I think this somewhat strange representation of the case. You should carefully consider what is the counterfactual.
As I understand it, the counterfactuals are
People use MIRI/CFAR office as a default meetup and coworking space. This has the disadvantage of going through alocked doors and an elevator with access control. Possibly this can be solved by installing some remote control on the door, and the elevator? Possibly this could cost less than $70k a year?
New CEA office is also not that small, and can host events?
Another counterfactual is turning it into a rationalist coffee. This would likely capture most of the benefits, without big part of the financial burden.
From the outside, the different quality of these spaces seems to be in part in level of professionalism and ideological differences, where some of the things which you will be likely allowed to organize and do in REACH would probably not be welcome in MIRI/CFAR or CEA space. Than, the hard question is, whether this is not actually a desirable feature.
I’m appreciative of you bringing up counterfactuals and do think they’re important to consider.
As someone who regularly hosts events at REACH, my counterfactual locations would be a room on UC Berkeley campus or in a public library. These have some disadvantages compared to REACH:
The campus rooms require a Berkeley student to unlock open the door to the building, which means one of the organizers has to sit out the first 15 minutes of the meetup, either standing by the door or wandering in and out to let people in.
The library would allow us to expose far fewer EAs to our (biosecurity-specific) meetup content, since right now many attendees just wander in due to being in the space.
They aren’t terrible options- I don’t think our meetup would shut down if REACH did. Still: they have disadvantages. I wouldn’t be trying to host at CFAR or CEA since:
The access control on the CFAR office space is required by the building management. They used to have more lax access controls, but it’s now much harder to have the CFAR office space be one that people can wander into. The MIRI space, AFAIK, has never been regularly used for open, non-technical gatherings.
I don’t believe that CEA is interested in hosting events and coworking in their office. My impression is that they (reasonably, I think) don’t consider it a part of their mandate.
I’m not sure about your final counterfactual suggestion- what would that look like in practice? Is this suggestion to open a rationalist-focused coffee shop?
Thanks for the reply! Continuing with counterfactual exercise and some goal factoring
hiring an external person to just stand by the door and open the door, either at the campus or CFAR space, for 1h / week, could cost $750/y
doing the same for 4 meetups a week per year would cost $3000, approximately 1⁄2 the price for reach per month
Yes, another counterfactual suggestion is to run a rationalist-focused coffee shop, as some form of social business. Apparently there are at least two places in the world where something like that works—Kocherga in Moscow https://kocherga-club.ru/, and we have a tea-house in Prague.
I’ll probably not comment on REACH further, my impression is matters of REACH are too emotionally charged and not up for rational discussion, at least not in public—note the down-votes on my comments.
(I do think its important to be able to have this sort of conversation. Understand if you don’t want to continue, appreciate you raising the counterfactual considerations in the first place)
I do think considering counterfactuals are important, but I think your points here are missing the core point I was making: the value of REACH is in reducing trivial inconveniences to zero* (for running events, and for casually bumping into each other).
*well, close to zero.
The reason there are 2-3 extra events per week now is that there is an easy way to make them happen, and a lot of flexibility on what sort of events one can host. If running a public event required arranging a person for that particular evening, it’d be much harder. This wouldn’t allow the spare energy in the system to turn into new-events-that-turn-into-more-people-and-energy.
It’s important that people can show up most times of day to work or hang out.
There’s also the fact that travelers can crash at REACH in a publicly legible way (whereas before the only way to do so was to know people in the Bay).
So the counterfactuals here are more like:
1) CFAR hires a person to let people in all day, every day. (right now CFAR has people, one of whose jobs is to let people in, but it often takes a long time for them to hear the bell and get around to it and come downstairs. This makes it feel like showing up is imposing an obligation on them, which discourages people being able to casually bump into each other, or to run extra events)
If you’re paying people $10/hour, 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, that’s more like $40,000. Technically cheaper, yes, but same order of magnitude, and coming with stronger costs (since CFAR is an office which sometimes needs control over the space for work reasons)
2) People who are less socially connected don’t get to visit the bay as often.
Trigger warning: If you love REACH, invested a lot into it, had some unforgettable moment there, or have some other strong connection to it, following post may trigger some negative emotion in you. I would be glad if you invest the effort in disassociating the negative emotions with people. I wish Berkeley community to have great spaces, be welcoming, and do great public events.
