Some cities, such as Boston and New York, are home to many EAs and some EA organizations, but lack dedicated EA spaces. Small offices in these cities could greatly facilitate local EA operations. Possible uses of such offices include: serving as an EA community center, hosting talks or reading groups, providing working space for small EA organizations, reducing overhead for event hosting, etc.
(Note: I believe someone actually is looking into starting such an office in Boston. I think (?) that might already be funded, but many other cities could plausibly benefit from offices of their own.)
The EA community has created several great coworking spaces, but mostly in an ad hoc way, with large overheads. Instead, a standard EA office could be created in upto 100 towns and cities. Companies, community organisers, and individuals working full-time on EA projects would be awarded a membership that allows them to use these offices in any city. Members gain from being able to work more flexibly, in collaboration with people with similar interests (this especially helps independent researchers with motivation). EA organisations benefit from decreased need to do office management (which can be done centrally without special EA expertise). EA community organisers gain easier access to an event space and standard resources, such as a library, and hotdesking space, and some access to the expertise of others using the office.
A place where EAs could live, work, and research for long periods, with an EA school for their children, an EA restaurant, and so on. Houses and a city UBI could be interesting incentives.
What would be the value add of an EA city, over and above that of an EA school and coworking space? For example, I don’t see why you need to eat at an EA restaurant, rather than just a regular restaurant with tasty and ethical food.
Note also that the libertarian “Free State Project” seems to have failed, despite there being many more libertarians than effective altruists.
Mere libertarians may have failed, as anarchists did in similar attempts. But I believe that EAs can do better. An EA city would be a perfect place to apply many of the ideas and polices we are currently advocating for.
Could you elaborate on the policies? And what, roughly, are you picturing—an EA-sympathising municipal government, or a more of a Honduran special economic zone type situation?
I don’t think I will elaborate on policies, given that they are the last thing to worry about. Even RP negative report counts new policies among the benefits of charter cities. Now we are supposed to have effective ways to improve welfare, why wouldn’t we build a new city, start from scratch, do it better than everybody else, and show it to the world? While I agree that this can’t be done without putting a lot of thinking into it, I believe it must be done sooner or later. From a longtermist point of view: how could we ever expect to carry out a rational colonization of other planets when nobody on earth has ever been able to successfully found at least one rational city?
Note, VR is going to get really good in the next three years, so I wouldn’t personally recommend getting too invested in any physical offices, but I guess as long as we’re renting it won’t be our problem.
I think it is pretty unlikely that VR improvements on the scale of 3y make people stop caring about being actually in person. This is a really hard problem that people have been working on for decades, and while we have definitely made a lot of progress if we were 3y from “who needs offices?” I would expect to already see many early adopters pushing VR as a comfortable environment for general work (VR desktop) or meetings.
This is a really hard problem that people have been working on for decades
What problem are you referring to. Face tracking and remote presence didn’t have a hardware platform at all until 2016, and wasn’t a desirable product until maybe this year (mostly due to covid), and wont be a strongly desirable product until hardware starts to improve dramatically next year. And due to the perversity of social software economics, it wont be profitable in proportion to its impact, so it’ll come late.
There are currently zero non-blurry face tracking headsets with that are light enough to wear throughout a workday, so you should expect to not see anyone using VR for work. But we know that next year there will be at least one of those (apple’s headset). It will appear suddenly and without any viable intermediaries. This could be a miracle of apple, but from what I can tell, it’s not. Competitors will be capable of similar feats a few years later.
(I expect to see limited initial impact from applevr (limited availability and reluctance from apple to open the gates), the VR office wont come all at once, even though the technical requirements will.)
(You can get headsets with adequate visual acuity (60ppd) right now, but they’re heavy, which makes them less convenient to use than 4k screens. They’re expensive, and they require a bigger, heavier, and possibly even more expensive computer to drive them (though this was arguably partly a software problem), which also means they wont have the portability benefits that 2025′s VR headsets will have, which means they’re not going to be practical for much at all, and afaik the software for face tracking isn’t available for them, and even if it were, it wouldn’t have a sufficiently large user network in professional realms.)
I think everyone will adapt. I vaguely remember hearing that there might be a relatively large contingent of people who never do adapt, I was unable to confirm this with 15 minutes of looking just now, though. Every accessibility complaint I came across seemed to be a solvable software problem rather than anything fundamental.
