I am sort of agnostic about whether the Berkeley community is a good idea or not. On one hand it certainly feels pointless to try to build up any non-Berkeley community. If someone is a committed rationalist they are pretty likely to move to Berkeley in the near future. In addiiton it is very hard to constantly lose friends. This post probably best captures the emotional reality:
“I have lost motivation to put any effort into preserving the local community – my friends have moved away and left me behind – new members are about a decade younger than myself, and I have no desire to be a ‘den mother’ to nubes who will just move to Berkley if they actually develop agency… I worry that I have wasted the last decade of my life putting emotional effort into relationships that I have been unable to keep and I would have been better off finding other communities that are not so prone to having its members disappear.”
If you base your social life around the rationality community, and do not live in Berkeley, you are in for alot of heart ache. For this reason I cannot really recommend people invest too heavily in the rationalist unless they want to move to Berkeley.
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On the other hand concentration has benefits. Living close to your friends has huge social benefits. As sarah says very few adults live on a street with their friends and many Berkeley rationalists do. Its looks likely there will be rationalist group parenting/unschooling. The Berkeley REACH looks awesome (I am a patron despite living on the other side of the country). The question is whether the Berkeley community is worth the severe toll it places on other rationalist communities. In the past i thought Berkeley had some pretty severe social problems. Alot of people (who were neither unusually well connected or high status) who moved their reported surprising levels of social isolation. However things seem to have improved a ton. There are now a ton of group houses near each other and the online community (discord/tumblr) is pretty inclusive and lets ‘not high status’ people make connections pretty easily.
Also arguably ‘Moloch already won’. So its hard to tell people to refrain from moving to Berkeley
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(I am currently one of the more active people in NYC. The meetup currently occurs in my apartment, etc. )
One pattern I’m noticing is because of the fact that because of the relative comparative advantage of citizenship in other countries, and the relative difficulty of attaining permanent residency in the United States, the communities of rationalists abroad are more stable over time because of the practical difficulty of convincing people to move to the United States. For example, having post-secondary education that is more subsidized not just in undergrad but in graduate studies as well in countries aside from the United States keeps non-American rationalists in their home countries until their mid-to-late twenties. That’s young enough I know rationalists who musing about moving to Berkeley to work on AI alignment or another community project someday, but I also know a lot of rationalists who have set down roots where they are by then, and aren’t inclined to move. Another thing if is a rationalist doesn’t have a university degree or highly in-demand skills (e.g., STEM) for big corporations, it’s difficult enough to get health insurance and visas for a lot of rationalists emigrating to the United States it doesn’t make sense to try. This first post I wrote is intended to be part of a sequence to be focused on finding solutions to problems apparently common to community organization both in Berkeley and elsewhere. I tried to end this post on a positive tone, intending to build up to optimism in the next one, with marked examples of recent success among rationalists around the world. Vancouver has a couple local EA organizations, and strategies we’ve implemented locally have dramatically increased our rate of meetups, doubled the number of rationalist houses (from 2 to 4, but in 6 months that is still significant. The same has happened in Motreal the last few months. Jan Kulveit is another rationalist who has commented on this post as well who has had reported a lot of success with local community organization in the Czech Republic, as has Toon Alfrink from the Netherlands. If we can integrate what worked for us into a single strategy for mobilizing resources in local rationality communities it could be excellent.
The good news is I think the possible global failure mode I pointed out of the rationality community being too heavily concentrated in a single geographic hub which may then collapse appears quite unlikely to come about for the foreseeable future. So while the experience of the NYC rationalist community may be similar to a lot of rationality communities, it’s not universal. I don’t know if that means much given the NYC community has lost so many people, but hopefully if something comes out of people sharing solutions we can find a way to help the NYC community as well.
