to big tech companies to work at one. Moving to Manchester would involve a major paycut and not being able to work at a startup, as far as I can tell.
I would definitely lose much, much more in prospective earnings than I would gain in reduced cost of living.
Startups are also a thing here too, just obviously not to the same extent that they are in the startup capital of the world. Good data on startups is very hard to find, but in absolute numbers Manchester is approximately second only to London in the UK.
It is very much true that if you are renting a room in a grouphouse, the pay cut you take here will not be made up for by the significantly reduced cost of living, this does however start to change if you want to buy property (you can buy 3 bedroom houses on the street behind ours, a few miles from downtown, for around £125k) have kids or retire early in a place with rationalists nearby. If people get the data I’ve been requesting then I should be able to work out exactly how it compares and at which point someone would be better off here.
I like living a short plane flight from my family. If I lived halfway around the world I would almost never see them, which is a significant cost to me now and would be more significant to me if I had children.
Fair point, and something to think about for anyone with ties in the UK/EU
It makes sense that the sort of people who would decide to found a community hub in the cheapest English-speaking location they could find would be extremely frugal people. However, I find extreme frugality stressful
It’s worth pointing out that the main frugality nerd in this project is me, everyone else ranges from “unironically premium mediocre” to “simple tastes but doesn’t think too strategically about it”
Although everyone has the option to benefit from the fact that my brain treats optimizing spending for X and Y constraints as a game.
Also food is really quite cheap here, partually because supermarkets produce their own branded stuff and it is actually decent quality, so the £60/month you are horrified by is not ramen and water but beef/chicken/pork, butter/olive oil, bread and a small but adequate serving of fruits and vegetables. I wouldn’t reccomend it, but you can meet your energy and protein needs with homemade fried chicken for only £25/month.
The writeup by the people who chose Manchester on the benefits of Manchester includes nothing about public transit and some implications that ‘the house shares a car’ is a significant component of transit plans. It seems plausible that in Manchester I would need to drive to get places somewhat frequently. I hate driving. Living anywhere where I need to drive to get around is an absolute dealbreaker.
It might not be mentioned in the doc, but that’s because it was written as part of the now-defunct Accelerator project, and its main goal was to convince its leader, Eric Bruylant (yes, that one), not to build a rationalist cult compound in rural Spain. It is however given a nod in this essay, ctrl+f public transport to find it.
Manchester has a much quicker, cheaper and more frequently running public transport system than Berkeley on an mile to mile basis. Hell, in most cases, it’s on par with the speed and frequency available from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Go have a play around on Google maps and tell me what you find.
For the ~2.5 hours it takes you to get from Berkeley to San Jose, you can make the 150 mile journey from Manchester to London. (When HS2 arrives, that will be cut down to just over 1 hour)
I currently have free healthcare (through my parents until I’m 26). The writeup claims that healthcare in the UK for Americans is cheaper than U.S. healthcare, but if they’re comparing to U.S. open market healthcare and missing that most Americans do not buy health care on the open market, “cheaper than U.S. healthcare” could still be really expensive. I can’t find numbers for this.
It turns out this is better than I originally thought. People on six month tourist visas still need insurance of an unknown but probably reasonable cost (Update: £60/month according to one commenter) however people on work visas pay just £200 per year for full access to the NHS, permanent residents pay absolutely nothing regardless of their country of origin. (Apparently its also pretty good compared with the US system, too)
I vaguely suspect from the writeup that I would be a bad culture fit. In particular, they seem to really hate the community in the Bay. It seems to me that ‘the Bay community but affordable’ is a great thing to aim for, and they seem to be instead conceiving of their project as “succeed where the Bay failed” and so I doubt we share priorities. They don’t seem to consider effective altruism a priority, which is the most important thing about the rationalist community to me by far.
You probably aren’t the ideal culture fit, which is fair. Although I’d point out most people think I’m a lot more agreeable in person, which is relevant as that would be the side of me you’d be dealing with.
As for Effective Altruism being a priority, it isn’t for me personally, given my aesthetic aversion to anything that makes me look like a good person. However, there are 2⁄5 people with GWWC pledges in this house and groundwork being laid to restart the defunct Manchester University EA chapter by Greg and some other locals.
Unfortunately, there’s only so many things that we can do with the limited resources we have at the moment.
I predict Manchester will have significantly (10% or greater) worse gender balance than the Bay in five years
First point: What is the gender balance of the Berkeley rationalist community?
This depends entirely on how you measure it. If I was to throw all other goals under the bus for the sake of proving you wrong, I’m pretty sure I could find enough women to nod along to a watered down version. If instead we’re going for rationalist Rationalists then a lot of the fandom people wouldn’t make the cut and I suspect if we managed to outdo tech, we would be beating The Bay.
Obviously I’m not going to do that, but if we are talking about mission-focused rationalists and excluding the ones that hang around in mostly EA circles, we may actually do better.
Thanks for answering this. It sounds like the things in the ‘maybe concerns, insufficient info’ categories are largely not concerns, which is encouraging. I’d be happy to privately contribute salary and CoL numbers to someone’s effort to figure out how much people would save.
https://angel.co/manchester/jobs is a little discouraging; there are Lead Java Developer roles listed for £30-50k , no equity which would pay $150,000-$180,000 base in SF and might well see more than $300k in total compensation. Even if you did want to buy a house, which again Bay rationalists largely just don’t, that means a house costs three-four years’ salary in both cases and in one case you own a million-dollar property which will (unfortunately for the city) probably appreciate significantly and in another you own a £125k property not expected to appreciate any. It might be better to target people who want to retire early to Manchester and people not in tech.
I don’t think any amount of gender-related recruiting is more predictive of gender balance than ‘how similar is this to the parts of the community which have gender balance’? So it actually would surprise me if, even throwing everything under the bus to achieve this goal, it worked. Of course, I’d say a thriving Manchester community with a lousy gender ratio would still be an amazing accomplishment. A reasonable way to estimate gender balance in the Bay might be “count at Solstice, excluding anyone who flew in for Solstice”? (On the Facebook page so far, of the 29 people attending 12 are women, but Facebook pages are very noisy estimates of attendance and the attendance will be an order of magnitude higher than that, so I won’t put that much weight on that.)
Come to think of it, you’ve got an uphill battle on gender ratios for another reason, which is that women are on average less likely to do weird things, less likely to be underemployed in their twenties, and likelier to have close social ties preventing moving. I still am confident in my prediction but this general factor might be a stronger contributor than culture-specific ones.
I’d be happy to privately contribute salary and CoL numbers to someone’s effort to figure out how much people would save.
Thank you. LW 2.0 message system doesn’t seem to be working properly, so I have sent a facebook request
https://angel.co/manchester/jobs is a little discouraging; there are Lead Java Developer roles listed for £30-50k , no equity which would pay $150,000-$180,000 base in SF and might well see more than $300k in total compensation.
That might be exaggerating the compensation gap just a little bit. The first senior software engineering position on that list offers £57k-£64k and 2-5% equity. (Also $300k annual compensation would put someone into the top 1% of all US adults, this is not your typical scenario. Even among rationalists, the median non-student income is $75000)
Also, hold on, Silicon Valley hasn’t seceded from the US. (Yet.) That $300k after taxes comes out to $185k (£141.5k), as opposed to £60k which comes out to £42.5k here ($55.5k). If we remove only the rent from the living expenses we have around $167k and £39k. If the houses are $1m and £125k respectively then you can buy a house there in 6 years, whereas here it would only take 3.2 years. (And no, houses are not meant to be offloaded to a greater fool when it comes time to sell. Although houses in the area we are buying are rising at ~5%/year due to the central location)
It might be better to target people who want to retire early to Manchester and people not in tech.
This is basically the general point, yes?
The opening line to the economics section:
Not to put too fine a point on it, but basing a community that’s not focused on maximising gross income in the most expensive city in North America doesn’t strike me as particularly rational.
Pointing out that “well actually, if you are a super-talented software dev you can make much more money in SF” is, well, not even wrong.
If all the talk about optimizing for human flourishing didn’t make it clear to people, perhaps the general outlook can be approximated by reading SSC Gives A Graduation Speech.
One of the underlying ideas for the project is the cost of living is low enough that you can generate your own basic income.
When you significantly reduce financial constrants, you can do a lot more things. A few that come to mind:
writing open-source software that benefits the world but can’t be made into a profitable buisness model
full-time blogging on a $1000 a month patreon fanbase
raising five children with a single breadwinner
having 10 partners and enough time to see them all regularly
living comfortably off part time work without being a programmer
having wild parties three nights a week
doing the starving artist thing without actually starving
making contributions in any field that doesn’t require more than $20k equipment (e.g. math)
writing/systemizing rationality material on a grand scale
seeing a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower
You basically can live like money doesn’t matter at a lot lower threshholds.
A reasonable way to estimate gender balance in the Bay might be “count at Solstice, excluding anyone who flew in for Solstice”? (On the Facebook page so far, of the 29 people attending 12 are women, but Facebook pages are very noisy estimates of attendance and the attendance will be an order of magnitude higher than that, so I won’t put that much weight on that.)
Accurate information would be good, I can proxy it from second hand anecdotes too. I’m just hesistant to relying on it for anything that matters.
