I think it’s easy to underestimate the value of online community building due to it requiring collective effort to get off the ground. EAGT and EAVR sprung up at around the same time, and they’re partly in the same boat. Insofar as there is or will be network overlap, we could benefit from each others’ existence due to increased network externalities from a larger population. If either or both can demonstrate a highly successfwl community, I think the value of the more general model of online community building is proven right.
The reason a widely-used online EA office hasn’t spontaneously sprung up yet is not because the community wouldn’t benefit greatly from it, it’s rather because it’s a coordination problem. There have been numerous local attempts at getting something like this off the ground, but it can’t sustain itself unless it reaches critical mass, so just trying to do it locally was doomed to fail from the start.
A space like this only has value to you if you can find people there that you like coworking with. And the people you like coworking with won’t be using the space unless they can find people they like coworking with. So if you end up trying to use it at different times, you’ll separately log on only to find an empty office and decide to log out again. Alternatively, if the network is small and you only find people you aren’t enthusiastic about coworking with, you might end up logging out again before compatible people log on.
For projects with a steep Lindy longevity (future life expectancy proportional to age; probability of failure decreases over time), network externalities (the utility of the network per user grows with the number of users), and positive threshold effects (e.g. critical mass/escape velocity), it doesn’t make sense to aim small—that’s just planning to fail. Instead, it makes sense to invest heavily at the very beginning, when all the value seems the most uncertain and the project hasn’t had time to prove itself.[1] For opportunities like that, you can’t expect to have the value demonstrated to you before you invest in it—you have to rely on theoretical understanding or guesswork.
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
While an IRL EA neighbourhood could be higher value, an online “embodied” community platform captures some of that value, and it can cover a much larger slice of the EA community. And, unlike temporary university groups, online platforms are always accessible regardless of changes in life-situations. Plus, the EAs who benefit from the online platform are more likely to be those people who counterfactually wouldn’t have been able to have high-fidelity interactions with other EAs, because they’re the people who are less likely to have access (or inclination) to an IRL community. So the counterfactual impact per person of online community building may be higher. Maybe.
Why regular video chat is qualitatively different
Spacial, directional audio, being able to implicitly convey your focus of attention by facing, and walking around the space, allows group conversations to organically split and merge. This is extremely important for anything aspiring to work in the way of a meetup, party or conference.
Can confirm. I think this is also why people underestimate the difference between e.g. Zoom coworking and coworking at the Gather Town. I call it the ladder of escalating interaction. VR is much better for this than Gather, and Gather is much better at this than Zoom.
When I log on to Gather, I can walk around and see what people are roughly doing based on their locations on the map. The fact that people are online means that they are at least weakly signalling that they are open to interactions. I can acquire this information without having to send them a message to check what they’re up to and how they feel about interacting, and without having to commit to interacting in any way. Thus, when I do interact (e.g. messaging someone to ask if they wish to chat, or joining a coworking pod with someone in order to work), it’s much more likely to be mutually beneficial.
Compared to Zoom, an online embodied community platform makes it much cheaper to meet other EAs and maintain a community. I frequently have 5-minute chats to briefly catch up with people when I notice they’re online and I can walk up to them in social areas. It’s much more like sharing an aspect of daily life. Now, technically, I could also just ask my FB or Discord friends for a 5-min chat to catch up, but the costs and uncertainties involved in arranging that are higher. And it’s hard to meet new people this way.
This has sort of the opposite of the coronavirus pandemic. When forecasters called out for collective action to prepare for the looming pandemic before the threat was legible (the only time when it could have worked), they looked like fools to ordinary people. And when someone points out an amazing opportunity and calls for collective action to realise it before the value is legible, they may look like fools—or worse, people may accuse them of not being humble enough, not being realistic, and tell them to get off their high horse.
I haven’t been able to try the gathertown thing much, as my computer always became very loud whenever it was open. That computer has just died, so I might visit soon. Unfortunately coworking in VR is still not a very good experience.
But once it is, I think establishing continuously populated shared workspaces in VR will happen without any deliberate coordination, as soon as it’s practical. I’d expect to start around 2025.
Maybe we should be deliberately coordinating about it anyway though! It’s conceivable that the network structure we get without deliberate coordination will be much less humane/productive than one we could design—or it might be that they end up being exactly the same, this is something we really need to investigate and will hopefully discuss at length in EA VR’s social tech design channel!
Oh. well, it’s actually possible that virtual offices wont happen without coordination in 2025 despite the hardware being ready then, for the very dumb reason that the software still sucks, making social coworking software is extremely hard. There will be virtual offices, but there wont necessarily be virtual offices that people want to hang out in organically.
Incidentally, that’s a very large part of what I want our group to be working on.
VR is better for events, talks, hang outs, discussions, imo. But when I need to work, I just can’t do the headset. So I’m hoping you’re right about them being much lighter and more convenient to wear.
Ehh it’s true on a certain level x] maybe it’s just entirely the “feeling like they’re in your world” thing. When I meet a person, I feel responsible for them. I pay much more attention to them and think about them more often. I usually try harder to like them. They enter my dunbar sphere.
