Thanks for putting in the time and effort to this post. I basically agree with your recommendations. Keeping the central hub in the Bay is the obvious default and if we try otherwise there's a good chance the community just stops existing. I like Boston and think it could be pretty exciting to all move there and would join in that effort. I would also join in an effort to move to the South Bay from Berkeley, because it's just nicer and cheaper there.
Niche point, but I want to mention that I thought Vaniver's comment on Wei Dai's post was excellent, where he talked about not trying to time the market. Basically, if you think that your country is going to explode in 10 years, the correct action is not to try to time it so that you leave in 9 years and 11 months, you shouldn't try to time it at all and should just leave now. If I were convinced the US was going to explode sometime in the coming decade I would indeed leave now, but I'm not at all convinced.
Habryka suspects that the rationalist community, writ large, basically wouldn’t exist without the Berkeley hub.
In the counterfactual where MIRI had been in Oxford this whole time, or wherever, I think there still would have been Bay Area, NYC, Boston, and Seattle communities. Maybe the Bay Area community would have been centered in SF instead, or something. Basically, I agree with your footnote, but some additional details:
It's less likely that we would have had the sense that there was one 'in-person primary hub', but I'm less convinced that the counterfactual on mission impact is huge here. Like, perhaps each of those communities would be better-developed and healthier without the significant brain drain? Maybe people would have still switched jobs between orgs, but also switched cities, so many more people would have lived in Boston and Seattle and the Bay Area, instead of lots of people who have lived in one other city and the Bay Area?
I think the rationality community is in a weird place where we get significant returns to concentration when considering getting work done (i.e. it'd be great to have every EA/rationalist org in the same spot) and also significant returns to dispersion when considering recruitment (having a healthy EA/rationalist community near every major university and in every tech hub seems like it would be great, and having the orgs communicating in the open with durable artifacts seems like it would be great for bringing people up to speed).
Habryka points out that it's very unlikely that he would have started LessWrong 2.0 if he hadn't known Vaniver socially. Both Habryka and Vaniver(?) initially moved to the Bay because that's where MIRI/CFAR was.
I laid the groundwork for reviving LW while living in Austin. [I suspect this was a core component of me still caring strongly about LW at the time, instead of going "yeah it's sad, but what are you going to do?" while going to in-person events.] In-person interactions were still an important part of it, but they happened at CFAR alumni reunions and Solstices, which I flew to.
Oli deciding to work on the project solidified at a... 80k New Year's house party, I think? I am pretty sure that was end of 2016-start of 2017, and I had just moved to the Bay Area in October 2016 to work for MIRI (and wouldn't have moved to the Bay except to work at an org like MIRI). That was made much easier by both of us living in the same city, and especially the same city as lots of other stakeholders (which made it low-cost to meet with them), but I'm not sure about the counterfactual of them being video calls. [Like, my sense is it's harder to schedule meetings / stay on people's radar without incidental contact, but our meetings with Eliezer were scheduled mostly without incidental contact, I think.]
Sorry for the US-centric viewpoint; I know it's hard to immigrate here, it's just that so many of us are already here.
This also feels like a hard-to-evaluate counterfactual. I have a sense that "most of the good people are already in the US or could get here", but I don't have a great sense of how much that's filtered by only having a good read of the people who are already in the US. If you take the LW core team as an example, I think 2 out of 6 are Americans, and the rest are from various parts of the world here on visas; I don't know whether to say "this is evidence that it's not that hard to get people into the US" or whether to say "in the world where MIRI had always been in Oxford, it would have been even easier for everyone in that reference class to congregate in Oxford, and we would have even more promising people to work on LW."
I think, all things considered, I have over 50% probability that MIRI's decision will be to stay in the Bay, and for more than three quarters of 'in-person Bay Area community members' to stay in or return to the Bay. [I don't work for MIRI at the moment, doing nondisclosed-by-default research made possible by the concentration of people in the Bay, and so even if MIRI moves it's not obvious that I'd follow in less than a year or two.]
