EA Houses: Live or Stay with EAs Around The World
Would you like to live with EAs? Want to connect with EAs when you travel? If someone “granted” you free rent, freeing up your time, what EA project could you complete?
Airbnb changed the world by making productive use of people’s spare bedrooms and second homes. We at Nonlinear are trying a simple experiment to see if we can do something similar in EA—connecting EAs who have extra space with EAs who need space.
Picture an EA who works a regular job to earn money to pay rent. You might not have enough money to provide them a $50,000 grant, but you might be able to provide your spare room, which frees up the EA to work on something high impact. You’re like an angel investor, but for “impact housing”.
We made a spreadsheet where you can either seek roommates, find EA couchsurfing opportunities, or become a host, providing space for EAs. Patrons can offer accommodations either for free, at a reduced rental fee, or against some service (such as pet sitting).
Some benefits:
Enable positive impact that would otherwise not happen
Support a better use of otherwise vacant or under-utilized housing
Fostering cultural, social, and intellectual exchange between groups of people
Provide actually affordable housing to people all across the world
Examples of housing that might be available
A room that just became available in your friends’ flat and they would love to have EAs around
You or your parents have a second home which sits empty much of the year
A city apartment or studio that stays vacant for a few weeks/months a year and needs regular check-ups
Your parents look for help with garden work and walking their dog in exchange for a room
You’re wanting to rent a house with a bunch of EAs and you want to find other like-minded people to join you.
Your parents are empty-nesters and would love to have something like an exchange student around, but with a higher impact.
A group of EAs in a city link up to rent a house together
Example use cases for guests
Conducting an EA research project (e.g. if you received an LTFF grant or similar)
Upskilling (e.g. learning technical ML skills)
Engaging in local community building, particularly in areas where there is little EA presence (e.g. taking a leading role in forming a group)
Launching a venture (e.g. startup, charity)
Increased runway to give you the space you need to experiment or think about things
Living with value-aligned people
Opportunity to participate in or grow the local EA community
Benefits for hosts
Create positive impact by enabling EAs to to work on projects they wouldn’t otherwise be able to
Contribute growing the local EA community and be around more EAs
Engage in stimulating conversations with EAs
Find someone to take care of your pet, garden, or similar
Examples of houses available
Emerson Spartz’s parents are Midwestern-wholesome empty nesters who would be thrilled to host a nice EA in one of their spare bedrooms. They live an hour from Chicago in a beautiful home surrounded by lush woodlands with a friendly dog and cat. His father, Tom, is a retired entrepreneur and mother, Maggi, runs a local nonprofit. This is a cozy retreat from the chaos of the world to work on something big.
Kat and Emerson’s Caribbean House
Emerson and I have a house on the beach in downtown San Juan, Puerto Rico, USA that we live in for half the year. While we’re gone we want to fill it with EAs doing important work on longtermism. There’s room for ten people and you could potentially stay for one week to six months. Perfect for somebody who wants to be surrounded by an EA community and escape the winter months.
OK, how does it work exactly?
If you have space, list it on the spreadsheet. Potential applicants can reach out then you can select the people you think will do the most good with the space. We’re keeping the MVP simple for now.
If you’d like to help get more people using the platform, here’s an email/message template you can send to ask friends or family if they have any space they’d like to turn into impact.
If you’d like to receive updates about available EA housing, the EA Houses project in general, and other Nonlinear projects, subscribe to our newsletter.
Reminder that you can listen to this post on your podcast player once/if it reaches 25 upvotes using the Nonlinear Library.
