This probably speaks to my own biases and perspectives, but my initial reaction to “come to the bay over the summer” involves several thoughts:
The bay? You mean the San Francisco area? What is with this in-group lingo? It feels sort of like the San Francisco version of View of the World from 9th Avenue.
I’m not going to quit my job just to hang out in a new city for a summer. I need to earn money for food, shelter, and clothing.
Also, there is the factor that “my word is my bond” and I don’t want to abandon my colleagues/boss/team after I made a commitment to them.[1]
Maybe this is mainly targeted at undergraduate students, who are more likely to have a few months of time over the summer with no commitments. But in that case how do they have the money to do what is basically an extended vacation? Most students aren’t earning much/any money.
Maybe this is only targeted at students who have wealthy families willing to fund expensive adventures.
Or maybe this is mainly targeted at students with fields of study that involve well-paid internships and student work, like a multi-thousand salary for being an intern at Google.
Or maybe there are some kind of travel grants people can apply for.
Maybe this is primarily targeted at people who do remote work and have no family commitments or other commitments. Okay, then I guess it is fine. I can imagine how it is really beneficial for a not-tied-down EA to be in a densely packed environment with other EAs, especially other EAs that have access to resources.
Maybe according to strict utilitarianism I should abandon them, but in terms of virtue that seems horrendous. I don’t want to be the kind of person who breaks his word whenever it is convenient; I want to have a really high bar for breaking my word.
I like this comment because it does a great job of illustrating how socioeconomic status influences the risks one can take. Consider the juxtaposition of these two statements:
(from the comment)
Maybe this is mainly targeted at undergraduate students, who are more likely to have a few months of time over the summer with no commitments. But in that case how do they have the money to do what is basically an extended vacation? Most students aren’t earning much/any money.
Maybe this is only targeted at students who have wealthy families willing to fund expensive adventures.
(from the OP)
It’s unclear from the outside:
How easy it is to start a project and how secure this is relative to starting ambitious things outside of EA. Funding, advisors, a high-trust community, and social prestige are available...Looking at what scale EA projects in the bay operate at disperses false notions of limits and helps shoot for the correct level of ambition
Even once you know these things intellectually, it’s hard to act in accordance with them before knowing them viscerally, e.g., viscerally feel secure in starting an ambitious project. Coming to Berkeley really helps with that.
Let’s say that for a typical motivated early-career EA, there’s a 60% chance that moving to the Bay will result in desirable full-time employment within one month. (I have no idea if that’s the correct number, just taking a wild guess.) From an expected-value standpoint, that seems like a great deal! Of course you would do that! But for someone who’s resource-constrained, that 40% combined with the high living costs are really big red flags. What happens if things don’t work out? What happens is that you’ve now blown all your savings and are up shit creek, and if you didn’t embed yourself in the community well enough during that time to get a job, you probably don’t have enough good friends to help you out of a financial hole either. So do you make the leap? Without a safety net or an upfront commitment, it’s so much harder to opt for high-upside but riskier pathways, and that in turn ends up impacting the composition of the community.
In theory, there is funding specifically to cover exactly the scenarios you are worried about (“40%”), for promising AI safety people going to the Bay Area.
If there is a systemic gap, the funders would very much like to know and people should comment (or PM and concerns can be referred if appropriate).
“The Bay Area” or “The Bay” is I think a totally normal abbreviation for the “San Francisco Bay Area”, see e.g. this wikitravel article. I’ve used this abbreviation with lots of people outside of the EA/Rationality community, and it seems to be commonly understood.
I’d expect it to be understood within people who live in the coastal US. I may have heard of “the Bay area” before I got involved in EA but definitely also wondered “what bay?” when people abbreviated to “the Bay”. (In Canada, The Bay is a department store, so spending your summer interning in the Bay would have very different connotations!)
Definitely agree it’s not an “ingroup” thing though, I think this is more of a certain class of American thing.
This probably speaks to my own biases and perspectives, but my initial reaction to “come to the bay over the summer” involves several thoughts:
The bay? You mean the San Francisco area? What is with this in-group lingo? It feels sort of like the San Francisco version of View of the World from 9th Avenue.
I’m not going to quit my job just to hang out in a new city for a summer. I need to earn money for food, shelter, and clothing.
Also, there is the factor that “my word is my bond” and I don’t want to abandon my colleagues/boss/team after I made a commitment to them.[1]
Maybe this is mainly targeted at undergraduate students, who are more likely to have a few months of time over the summer with no commitments. But in that case how do they have the money to do what is basically an extended vacation? Most students aren’t earning much/any money.
Maybe this is only targeted at students who have wealthy families willing to fund expensive adventures.
Or maybe this is mainly targeted at students with fields of study that involve well-paid internships and student work, like a multi-thousand salary for being an intern at Google.
Or maybe there are some kind of travel grants people can apply for.
Maybe this is primarily targeted at people who do remote work and have no family commitments or other commitments. Okay, then I guess it is fine. I can imagine how it is really beneficial for a not-tied-down EA to be in a densely packed environment with other EAs, especially other EAs that have access to resources.
Maybe according to strict utilitarianism I should abandon them, but in terms of virtue that seems horrendous. I don’t want to be the kind of person who breaks his word whenever it is convenient; I want to have a really high bar for breaking my word.
I like this comment because it does a great job of illustrating how socioeconomic status influences the risks one can take. Consider the juxtaposition of these two statements:
(from the comment)
(from the OP)
Let’s say that for a typical motivated early-career EA, there’s a 60% chance that moving to the Bay will result in desirable full-time employment within one month. (I have no idea if that’s the correct number, just taking a wild guess.) From an expected-value standpoint, that seems like a great deal! Of course you would do that! But for someone who’s resource-constrained, that 40% combined with the high living costs are really big red flags. What happens if things don’t work out? What happens is that you’ve now blown all your savings and are up shit creek, and if you didn’t embed yourself in the community well enough during that time to get a job, you probably don’t have enough good friends to help you out of a financial hole either. So do you make the leap? Without a safety net or an upfront commitment, it’s so much harder to opt for high-upside but riskier pathways, and that in turn ends up impacting the composition of the community.
In theory, there is funding specifically to cover exactly the scenarios you are worried about (“40%”), for promising AI safety people going to the Bay Area.
If there is a systemic gap, the funders would very much like to know and people should comment (or PM and concerns can be referred if appropriate).
“The Bay Area” or “The Bay” is I think a totally normal abbreviation for the “San Francisco Bay Area”, see e.g. this wikitravel article. I’ve used this abbreviation with lots of people outside of the EA/Rationality community, and it seems to be commonly understood.
I’d expect it to be understood within people who live in the coastal US. I may have heard of “the Bay area” before I got involved in EA but definitely also wondered “what bay?” when people abbreviated to “the Bay”. (In Canada, The Bay is a department store, so spending your summer interning in the Bay would have very different connotations!)
Definitely agree it’s not an “ingroup” thing though, I think this is more of a certain class of American thing.