Come to think of it, you’ve got an uphill battle on gender ratios for another reason, which is that women are on average less likely to do weird things, less likely to be underemployed in their twenties, and likelier to have close social ties preventing moving. I still am confident in my prediction but this general factor might be a stronger contributor than culture-specific ones.
Which is why we aren’t trying to bridge the gap by flying them across the Atlantic and instead trying to find them right here, and increasing the conversion rate by omitting the parts that don’t make people more rational but nonetheless make women disproportionately feel like “this isn’t for me”.
Also, dear god, I’m probably the last person that should be running this if the goal is to recruit well-heeled Ivy grad women. But again, that isn’t what we’re trying to do here. I mean, if it strikes the fancy of a few, that’s great, but it isn’t our comparative advantage. We can’t be everything to everyone.
Are you disagreeing with my prediction? I’d be happy to bet on it and learning that two of the four initial residents are trans women does not change it.
I wrote a post listing reasons why I would not move to Manchester. Since writing it I’ve gotten more confident about the ‘bad culture fit’ conclusion by reading bendini’s blog. I would also add that the part of the community with the best gender ratio (rationalist tumblr) and the adjacent community with the best gender ratio (Alicorn’s fan community) are also the ones with the norms that the founders of this project seem to find most objectionable, and the ones who seem to be the worst culture fit for the project. I think things like ‘culture fit with existing parts of the community that are gender-balanced’ end up predicting gender ratio much more than degree of prioritization of attracting women, so I predict Manchester will have significantly (10% or greater) worse gender balance than the Bay in five years, and less strongly expect it to have worse gender balance than the community as a whole.
I’d rather not lose this exchange to Tumblr’s archiving system, so I’ll respond to relevent bits here:
Startups are also a thing here too, just obviously not to the same extent that they are in the startup capital of the world. Good data on startups is very hard to find, but in absolute numbers Manchester is approximately second only to London in the UK.
It is very much true that if you are renting a room in a grouphouse, the pay cut you take here will not be made up for by the significantly reduced cost of living, this does however start to change if you want to buy property (you can buy 3 bedroom houses on the street behind ours, a few miles from downtown, for around £125k) have kids or retire early in a place with rationalists nearby. If people get the data I’ve been requesting then I should be able to work out exactly how it compares and at which point someone would be better off here.
Fair point, and something to think about for anyone with ties in the UK/EU
It’s worth pointing out that the main frugality nerd in this project is me, everyone else ranges from “unironically premium mediocre” to “simple tastes but doesn’t think too strategically about it”
Although everyone has the option to benefit from the fact that my brain treats optimizing spending for X and Y constraints as a game.
Also food is really quite cheap here, partually because supermarkets produce their own branded stuff and it is actually decent quality, so the £60/month you are horrified by is not ramen and water but beef/chicken/pork, butter/olive oil, bread and a small but adequate serving of fruits and vegetables. I wouldn’t reccomend it, but you can meet your energy and protein needs with homemade fried chicken for only £25/month.
It might not be mentioned in the doc, but that’s because it was written as part of the now-defunct Accelerator project, and its main goal was to convince its leader, Eric Bruylant (yes, that one), not to build a rationalist cult compound in rural Spain. It is however given a nod in this essay, ctrl+f public transport to find it.
Manchester has a much quicker, cheaper and more frequently running public transport system than Berkeley on an mile to mile basis. Hell, in most cases, it’s on par with the speed and frequency available from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Go have a play around on Google maps and tell me what you find.
For the ~2.5 hours it takes you to get from Berkeley to San Jose, you can make the 150 mile journey from Manchester to London. (When HS2 arrives, that will be cut down to just over 1 hour)
It turns out this is better than I originally thought. People on six month tourist visas still need insurance of an unknown but probably reasonable cost (Update: £60/month according to one commenter) however people on work visas pay just £200 per year for full access to the NHS, permanent residents pay absolutely nothing regardless of their country of origin. (Apparently its also pretty good compared with the US system, too)
You probably aren’t the ideal culture fit, which is fair. Although I’d point out most people think I’m a lot more agreeable in person, which is relevant as that would be the side of me you’d be dealing with.
As for Effective Altruism being a priority, it isn’t for me personally, given my aesthetic aversion to anything that makes me look like a good person. However, there are 2⁄5 people with GWWC pledges in this house and groundwork being laid to restart the defunct Manchester University EA chapter by Greg and some other locals.
Unfortunately, there’s only so many things that we can do with the limited resources we have at the moment.
First point: What is the gender balance of the Berkeley rationalist community?
This depends entirely on how you measure it. If I was to throw all other goals under the bus for the sake of proving you wrong, I’m pretty sure I could find enough women to nod along to a watered down version. If instead we’re going for rationalist Rationalists then a lot of the fandom people wouldn’t make the cut and I suspect if we managed to outdo tech, we would be beating The Bay.