So its hard to tell people to refrain from moving to Berkeley
I apologize for possibly/probably twisting your words a bit here, but I never have trouble telling people to refrain from moving to the Bay/Berkeley. I tell them I lived there for a few years and it’s a pretty unpleasant place, objectively, along any of ten different metrics relevant to comfort and peace of mind. I tell them I never actually developed any sense of belonging with the local Rationalist Community, so it’s not gauranteed that that will happen. I tell them I make a pretty good amount of money in many cities, but since I’m not a Comp Sci grad that doesn’t translate to a decent living in Berkeley. I tell them on top of that, Berkeley is one of the most expensive places to live in the world and if there were some kind of objective ratio of cost of living divided by objective comfort/quality/value-of-a-dollar, Berkeley would be near the top worldwide.
I also don’t find the proposition that you have to literally move to an expensive unpleasant overcrowded dystopian city in order to be rational to be particularly, uh, rational.
If you could turn that warning into a post, I think it might be helpful, especially if you can be explicit about things. Having it come from someone with experience living there helps make the message credible, and helps you craft a better message. I worry my words ring hollow, and I can’t make clear much of what I see.
I don’t tell everyone to move to Berkeley. But if you are heavily invested socially in the rationalist community you are passing up alot of personal utility by not moving to Berkeley. Other considerations apply of course. But I think the typical hghly invested rationalist would be personally better off if they moved to Berkeley. Whether this dynamic is good for the community longterm or not is unclear.
What do you mean by a new branch of the rationality community? John Maxwell suggested in another thread local rationality communities aside from Berkeley could have comparative advantages in specializing in offering rationalists the sort of things they might want but typically can’t find in Berkeley. This has been the intention of other projects to build up like local rationality communities like Project Kernel (which is currently experiencing significant problems).
Alright, that makes sense. I was reading some of Zvi’s other posts on his blog about the rationality community, and I think there are significant advantages to start a new local meetup he was missing. Some of them used to apply to me until the last few months we’ve had success in starting a new local meetup after organization fell through for almost a year.
I am sort of agnostic about whether the Berkeley community is a good idea or not. On one hand it certainly feels pointless to try to build up any non-Berkeley community. If someone is a committed rationalist they are pretty likely to move to Berkeley in the near future. In addiiton it is very hard to constantly lose friends.
So there is the ‘Craft’ and the ‘Community’, or at least that is sometimes how rationality is modeled. And the Community could be broken down into Berkeley and other communities elsewhere. But if rationality is also about a mission to ensure human values are carried to the stars, and right now that hinges on AI alignment, it makes sense to me the rationality community is significantly concentrated in the Bay Area. This or other mindsets of singular focus in the name of the Craft appear they might come at some expense to the Community in Berkeley as well. The last year has seen some people in the Berkeley community ask if the Berkeley community is good for the community. I think this might be part of a worldwide problem in rationality, which I only have half an idea of how to tackle. I might need to get a lot of thoughts down before I figure out where I’m going with them.
This post probably best captures the emotional reality:
“I have lost motivation to put any effort into preserving the local community – my friends have moved away and left me behind – new members are about a decade younger than myself, and I have no desire to be a ‘den mother’ to nubes who will just move to Berkley if they actually develop agency… I worry that I have wasted the last decade of my life putting emotional effort into relationships that I have been unable to keep and I would have been better off finding other communities that are not so prone to having its members disappear.”
If you base your social life around the rationality community, and do not live in Berkeley, you are in for alot of heart ache. For this reason I cannot really recommend people invest too heavily in the rationalist unless they want to move to Berkeley.
There are stories of mixed success throughout the community in building a rationalist community outside of Berkeley, and it gives me some hope, but then I read about these experiences and I feel ambivalent. I’m afraid anything other local rationality community organizers might recommend is something NYC or another once-flourishing rationalist community has already tried before, and it didn’t work. I’m also afraid if a new community takes advice on how to build up while retaining membership over time that worked somewhere else, and then fails, it will greatly discourage the new community someone tried launching. Ultimately I consider the struggles the community faces as hard optimization problems, and right now I’m holding off on proposing solutions until I’ve discussed the solution more.