The thing I'm most worried about, tho, is something like "the Bay Area growing crazier and more hostile month over month, and us having squandered our obvious chance to do a coordinated move, in ways that make it harder to coordinate future moves." If the 'in-person community' has survived COVID quarantines and people moving away temporarily (which I think it mostly has, but maybe other people's sense of this is very different?), it seems likely to me that it would also survive MIRI moving to Boston (or wherever) and lots of other orgs staying in the Bay. [Like, OpenAI isn't going to move to Boston, OpenPhil probably won't, and so on.]
Maybe I shouldn't be very worried about this? 80k left the Bay, after all, and seems to be doing well, and landed in another EA/rationalist hub. If the temperature in the Bay gradually ramps up, maybe at some future point AI Impacts leaves, and then the LW team leaves, and then MIRI leaves, or whatever, and the existence of secondary hubs means this is a more gradual transition than it might seem.
You misunderstand the problem with cancel culture. It's not about personal safety. The political significance of a man with a gun is not that he might shoot you, but that the credible threat to shoot lets him boss everyone else around. (Because though he doesn't have enough bullets to shoot everybody, no one wants to step out of line first.)
If the occasional dissident is willing the bear the costs of speaking, but can't win the argument in public despite being correct (because winning the argument in public would require one's interlocutors to concede, which they can never do if they can't bear the costs of speaking), then your rationalist community fails to achieve the map that reflects the territory. The problem isn't "safety" for individuals; the problem is that your community is failing to do the thing it markets itself as doing. At that point, you should probably stop calling the thing a "rationalist community" in order to avoid confusing innocents who came to you looking for shared maps? (But you still might want to have a cool website where people talk about Bayesian statistics!)
Can you add a quoted section to this comment to help clarify what you are responding to? I don't currently have much of an idea what point in the post you are responding to, and what it's relevance for the discussed decision is.
In response to
Social safety is a much tougher nut to crack. [...] The prominence of cancel culture and its effects on people such as Robin Hanson and Steve Hsu have put some rationalists on edge, especially those who write (or act) publicly in a way that's traceable to their real identity. [...] I guess cities are maybe worse on the cancel culture dimension because if you're hidden in the middle of nowhere it's harder for people to credibly threaten to physically attack you.
I think I still don't get it. But maybe this isn't super important. I don't think I understand what your second paragraph tries to suggest, or what it has to do with the discussion or decision at hand. Maybe it's objecting to using the phrase "rationalist community", but the paragraph seems like it's talking about misunderstanding the mechanism behind cancel culture, and I don't see how those go together.
I'll try to reword/expand here what I read Zack as saying/implying, without presently agreeing or disagreeing with it (except for one meta bit below):
“mingyuan's post implies that the main threat from cancel culture is being personally (perhaps physically) attacked. However, the main problem with attempting to center a rationalist community in an area that is sufficiently affected by cancel culture occurs well before the point where being personally attacked is likely. The problem is that people reflexively censor what they say, in such a way that the community stops being able to coordinate on anything that is true but cancellable, or even potentially-true but cancellable.¹ This would cause arrived-at consensus about reality to be distorted in a way that no longer reflects rationalist ideals and makes the resultant community no longer worthy of² the name. Because this has such an impact, centering on individual “social safety” as described in the original post is misleading and distracting when thinking about how to defend a rationalist community from the effects of cancel culture, in that it may lead to accepting solutions that preserve such individual safety but destroy defining aspects of the community in the process.”
¹ Zack's first comment has other references about how this can create an equilibrium that's difficult to break, and why partial answers work poorly, but I'm not confident enough to copy those here, and I think they may have been distracting as originally interleaved with the main argument.
² I considered writing “accurately described by” instead of “worthy of” here, but I place more salience on the emotion/motivation aspect in that part of Zack's comment.
Zack, how accurate is this? habryka, does that help?
(My read on the meta-aspect of the very first part is that I interpret the “I guess cities are maybe worse on the cancel culture dimension because if you're hidden in the middle of nowhere it's harder for people to credibly threaten to physically attack you.” part of mingyuan's post as less salient, and more intended as a potentially nonrepresentative example, compared to the “But, is there anywhere, physically, that one can go to escape cancel culture? My instinct is no”, which dominates my felt-sense of that section. So (without intending to judge whether this is good or bad) I think Zack is responding at something of an angle to the thrust of the original post.)