- EA Forum Lowdown: April 2022 by (1 May 2022 14:48 UTC; 154 points)
- Doing good easier: how to have passive impact by (2 May 2022 14:48 UTC; 51 points)
- EA Houses: a Positive Testimonial by (4 Aug 2022 1:12 UTC; 50 points)
- EA Housing Slack by (14 May 2022 20:16 UTC; 38 points)
- Living Nomadically: My 80/20 Guide by (LessWrong; 8 Feb 2023 1:31 UTC; 37 points)
- EAG & EAGx lodging considerations by (4 May 2022 23:58 UTC; 35 points)
- EA Houses: Airtable, Map, tech projects by (11 Jan 2023 20:30 UTC; 29 points)
- Idea: Curated database of quick-win tangible, attributable projects (update 2024: links Airtable, but the EA side is not actively monitored) by (13 Jan 2023 22:21 UTC; 29 points)
- 's comment on Let’s advertise infrastructure projects by (24 Sep 2022 8:42 UTC; 27 points)
- Effective [Re]location by (11 May 2022 21:39 UTC; 26 points)
- 's comment on EA Housing Slack by (14 May 2022 21:57 UTC; 14 points)
- How to Get Housing in Berkeley by (8 Sep 2022 20:47 UTC; 12 points)
- 's comment on You have a place to stay in Sweden, should you need it. by (LessWrong; 19 Aug 2022 11:59 UTC; 10 points)
- 's comment on What are some low-cost outside-the-box ways to do/fund alignment research? by (11 Nov 2022 16:02 UTC; 5 points)
- 's comment on What are some low-cost outside-the-box ways to do/fund alignment research? by (12 Nov 2022 11:59 UTC; 1 point)
Are you curating the spreadsheet in any way? In particular, do you have a mechanism for removing entries submitted by people who have in the past made unwanted sexual advances or otherwise a track record of not respecting community members’ boundaries?
Light touch curation, yes—we’d certainly appreciate a heads up on anything like this!
As an experiment I converted the google sheets into a Notion database and plugged a map into it if anyone’s curious. (Keep in mind this isn’t in sync with the gsheet anymore) Map view of Notion database: https://app.notionmaps.com/map/ea-houses-l4re6115
Great thinking, @Alex Long. I think I would be much more likely (say, 5% → 35%) to reference this Google Sheet if it was migrated to a Notion database (with mapping capabilities). Up to you, @Kat Woods.
You might also be able to convert the Google Sheet directly into a Google Map, but I suspect it’d be a bit more challenging to implement.
It’s a lovely idea! Do you have an idea of how to keep it up to date, so that old, no-longer-available rows don’t detract from the active ones?
Good question! We’re planning on pinging listings on the sheets roughly every four months to see if it’s still up to date. We also have a column that says when the listing was last updated.
Anyone know how to add this to this list
?
Good idea! I messaged them
Hi, there may be a use case for people wanting a change of scenario for inspiration on a challenge or may want to hunker down to do some deep work. In such cases, a month long stay may be needed to do some effective work. Has it been considered to do housing swaps?
Looks like it has some overlap with the EA couchsurfing facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1021488637885621, probably usefull to work together?
Agreed—we reached out to some people in the group to see if they wanted to add their listings to the sheet!
Does anyone have any data or anecdotal evidence on how often people have actually stayed in EA houses that sprung from this list?
Good question! Somebody wrote this post. And I’ve had a handful of people say they use it all the time. Mostly for EAGs or other conferences.
Haven’t heard of anybody using it for long stays yet, which was my original use case for it.
I like this because it is a low overhead way for high impact people to organise retreats, holidays etc. with aligned people and this is plausibly very valuable for some people. It will also nudge people to look after themselves and spend time in nice plaes which on the current margin is maybe a good thing, idk.
Fwiw I think that LTFF would fund all of the ‘example use cases for guests’ anyway for someone reasoably high impact/value aligned anway, so I think this is more about nudges than actually creating opportunities that don’t already exist.
Not all EAs work on the long-term future
Sure, but it’s pretty reasonable to think that Kat thinks that majority of value will come from helping longtermists given that that is literally that reason she set up nonlinear.
Also, EAIF will fund these things.
I think that we should just bite the bullet here and recognise that the vast majority of smart dedicated people trying very hard to use reason and evidence to do the most good are working on improving the long run future.