On the other hand concentration has benefits. Living close to your friends has huge social benefits. As sarah says very few adults live on a street with their friends and many Berkeley rationalists do. Its looks likely there will be rationalist group parenting/unschooling. The Berkeley REACH looks awesome (I am a patron despite living on the other side of the country). The question is whether the Berkeley community is worth the severe toll it places on other rationalist communities. In the past i thought Berkeley had some pretty severe social problems. Alot of people (who were neither unusually well connected or high status) who moved their reported surprising levels of social isolation. However things seem to have improved a ton. There are now a ton of group houses near each other and the online community (discord/tumblr) is pretty inclusive and lets ‘not high status’ people make connections pretty easily.
Also arguably ‘Moloch already won’. So its hard to tell people to refrain from moving to Berkeley.
Ideally we would find ways to create similar outcomes for rationalists in lots of different places, which I see as a hard optimization problem I’m holding off on proposing solutions to until I’ve looked at it from more angles.
I am sort of agnostic about whether the Berkeley community is a good idea or not. On one hand it certainly feels pointless to try to build up any non-Berkeley community. If someone is a committed rationalist they are pretty likely to move to Berkeley in the near future. In addiiton it is very hard to constantly lose friends. This post probably best captures the emotional reality:
“I have lost motivation to put any effort into preserving the local community – my friends have moved away and left me behind – new members are about a decade younger than myself, and I have no desire to be a ‘den mother’ to nubes who will just move to Berkley if they actually develop agency… I worry that I have wasted the last decade of my life putting emotional effort into relationships that I have been unable to keep and I would have been better off finding other communities that are not so prone to having its members disappear.”
If you base your social life around the rationality community, and do not live in Berkeley, you are in for alot of heart ache. For this reason I cannot really recommend people invest too heavily in the rationalist unless they want to move to Berkeley.
===
On the other hand concentration has benefits. Living close to your friends has huge social benefits. As sarah says very few adults live on a street with their friends and many Berkeley rationalists do. Its looks likely there will be rationalist group parenting/unschooling. The Berkeley REACH looks awesome (I am a patron despite living on the other side of the country). The question is whether the Berkeley community is worth the severe toll it places on other rationalist communities. In the past i thought Berkeley had some pretty severe social problems. Alot of people (who were neither unusually well connected or high status) who moved their reported surprising levels of social isolation. However things seem to have improved a ton. There are now a ton of group houses near each other and the online community (discord/tumblr) is pretty inclusive and lets ‘not high status’ people make connections pretty easily.
Also arguably ‘Moloch already won’. So its hard to tell people to refrain from moving to Berkeley
===
(I am currently one of the more active people in NYC. The meetup currently occurs in my apartment, etc. )
One pattern I’m noticing is because of the fact that because of the relative comparative advantage of citizenship in other countries, and the relative difficulty of attaining permanent residency in the United States, the communities of rationalists abroad are more stable over time because of the practical difficulty of convincing people to move to the United States. For example, having post-secondary education that is more subsidized not just in undergrad but in graduate studies as well in countries aside from the United States keeps non-American rationalists in their home countries until their mid-to-late twenties. That’s young enough I know rationalists who musing about moving to Berkeley to work on AI alignment or another community project someday, but I also know a lot of rationalists who have set down roots where they are by then, and aren’t inclined to move. Another thing if is a rationalist doesn’t have a university degree or highly in-demand skills (e.g., STEM) for big corporations, it’s difficult enough to get health insurance and visas for a lot of rationalists emigrating to the United States it doesn’t make sense to try. This first post I wrote is intended to be part of a sequence to be focused on finding solutions to problems apparently common to community organization both in Berkeley and elsewhere. I tried to end this post on a positive tone, intending to build up to optimism in the next one, with marked examples of recent success among rationalists around the world. Vancouver has a couple local EA organizations, and strategies we’ve implemented locally have dramatically increased our rate of meetups, doubled the number of rationalist houses (from 2 to 4, but in 6 months that is still significant. The same has happened in Motreal the last few months. Jan Kulveit is another rationalist who has commented on this post as well who has had reported a lot of success with local community organization in the Czech Republic, as has Toon Alfrink from the Netherlands. If we can integrate what worked for us into a single strategy for mobilizing resources in local rationality communities it could be excellent.
