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.
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.