Yes, I got that part of his post, but the second paragraph feels more like a Carthage Delenda Est Comment that doesn’t have much to do with the first point, but I am not sure, and wanted to check. Like, it says some stuff about cancel culture and if you can’t win the public argument something bad happens and that we shouldn’t even be called the “rationalist community”, but I can’t figure out what that has to do with the location discussion.
Not Zach, but I think he's saying that if:
And 2. You believe cancel culture is anithetical to rationality.
Then 3. You should choose a location that has less of it.
This is very different from being personally worried for your safety, which Ming rightly points out you're not safe from anywhere.
Rather, if you think there are pernicious cultural effects antithetical to your goals, you should be evaluating on that basis.
The relevance is that your decisions as part of a group's coordination process should depend on what you think the group is actually doing in practice.
(If that sentence didn't make sense, then please forget it and write off this thread as a waste; I started typing a parable about the Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, but on reflection, it's probably better if I withhold further commentary on this topic until I finish a future top-level non-Frontpageable post, which has been delayed a while because I also have to finish 20,000+ words of background material that I want to publish first or concurrently. Sorry if this has been obnoxious.)
Agreed with your reasoning about the risk of the community falling apart if we tried to move it. It might not permanently fall apart, although that's a risk, but even if it didn't I expect it would set it back in size and development about 5 years in the process of trying to shift it, losing some people and infrastructure in the process.
To say something more general, I think much of the discussion around this topic has suffered from a bias for My Favorite City, or maybe more accurately My Favorite Tradeoff. That is, people want different things in different amounts, and for most people there is going to be some tradeoff that is better than the current one for them, all else equal. Of course, all else is not equal because these expression of preference tend to assume everything just moved with them to their favorite tradeoff, which isn't realistic, as your analysis points out.
Your multiple recommendations do a nice job of navigating this, considering conditions that might be strong enough to precipitate a move and where that move should be to under those conditions, rather than directly trying to optimize for some favored tradeoffs. I don't necessarily want to live in Boston or Oxford, for example, but I can appreciate why those might be the right choices under certain conditions and why I would have to reasonably chose if I wanted to move along with them or not.
This is probably better put in another post, but I think I agree with your read of the situation and recommendations, and want to follow it with the (to me) logical next step: "how to get some of the good things we could get by moving, without moving"
I like this post because it does talk about a bunch of things that could be got (sense of safety, isolation from political unrest, etc).
It seems not-easy and also not-impossible to brainstorm ways of dealing with this as a community in a sane and cost-effective way.
One way this could go: (sketch of a vision)
Right now SF and most cities have a bunch of "earthquake disaster preparation" advice. Things you should have on hand, ready to go, plans you should have made ahead of time, people to contact in case communications go down, things to do to prepare your home structure, attach your furniture to the walls, etc.
We could make some community version of that, pointed directly at the things we want to point at.
You mention that moving to a rural area would be an "all-in" dynamic, but Berkeley feels more that way to me than most places.
It's so far-left / woke here that I feel my only option is to hang out with rationalists. It doesn't really feel like I have social options outside of the rationality community that aren't a version of "hold your tongue and fake agree with everything that's said."
I've lived in a lot of places, and there DO exist places with much weaker / nonexistent cancel culture. Blue cities in red states are usually this way.
(I've found the Berkely university culture, the startup-founder culture, and the programmer culture pretty good alternatives that made me feel less locked-in, though I never ended up exploring super far in any of those directions, so some chance I would change my mind if I were to go more all-in on another community)
I'm too old to really mesh with university culture, and don't code which makes programmer/startup culture not a good fit either.
(I would also argue that woke culture is taking over coastal programmer culture too, anyways)
It's been a month and a half since I posted The rationalist community's location problem, and there's been a ton of good discussion both in the comments and elsewhere. In this post I hope to summarize the discussion so far, provide additional data, and give my take on what I think we should do.
