Very good post! I agree with most of the points and the framing helps to see where there is room for improvement Regarding this sentence: “In practice, it seems that many physical hubs but one virtual/intellectual hub may be best.” Do you have any particular thoughts on how to optimize a virtual hub or Schelling point? For example, EAGx Virtual will take place in October and there might be some things that could make it a better Schelling point.
For “virtual/intellectual hub”, the central example in my mind was the EA Forum, and more generally the way in which there’s a web of links (both literal hyperlinks and vaguer things) between the Forum, EA-relevant blogs, work put out by EA orgs, etc. Specifically in the sense that if you stumble across and properly engage with one bit of it, e.g. an EA blog post on wild animal suffering, then there’s a high (I’d guess?) chance you’ll soon see a lot of other stuff too, like being aware of centralised infrastructure like the Forum and 80k advising, and becoming aware of the central ideas like cause prio and x-risk. Therefore maybe the virtual/physical distinction was a bit misleading, and the real distinction is more like “Schelling point for intellectual output / ideas” vs “Schelling point for meeting people”.
That being said, a point that comes to mind is that geographic dispersion is one of the most annoying things for real-world Schelling points and totally absent* if you do it virtually, so maybe there’s some perspective like “don’t think about EAGx Virtual as recreating an EAG but virtually, but rather as a chance to create a meeting-people-Schelling-point without the traditional constraints, and maybe this ends up looking more ambitious”?
(*minus timezones, but you can mail people melatonin beforehand :) )
Very good post! I agree with most of the points and the framing helps to see where there is room for improvement
Regarding this sentence: “In practice, it seems that many physical hubs but one virtual/intellectual hub may be best.”
Do you have any particular thoughts on how to optimize a virtual hub or Schelling point?
For example, EAGx Virtual will take place in October and there might be some things that could make it a better Schelling point.
For “virtual/intellectual hub”, the central example in my mind was the EA Forum, and more generally the way in which there’s a web of links (both literal hyperlinks and vaguer things) between the Forum, EA-relevant blogs, work put out by EA orgs, etc. Specifically in the sense that if you stumble across and properly engage with one bit of it, e.g. an EA blog post on wild animal suffering, then there’s a high (I’d guess?) chance you’ll soon see a lot of other stuff too, like being aware of centralised infrastructure like the Forum and 80k advising, and becoming aware of the central ideas like cause prio and x-risk. Therefore maybe the virtual/physical distinction was a bit misleading, and the real distinction is more like “Schelling point for intellectual output / ideas” vs “Schelling point for meeting people”.
That being said, a point that comes to mind is that geographic dispersion is one of the most annoying things for real-world Schelling points and totally absent* if you do it virtually, so maybe there’s some perspective like “don’t think about EAGx Virtual as recreating an EAG but virtually, but rather as a chance to create a meeting-people-Schelling-point without the traditional constraints, and maybe this ends up looking more ambitious”?
(*minus timezones, but you can mail people melatonin beforehand :) )