Probably I’m a bit confused what is your main claim of the impact produced from an EA perspective. Lowering the barriers for some things to happen from small to zero, and creating value by randomly occurring social connections? In the first case, I would propose to take a step forward, and estimate the impact of things actually happening, and costs ofcounterfactual conditions also causing them to happen.
From my experience, the inconveniences of co-working in CFARs office are really trivial (waiting about 1 minute). On the other hand, the environment, at least for me, felt more conductive to work. I agree the psychological barrier “like the feel showing up is imposing an obligation on them” is real, but it may difficult to evaluate all the effects. One of the effects may be a subtle pressure to actually work on EA projects.
It also seems plausible some value may be not created but lost for some of the visitors to Bay who are less socially connected, as they may end up hanging in the zero-entry-effort space and not overcome the barriers to get to more walled spaces, where they would get more value.
(I’m not arguing the total EV is negative, as this is very uncertain and I would expect positive EV, just arguing that people should take the possibility of creating such low-cost low-value equilibrium traps seriously.)
With meetups, it seems the things most likely to cause impact are the biorisk meetups and possibly EA meetups. Which would likely happen anyway, maybe with fewer participants.
“There’s also the fact that travelers can crash at REACH in a publicly legible way”
Again, a simple counterfactual would be to create a web-page, of just a facebook group, where people can ask for couches, and incentivize existing rationality houses to participate. (e.g. give some money to every house which is taking short-term guests)
To sum up my my ideas on somewhat more meta- level.
1. I agree that some of the problems REACH tries to solve are real and important. IMO most value depends on some way how to integrate new people in the community where most of the existing members are saturated by social connections and have little incentives to meet new people. And how to have evening hangout space.
2. I’m totally pro physical spaces, humans need spaces. Also noticing that there already are already lots of physical spaces in Berkeley.
3. It is plausible that REACH is close to optimum solution. I don’t see any reasonable analysis showing this is the case. Also I don’t see how a community of a hundreds people can have problems supporting such a place, _if it really wants it_. If it is a problem, maybe it has support of only some minor fraction of the community? If the community is “voting” that way, why should institutional grant-makers step in?
4. At least to me, REACH “as a process” does not seem a well-thought rational way of solving the problems, but more of a solution, backtracking to what the positive impacts generally are. With a lot of emotional energy and personal costs invested in the project.
5. I disapprove the epistemics surrounding REACH. E.g. the “Reflections on Berkeley REACH” post does not represent reasonable criticism of REACH the author was aware of, and in contrast includes a call to discourage public negative comments in the form “I am hosting a pre-EAG party tonight and will be volunteering at EAG this weekend so may be slow to respond to comments. If you have harsh critical feedback for me, I’d prefer to receive it privately and have a chance to consider and address it before it is posted publicly.” I totally emotionally empathize and for sure only a total asshole can now post critical feedback. Also anything framed “Last Chance”, only 2 days,… is kind of obviously not a good background for dispassionate discussion. (The rent hike was known for weeks.)
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)
I disapprove the epistemics surrounding REACH. E.g. the “Reflections on Berkeley REACH” post does not represent reasonable criticism of REACH the author was aware of, and in contrast includes a call to discourage public negative comments
I actually had more of a response to your email in the original draft, and was advised to cut it for the final version by multiple people as being too personal/specific for a public post.
I admit that I am not perfectly rational, and have never tried to be. Harsh public criticism of me and my project hurts me, and I prefer avoiding pain whenever possible. Critical feedback that is not framed in an overly aggressive way is definitely welcome, and if I get super harsh feedback I will recover, but I will be sad about it. I assume this is how most people feel, but given the level of harsh criticism on LessWrong plus typical mind fallacy, it seemed worth spelling out here.
I actually had more of a response to your email in the original draft, and was advised to cut it for the final version by multiple people as being too personal/specific for a public post.
is not a positive sign.
The core worries of my email were impersonal and quite generic.
So the core of my email was this concern:
This should be not much controversial facts 1) REACH put itself into the position of being one of the most public-facing things in Berkeley community. If non-Berkeley people come to Bay and look for events and places, they’ll highly likely land up at REACHs page, or at the physical space. -- you have obvious incentives to be it that way 2) REACH got some support from SSC, so many people noticed, some of them are donating 3) This is actually happening: during my stay, few times some random person asked at the door that they heard about REACH and wanted to see it. 4) As Berkeley is one of the main hubs, people from other places will come to Berkeley and take inspiration
the result is REACH is one of the “store-fronts” of the community
These are my vague impressions 5) At the same time, it seems REACH is actually supported only by some part of the community, or the support is more like “donating stuff” 6) The ambition is more focused on the local community.
On the object level 7) It is very expensive (...) 8) It is obviously cash-strapped 9) The lack of money is signaled in various ways
(which together make it somewhat problematic store-front)
So in short, my worry was that having REACH as one of the most public facing things with the external world could be harmful mainly from signalling/PR perspective.
As it may be unclear what I have meant by 8) and 9): we have talked previously in person about, for example, “donated clothes exchange”. While “donated clothes exchange” may be a typical activity of a “stock community center”, it is surprising in a rationalist centre. From the signalling perspective, to an external visitor, it shows
implicitly very low valuation of your time
implicitly somewhat low valuation of the cost of your space
The rest of the email were mainly constructive suggestions how to get aligned/ potentially get funding from CEA to get the place more professional look, and that really was more personal.
The more meta-point is: What I care in this about is EA (and rationality, x-risk, etc), and I raised a concern about a possible harm to these from a “brand” perspective. The harm caused by such problem would be mainly in opportunities (the specific way of causing impact being some of the random SSC readers visiting, looking at this, and turning away with the first impression “ok these people talk a lot about changing the world online, but it is not a serious effort”)
If it was impossible to distill some sort of impersonal, generic concern from the previously quoted text, and if multiple people advised you that addressing concerns like this is too personal/specific for a public post, than, well, that’s the point 5).
Some of this feels like a kind of criticism that’s inevitably going to apply to a project like REACH, whether it succeeds or not. Like, there’s basically no way to avoid it being very expensive. There may be a path to “not cash-strapped”, but it seems like basically any such path is going to go via “cash-strapped store front”, because it’s going to be much easier to get money after it’s seen to be successful.
(Perhaps it would be nice if we could raise money for these things without someone like Sarah needing to fund their initial success, and then maybe we could avoid them being both cash-strapped and highly public. But if so, that’s more a criticism of the community than of REACH.)
That doesn’t make your criticisms false, but if I’m right, this seems like a property of them that’s important to note and engage with.
Separately, I’m not convinced that the signaling properties of clothes exchanges are what you say. I have no evidence here, just intuition.
The back rooms now look like more coworking space, no longer like thrift store
Various “suggested donation” things now really look like “suggested donation” less like “if you don’t pay this price you should be ashamed”
You seem less stressed
It seems REAC will turn into REACH, & similar
The impression I had before was more nuanced that how you possibly interpreted it at that time. I’m definitely pro “people need spaces”; I also believe how spaces feel have important and underappreciated influence on what people do in them. To somehow sum it, I like how things have changed.
From what I hear, any plan for improving MIRI/CFAR space that involves the collaboration of the landlord is dead in the water; they just always say no to things, even when it’s “we will cover all costs to make this lasting improvement to your building”.
Does MIRI/CFAR view having such a landlord as an acceptable state of affairs? Is there a plan for moving to another space, with less recalcitrant owners/renters?
Does MIRI/CFAR view having such a landlord as an acceptable state of affairs? Is there a plan for moving to another space, with less recalcitrant owners/renters?
No, and yes. But as you might expect, real estate in Berkeley is a difficult problem to solve quickly.
[With mod hat on]: My model of the situation here is indeed that discussing REACH and other community institutions is harder than the average topic on LessWrong, and as such will have more unjustified upvotes/downvotes than usual. I don’t think the discussion so far has made me think that it’s that politicized though, and your direct reply to Ray is currently at 5 karma, which doesn’t ring any major alarm bells for me (in general, since a single strong downvote can move things relatively far into the negative, I would encourage people to have a bit more patience to let the karma system settle into its final equilibrium. Seeing your comment at −2 can really hurt, and how easy that can happen with our new karma system is indeed a problem that I would like to fix. I do think the benefits of weighting opinions by overall karma is worth it, and I don’t yet have a great alternative solution besides hoping that people develop more patience).
One meta-level up, I think that complaining about vote patterns is a dangerous pandora’s box that I would only want to open in exceptional circumstances, and I don’t think this is one of those situations. I recognize that we right now don’t have a great solution to pointing out patterns in voting that seem to highlight important aspects of the overall site culture, and this comment has made me more aware of the need for that, so for now I would encourage people to use the report button or Intercom to let the moderators know that you feel that a bunch of ideas are getting unjustifiably dismissed or hyped. We should soon have some better technology of dealing with this.
