Ah, sorry for that. I was a bit unclear in what I wanted to express with the above, sorry for being confusing:
Here are the two separate things I wanted to say:
London itself is about as closely connected via public transport, group houses, people visiting each other and just physical density of people as the East Bay and SF are. Let’s call this group the “core Bay Area”, and the other part the “core London Area”. It takes about 30-45 minutes to get from any point in the East Bay to any location in SF, and similarly it takes about 30-45 minutes to get from any point in London to any other point in London and both cost about $10.
Then the London core area, which in the EA Forum statistics is just London, has 2118 sessions in the period from July 1st to now. The core Bay Area, which consists in the statistic above of San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland, has 3776 sessions in the same time, making the London core Area about 56% the size of the core Bay Area.
The wider Bay Area, including the South Bay, San Jose, etc. are about as closely connected as Cambridge, London and Oxford are. I.e. it takes about 2 hours to get from any point in the space to another, and it costs something around $30-$50 to do so. Then the total amount of sessions from the wider Bay Area in the same period is 4771, and 4144 in the wider London area, making the wider London Area about 86% the size of the wider Bay Area.
I did an analysis on the traffic data on that a while ago, and forgot to make this distinction clear.
(To quickly check the thing above I went through the top 50 entries for the Google Analytics account sorted via city, and added all of the ones that are close to London and all of the ones that are close to SF to this spreadsheet, together with the number of sessions. I did not find any entries of cities on that list that were not Oxford, London or Cambridge that had any significant amount of people and were comparatively close to London, though I might have missed one or two with <50 sessions, since I am not as familiar with the British city names. Here is the spreadsheet with my numbers:
You included Los Angeles and San Diego in your ‘wider Bay Area’ sum? They’re hundreds of miles away, so if you include those I want to start including West England/North England/Ireland/Belgium/Netherlands/France/West Germany/Switzerland in the ‘wider London area’ sum.
I don’t know if there’s any way for me to look through the Analytics data myself;, but even if I use the EA hub (which I’d expect to be Anglophone-skewed and so under-represent much of Western Europe), that would double the number of people in the ‘wider London area’ (see picture).
Maybe there are factors other than distance I’m overlooking though; does it really take 2 hours and $30-$50 to get from LA/SD to SF? Because I wouldn’t have expected that and yeah, even Belgium → London is going to be significantly longer or more expensive.
Edit: Someone else pointed out to me that using analytics data over a period including EAG itself should skew towards SF just because EAG was in SF during that period, i.e. there was a huge concentration of EAs there that there wouldn’t have been without the conference. I don’t have much opinion on how strong this effect is, but it seems so easy to eliminate by looking at a different date range that I thought I may as well mention it.
does it really take 2 hours and $30-$50 to get from LA/SD to SF?
By plane, it takes about 3 hours (1 hour flight, 1 hour at the airport, ~1 hour driving to/from airports) and costs $50-100. By car, it takes 6-8 hours and costs about $100.*
*$50 for gas at around $4 per gallon; I read a while ago that car maintenance costs about as much as gas, so double this to get the full cost.
Note for non-Americans: California is almost twice the size of the UK. The distance from LA to SF roughly equals the distance from Oxford to Paris.
Yeah, LA and San Diego are probably a bit farther away than the other cities. I would be happy with a comparison that removes them.
Though removing them from the comparison doesn’t change too much. The general point I was trying to make was more that the highest density areas of the two locations, in which frequent travel is actually feasible, aren’t of equal size, though their wider areas are indeed quite comparable. And that there is a really big difference in a 2 hour drive and a 30 minute drive (i.e. over the past two years I’ve been to Oxford more often than to Stanford, simply because it’s so far away).
For the sake of EA Global travel times, I think treating them both as about similar size seems reasonable to me. Which is what we did in the analysis for this year’s EAG. Though for everyday community building considerations, the difference in density is actually pretty important (and is reflected in the number of meetups, social events, EA orgs, etc.).
I see an implicit premise that we’re best off creating a single EA super-hub, but is that true? Here are some reasons it might not be:
In academia, we see prestigious universities located in far-flung cities, and that seems to work pretty well. When a close friend of mine graduated from a prestigious university, his professors advised him to attend graduate school elsewhere to get a different way of looking at things. I assume this is a combination of different research groups developing their own views and also the influence of local culture on the university. Both could be factors for increasing intellectual diversity in EA.
You talk about the number of local meetups, but in practice the Bay Area has relatively few. Meetups focused on evangelizing EA to newcomers are especially rare (despite Bay Area residents being an ideal target audience: open-minded, altruistically inclined, high income, educated, etc.), and people have talked about the difficulty of breaking in to the community without already having connections. I suspect there’s some sense in which the Bay Area community just doesn’t want to grow more. Contrast with stories of the NY rationality community (in the days before the founders left for the Bay Area). I wonder about the wisdom of showering the Bay Area community with visitors year after year, instead of choosing a smaller hub such that EAG might actually make a difference in terms of having it be a Schelling point.
A single super-hub means a single point of failure in the event of disasters.
An interesting fact re: the Bay Area community is the number of people who were organizers in some other place and mostly stopped organizing some time after moving here. I think there are at least 4 different people like this and perhaps as many as 8. I don’t know if it’d be valuable to interview them.