Obviously I’m not going to do that, but if we are talking about mission-focused rationalists and excluding the ones that hang around in mostly EA circles, we may actually do better.
Thanks for answering this. It sounds like the things in the ‘maybe concerns, insufficient info’ categories are largely not concerns, which is encouraging. I’d be happy to privately contribute salary and CoL numbers to someone’s effort to figure out how much people would save.
https://angel.co/manchester/jobs is a little discouraging; there are Lead Java Developer roles listed for £30-50k , no equity which would pay $150,000-$180,000 base in SF and might well see more than $300k in total compensation. Even if you did want to buy a house, which again Bay rationalists largely just don’t, that means a house costs three-four years’ salary in both cases and in one case you own a million-dollar property which will (unfortunately for the city) probably appreciate significantly and in another you own a £125k property not expected to appreciate any. It might be better to target people who want to retire early to Manchester and people not in tech.
I don’t think any amount of gender-related recruiting is more predictive of gender balance than ‘how similar is this to the parts of the community which have gender balance’? So it actually would surprise me if, even throwing everything under the bus to achieve this goal, it worked. Of course, I’d say a thriving Manchester community with a lousy gender ratio would still be an amazing accomplishment. A reasonable way to estimate gender balance in the Bay might be “count at Solstice, excluding anyone who flew in for Solstice”? (On the Facebook page so far, of the 29 people attending 12 are women, but Facebook pages are very noisy estimates of attendance and the attendance will be an order of magnitude higher than that, so I won’t put that much weight on that.)
Come to think of it, you’ve got an uphill battle on gender ratios for another reason, which is that women are on average less likely to do weird things, less likely to be underemployed in their twenties, and likelier to have close social ties preventing moving. I still am confident in my prediction but this general factor might be a stronger contributor than culture-specific ones.
Thank you. LW 2.0 message system doesn’t seem to be working properly, so I have sent a facebook request
That might be exaggerating the compensation gap just a little bit. The first senior software engineering position on that list offers £57k-£64k and 2-5% equity. (Also $300k annual compensation would put someone into the top 1% of all US adults, this is not your typical scenario. Even among rationalists, the median non-student income is $75000)
Also, hold on, Silicon Valley hasn’t seceded from the US. (Yet.) That $300k after taxes comes out to $185k (£141.5k), as opposed to £60k which comes out to £42.5k here ($55.5k). If we remove only the rent from the living expenses we have around $167k and £39k. If the houses are $1m and £125k respectively then you can buy a house there in 6 years, whereas here it would only take 3.2 years. (And no, houses are not meant to be offloaded to a greater fool when it comes time to sell. Although houses in the area we are buying are rising at ~5%/year due to the central location)
This is basically the general point, yes?
The opening line to the economics section:
Pointing out that “well actually, if you are a super-talented software dev you can make much more money in SF” is, well, not even wrong.
If all the talk about optimizing for human flourishing didn’t make it clear to people, perhaps the general outlook can be approximated by reading SSC Gives A Graduation Speech.
One of the underlying ideas for the project is the cost of living is low enough that you can generate your own basic income.
When you significantly reduce financial constrants, you can do a lot more things. A few that come to mind:
writing open-source software that benefits the world but can’t be made into a profitable buisness model
full-time blogging on a $1000 a month patreon fanbase
raising five children with a single breadwinner
having 10 partners and enough time to see them all regularly
living comfortably off part time work without being a programmer
having wild parties three nights a week
doing the starving artist thing without actually starving
making contributions in any field that doesn’t require more than $20k equipment (e.g. math)
writing/systemizing rationality material on a grand scale
seeing a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower
You basically can live like money doesn’t matter at a lot lower threshholds.
Accurate information would be good, I can proxy it from second hand anecdotes too. I’m just hesistant to relying on it for anything that matters.
Which is why we aren’t trying to bridge the gap by flying them across the Atlantic and instead trying to find them right here, and increasing the conversion rate by omitting the parts that don’t make people more rational but nonetheless make women disproportionately feel like “this isn’t for me”.
Also, dear god, I’m probably the last person that should be running this if the goal is to recruit well-heeled Ivy grad women. But again, that isn’t what we’re trying to do here. I mean, if it strikes the fancy of a few, that’s great, but it isn’t our comparative advantage. We can’t be everything to everyone.
According to worldnomads.com, my healthcare as a US citizen in the UK would be about $70 a month, or 60ish pounds, if I had to guess
welp, 2⁄4 current residents and the next one planned to come there are trans women so um, what gender ratio issue again?
Are you disagreeing with my prediction? I’d be happy to bet on it and learning that two of the four initial residents are trans women does not change it.