As your fellow Cantabrigian I have some sympathies for this argument. But I’m confused about some parts of it and disagree with others:
“EA hub should be on the east coast” is one kind of claim. “People starting new EA projects, orgs, and events should do so on the east coast” is a different one. They’d be giving up the very valuable benefits of living near the densest concentrations of other orgs, especially funders. You’re right that the reasons for Oxford and the Bay being the two hubs are largely historical rather than practical, but that’s the nature of Schelling points; it might have been better to have started in the East Coast (or somewhere temperate, cheap, cosmopolitan, and globally centrally located like Barcelona), but how are we going to all coordinate to move there? The options that come to mind (Open Phil, FTX, CEA, and/or others move there, or coordinate to do so together?) seem very costly — on the order of weeks or months of the entire organization’s time.
By the commonly held view that AI is by far the most important cause area, it’s fine that the Bay is an EA hub despite the tech industry being its only non-Schelling-point reason to be a hub.
For better or worse, Berkeley is also a hub for community-building now; tons of student organizers spent this summer there. Again, they go there for the recursive common-knowledge reason that other people will also be going there, so there’d have to be some (costly?) coordinated shift probably driven by a major org.
Seems slightly like cheating to count all those universities (or indeed all those cities) as part of the same hub. Oxford and London are way closer than any of Boston, DC, and NYC are to each other. It seems like a place can be a hub if it would be physically easy for any two people living in it to meet every week. Boston, NYC, and DC are not close enough to qualify. Pointing out the cause area networks that each of these cities have, and cumulatively counting them against the Bay “merely” having the AI industry, makes it seem more likely than it is that the entire East Coast could achieve the kind of Schelling status that Berkeley has. (Indeed, notably the Bay Area EA community is overwhelmingly located specifically in Berkeley, supporting the idea that physical proximity is very important.)
Generally I really like the East Coast lifestyle (insofar as it differs from the Bay’s) and am figuring out how to articulate it. Maybe it’s that people are a little more ironic. Maybe it’s that having to Uber basically everywhere in the Bay is dystopian. That being said, lots of EAs like the outdoors, and the East Coast is much worse than the Bay Area for hiking etc.
One thing that I like about Boston relative to the Bay is the relatively horizontal social/professional structure: it feels like, in the Bay, there’s a pretty clear status pyramid and a pretty clear line of who’s in the elite circle (access to the top workspaces), while it’s looser and chiller in Boston. But it seems like this results from the Bay being a major hub and Boston being less of a hub. E.g., once a certain office space opens in Cambridge, I expect some of these dynamics to reappear, and if Boston became as booming as Berkeley, I think a pyramid would likely start to become more apparent as well. (Sad.)
As your fellow Cantabrigian I have some sympathies for this argument. But I’m confused about some parts of it and disagree with others:
“EA hub should be on the east coast” is one kind of claim. “People starting new EA projects, orgs, and events should do so on the east coast” is a different one. They’d be giving up the very valuable benefits of living near the densest concentrations of other orgs, especially funders. You’re right that the reasons for Oxford and the Bay being the two hubs are largely historical rather than practical, but that’s the nature of Schelling points; it might have been better to have started in the East Coast (or somewhere temperate, cheap, cosmopolitan, and globally centrally located like Barcelona), but how are we going to all coordinate to move there? The options that come to mind (Open Phil, FTX, CEA, and/or others move there, or coordinate to do so together?) seem very costly — on the order of weeks or months of the entire organization’s time.
By the commonly held view that AI is by far the most important cause area, it’s fine that the Bay is an EA hub despite the tech industry being its only non-Schelling-point reason to be a hub.
For better or worse, Berkeley is also a hub for community-building now; tons of student organizers spent this summer there. Again, they go there for the recursive common-knowledge reason that other people will also be going there, so there’d have to be some (costly?) coordinated shift probably driven by a major org.
Seems slightly like cheating to count all those universities (or indeed all those cities) as part of the same hub. Oxford and London are way closer than any of Boston, DC, and NYC are to each other. It seems like a place can be a hub if it would be physically easy for any two people living in it to meet every week. Boston, NYC, and DC are not close enough to qualify. Pointing out the cause area networks that each of these cities have, and cumulatively counting them against the Bay “merely” having the AI industry, makes it seem more likely than it is that the entire East Coast could achieve the kind of Schelling status that Berkeley has. (Indeed, notably the Bay Area EA community is overwhelmingly located specifically in Berkeley, supporting the idea that physical proximity is very important.)
Generally I really like the East Coast lifestyle (insofar as it differs from the Bay’s) and am figuring out how to articulate it. Maybe it’s that people are a little more ironic. Maybe it’s that having to Uber basically everywhere in the Bay is dystopian. That being said, lots of EAs like the outdoors, and the East Coast is much worse than the Bay Area for hiking etc.
One thing that I like about Boston relative to the Bay is the relatively horizontal social/professional structure: it feels like, in the Bay, there’s a pretty clear status pyramid and a pretty clear line of who’s in the elite circle (access to the top workspaces), while it’s looser and chiller in Boston. But it seems like this results from the Bay being a major hub and Boston being less of a hub. E.g., once a certain office space opens in Cambridge, I expect some of these dynamics to reappear, and if Boston became as booming as Berkeley, I think a pyramid would likely start to become more apparent as well. (Sad.)
Hmm yeah, I went East Coast --> Bay and I somewhat miss the irony.
Ah this irony point is interesting! Do you think that this irony is in some way antithetical to the statusy self-importance of west coast culture?