I do think that discussing this object-level issue is important, and that I would like LessWrong to be a place where that discussion can happen.
I think this somewhat strange representation of the case. You should carefully consider what is the counterfactual.
As I understand it, the counterfactuals are
People use MIRI/CFAR office as a default meetup and coworking space. This has the disadvantage of going through alocked doors and an elevator with access control. Possibly this can be solved by installing some remote control on the door, and the elevator? Possibly this could cost less than $70k a year?
New CEA office is also not that small, and can host events?
Another counterfactual is turning it into a rationalist coffee. This would likely capture most of the benefits, without big part of the financial burden.
From the outside, the different quality of these spaces seems to be in part in level of professionalism and ideological differences, where some of the things which you will be likely allowed to organize and do in REACH would probably not be welcome in MIRI/CFAR or CEA space. Than, the hard question is, whether this is not actually a desirable feature.
I’m appreciative of you bringing up counterfactuals and do think they’re important to consider.
As someone who regularly hosts events at REACH, my counterfactual locations would be a room on UC Berkeley campus or in a public library. These have some disadvantages compared to REACH:
The campus rooms require a Berkeley student to unlock open the door to the building, which means one of the organizers has to sit out the first 15 minutes of the meetup, either standing by the door or wandering in and out to let people in.
The library would allow us to expose far fewer EAs to our (biosecurity-specific) meetup content, since right now many attendees just wander in due to being in the space.
They aren’t terrible options- I don’t think our meetup would shut down if REACH did. Still: they have disadvantages. I wouldn’t be trying to host at CFAR or CEA since:
The access control on the CFAR office space is required by the building management. They used to have more lax access controls, but it’s now much harder to have the CFAR office space be one that people can wander into. The MIRI space, AFAIK, has never been regularly used for open, non-technical gatherings.
I don’t believe that CEA is interested in hosting events and coworking in their office. My impression is that they (reasonably, I think) don’t consider it a part of their mandate.
I’m not sure about your final counterfactual suggestion- what would that look like in practice? Is this suggestion to open a rationalist-focused coffee shop?
Thanks for the reply! Continuing with counterfactual exercise and some goal factoring
hiring an external person to just stand by the door and open the door, either at the campus or CFAR space, for 1h / week, could cost $750/y
doing the same for 4 meetups a week per year would cost $3000, approximately 1⁄2 the price for reach per month
Yes, another counterfactual suggestion is to run a rationalist-focused coffee shop, as some form of social business. Apparently there are at least two places in the world where something like that works—Kocherga in Moscow https://kocherga-club.ru/, and we have a tea-house in Prague.
I’ll probably not comment on REACH further, my impression is matters of REACH are too emotionally charged and not up for rational discussion, at least not in public—note the down-votes on my comments.
(I do think its important to be able to have this sort of conversation. Understand if you don’t want to continue, appreciate you raising the counterfactual considerations in the first place)
I do think considering counterfactuals are important, but I think your points here are missing the core point I was making: the value of REACH is in reducing trivial inconveniences to zero* (for running events, and for casually bumping into each other).
*well, close to zero.
The reason there are 2-3 extra events per week now is that there is an easy way to make them happen, and a lot of flexibility on what sort of events one can host. If running a public event required arranging a person for that particular evening, it’d be much harder. This wouldn’t allow the spare energy in the system to turn into new-events-that-turn-into-more-people-and-energy.
It’s important that people can show up most times of day to work or hang out.
There’s also the fact that travelers can crash at REACH in a publicly legible way (whereas before the only way to do so was to know people in the Bay).
So the counterfactuals here are more like:
1) CFAR hires a person to let people in all day, every day. (right now CFAR has people, one of whose jobs is to let people in, but it often takes a long time for them to hear the bell and get around to it and come downstairs. This makes it feel like showing up is imposing an obligation on them, which discourages people being able to casually bump into each other, or to run extra events)
If you’re paying people $10/hour, 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, that’s more like $40,000. Technically cheaper, yes, but same order of magnitude, and coming with stronger costs (since CFAR is an office which sometimes needs control over the space for work reasons)
2) People who are less socially connected don’t get to visit the bay as often.
Trigger warning: If you love REACH, invested a lot into it, had some unforgettable moment there, or have some other strong connection to it, following post may trigger some negative emotion in you. I would be glad if you invest the effort in disassociating the negative emotions with people. I wish Berkeley community to have great spaces, be welcoming, and do great public events.
