I can understand the frustrations of people like Zvi who don’t want to invest in local rationality communities, but I don’t think that reaction is inevitable.
I went to a CFAR mentor’s workshop in March and it didn’t make me sad that the average Tuesday NYC rationality meetup isn’t as awesome. It gave me the agency-inspiration to make Tuesdays in NYC more awesome, at least by my own selfish metrics. Since March we’ve connected with several new people, established a secondary location for meetups in a beautiful penthouse (and have a possible tertiary location), hosted a famous writer, and even forced Zvi to sit through another circle. The personal payoff for investing in the local community isn’t just in decades-long friendships, it’s also in how cool next Tuesday will be. It pays off fast.
And besides, on a scale of decades people will move in an out of NYC/Berkeley/anywhere else several times anyway as jobs, schools, and residential zoning laws come and go. Several of my best friends, including my wife, came to NYC from the Bay Area. Should the Areans complain that NYC is draining them of wonderful people?
One of my favorite things about this community is that we’re all geographically diverse rootless cosmopolitans. I could move to a shack in Montana next year and probably find a couple of people I met at NYC/CFAR/Solstice/Putanumonit to start a meetup with. Losing friends sucks, but it doesn’t mean that investing in the local rationality community is pointless.
Thank you for making this comment. Of all the reactions to this post, this one best captures how I want rationalists outside the Bay Area to relate to it going forward. Of course it doesn’t go as far as I’d like, but I’m unsure of how I want to take it. I’ve been reading some of Zvi’s posts from last year, which are wrongly pessimistic not because they’re a self-fulfilling prophecy preventing non-Berkeley rationality communities from achieving their values, but because it’s a map of how rationality communities develop not matching the territory. (I’m aware things were more tense between NYC and Berkeley a year ago, and while I don’t know all the details, I imagine Zvi had sufficient reason for how he felt, and may not endorse as strongly now everything he said then.) At the same time, not regarding inter-community dynamics, but the whole rationality movement, I feel like the Community has failed to uphold the Craft. This isn’t the same as not devoting enough resources or doing so in the right way toward AI alignment or another mission. It’s about the sense I got from reading posts like this one from last year, and my sense other rationality communities are like Berkeley now: rationalists have an aversion to the changes trying to level up might bring to their communities because it would disturb the local state of affairs too much.
In Vancouver, we never blamed the Bay Area for our woes. I think it partially induced our woes, but I don’t think from the scale of the individual to the whole Berkeley rationality community, or any subset in between should be blamed for what’s happened. We depressed ourselves with how inadequate we seemed relative to Berkeley, and to the extent the Berkeley rationality community perpetuates that mindset, they’re preventing the expansion of the Craft. That nobody in Berkeley talks about that, and barely anybody who complains about Berkeley mentions this, leads me to think it’s a huge blind spot for all of us. In the past there have been attitudes toward other rationality communities from Berkeley rationalists I’ve found upsetting because of the harm I think they cause, but to act as though there is an agency at the heart of the Berkeley rationality community conspiring to plunder others is pointless.
If rationality communities outside Berkeley are tired of losing people because it prevents them from launching projects which would advance the rationality happening in Berkeley, I want to help solve that problem. If rationality communities outside Berkeley are tired of losing people to Berkeley because they feel like there should be a more equitable distribution of bonobo rationalist cuddle puddles between Berkeley and everywhere else, that’s not a problem I’m interested in putting much effort to solve. I’ve got nothing against bonobo rationalists, and if I had a magic button which would optimize cuddle puddles everywhere for any rationalist who’d want them, I’d press it.
I think different concerns about the relationship between Berkeley and other rationality communities are all bundled up, it’s hard to tease them out, and so for now I’m treating them as though they’re all equally valid. But to the extent complaints are less of the form “we’re tired of Berkeley taking up too much of the bandwidth of the awesome projects in the worldwide community” and more “we demand a redistribution of warm fuzzies”, the less they move me. Local communities need to give individual rationalists reasons to stay, or reasons to come, and they need to take more self-responsibility for that. That’s the attitude I tried bringing to turning things around in Vancouver, it inspired others, and we got a lot done. It sounds like some of what NYC experienced is an outlier in that regard, but based on the other comments here it’s my impression local rationality communities solving the problem of getting hollowed out might be getting organized. My experience has been it’s 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration. Based on my experience in Vancouver and accounts from elsewhere I’m guessing we can identify some heuristic ‘best practices’ for rationality community organization/development. So if rationalists, wherever they are, are willing to perspire, I’m confident other, more developed rationality communities can provide them with the tools they need. But to get people to the point they’re willing to perspire, I (we?) have to get that 1% inspiration right. And how to do that is what I’m stuck on now.
