I’m always excited to hear about another push to establish strong EA working communities outside of The Bay and Oxbridge. But this makes me realize a concern I have with the proliferation of “hub projects” — are they separate efforts cancelling out?
Hubs are good[1] because densifying talent increases innovation and community-building. However, if hubs are funded to draw people to their hub, and they are entirely drawing people from other hubs (that are themselves funded to do the same)… I think we can see this would be a poor use of funding.
However, I assume this concern loses its teeth upon contact with reality. I bet what is happening with 2nd tier hub projects like this[2] is that they’re primarily drawing people near them and catching some wandering, hub-less talent for short periods. In that case, they seem like a reasonable use of resources.
But as far as hubs are good meta-EA projects, I wonder how much coordination there should be to ensure we avoid the silly zero-sum race to the bottom dynamics as we see in the USA, where states will outbid each other to lure companies to their area. Is this coordination happening already? One rule that seems reasonable (and may already be implemented) is to prioritise offering residencies to hubless people (all else equal).
The logical conclusion of developing one hyper-hub seems bad because EA knowledge and talent should be geographically diverse, assuming we want EA to survive a catastrophe.
I’ve recently heard about Boston, Cape Town, Bahamas, and Berlin but I’m unsure how much they (outside of the FTX Bahamas one, which is) are offering residencies
It seems to me that there is some subtle confusion going on here.
0. It’s actually more about the ‘Season’.
1. This isn’t really “a push to establish a community outside of The Bay or Oxford”, as that community already exists in Prague for some time. E.g. Prague had it’s coworking space since ca 2017, sooner than almost anywhere else, already has something like ˜15 FTE ppl working on EA/longtermist relevant projects, etc. I think to some extent what happened over past few years was the existing Prague hub focused too much on ‘doing the work’ and comparably less on ‘promoting the place’ or ‘writing posts about how it is a hub on EA forum’. So, in the hub dynamics, more than ‘establishing something’, perhaps you can view this as ‘creating common knowledge about something’ / ‘upgrade’.
2. I think structure with ‘one giant hub’ is bad not only for suving physical catastrophe, but mainly because more subtle memetics and social effects, talent-routing, and overall robustness. For example: if the US cultural wars stuff escalated and EA become subject of wrath of one of the sides, it could have large negative effects not only directly due to hostile environment, but also due to secondary reactions of EA, induced opinion polarization, etc.
3. On practical level, I think the strongest current developments toward multi-hub network structure are often clearly sensible—for example, not having visible presence on the East Coast was in my view a bug, not a feature.
Also +1 that having hubs in US and UK is sub-optimal.
To your knowledge, have there been any efforts to systematically compare different hub candidates? I’d be curious to see the reasoning behind why location A might be more preferable than B, C, D, etc.
I think you’re right in your third paragraph. I lead a small group far outside of a ‘hub’ and I’d find this really useful as being immersed in a fully EA environment for some time. It wouldn’t so much being a case of pulling me FT to Prague, but more a chance to spend time in an EA environment that is different from my home one. That’s largely what was behind my own application, anyway.
I’m always excited to hear about another push to establish strong EA working communities outside of The Bay and Oxbridge. But this makes me realize a concern I have with the proliferation of “hub projects” — are they separate efforts cancelling out?
Hubs are good[1] because densifying talent increases innovation and community-building. However, if hubs are funded to draw people to their hub, and they are entirely drawing people from other hubs (that are themselves funded to do the same)… I think we can see this would be a poor use of funding.
However, I assume this concern loses its teeth upon contact with reality. I bet what is happening with 2nd tier hub projects like this[2] is that they’re primarily drawing people near them and catching some wandering, hub-less talent for short periods. In that case, they seem like a reasonable use of resources.
But as far as hubs are good meta-EA projects, I wonder how much coordination there should be to ensure we avoid the silly zero-sum race to the bottom dynamics as we see in the USA, where states will outbid each other to lure companies to their area. Is this coordination happening already? One rule that seems reasonable (and may already be implemented) is to prioritise offering residencies to hubless people (all else equal).
The logical conclusion of developing one hyper-hub seems bad because EA knowledge and talent should be geographically diverse, assuming we want EA to survive a catastrophe.
I’ve recently heard about Boston, Cape Town, Bahamas, and Berlin but I’m unsure how much they (outside of the FTX Bahamas one, which is) are offering residencies
It seems to me that there is some subtle confusion going on here.
0. It’s actually more about the ‘Season’.
1. This isn’t really “a push to establish a community outside of The Bay or Oxford”, as that community already exists in Prague for some time. E.g. Prague had it’s coworking space since ca 2017, sooner than almost anywhere else, already has something like ˜15 FTE ppl working on EA/longtermist relevant projects, etc. I think to some extent what happened over past few years was the existing Prague hub focused too much on ‘doing the work’ and comparably less on ‘promoting the place’ or ‘writing posts about how it is a hub on EA forum’. So, in the hub dynamics, more than ‘establishing something’, perhaps you can view this as ‘creating common knowledge about something’ / ‘upgrade’.
2. I think structure with ‘one giant hub’ is bad not only for suving physical catastrophe, but mainly because more subtle memetics and social effects, talent-routing, and overall robustness. For example: if the US cultural wars stuff escalated and EA become subject of wrath of one of the sides, it could have large negative effects not only directly due to hostile environment, but also due to secondary reactions of EA, induced opinion polarization, etc.
3. On practical level, I think the strongest current developments toward multi-hub network structure are often clearly sensible—for example, not having visible presence on the East Coast was in my view a bug, not a feature.
Agree with all three points, but most critically with #2. And only having hubs in the US and UK is very much non-ideal for a variety of reasons.
Also +1 that having hubs in US and UK is sub-optimal.
To your knowledge, have there been any efforts to systematically compare different hub candidates? I’d be curious to see the reasoning behind why location A might be more preferable than B, C, D, etc.
There was an earlier attempt here.
I think you’re right in your third paragraph. I lead a small group far outside of a ‘hub’ and I’d find this really useful as being immersed in a fully EA environment for some time. It wouldn’t so much being a case of pulling me FT to Prague, but more a chance to spend time in an EA environment that is different from my home one. That’s largely what was behind my own application, anyway.