The good news is I think the possible global failure mode I pointed out of the rationality community being too heavily concentrated in a single geographic hub which may then collapse appears quite unlikely to come about for the foreseeable future. So while the experience of the NYC rationalist community may be similar to a lot of rationality communities, it’s not universal. I don’t know if that means much given the NYC community has lost so many people, but hopefully if something comes out of people sharing solutions we can find a way to help the NYC community as well.
I apologize for possibly/probably twisting your words a bit here, but I never have trouble telling people to refrain from moving to the Bay/Berkeley. I tell them I lived there for a few years and it’s a pretty unpleasant place, objectively, along any of ten different metrics relevant to comfort and peace of mind. I tell them I never actually developed any sense of belonging with the local Rationalist Community, so it’s not gauranteed that that will happen. I tell them I make a pretty good amount of money in many cities, but since I’m not a Comp Sci grad that doesn’t translate to a decent living in Berkeley. I tell them on top of that, Berkeley is one of the most expensive places to live in the world and if there were some kind of objective ratio of cost of living divided by objective comfort/quality/value-of-a-dollar, Berkeley would be near the top worldwide.
I also don’t find the proposition that you have to literally move to an expensive unpleasant overcrowded dystopian city in order to be rational to be particularly, uh, rational.
If you could turn that warning into a post, I think it might be helpful, especially if you can be explicit about things. Having it come from someone with experience living there helps make the message credible, and helps you craft a better message. I worry my words ring hollow, and I can’t make clear much of what I see.
I don’t tell everyone to move to Berkeley. But if you are heavily invested socially in the rationalist community you are passing up alot of personal utility by not moving to Berkeley. Other considerations apply of course. But I think the typical hghly invested rationalist would be personally better off if they moved to Berkeley. Whether this dynamic is good for the community longterm or not is unclear.
Or you could start a new branch.
What do you mean by a new branch of the rationality community? John Maxwell suggested in another thread local rationality communities aside from Berkeley could have comparative advantages in specializing in offering rationalists the sort of things they might want but typically can’t find in Berkeley. This has been the intention of other projects to build up like local rationality communities like Project Kernel (which is currently experiencing significant problems).
I meant “a new local meetup”.
Alright, that makes sense. I was reading some of Zvi’s other posts on his blog about the rationality community, and I think there are significant advantages to start a new local meetup he was missing. Some of them used to apply to me until the last few months we’ve had success in starting a new local meetup after organization fell through for almost a year.
That seems common. “keep at it” is my only advice. Let us know if you make breakthroughs.
Thanks for your response.
So there is the ‘Craft’ and the ‘Community’, or at least that is sometimes how rationality is modeled. And the Community could be broken down into Berkeley and other communities elsewhere. But if rationality is also about a mission to ensure human values are carried to the stars, and right now that hinges on AI alignment, it makes sense to me the rationality community is significantly concentrated in the Bay Area. This or other mindsets of singular focus in the name of the Craft appear they might come at some expense to the Community in Berkeley as well. The last year has seen some people in the Berkeley community ask if the Berkeley community is good for the community. I think this might be part of a worldwide problem in rationality, which I only have half an idea of how to tackle. I might need to get a lot of thoughts down before I figure out where I’m going with them.
There are stories of mixed success throughout the community in building a rationalist community outside of Berkeley, and it gives me some hope, but then I read about these experiences and I feel ambivalent. I’m afraid anything other local rationality community organizers might recommend is something NYC or another once-flourishing rationalist community has already tried before, and it didn’t work. I’m also afraid if a new community takes advice on how to build up while retaining membership over time that worked somewhere else, and then fails, it will greatly discourage the new community someone tried launching. Ultimately I consider the struggles the community faces as hard optimization problems, and right now I’m holding off on proposing solutions until I’ve discussed the solution more.
Ideally we would find ways to create similar outcomes for rationalists in lots of different places, which I see as a hard optimization problem I’m holding off on proposing solutions to until I’ve looked at it from more angles.