Starting EA community offices
Effective altruism
(Note: I believe someone actually is looking into starting such an office in Boston. I think (?) that might already be funded, but many other cities could plausibly benefit from offices of their own.)
Here is a more ambitious version:
EA Coworking Spaces at Scale
Effective Altruism
Here is an even more ambitious one:
Found an EA charter city
Effective Altruism
What would be the value add of an EA city, over and above that of an EA school and coworking space? For example, I don’t see why you need to eat at an EA restaurant, rather than just a regular restaurant with tasty and ethical food.
Note also that the libertarian “Free State Project” seems to have failed, despite there being many more libertarians than effective altruists.
Lower cost of living, meaning you can have more people working on less profitable stuff.
I’m not sure 5000 free staters (out of 20k signatories) should be considered failure.
Right, but it sounds like it didn’t go well afterwards? https://www.google.com/amp/s/newrepublic.com/amp/article/159662/libertarian-walks-into-bear-book-review-free-town-project
Mere libertarians may have failed, as anarchists did in similar attempts. But I believe that EAs can do better. An EA city would be a perfect place to apply many of the ideas and polices we are currently advocating for.
Could you elaborate on the policies? And what, roughly, are you picturing—an EA-sympathising municipal government, or a more of a Honduran special economic zone type situation?
I don’t think I will elaborate on policies, given that they are the last thing to worry about. Even RP negative report counts new policies among the benefits of charter cities. Now we are supposed to have effective ways to improve welfare, why wouldn’t we build a new city, start from scratch, do it better than everybody else, and show it to the world? While I agree that this can’t be done without putting a lot of thinking into it, I believe it must be done sooner or later. From a longtermist point of view: how could we ever expect to carry out a rational colonization of other planets when nobody on earth has ever been able to successfully found at least one rational city?
Note, VR is going to get really good in the next three years, so I wouldn’t personally recommend getting too invested in any physical offices, but I guess as long as we’re renting it won’t be our problem.
I think it is pretty unlikely that VR improvements on the scale of 3y make people stop caring about being actually in person. This is a really hard problem that people have been working on for decades, and while we have definitely made a lot of progress if we were 3y from “who needs offices?” I would expect to already see many early adopters pushing VR as a comfortable environment for general work (VR desktop) or meetings.
What problem are you referring to. Face tracking and remote presence didn’t have a hardware platform at all until 2016, and wasn’t a desirable product until maybe this year (mostly due to covid), and wont be a strongly desirable product until hardware starts to improve dramatically next year. And due to the perversity of social software economics, it wont be profitable in proportion to its impact, so it’ll come late.
There are currently zero non-blurry face tracking headsets with that are light enough to wear throughout a workday, so you should expect to not see anyone using VR for work. But we know that next year there will be at least one of those (apple’s headset). It will appear suddenly and without any viable intermediaries. This could be a miracle of apple, but from what I can tell, it’s not. Competitors will be capable of similar feats a few years later.
(I expect to see limited initial impact from applevr (limited availability and reluctance from apple to open the gates), the VR office wont come all at once, even though the technical requirements will.)
(You can get headsets with adequate visual acuity (60ppd) right now, but they’re heavy, which makes them less convenient to use than 4k screens. They’re expensive, and they require a bigger, heavier, and possibly even more expensive computer to drive them (though this was arguably partly a software problem), which also means they wont have the portability benefits that 2025′s VR headsets will have, which means they’re not going to be practical for much at all, and afaik the software for face tracking isn’t available for them, and even if it were, it wouldn’t have a sufficiently large user network in professional realms.)
You think they’ll get past the dizziness problem?
I think everyone will adapt. I vaguely remember hearing that there might be a relatively large contingent of people who never do adapt, I was unable to confirm this with 15 minutes of looking just now, though. Every accessibility complaint I came across seemed to be a solvable software problem rather than anything fundamental.
I heard that New York was starting a coworking space as well
I think Berlin has something like this
Indeed, the space was organized by Effektiv Spenden: teamwork-berlin.org
I think EA Israel would have more people working remotely in international organizations if we had community offices.
[We recently got an office which I’m going to check out tomorrow; Not an ideal location for me but will try!]