Ah, sorry for that. I was a bit unclear in what I wanted to express with the above, sorry for being confusing:
Here are the two separate things I wanted to say:
London itself is about as closely connected via public transport, group houses, people visiting each other and just physical density of people as the East Bay and SF are. Let’s call this group the “core Bay Area”, and the other part the “core London Area”. It takes about 30-45 minutes to get from any point in the East Bay to any location in SF, and similarly it takes about 30-45 minutes to get from any point in London to any other point in London and both cost about $10.
Then the London core area, which in the EA Forum statistics is just London, has 2118 sessions in the period from July 1st to now. The core Bay Area, which consists in the statistic above of San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland, has 3776 sessions in the same time, making the London core Area about 56% the size of the core Bay Area.
The wider Bay Area, including the South Bay, San Jose, etc. are about as closely connected as Cambridge, London and Oxford are. I.e. it takes about 2 hours to get from any point in the space to another, and it costs something around $30-$50 to do so. Then the total amount of sessions from the wider Bay Area in the same period is 4771, and 4144 in the wider London area, making the wider London Area about 86% the size of the wider Bay Area.
I did an analysis on the traffic data on that a while ago, and forgot to make this distinction clear.
(To quickly check the thing above I went through the top 50 entries for the Google Analytics account sorted via city, and added all of the ones that are close to London and all of the ones that are close to SF to this spreadsheet, together with the number of sessions. I did not find any entries of cities on that list that were not Oxford, London or Cambridge that had any significant amount of people and were comparatively close to London, though I might have missed one or two with <50 sessions, since I am not as familiar with the British city names. Here is the spreadsheet with my numbers:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oAMqV67sJ3UEmIg4kw1gNgu95wtxODGg8FIyr_jglCo/edit?usp=sharing)
You included Los Angeles and San Diego in your ‘wider Bay Area’ sum? They’re hundreds of miles away, so if you include those I want to start including West England/North England/Ireland/Belgium/Netherlands/France/West Germany/Switzerland in the ‘wider London area’ sum.
I don’t know if there’s any way for me to look through the Analytics data myself;, but even if I use the EA hub (which I’d expect to be Anglophone-skewed and so under-represent much of Western Europe), that would double the number of people in the ‘wider London area’ (see picture).
Maybe there are factors other than distance I’m overlooking though; does it really take 2 hours and $30-$50 to get from LA/SD to SF? Because I wouldn’t have expected that and yeah, even Belgium → London is going to be significantly longer or more expensive.
Edit: Someone else pointed out to me that using analytics data over a period including EAG itself should skew towards SF just because EAG was in SF during that period, i.e. there was a huge concentration of EAs there that there wouldn’t have been without the conference. I don’t have much opinion on how strong this effect is, but it seems so easy to eliminate by looking at a different date range that I thought I may as well mention it.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B35Cz9EPOFE_bkswb255aGkyWFE/view?usp=sharing
By plane, it takes about 3 hours (1 hour flight, 1 hour at the airport, ~1 hour driving to/from airports) and costs $50-100. By car, it takes 6-8 hours and costs about $100.*
*$50 for gas at around $4 per gallon; I read a while ago that car maintenance costs about as much as gas, so double this to get the full cost.
Note for non-Americans: California is almost twice the size of the UK. The distance from LA to SF roughly equals the distance from Oxford to Paris.
Yeah, LA and San Diego are probably a bit farther away than the other cities. I would be happy with a comparison that removes them.
Though removing them from the comparison doesn’t change too much. The general point I was trying to make was more that the highest density areas of the two locations, in which frequent travel is actually feasible, aren’t of equal size, though their wider areas are indeed quite comparable. And that there is a really big difference in a 2 hour drive and a 30 minute drive (i.e. over the past two years I’ve been to Oxford more often than to Stanford, simply because it’s so far away).
For the sake of EA Global travel times, I think treating them both as about similar size seems reasonable to me. Which is what we did in the analysis for this year’s EAG. Though for everyday community building considerations, the difference in density is actually pretty important (and is reflected in the number of meetups, social events, EA orgs, etc.).
I see an implicit premise that we’re best off creating a single EA super-hub, but is that true? Here are some reasons it might not be:
In academia, we see prestigious universities located in far-flung cities, and that seems to work pretty well. When a close friend of mine graduated from a prestigious university, his professors advised him to attend graduate school elsewhere to get a different way of looking at things. I assume this is a combination of different research groups developing their own views and also the influence of local culture on the university. Both could be factors for increasing intellectual diversity in EA.
You talk about the number of local meetups, but in practice the Bay Area has relatively few. Meetups focused on evangelizing EA to newcomers are especially rare (despite Bay Area residents being an ideal target audience: open-minded, altruistically inclined, high income, educated, etc.), and people have talked about the difficulty of breaking in to the community without already having connections. I suspect there’s some sense in which the Bay Area community just doesn’t want to grow more. Contrast with stories of the NY rationality community (in the days before the founders left for the Bay Area). I wonder about the wisdom of showering the Bay Area community with visitors year after year, instead of choosing a smaller hub such that EAG might actually make a difference in terms of having it be a Schelling point.
A single super-hub means a single point of failure in the event of disasters.
An interesting fact re: the Bay Area community is the number of people who were organizers in some other place and mostly stopped organizing some time after moving here. I think there are at least 4 different people like this and perhaps as many as 8. I don’t know if it’d be valuable to interview them.