Online community building
I think it’s easy to underestimate the value of online community building due to it requiring collective effort to get off the ground. EAGT and EAVR sprung up at around the same time, and they’re partly in the same boat. Insofar as there is or will be network overlap, we could benefit from each others’ existence due to increased network externalities from a larger population. If either or both can demonstrate a highly successfwl community, I think the value of the more general model of online community building is proven right.
The reason a widely-used online EA office hasn’t spontaneously sprung up yet is not because the community wouldn’t benefit greatly from it, it’s rather because it’s a coordination problem. There have been numerous local attempts at getting something like this off the ground, but it can’t sustain itself unless it reaches critical mass, so just trying to do it locally was doomed to fail from the start.
A space like this only has value to you if you can find people there that you like coworking with. And the people you like coworking with won’t be using the space unless they can find people they like coworking with. So if you end up trying to use it at different times, you’ll separately log on only to find an empty office and decide to log out again. Alternatively, if the network is small and you only find people you aren’t enthusiastic about coworking with, you might end up logging out again before compatible people log on.
For projects with a steep Lindy longevity (future life expectancy proportional to age; probability of failure decreases over time), network externalities (the utility of the network per user grows with the number of users), and positive threshold effects (e.g. critical mass/escape velocity), it doesn’t make sense to aim small—that’s just planning to fail. Instead, it makes sense to invest heavily at the very beginning, when all the value seems the most uncertain and the project hasn’t had time to prove itself.[1] For opportunities like that, you can’t expect to have the value demonstrated to you before you invest in it—you have to rely on theoretical understanding or guesswork.
While an IRL EA neighbourhood could be higher value, an online “embodied” community platform captures some of that value, and it can cover a much larger slice of the EA community. And, unlike temporary university groups, online platforms are always accessible regardless of changes in life-situations. Plus, the EAs who benefit from the online platform are more likely to be those people who counterfactually wouldn’t have been able to have high-fidelity interactions with other EAs, because they’re the people who are less likely to have access (or inclination) to an IRL community. So the counterfactual impact per person of online community building may be higher. Maybe.
Why regular video chat is qualitatively different
Can confirm. I think this is also why people underestimate the difference between e.g. Zoom coworking and coworking at the Gather Town. I call it the ladder of escalating interaction. VR is much better for this than Gather, and Gather is much better at this than Zoom.
When I log on to Gather, I can walk around and see what people are roughly doing based on their locations on the map. The fact that people are online means that they are at least weakly signalling that they are open to interactions. I can acquire this information without having to send them a message to check what they’re up to and how they feel about interacting, and without having to commit to interacting in any way. Thus, when I do interact (e.g. messaging someone to ask if they wish to chat, or joining a coworking pod with someone in order to work), it’s much more likely to be mutually beneficial.
Compared to Zoom, an online embodied community platform makes it much cheaper to meet other EAs and maintain a community. I frequently have 5-minute chats to briefly catch up with people when I notice they’re online and I can walk up to them in social areas. It’s much more like sharing an aspect of daily life. Now, technically, I could also just ask my FB or Discord friends for a 5-min chat to catch up, but the costs and uncertainties involved in arranging that are higher. And it’s hard to meet new people this way.
This has sort of the opposite of the coronavirus pandemic. When forecasters called out for collective action to prepare for the looming pandemic before the threat was legible (the only time when it could have worked), they looked like fools to ordinary people. And when someone points out an amazing opportunity and calls for collective action to realise it before the value is legible, they may look like fools—or worse, people may accuse them of not being humble enough, not being realistic, and tell them to get off their high horse.
I haven’t been able to try the gathertown thing much, as my computer always became very loud whenever it was open. That computer has just died, so I might visit soon. Unfortunately coworking in VR is still not a very good experience.
But once it is, I think establishing continuously populated shared workspaces in VR will happen without any deliberate coordination, as soon as it’s practical. I’d expect to start around 2025.
Maybe we should be deliberately coordinating about it anyway though! It’s conceivable that the network structure we get without deliberate coordination will be much less humane/productive than one we could design—or it might be that they end up being exactly the same, this is something we really need to investigate and will hopefully discuss at length in EA VR’s social tech design channel!
Oh. well, it’s actually possible that virtual offices wont happen without coordination in 2025 despite the hardware being ready then, for the very dumb reason that the software still sucks, making social coworking software is extremely hard. There will be virtual offices, but there wont necessarily be virtual offices that people want to hang out in organically.
Incidentally, that’s a very large part of what I want our group to be working on.
VR is better for events, talks, hang outs, discussions, imo. But when I need to work, I just can’t do the headset. So I’m hoping you’re right about them being much lighter and more convenient to wear.
This, on the other hand, is just plain false. :p
Ehh it’s true on a certain level x] maybe it’s just entirely the “feeling like they’re in your world” thing. When I meet a person, I feel responsible for them. I pay much more attention to them and think about them more often. I usually try harder to like them. They enter my dunbar sphere.