Probably I’m a bit confused what is your main claim of the impact produced from an EA perspective. Lowering the barriers for some things to happen from small to zero, and creating value by randomly occurring social connections? In the first case, I would propose to take a step forward, and estimate the impact of things actually happening, and costs ofcounterfactual conditions also causing them to happen.
From my experience, the inconveniences of co-working in CFARs office are really trivial (waiting about 1 minute). On the other hand, the environment, at least for me, felt more conductive to work. I agree the psychological barrier “like the feel showing up is imposing an obligation on them” is real, but it may difficult to evaluate all the effects. One of the effects may be a subtle pressure to actually work on EA projects.
It also seems plausible some value may be not created but lost for some of the visitors to Bay who are less socially connected, as they may end up hanging in the zero-entry-effort space and not overcome the barriers to get to more walled spaces, where they would get more value.
(I’m not arguing the total EV is negative, as this is very uncertain and I would expect positive EV, just arguing that people should take the possibility of creating such low-cost low-value equilibrium traps seriously.)
With meetups, it seems the things most likely to cause impact are the biorisk meetups and possibly EA meetups. Which would likely happen anyway, maybe with fewer participants.
“There’s also the fact that travelers can crash at REACH in a publicly legible way”
Again, a simple counterfactual would be to create a web-page, of just a facebook group, where people can ask for couches, and incentivize existing rationality houses to participate. (e.g. give some money to every house which is taking short-term guests)
To sum up my my ideas on somewhat more meta- level.
1. I agree that some of the problems REACH tries to solve are real and important. IMO most value depends on some way how to integrate new people in the community where most of the existing members are saturated by social connections and have little incentives to meet new people. And how to have evening hangout space.
2. I’m totally pro physical spaces, humans need spaces. Also noticing that there already are already lots of physical spaces in Berkeley.
3. It is plausible that REACH is close to optimum solution. I don’t see any reasonable analysis showing this is the case. Also I don’t see how a community of a hundreds people can have problems supporting such a place, _if it really wants it_. If it is a problem, maybe it has support of only some minor fraction of the community? If the community is “voting” that way, why should institutional grant-makers step in?
4. At least to me, REACH “as a process” does not seem a well-thought rational way of solving the problems, but more of a solution, backtracking to what the positive impacts generally are. With a lot of emotional energy and personal costs invested in the project.
5. I disapprove the epistemics surrounding REACH. E.g. the “Reflections on Berkeley REACH” post does not represent reasonable criticism of REACH the author was aware of, and in contrast includes a call to discourage public negative comments in the form “I am hosting a pre-EAG party tonight and will be volunteering at EAG this weekend so may be slow to respond to comments. If you have harsh critical feedback for me, I’d prefer to receive it privately and have a chance to consider and address it before it is posted publicly.” I totally emotionally empathize and for sure only a total asshole can now post critical feedback. Also anything framed “Last Chance”, only 2 days,… is kind of obviously not a good background for dispassionate discussion. (The rent hike was known for weeks.)
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:
I actually had more of a response to your email in the original draft, and was advised to cut it for the final version by multiple people as being too personal/specific for a public post.
I admit that I am not perfectly rational, and have never tried to be. Harsh public criticism of me and my project hurts me, and I prefer avoiding pain whenever possible. Critical feedback that is not framed in an overly aggressive way is definitely welcome, and if I get super harsh feedback I will recover, but I will be sad about it. I assume this is how most people feel, but given the level of harsh criticism on LessWrong plus typical mind fallacy, it seemed worth spelling out here.
Unfortunately this
is not a positive sign.
The core worries of my email were impersonal and quite generic.
So the core of my email was this concern:
This should be not much controversial facts
1) REACH put itself into the position of being one of the most public-facing things in Berkeley community. If non-Berkeley people come to Bay and look for events and places, they’ll highly likely land up at REACHs page, or at the physical space.
-- you have obvious incentives to be it that way
2) REACH got some support from SSC, so many people noticed, some of
them are donating
3) This is actually happening: during my stay, few times some random
person asked at the door that they heard about REACH and wanted to see
it.
4) As Berkeley is one of the main hubs, people from other places will
come to Berkeley and take inspiration
the result is REACH is one of the “store-fronts” of the community
These are my vague impressions
5) At the same time, it seems REACH is actually supported only by some
part of the community, or the support is more like “donating stuff”
6) The ambition is more focused on the local community.
On the object level
7) It is very expensive (...)