I can understand the frustrations of people like Zvi who don’t want to invest in local rationality communities, but I don’t think that reaction is inevitable.
I went to a CFAR mentor’s workshop in March and it didn’t make me sad that the average Tuesday NYC rationality meetup isn’t as awesome. It gave me the agency-inspiration to make Tuesdays in NYC more awesome, at least by my own selfish metrics. Since March we’ve connected with several new people, established a secondary location for meetups in a beautiful penthouse (and have a possible tertiary location), hosted a famous writer, and even forced Zvi to sit through another circle. The personal payoff for investing in the local community isn’t just in decades-long friendships, it’s also in how cool next Tuesday will be. It pays off fast.
And besides, on a scale of decades people will move in an out of NYC/Berkeley/anywhere else several times anyway as jobs, schools, and residential zoning laws come and go. Several of my best friends, including my wife, came to NYC from the Bay Area. Should the Areans complain that NYC is draining them of wonderful people?
One of my favorite things about this community is that we’re all geographically diverse rootless cosmopolitans. I could move to a shack in Montana next year and probably find a couple of people I met at NYC/CFAR/Solstice/Putanumonit to start a meetup with. Losing friends sucks, but it doesn’t mean that investing in the local rationality community is pointless.
Thank you for making this comment. Of all the reactions to this post, this one best captures how I want rationalists outside the Bay Area to relate to it going forward. Of course it doesn’t go as far as I’d like, but I’m unsure of how I want to take it. I’ve been reading some of Zvi’s posts from last year, which are wrongly pessimistic not because they’re a self-fulfilling prophecy preventing non-Berkeley rationality communities from achieving their values, but because it’s a map of how rationality communities develop not matching the territory. (I’m aware things were more tense between NYC and Berkeley a year ago, and while I don’t know all the details, I imagine Zvi had sufficient reason for how he felt, and may not endorse as strongly now everything he said then.) At the same time, not regarding inter-community dynamics, but the whole rationality movement, I feel like the Community has failed to uphold the Craft. This isn’t the same as not devoting enough resources or doing so in the right way toward AI alignment or another mission. It’s about the sense I got from reading posts like this one from last year, and my sense other rationality communities are like Berkeley now: rationalists have an aversion to the changes trying to level up might bring to their communities because it would disturb the local state of affairs too much.
In Vancouver, we never blamed the Bay Area for our woes. I think it partially induced our woes, but I don’t think from the scale of the individual to the whole Berkeley rationality community, or any subset in between should be blamed for what’s happened. We depressed ourselves with how inadequate we seemed relative to Berkeley, and to the extent the Berkeley rationality community perpetuates that mindset, they’re preventing the expansion of the Craft. That nobody in Berkeley talks about that, and barely anybody who complains about Berkeley mentions this, leads me to think it’s a huge blind spot for all of us. In the past there have been attitudes toward other rationality communities from Berkeley rationalists I’ve found upsetting because of the harm I think they cause, but to act as though there is an agency at the heart of the Berkeley rationality community conspiring to plunder others is pointless.
If rationality communities outside Berkeley are tired of losing people because it prevents them from launching projects which would advance the rationality happening in Berkeley, I want to help solve that problem. If rationality communities outside Berkeley are tired of losing people to Berkeley because they feel like there should be a more equitable distribution of bonobo rationalist cuddle puddles between Berkeley and everywhere else, that’s not a problem I’m interested in putting much effort to solve. I’ve got nothing against bonobo rationalists, and if I had a magic button which would optimize cuddle puddles everywhere for any rationalist who’d want them, I’d press it.
I think different concerns about the relationship between Berkeley and other rationality communities are all bundled up, it’s hard to tease them out, and so for now I’m treating them as though they’re all equally valid. But to the extent complaints are less of the form “we’re tired of Berkeley taking up too much of the bandwidth of the awesome projects in the worldwide community” and more “we demand a redistribution of warm fuzzies”, the less they move me. Local communities need to give individual rationalists reasons to stay, or reasons to come, and they need to take more self-responsibility for that. That’s the attitude I tried bringing to turning things around in Vancouver, it inspired others, and we got a lot done. It sounds like some of what NYC experienced is an outlier in that regard, but based on the other comments here it’s my impression local rationality communities solving the problem of getting hollowed out might be getting organized. My experience has been it’s 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration. Based on my experience in Vancouver and accounts from elsewhere I’m guessing we can identify some heuristic ‘best practices’ for rationality community organization/development. So if rationalists, wherever they are, are willing to perspire, I’m confident other, more developed rationality communities can provide them with the tools they need. But to get people to the point they’re willing to perspire, I (we?) have to get that 1% inspiration right. And how to do that is what I’m stuck on now.