I imagine that if you listed some people that are working on NT things I would think they mostly either:
Haven’t been around EA very long, so haven’t been exposed to LT ideas properly
Don’t think about things well
Are very averse to taking weird ideas seriously
Are actually working on LT things but it doesn’t look like this for optics reasons
To be clear, there are plenty of people working on LT issues who have some/all of the above problems and I am also not very excited about them or their work.
I would be super interested in seeing your list though, I’m sure there are some exceptions.
My previous comment may well ‘deserve’ to be down voted, but given that it has been heavily down voted I would appreciate it a lot if some of the downvoters could explain why they downvoted the comment.
“Don’t think about things well” is probably what caused it. It makes it hard not to read your post as NT EA’s being stupid. If you removed that, your comment would have basically the same meaning, except it would be because of lack of exposure (or not taking weird ideas seriously) and not something that feels like a proxy for stupidity.
Disclaimer: I didn’t downvote you
Full disclosure: I’m thinking about writing up about ways in which EA’s focus on impact, and the amount deference to high status people, creates cultural dynamics which are very negative for some of its members.
It’s a divisive claim, and not backed up with anything. By saying ‘bite the bullet’, it’s like you’re taunting the reader to say “if you don’t recognise this, you’re willfully avoiding the truth / cowardly in the face of truth”. Whereas for such a claim I think onus is on you to back it up.
It’s also quite a harsh value judgement of others, and bad for that reason—see below.
This implies “some people matter, others do not”. It’s unpleasant and a value judgement, and worth downvoting on that alone. It also assumes such judgements can easily be made of others, whether they “Don’t think about things well”. I think I’ve pretty good judgement of people and how they think (it’s part of my job to have it), but I wouldn’t make these claims about someone as if it’s definitive and then decide whether to engage / disengage with them off the bat of that.
But it’s even more worth downvoting given how many—in my experience, I’ll caveat—EAs end up disconnecting from the community or beat themselves up because they feel the community makes value judgements about them, their worth, and whether they’re worth talking to. I think it’s bad for all the ‘mental health--> productivity --> impact’ reasons, but most importantly because I think not hurting others or creating conditions in which they would be hurt matters. This statement you made seems to me to be very value judgementy, and would make many people feel threatened and less like expressing their thoughts in case they would be accused of ‘not thinking well’, so I certainly don’t want it going unchallenged, hence downvoting it.
I think making a list of people doing things, and ranking them against your four criteria above, and sharing that with other people would bring further negative tones to the EA community.
You directly said that all the smart dedicated people are working on LT causes or interventions and also distinctly said that NT people aren’t very good or thought out and that’s why they are NT.
Moving to explicit slagging of different cause areas isn’t an orthodox or acceptable view IMO in EA, even among “pure” LT or NT talking about other respective areas.
Things get metal in a world without these norms, which is why EA leaders pay a lot of attention to maintaining them. Very strong people, who don’t perfectly agree with every possible aspect of LT implementations, are very happy to see strong AI safety work and see it grow greatly. Some NT people are sitting on pretty powerful and unvoiced novel criticisms on LT (and vice versa). These ideas can’t really be socialized and won’t be said.
Note that this does not involve horse trading or anything like that.
I would expect to provide aid or resources to other EAs working on their cause areas I am not interested in and vice versa. Not doing so is defection.
I guess another aspect is that the “large” resources that will need to be deployed to LT, like 7 figure comp for individual talent and small armies of PA, comms and operations, producing reams of impressive looking applied math output, outreach, public figures, and other work, is important. All of the above is like the expenses of medium size startup by the way.
Yet, there is anxiety among NT, who say, give up high six figure salaries, staff and can’t quite compete in a material sense, that the situation in the above paragraph will just runaway, with the resulting ”complex” leading to certain excesses, like insular, uncollegial and self interested views that consume other areas.
All the above is sort of known, has been thought about for a long time and the proximate issues are manageable, even stale.
So, anyways, sort of sitting in “the outer loop”, looking at the situation in the first two paragraphs, a reasonable view is to be concerned about the related anxiety and pressure manifesting in an unhealthy way, coloring and providing an unstable tail wind to topics or memes like “vultures”, “funding”, “trust” etc. These are genuinely important and valuable topics that need examination. But these anxieties and tailwinds risk poisoning and spoiling this thinking. They also provide a powerful soapbox for posturing and other malign behaviour.
