Programmer doing AI interpretability research and sometimes running meetups.
Tristan H
Karma: 66
Bay Area AI & Alignment Scene Q&A
Predictable Outcome Payments
UDASSA as a theory of consciousness and the universe
Evolution and FDT
Deluxe Utilitarianism
Potential Future People
Valuing Options
Fiction Pitches
Spending Money Unusually
Superforecasting 101
Gallup Poll Prediction
Petrov Day
Game Theory / Coordination Games
Effective Purchases
Discussing Próspera, the new charter city
All Possible Views About Humanity’s Future Are Wild
Estimating physical quantities
You mention having a second office in “the city proper”: Would that be referring to Bellingham and Peekskill or Seattle and NYC? Alternatively would working from home some days of the week be viable for many employees?
I ask this because to me these would make the difference for the viability of living mainly in Seattle/NYC and spending 3 days a week at the campus, as opposed to the reverse case of living mainly near the campus and going into the city on weekends.
This isn’t a huge difference from the perspective of doing things on weekends, but it makes a difference for having a significant other who lives in the city and going to meetups. It means if you want to live with someone who has to commute from the city you get to spend 5⁄7 evenings a week with them instead of 3⁄7, which to me seems like a pretty big difference, and I suspect would seem like a big difference to prospective partners as well. I also find weekly meetups like OBNYC to be a great foundation for a social life, and taking the train both ways for them would be a bit much. So given OBNYC Meetups are on Tuesdays, any MIRI employees living in NYC that spent Wed/Thurs/Fri on campus would be free to attend them.
Personally, dating and socializing concerns mean that I’d find the “live in NYC, spend 3 days a week on a campus in nature” option rather appealing, but the “live on campus, spend weekends at partner’s place or hotel in NYC” much less appealing.
Anecdote from the NYC rationalist (OBNYC) group: Something I think we’d want that other groups might want too is an easy way for people organizing meetups to post to multiple channels like a website, mailing list, LessWrong and meetup.com.
Another issue we have that others may have too is that we tend to host meetups at people’s apartments, and the people hosting don’t necessarily want their addresses to be posted publicly. We currently handle this by only posting the address on a Google Group which is configured so you have to “apply” with a text box, and then we basically accept every application that seems like a reasonable human or mentions how they found the group. But Google doesn’t give us any way to say what to put in the box, or make the box less intimidating. I know when I first visited NYC the “application” almost intimidated me out of joining, and made me more hesitant to show up to some person’s apartment in case I was intruding on a social group I wasn’t really welcome in. I imagine a lower-friction and more welcoming way to put up a small roadblock to seeing the address would help recruiting.