8) It is obviously cash-strapped
9) The lack of money is signaled in various ways
(which together make it somewhat problematic store-front)
So in short, my worry was that having REACH as one of the most public facing things with the external world could be harmful mainly from signalling/PR perspective.
As it may be unclear what I have meant by 8) and 9): we have talked previously in person about, for example, “donated clothes exchange”. While “donated clothes exchange” may be a typical activity of a “stock community center”, it is surprising in a rationalist centre. From the signalling perspective, to an external visitor, it shows
implicitly very low valuation of your time
implicitly somewhat low valuation of the cost of your space
The rest of the email were mainly constructive suggestions how to get aligned/ potentially get funding from CEA to get the place more professional look, and that really was more personal.
The more meta-point is: What I care in this about is EA (and rationality, x-risk, etc), and I raised a concern about a possible harm to these from a “brand” perspective. The harm caused by such problem would be mainly in opportunities (the specific way of causing impact being some of the random SSC readers visiting, looking at this, and turning away with the first impression “ok these people talk a lot about changing the world online, but it is not a serious effort”)
If it was impossible to distill some sort of impersonal, generic concern from the previously quoted text, and if multiple people advised you that addressing concerns like this is too personal/specific for a public post, than, well, that’s the point 5).
Some of this feels like a kind of criticism that’s inevitably going to apply to a project like REACH, whether it succeeds or not. Like, there’s basically no way to avoid it being very expensive. There may be a path to “not cash-strapped”, but it seems like basically any such path is going to go via “cash-strapped store front”, because it’s going to be much easier to get money after it’s seen to be successful.
(Perhaps it would be nice if we could raise money for these things without someone like Sarah needing to fund their initial success, and then maybe we could avoid them being both cash-strapped and highly public. But if so, that’s more a criticism of the community than of REACH.)
That doesn’t make your criticisms false, but if I’m right, this seems like a property of them that’s important to note and engage with.
Separately, I’m not convinced that the signaling properties of clothes exchanges are what you say. I have no evidence here, just intuition.
Jan, I’m curious after seeing REACH again this month if you still have the same impression as before.
It seems to be moving in good direction! Things I noticed and like include
Seems a larger group of people is involved in the management of the place
It has a web separate from http://www.bayrationality.com/
The back rooms now look like more coworking space, no longer like thrift store
Various “suggested donation” things now really look like “suggested donation” less like “if you don’t pay this price you should be ashamed”
You seem less stressed
It seems REAC will turn into REACH, & similar
The impression I had before was more nuanced that how you possibly interpreted it at that time. I’m definitely pro “people need spaces”; I also believe how spaces feel have important and underappreciated influence on what people do in them. To somehow sum it, I like how things have changed.
From what I hear, any plan for improving MIRI/CFAR space that involves the collaboration of the landlord is dead in the water; they just always say no to things, even when it’s “we will cover all costs to make this lasting improvement to your building”.
Does MIRI/CFAR view having such a landlord as an acceptable state of affairs? Is there a plan for moving to another space, with less recalcitrant owners/renters?
No, and yes. But as you might expect, real estate in Berkeley is a difficult problem to solve quickly.
Yep, I think there is a plan for at least MIRI to move out.
[With mod hat on]: My model of the situation here is indeed that discussing REACH and other community institutions is harder than the average topic on LessWrong, and as such will have more unjustified upvotes/downvotes than usual. I don’t think the discussion so far has made me think that it’s that politicized though, and your direct reply to Ray is currently at 5 karma, which doesn’t ring any major alarm bells for me (in general, since a single strong downvote can move things relatively far into the negative, I would encourage people to have a bit more patience to let the karma system settle into its final equilibrium. Seeing your comment at −2 can really hurt, and how easy that can happen with our new karma system is indeed a problem that I would like to fix. I do think the benefits of weighting opinions by overall karma is worth it, and I don’t yet have a great alternative solution besides hoping that people develop more patience).
One meta-level up, I think that complaining about vote patterns is a dangerous pandora’s box that I would only want to open in exceptional circumstances, and I don’t think this is one of those situations. I recognize that we right now don’t have a great solution to pointing out patterns in voting that seem to highlight important aspects of the overall site culture, and this comment has made me more aware of the need for that, so for now I would encourage people to use the report button or Intercom to let the moderators know that you feel that a bunch of ideas are getting unjustifiably dismissed or hyped. We should soon have some better technology of dealing with this.
I do think that discussing this object-level issue is important, and that I would like LessWrong to be a place where that discussion can happen.