It's worth noting that there are two related discussions going on in parallel. The first is this one: rationalists as a whole have become less tied down geographically during the pandemic, and it seemed like a good time to reassess whether the Berkeley hub was the optimal setup. The second is internal to MIRI (though it's been posted about publicly a bit) – like everyone else, MIRI has had to experiment with new and nonstandard working setups in 2020, and that's also put them in a place of wanting to reassess whether being in Berkeley is optimal.
Note: I work for MIRI, but these are entirely my own opinions and not MIRI's – I've been thinking about this problem since long before I joined MIRI and don't necessarily see eye-to-eye with most people there on this question.
People have shown the most serious interest in college towns (e.g. Austin, Ann Arbor, Oxford) and several European cities (e.g. Berlin, Tallinn, Prague, London). Options in New Zealand and Australia have been floated but appear to not be under very serious consideration. MIRI's main options under consideration are (1) the Toronto area, or (2) rural New Hampshire, within a couple hours' drive of Boston.
After looking at all the comments I thought, "Wow, there sure are a lot of places people are interested in and a lot of different things they care about. This seems like a great time to use a spreadsheet!" So here it is. You will quickly notice that it is not all the way filled out; this is because it has nearly 1500 cells and I was doing it alone. It is publicly editable, so please contribute a bit of your time to fill out a column or two if you think it's valuable to have this data!
The spreadsheet is informative, but it doesn't make the decision for us. In order for it to be useful, we have to figure out what we value.
The rationalist community is many things, but fundamentally, it exists to carry out the project of rationality, broadly defined. As such, our goal in choosing a location should be to preserve (or improve) the ability of individuals in the community to do productive work on this project.
I've come to believe that the two main cruxes for our ability to advance our goals are:
Apart from those, I think people will have a huge range of idiosyncratic preferences leading to competing access needs. For example, some people really want low cost of living while others really want high salaries, but the two are generally anticorrelated. Or, some people strongly prefer winter to wildfires and some people strongly prefer wildfires to winter. These are considerations that every individual will need to weigh for themselves, since there's no objective right answer. On the other hand, I think the in-person community and safety considerations are more universally important and easier to evaluate objectively.
Habryka suspects that the rationalist community, writ large, basically wouldn’t exist without the Berkeley hub. If we go with that assumption[1], we need to be really careful about how and whether we move away from Berkeley, because it's very possible that if there's no hub in Berkeley, the in-person community will essentially cease to exist.
(Note: Pre-pandemic, I estimated that there were at least 400 rationalists living in the Bay community.[2] I've seen and participated in several just-for-fun efforts to draw out all the social and professional connections between people in the community, and it always ended up as a connected graph. Point being: That's a lot of people, and you can't neatly remove just a subset of them without disrupting the whole social graph.)
I think that MIRI has been underweighting this concern, given their interest in moving to places like rural NH and Toronto, where it would be hard for others to follow. Whatever MIRI's internal goals, it is de facto very linked to CFAR and LessWrong – two organizations very focused on building and nurturing the rationalist community – and it might be logistically difficult to move MIRI without the other two (e.g. MIRI and CFAR share Anna Salamon, and LW depends on CFAR for much of its admin). Moving CFAR and LW away from the center of the community strikes me as an obviously wrong move. I also think that MIRI itself should want to be where the community is for reasons of recruiting, idea exchange, and social well-being.
Why is it important?
Why is having an in-person community important for the mission? So many reasons, according to me! Here are some bullet points:
Takeaway
So what do I concretely think we should do? Basically, I think if we move away from the Bay, we need to optimize the new location for ease of following. When my housemates and I went through a list of all the rationalists we knew to see how many might follow MIRI to rural New Hampshire, we were only able to think of five, and that seems really quite bad.
Here are some things that I think go into ease of following:
A sense of safety is fairly necessary for getting productive work done. If you don't feel physically, socially, and financially safe, you're more likely to be anxious and distracted. As an extreme example, you don't want to be a penniless refugee alone in a war zone with no family or friends.
I think people are indeed treating this as a major consideration, tacitly or otherwise. So let's dig into it.
Physical safety
Factors that go into this are crime (particularly but not solely violent crime), laws, and the general feel of the place (maybe this just straightforwardly correlates with crime, I don't know).
One example when it comes to laws is the fact that male sodomy is a crime in Singapore. Singapore has other good things going for it, but we don't want to move somewhere where the gay members of our community will have to worry about being arrested just for living their normal lives. (Note that there's some disagreement as to how much of a problem this would actually be, but in terms of feeling safe I think it matters quite a bit either way.)
As for general feel, I'd count things like street homelessness, trash and feces on the sidewalk, and busy roadways cutting through residential areas as negatives; and things like clean and well-maintained parks, lots of children running around, and people systematically smiling at you on the street as positives.
I think some people probably are attracted to rural living because they like having control over their environment – in that they both have more property and are less restricted in what they can do with it. I can see this contributing to a feeling of physical safety. However, I think buying and building on rural land probably takes quite a lot of time and attention, and after really taking that into consideration I don't feel as excited about it as I initially expected to.
Political unrest
A lot of people's desire to move seems to be motivated by nebulous fear of the US political situation. I am not one of those people, and I'm frankly a little confused about their epistemic state. Despite inside view on the situation, widespread violent political unrest in the US continues to seem incredibly unlikely to me.
It makes sense to me that we might want to move out of the US to a country with generally saner governance. That makes sense to me if you think that political polarization and general societal decline is going to proceed apace in the US, and want to establish yourself somewhere saner and stabler sooner rather than later.
However, that doesn't seem to be the goal – the goal seems to be just "flee the US." And I don't think we're at a point where this is a reasonable goal.
For an interesting example, let's look at Wei Dai's story about how his grandparents ended up trapped in communist China. Very importantly, his grandparents did not fail to see the warning signs of a hostile takeover. They knew things were bad, but they stayed because they hoped that they would be favored under the new system – and got burned when that turned out not to be the case. This just does not apply to our current situation, and it seems really unlikely that it will suddenly become impossible for us to leave, without significantly more warning signs beforehand than we're currently seeing.
Something that's even harder for me to understand is the "flee to a rural area of the US" plan. If we are worried about violent political unrest, it's not clear to me that rural areas are that much safer. Yes they're less densely populated, but they're often very politically polarized and have relatively high rates of gun ownership. Even if we grant that violent political unrest is more likely in cities, the historical likelihood of dying in this manner in the US is statistically zero; and if the situation looks bad, having a car and a passport seems good enough to be able to get you out in plenty of time.
The only situation where you really want to get out of all urban centers is if you're expecting a nuclear attack, which seems vastly less likely than political violence in general. My models here aren't super explicit, but given the fact that despite the entire Cold War the only time nuclear weapons have been deployed against enemies was in 1945, priors on nuclear attack are just incredibly low. (ETA: A commenter makes the reasonable point, "What about anthropics? There've been a lot of close calls.)
For more on the subject of political unrest, see kdbscott's question post from last week.
Social safety
Social safety is a much tougher nut to crack. At a smaller scale, everything I said above about having a rationalist community with good lines of retreat seems important. But what about social safety at the broader societal level? The prominence of cancel culture and its effects on people such as Robin Hanson and Steve Hsu have put some rationalists on edge, especially those who write (or act) publicly in a way that's traceable to their real identity.
But, is there anywhere, physically, that one can go to escape cancel culture? My instinct is no, but I didn't do a ton of thinking about this. As a toy example of the type of thing that might matter, maybe European universities are less (or more) likely than their American counterparts to fire a professor for saying something that's not PC. Also, I guess cities are maybe worse on the cancel culture dimension because if you're hidden in the middle of nowhere it's harder for people to credibly threaten to physically attack you. But again, this is all very off-the-cuff and not grounded in strong models. I'd welcome other people's thoughts here.
Financial safety
This one's pretty straightforward. All else equal, you want high salaries, low cost of living, low taxes, and good job security and job availability. Obviously many of those trade off against each other, but bottom line, more money is better.
From all this, I think it's pretty clear that we need to be in either a college town or a major metropolitan area (though not necessarily in the heart of one).
My primary recommendation is that the community – and MIRI – should stay in the Bay.[3] This seems like the surest way to not destroy the large (and, pre-pandemic, thriving) in-person community we've built. It's pretty likely we could move MIRI and/or a sizable contingent of people to the South Bay without disrupting things too much, if we wanted to. If some MIRI researchers want a more secluded, less urban lifestyle, they can move to the suburbs (e.g. Moraga, if the bulk of the community stays in Berkeley), or even just North Berkeley. That way they can have a quieter environment but still be within easy commuting distance of everyone else.
If we decide that we need to leave California but not the US – for example, because CA passes laws that make it unfriendly to tech and business, or because wildfire season appears to be getting significantly longer every year – we should move to the Boston/Cambridge area. It of course ticks the boxes of both being in a metropolitan area and being near a good college. MIT is the best technical university in the world by most measures, and the Boston area has plenty of tech jobs. There are trade-offs in terms of climate and costs (e.g. the Bay has higher rents but Boston has higher taxes), and the cultural milieu is certainly quite different, but overall I'm optimistic about the possibility of building a strong community in the Boston area.
If we decide we need to leave the US, I think we should probably move to Oxford. Oxford is home to FHI and Nick Bostrom; many rationalists have spent time there and enjoyed it; and both these things contribute to the fact that it's had a stable x-risk/rationality culture for many years. It also ticks the box of being a university town, and it's an hour's train ride from London (commuting distance by Bay Area standards!), which is not only a huge metropolis but also home to 80,000 Hours.
I have not actually looked into the practical aspects of living in England very much. For example, I don't know how hard it is for US or EU citizens to get work there, and I'm very ignorant of Britain's political situation (beyond having heard of Brexit and Dominic Cummings). Insight into these or any related questions would be much appreciated :)
No matter where MIRI ends up, I think it would be good in the abstract for the community as a whole to pay more attention to and nurture secondary hubs (such as Prague) and enclaves (such as the EA Hotel). I say "it would be good in the abstract", because I don't really have any concrete plans for this. At the very least we should acknowledge that each provides things the Bay can't – e.g. the quiet focus and financial support of the EA Hotel, or how much easier it is for someone in the EU to move to Prague than to the US.
Some examples of beneficial exchange between hubs: CFAR has been running several workshops a year in Prague and training a whole cohort of Czech CFAR instructors. Buck has previously suggested 'EA residencies', where employees from Bay Area orgs go live near different local groups (e.g. Yale EA) for a couple months. Scott Alexander and six other Bay rationalists/EAs took a road trip last year to visit a bunch of East Coast EA groups and SlateStarCodex meetups.
While the pandemic has eliminated most opportunities like these due to the drastic reduction in face-to-face interaction, it's also untethered many people from their physical locations, a change which if it persists will make inter-hub exchange much easier. I also expect that there's plenty of low-hanging fruit in this domain, since not much attention has been put on it up to this point.
Thank you all for reading; please let me know your thoughts in the comments, and help fill in the location spreadsheet if you're so inclined!
[1] I'm not sure I agree with him there, since if there wasn't one large hub, I can imagine a world where local meetup groups became more important, as in the early days of OBNYC. Lots of places had and still have fairly successful local groups, and they might be even stronger without the "Berkeley brain drain" problem.
[2] I counted ~30 rationalist group houses in Berkeley and ~8 in San Francisco; the calculation assumes that a group house has an average of 5 people and that about half of people in the community live in group houses. Also, this is probably a low estimate since we sold nearly 300 tickets for the 2019 Winter Solstice. Additional data: Open-invite SSC or LW meetups and parties usually get about 150 people, and it's definitely not the same people every time.
[3] I did not write this bottom line beforehand – I started this discussion to see what the correct answer was, and I just think this is probably it. I'm pretty sure I dislike living in the Bay more than the average Bay Area rationalist, and I've often personally dreamed of moving. If I could wave a magic wand and move the whole community to Oxford with no roadblocks I probably would. But in the end I value the continued existence of the in-person community more than my own personal feelings about the city.