In total, this might ultimately may foul up important transitions with bad effects on everyone.
So like, even if everything in your comment was true, comments just that go straight to “NT are bad”, are not helpful.
I didn’t downvote. The negative component of the impression I got is it seems vaguely rude to my model of neartermists, and the first paragraph doesn’t quite seem to be true even if the most impact is produced by longtermists, because people could have bad epistemics or different morals and still be smart and dedicated. Also it should be out of scope of this discussion.
Also, even if most of the impact is produced by longtermists, people working in global health or animal welfare are often like 60% of the way there epistemically compared to the average person, and from a longtermist perspective the reason why they aren’t producing much impact is just that reality is unfair and effectiveness is a conjunction of multipliers.
I think some common reasons to not primarily focus on improving the long-run future, such as person-affecting views, non-totalist utilitarian beliefs and the cluelessness objection don’t fit into the 4 categories you described.
I set up an Airtable for the EA Houses entries here, and also transferred over the existing content
I set up this Zapier to automate ‘add new entries’ from the original Google Sheet.
However, I don’t have a full Zapier account and not sure I want to cover the $20 per month this cost. Does anyone already have a Zapier account that could take this over?
Update: I think my free plan might suffice for this.
Looks like you’ve now moved into something airtable based. It’s looking good.
I suggest editing the original post to note the updated location?
Also, some issues with the new location, which is good but
Some ‘merging’ of houses (when an individual like me put up 2 houses) seemed to have been done wrongly. E.g., info from my English house was merged into my American house, and the English house seems to have disappeared
Obviously the map is a static image; I assume you plan to update with a link to a geocoded dynamic map thing?
Maybe you should add/automate a ‘country’ field, as I did in my Airtable version
Good idea! Updated the links in the original post.
Sorry about the merging mistake! It should be easy to edit entries now if you want.
Map is static for now.
Automating country field is a cool idea. Will see if that’s possible with the new setup.
I suggest editing this post for the update?
Has anyone ever put these on a collaborative Google map? It might be a few hours work by hand and would be very useful I think.
Better still, some way of automating a google map based on this list, so it stays updated?
Thanks to this comment, I’m now working on setting this up!
Alex’s is great, and I’m working with him to make it so it’s automatically updating. Will also probably be switching to Notion which will allow for a lot more intuitive sorting and filtering.
Looks like Alex Long started this
This is really great and coming along nicely!
Update: These suggestions below were already posted on the ‘suggestions’ tab of the Google Sheet. Sorry for the repetition.
Some suggestions:
Someone should/we should find a way to integrate this with a Google map. Would be great to see.
Maybe worth switching this over to an Airtable? To permit easier filtering and … all the other great stuff Airtable allows.
I love this. It reminds me of stuff like MyPlace (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/travel/airbnb-alternatives-home-sharing.html) but simpler/cleaner as a sheet.
I would like to suggest (I’ll put it in the suggestions on the spreadsheet as well) .
a. Use trustroots.org they could add a “circle” for you and you could point there? b. Use the Trustroots software, you (or I got you) could ask openhospitality.network to host it for you 🙃
Great idea! Are you thinking of using some sort of expectation docs or simple MOU?
We’re trying to keep it super informal for now :)
It’s 2024 now. Has there been any actual couchsurfing activity?
has there been any couchsurfing activity?
is the idea being further discussed in some other place?
It would be great if the OP could make a post-mortem (doubly appropriate if the idea is actually dead).
Please drop me a line via WhatsApp, Telegram, VK or social networks in the profile if you would like to exchange thoughts in more like real time about couchsurfing.
There’s been couch surfing activity. Don’t know how much, but I’ve heard from a few people that they’ve used it a lot.
Since there are virtually no ongoing costs for this to stay up, I don’t think it’s worth setting up M&E