I think some people might look at this to choose which EA hub to live in or where to found an organization (of course, not everyone can/should live in a hub).
I think it is easy to overlook the density of EAs when making such a decision: e.g. Oxford’s population is ~60x smaller than London’s and its land area is maybe 100-300x smaller. So the travel time to visit another random EA tends to be much lower, and it’s a lot more likely that you bump into people on the street. (My impression is that Berkeley is somewhere between Oxford and London, but I don’t know the details.)
EA density is definitely something worth considering. We reported this for the main EA cities in the 2018 Geography article (graph below) and you can see the graph for 2019 below that.
Of course, as I discuss in the ‘What counts as an EA Hub?’ section, what characteristics matter in identifying a hub will depend on your practical purposes: as you say, density probably matters more if you are looking for somewhere to live and want to bump into random EAs on the street, but I would imagine less so if you are looking to found an organisation and want an accessible pool of people to hire from.
I imagine that if you are thinking about travel time and likelihood of bumping into people randomly, functional density is probably also higher in some of these cases, due to EA populations already being very localised within certain parts of cities.
Thanks for the extra analysis, that’s interesting. Good point that it depends on your purpose.
Also, just to be clear, I didn’t intend this as a criticism of the OP at all—this point just came up in conversation yesterday and I thought it was worth sharing! I find these posts really helpful and keep coming back to them as I think through all sorts of problems.
I think some people might look at this to choose which EA hub to live in or where to found an organization (of course, not everyone can/should live in a hub).
I think it is easy to overlook the density of EAs when making such a decision: e.g. Oxford’s population is ~60x smaller than London’s and its land area is maybe 100-300x smaller. So the travel time to visit another random EA tends to be much lower, and it’s a lot more likely that you bump into people on the street. (My impression is that Berkeley is somewhere between Oxford and London, but I don’t know the details.)
Thanks for the comment Max.
EA density is definitely something worth considering. We reported this for the main EA cities in the 2018 Geography article (graph below) and you can see the graph for 2019 below that.
Of course, as I discuss in the ‘What counts as an EA Hub?’ section, what characteristics matter in identifying a hub will depend on your practical purposes: as you say, density probably matters more if you are looking for somewhere to live and want to bump into random EAs on the street, but I would imagine less so if you are looking to found an organisation and want an accessible pool of people to hire from.
I imagine that if you are thinking about travel time and likelihood of bumping into people randomly, functional density is probably also higher in some of these cases, due to EA populations already being very localised within certain parts of cities.
Thanks for the extra analysis, that’s interesting. Good point that it depends on your purpose.
Also, just to be clear, I didn’t intend this as a criticism of the OP at all—this point just came up in conversation yesterday and I thought it was worth sharing! I find these posts really helpful and keep coming back to them as I think through all sorts of problems.