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.
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.