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.
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.