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.
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.