One thing this post doesn’t really touch on, which I would like more discussion about, is why we should establish new hubs in the first place. I think creating an EA hub that’s as good as Berkeley or Oxford is actually really difficult, so we should plausibly spend a lot of time deciding whether it’s worth the cost. We should weigh up the cost of new hubs with the cost of just trying to get people to move to an existing one. Sure, maybe not everyone can move to Oxford or Berkeley if they want to, but not everyone needs to live in a ‘hub’.
Maybe the flip side of this is that we should just have a bunch of people trying to start hubs, and we see who succeeds and who fails. That might be a good indicator of hub ‘attractiveness’. But I’m not sure we have the time or resources to try that
One thing this post doesn’t really touch on, which I would like more discussion about, is why we should establish new hubs in the first place. I think creating an EA hub that’s as good as Berkeley or Oxford is actually really difficult, so we should plausibly spend a lot of time deciding whether it’s worth the cost. We should weigh up the cost of new hubs with the cost of just trying to get people to move to an existing one. Sure, maybe not everyone can move to Oxford or Berkeley if they want to, but not everyone needs to live in a ‘hub’.
Maybe the flip side of this is that we should just have a bunch of people trying to start hubs, and we see who succeeds and who fails. That might be a good indicator of hub ‘attractiveness’. But I’m not sure we have the time or resources to try that