This ties into an underrated factor I talked about in this comment:
But then I also read stuff like this post by Alyssa, who is from the Berkeley rationalist community, and Zvi’s comment about Berkeley itself eating the seed corn of Berkeley sounds plausible. Sarah C also wrote this post about how the Bayesian Area has changed over the years. The posts are quite different but the theme of both is the Bayesian Area in reality defies many rationalists’ expectations of what the community is or should be about.
Another thing is much of the recruitment is driven by efforts which are decidedly more ‘effective altruist’ than they are ‘rationalist’. With the Open Philanthropy Project and the effective altruism movement enabling the growth of so many community projects based in the Bay Area, it both i) draws people from outside Bay Area; ii) draws attention to the sorts of projects EA incentivizes at the expense of focusing on other rationalist projects in Berkeley. As far as I can tell, much of the rationality community who don’t consider themselves effective altruists aren’t happy EA eats up such a huge part of the community’s time, attention and money. As far as I can tell, it’s not that they don’t like EA. The major complaint is projects in the community with the EA stamp of approval are magically more deserving of support than other rationalist projects, regardless of arguments weighing the projects against each other.
To me a funny thing is from the other side I’m aware of a lot of effective altruists long focused on global poverty alleviation or other causes are unhappy with a disproportionate diversion of time, attention, money, and talent toward AI alignment, but moreover EA movement-building and other meta-level activities. Both rationalists and effective altruists find projects also receive funding on the basis of fitting frameworks which are ultimately too narrow and limited to account for all the best projects (e.g., the Important/Neglected/Tractable framework). So it appears the most prioritized projects in effective altruism are driving rapid changes that the grassroots elements of both the rationality and EA movements aren’t able to adapt to. A lot of effective altruists and rationalists from outside the Bay Area perceive it as a monolith eating their communities, and a lot of rationalists in Berkeley see the same happening to local friends whose attention used to not be so singularly focused on EA.
This ties into an underrated factor I talked about in this comment: