I just want to say I really like this style of non-judgmental anthropology and think it gives an accurate-in-my-experience range of what people are thinking and feeling in the Bay, for better and for worse.
Also: one thing that I sort of expected to come up and didn’t see, except indirectly in a few vignettes, is just how much of one’s life in the Bay Area rationalist/EA scene is comprised of work, of AI, and/or of EA. Part of this is just that I’ve only ever lived in the Bay for up to ~6 weeks at a time and was brought there by work, and if I lived there permanently I’d probably try to carve out some non-EA/AI time, but I think it’s a fairly common experience for people who move to the Bay to do AI safety-related things to find that it absorbs everything else unless you make a conscious effort not to. At basically all the social events I attended, >25% of the attendees worked in the same office I did and >25% of the people at any given time are talking about AI or EA. This has not been my experience even while doing related full-time work in Boston, Oxford, and DC.
Again, part of this is that I’ve been in Berkeley for shorter stints that were more work-focused. But yeah, I think it’s not just my experience that the scene is very intense in this way, and this amplifies everything in this post in terms of how much it affects your day-to-day experience.
I just want to say I really like this style of non-judgmental anthropology and think it gives an accurate-in-my-experience range of what people are thinking and feeling in the Bay, for better and for worse.
Also: one thing that I sort of expected to come up and didn’t see, except indirectly in a few vignettes, is just how much of one’s life in the Bay Area rationalist/EA scene is comprised of work, of AI, and/or of EA. Part of this is just that I’ve only ever lived in the Bay for up to ~6 weeks at a time and was brought there by work, and if I lived there permanently I’d probably try to carve out some non-EA/AI time, but I think it’s a fairly common experience for people who move to the Bay to do AI safety-related things to find that it absorbs everything else unless you make a conscious effort not to. At basically all the social events I attended, >25% of the attendees worked in the same office I did and >25% of the people at any given time are talking about AI or EA. This has not been my experience even while doing related full-time work in Boston, Oxford, and DC.
Again, part of this is that I’ve been in Berkeley for shorter stints that were more work-focused. But yeah, I think it’s not just my experience that the scene is very intense in this way, and this amplifies everything in this post in terms of how much it affects your day-to-day experience.