I rather think it’s sound advice, and have often given it myself. Besides it being, in my judgement, good from an impact point of view, I also guess that it has direct personal benefits for the advisee to figure out how people at hubs are thinking. It seems quite commonsensical advice to me, and I would guess that people in other movements give analogous advice.
I agree that all else equal, it’s highly useful to know what people at hubs are thinking, because they might have great ideas, influence funding, etc.
However, I think a charitable interpretation of that comment is that it is referring to the fact that we are not perfect reasoners, and inevitably may start to agree with people we think are cool and/or have money to give us. So in some ways, it might be good to have people not even be exposed to the ideas, to allow their own uncorrelated ideas to run their course in whatever place they are. Their uncorrelated ideas are likely to be worse, but if there are enough people like this, then new and better ideas may be allowed to develop that otherwise wouldn’t have been.
I used the word “icky” to mean “this makes me feel a bit sus because it could plausibly be harmful to push this but I’m not confident it is wrong”. I also think it is mostly harmful to push it to young people who are newly excited about EA and haven’t had the space to figure out their own thoughts on deferring, status, epistemics, cause prio etc.
I don’t think the OP said anything about a Berkeley EA hub specifically? (Indeed, #3 talks about EA hubs, so Akash is clearly not referring to any particular hub.) Personally, when I read the sentence you quoted I nodded in agreement, because it resonates with my experience living both in places with lots of EAs (Oxford, Nassau) and in places with very few EAs (Buenos Aires, Tokyo, etc.), and noticing the difference this makes. I never lived in Berkeley and don’t interact much with people from that hub.
I think there’s probably not that much we’d disagree on about what people should be doing and my comment was more of a “feeling/intuitions/vague uncomfortableness” thing rather than anything well-thought out because of a few reasons I might flesh out into something more coherent at some point in the future.
“Icky” feels like pretty strong language.
I rather think it’s sound advice, and have often given it myself. Besides it being, in my judgement, good from an impact point of view, I also guess that it has direct personal benefits for the advisee to figure out how people at hubs are thinking. It seems quite commonsensical advice to me, and I would guess that people in other movements give analogous advice.
I agree that all else equal, it’s highly useful to know what people at hubs are thinking, because they might have great ideas, influence funding, etc.
However, I think a charitable interpretation of that comment is that it is referring to the fact that we are not perfect reasoners, and inevitably may start to agree with people we think are cool and/or have money to give us. So in some ways, it might be good to have people not even be exposed to the ideas, to allow their own uncorrelated ideas to run their course in whatever place they are. Their uncorrelated ideas are likely to be worse, but if there are enough people like this, then new and better ideas may be allowed to develop that otherwise wouldn’t have been.
I used the word “icky” to mean “this makes me feel a bit sus because it could plausibly be harmful to push this but I’m not confident it is wrong”. I also think it is mostly harmful to push it to young people who are newly excited about EA and haven’t had the space to figure out their own thoughts on deferring, status, epistemics, cause prio etc.
I don’t think the OP said anything about a Berkeley EA hub specifically? (Indeed, #3 talks about EA hubs, so Akash is clearly not referring to any particular hub.) Personally, when I read the sentence you quoted I nodded in agreement, because it resonates with my experience living both in places with lots of EAs (Oxford, Nassau) and in places with very few EAs (Buenos Aires, Tokyo, etc.), and noticing the difference this makes. I never lived in Berkeley and don’t interact much with people from that hub.
I think there’s probably not that much we’d disagree on about what people should be doing and my comment was more of a “feeling/intuitions/vague uncomfortableness” thing rather than anything well-thought out because of a few reasons I might flesh out into something more coherent at some point in the future.