If I could change the effective altruism community tomorrow, I would move it somewhere other than the Bay Area, or at least make it more widely known that moving to the Bay is defecting in a tragedy of the commons and makes you Bad.
If there were large and thriving EA communities all over the place, nobody would need to move to the Bay, we’d have better outreach to a number of communities, and fewer people would have to move a long distance, get US visas, or pay a high rent in order to get seriously involved in EA. The more people move to the Bay, the harder it is to be outside the Bay, because of the lack of community. If everyone cooperated in developing relatively local communities, rather than moving to the bay, there’d be no need to move to the Bay in the first place. But we, a community that fangirls over ‘Meditations on Moloch’ (http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/) and prides itself on working together to get shit done, can’t even cooperate on this simple thing.
I know people who are heartbroken and depressed because they need community and all their partners are in the Bay and they want to contribute, but they can’t get a US visa or they can’t afford Bay Area rent levels, so they’re stuck friendless and alone in whatever shitty place they were born in. This should not be a hard problem to solve if we apply even a little thought and effort to it; any minimally competent community could pull this off.
Anonymous #8:
There’s a lot of EA outside the Bay! The Oxford/London cluster in particular is quite nice (although I live there, so I’m biased).
+1 London community is awesome. Also heard very good things about the Berlin & Vancouver communities.
I can recommend Berlin! Also biased. ;-)