Agreed that these are important questions. I think I shared most of my takeaway on these in Thoughts on Reach, although it wasn’t quite optimized to answer them in this format.
There’s a few potential cruxes here and I’m not sure which seem most relevant to you:
1) How important to have a centralized space that is public, legible and is easy to get to?
2) If #1 matters, could the CFAR venue adequately provide that space?
3) How important are trivial inconveniences?
4) How important is it for people to get to bump into each other over time and form connections in low-stakes settings?
5) Are there meaningful alternatives to how to fund and organize REACH at a core project level? (By which I mean “the basic premise of have a crowdfunded space with events and coworking”)
6) Are there tactical ways REACH should be differently organized (given it’s current resources), such that it makes sense to withhold funding?
If the CFAR office didn’t exist yet, you might ask similar questions about why it’s necessary for them to have an office at all – can’t we just meet at people’s houses? (This is how many early organizations get started). But there is a level of scaling that a business have trouble doing when they get to a certain size if they don’t start having a physical space to allow a wider swath of possibilities than individual houses.
Similarly, when a community reaches a particular size, entire swaths of possibility become enabled when you start investing in larger infrastructure. Distributing public events and people-staying-over along individual houses is extra organizational work that you have spend with each instance, and depends on group houses wanting to serve as semi-public venues. (Often, in my experience, they sometimes do, but then sometimes actually want their house to be private, and not being able to because you already committed to an event can build up psychological stress over time)
I think the strongest counter-argument to REACH is “why can’t you just use the CFAR office?”. The counterargument to that is “CFAR doesn’t seem to especially want people to use the CFAR office for this purpose” (My impression is that CFAR doesn’t have the organizational capacity to optimize themselves as a community center in addition to running their core workshops and additional experimental programs. It makes sense to have a place and organization that is _just_ optimizing for that. Someone from CFAR feel welcome to weigh in here)
For easy reference, the relevant bit of Thoughts on REACH:
Measuring Intangibles
The most saliently high-impact output of meetups I’m aware of:
* The Boston meetup provided a lot of enthusiasm and volunteer infrastructure that allowed Max Tegmark to launch the Future of Life Institute, which in turn got Elon Musk involved with AI. (There’s room to debate if this was net-positiveor not. But my current guess is yes, and the magnitude of the impact was both unmistakably high and unmistakably causal with meetups)
* I’m not sure how relevant the meetups were, but my impression is that years ago in NYC, the existence of the rationality community lowered the activation energy for Michael Vassar introducing Holden Karnosfky to Carl Shulman, most likely substantially changing Givewell’s direction.
More generally, meetups seem to :
* Foster the growth of rationalists and EAs, many of whom then go on to work on important projects. Sometimes this effect is immediate, sometimes it happens over the course of years
* Introduce people to each other (and to the broader ecosystem of organizations and thinkers) that increases the overall “luck surface area” of both individuals, and the collective rationalsphere.
* Provide a change-in-social-environment that allow important ideas from the sequences to actually take root, leading eventually to more capable individuals and ideas.
* Incubate projects (I think FLI counts. MetaMed didn’t work out in the end but I think from an expected-value and learning framework it counted. I think many organizations have their roots in people bouncing into each other at meetups)
Agreed that these are important questions. I think I shared most of my takeaway on these in Thoughts on Reach, although it wasn’t quite optimized to answer them in this format.
There’s a few potential cruxes here and I’m not sure which seem most relevant to you:
1) How important to have a centralized space that is public, legible and is easy to get to?
2) If #1 matters, could the CFAR venue adequately provide that space?
3) How important are trivial inconveniences?
4) How important is it for people to get to bump into each other over time and form connections in low-stakes settings?
5) Are there meaningful alternatives to how to fund and organize REACH at a core project level? (By which I mean “the basic premise of have a crowdfunded space with events and coworking”)
6) Are there tactical ways REACH should be differently organized (given it’s current resources), such that it makes sense to withhold funding?
If the CFAR office didn’t exist yet, you might ask similar questions about why it’s necessary for them to have an office at all – can’t we just meet at people’s houses? (This is how many early organizations get started). But there is a level of scaling that a business have trouble doing when they get to a certain size if they don’t start having a physical space to allow a wider swath of possibilities than individual houses.
Similarly, when a community reaches a particular size, entire swaths of possibility become enabled when you start investing in larger infrastructure. Distributing public events and people-staying-over along individual houses is extra organizational work that you have spend with each instance, and depends on group houses wanting to serve as semi-public venues. (Often, in my experience, they sometimes do, but then sometimes actually want their house to be private, and not being able to because you already committed to an event can build up psychological stress over time)
I think the strongest counter-argument to REACH is “why can’t you just use the CFAR office?”. The counterargument to that is “CFAR doesn’t seem to especially want people to use the CFAR office for this purpose” (My impression is that CFAR doesn’t have the organizational capacity to optimize themselves as a community center in addition to running their core workshops and additional experimental programs. It makes sense to have a place and organization that is _just_ optimizing for that. Someone from CFAR feel welcome to weigh in here)
For easy reference, the relevant bit of Thoughts on REACH: