Was being part of the Bay area rationalist community a primary motivating factor for moving to the area for most rationalists who live there?
Maybe this community just attracts a lot of techies. Or maybe there’s more AI alignment jobs there.
Personally, I’ve participated in relatively little in-person rationalist community. The online forum meets my needs pretty decently. But this is partly because I’m building a career in scientific research, and anticipate that I’ll be around smart people wherever I go. I’m averse to moving to the Bay area for all the usual reasons: the high cost of living, fires, gender skew, and state legal system. May wind up getting sucked down there anyway.
Is the Bay area rationalist community really all that great as a social group compared to just meeting the smart nice sane people who live in every town?
I think there’s likely a pretty big selection effect on who posts in these discussions about community, because the only reason I’m even here to comment at all is that the in-person rationalist community helped me build the confidence to do so. Before moving in with the LW team, I was so shy and low-self-esteem that I didn’t think myself worthy to even talk to the people whose names I’d seen online. I spent the last two years of college wishing desperately for the return of the rationalists I knew who had all up and moved to the Bay, but never once reaching out to them, because I didn’t feel like I was smart or cool enough to be worth their time. The first time I posted on LW I was so nervous that I cried for an hour before pressing submit, and I only got to that point in the first place because someone was sitting next to me giving me encouragement and basically holding my hand through all of it.
I’m also not good at making friends online and don’t enjoy spending much of my time interacting online, so for the people who have said that they get plenty of value out of just being part of the rationalist community online, well, that wouldn’t work for me either.
The problem with your last question—about meeting other smart nice sane people—is that you’re assuming I would have met people otherwise. My expectation after college was that I’d move to a new city and basically spend all of my time alone, just like I had for most of my life up to that point. I’d make friendly acquaintances at work and then come home to an empty apartment, forever. If I got lonely I could call my mom.
Instead I moved to the Bay (yes, solely to be part of the rationalist community) and into a rationalist group house. I’m not a techie, I didn’t have a job lined up, and I only knew a couple people in the community, and those not very well. Being thrust into that social environment headfirst was really important for me, because I don’t think I ever would have gotten over the social hurdles of interacting with rationalists otherwise and would have spent the rest of my life pretty lonely—or else just moved back to my hometown, which is what my sister and almost all of our friends ended up doing.
Also, I knew a lot of nice, smart, sane people at my elite college, and I was friends with them, but there was always something missing. Rationality was a big part of my life long before I ever met other rationalists, and it was exhausting to have to re-explain AI risk, transhumanism, and the basic definition of rationality any time I wanted to talk to someone about the things I cared about.
It also wasn’t until I moved to the Bay community that I ever felt I was surrounded by people who were better than me. Growing up I was always the smartest kid in the room, and in college, I was more thoughtful and more altruistic than the people around me, and I was better at dealing with my own problems and directing my own actions than most adults I knew. As a result there were very few people for me to learn from, something that was disappointing and isolating for my entire life. That feeling has completely disappeared since I moved here; I’m always being pushed to become better by the people around me.
Thanks for sharing such a compelling personal story about what the rationalist in-person community means to you.
My experience is sort of opposite to yours. It sounds like prior to integrating with the rationalist community, you:
Had a well-developed set of compatible intellectual interests in rat-related topics
Lacked social confidence
By contrast, I:
Had social confidence
Lacked a well-developed set of intellectual interests in rat-related topics.
Rationalism online gave me room to develop my intellectual interests. I had a very low bar for my first post on LW. I’ve never seen participation in the rationalist community as the place where I’ll finally be able to “be myself.”
Instead, I view my future professional community of scientific researchers as fulfilling that role. Prior to COVID, I was able to attend the 2020 AAAS conference, where AI safety, the future of scientific research, and topics related to transhumanism were all heavily discussed. This was thrilling to me.
Lacking there, of course, was the deep moral and economic discussions and wide-ranging amateur scholarship that we enjoy here. To me, LW is sort of like a scientific water cooler conversation. Which is excellent (no sarcasm intended). Definitely not something I want to set as my #1 priority for optimizing, nor something that I can imagine very many people uprooting their lives to pursue.
But valuable nonetheless. Certainly lacking in the school system and among the vast majority of “smart nice sane people.”
I do find myself getting almost all my intellectual “inputs” from the internet, books, and coursework. The exceptions are my friends and family who have long-term professional careers or amateur scholarly interests. When they talk about those subjects, I often learn quite a bit. Much of my social satisfaction is due to my ability to extract this kind of conversation from my friends and relations. I expect that will grow as I am increasingly surrounded by fellow scientists and their social networks.
Is the Bay area rationalist community really all that great as a social group compared to just meeting the smart nice sane people who live in every town?
I’ll say the one big advantage here is pre-existing shared context. I can walk into a rationalist or EA party or other space and just already have a ton in common with the other people there. We have natural things to talk about, and there’s some useful amount of pre-vetting that happens via a self-selection process that seems to shed many of the “smart nice sane people” would are otherwise fairly incompatible with much of rationality and EA (for example, high contextualizers who are uncomfortable talking about ideas in isolation from the social consequences of talking about those ideas).
Haha, I guess if I liked parties that would be a draw. As it is, I’ve been collecting people like this for years and have a solid friend group who I can have these conversations with regularly. But maybe post-pandemic I’ll take a turn at being a rationalist socialite down in San Fran and see if I like it.
I honestly have no idea what non-college, non-rationalist parties are like, but if I just compare the two, rationalist parties have significantly less drinking, often have more accommodations for people with sensory processing issues, and almost always have waaaay more conversations about AI alignment.
Was being part of the Bay area rationalist community a primary motivating factor for moving to the area for most rationalists who live there?
Maybe this community just attracts a lot of techies. Or maybe there’s more AI alignment jobs there.
Personally, I’ve participated in relatively little in-person rationalist community. The online forum meets my needs pretty decently. But this is partly because I’m building a career in scientific research, and anticipate that I’ll be around smart people wherever I go. I’m averse to moving to the Bay area for all the usual reasons: the high cost of living, fires, gender skew, and state legal system. May wind up getting sucked down there anyway.
Is the Bay area rationalist community really all that great as a social group compared to just meeting the smart nice sane people who live in every town?
I think there’s likely a pretty big selection effect on who posts in these discussions about community, because the only reason I’m even here to comment at all is that the in-person rationalist community helped me build the confidence to do so. Before moving in with the LW team, I was so shy and low-self-esteem that I didn’t think myself worthy to even talk to the people whose names I’d seen online. I spent the last two years of college wishing desperately for the return of the rationalists I knew who had all up and moved to the Bay, but never once reaching out to them, because I didn’t feel like I was smart or cool enough to be worth their time. The first time I posted on LW I was so nervous that I cried for an hour before pressing submit, and I only got to that point in the first place because someone was sitting next to me giving me encouragement and basically holding my hand through all of it.
I’m also not good at making friends online and don’t enjoy spending much of my time interacting online, so for the people who have said that they get plenty of value out of just being part of the rationalist community online, well, that wouldn’t work for me either.
The problem with your last question—about meeting other smart nice sane people—is that you’re assuming I would have met people otherwise. My expectation after college was that I’d move to a new city and basically spend all of my time alone, just like I had for most of my life up to that point. I’d make friendly acquaintances at work and then come home to an empty apartment, forever. If I got lonely I could call my mom.
Instead I moved to the Bay (yes, solely to be part of the rationalist community) and into a rationalist group house. I’m not a techie, I didn’t have a job lined up, and I only knew a couple people in the community, and those not very well. Being thrust into that social environment headfirst was really important for me, because I don’t think I ever would have gotten over the social hurdles of interacting with rationalists otherwise and would have spent the rest of my life pretty lonely—or else just moved back to my hometown, which is what my sister and almost all of our friends ended up doing.
Also, I knew a lot of nice, smart, sane people at my elite college, and I was friends with them, but there was always something missing. Rationality was a big part of my life long before I ever met other rationalists, and it was exhausting to have to re-explain AI risk, transhumanism, and the basic definition of rationality any time I wanted to talk to someone about the things I cared about.
It also wasn’t until I moved to the Bay community that I ever felt I was surrounded by people who were better than me. Growing up I was always the smartest kid in the room, and in college, I was more thoughtful and more altruistic than the people around me, and I was better at dealing with my own problems and directing my own actions than most adults I knew. As a result there were very few people for me to learn from, something that was disappointing and isolating for my entire life. That feeling has completely disappeared since I moved here; I’m always being pushed to become better by the people around me.
Thanks for sharing such a compelling personal story about what the rationalist in-person community means to you.
My experience is sort of opposite to yours. It sounds like prior to integrating with the rationalist community, you:
Had a well-developed set of compatible intellectual interests in rat-related topics
Lacked social confidence
By contrast, I:
Had social confidence
Lacked a well-developed set of intellectual interests in rat-related topics.
Rationalism online gave me room to develop my intellectual interests. I had a very low bar for my first post on LW. I’ve never seen participation in the rationalist community as the place where I’ll finally be able to “be myself.”
Instead, I view my future professional community of scientific researchers as fulfilling that role. Prior to COVID, I was able to attend the 2020 AAAS conference, where AI safety, the future of scientific research, and topics related to transhumanism were all heavily discussed. This was thrilling to me.
Lacking there, of course, was the deep moral and economic discussions and wide-ranging amateur scholarship that we enjoy here. To me, LW is sort of like a scientific water cooler conversation. Which is excellent (no sarcasm intended). Definitely not something I want to set as my #1 priority for optimizing, nor something that I can imagine very many people uprooting their lives to pursue.
But valuable nonetheless. Certainly lacking in the school system and among the vast majority of “smart nice sane people.”
I do find myself getting almost all my intellectual “inputs” from the internet, books, and coursework. The exceptions are my friends and family who have long-term professional careers or amateur scholarly interests. When they talk about those subjects, I often learn quite a bit. Much of my social satisfaction is due to my ability to extract this kind of conversation from my friends and relations. I expect that will grow as I am increasingly surrounded by fellow scientists and their social networks.
I’ll say the one big advantage here is pre-existing shared context. I can walk into a rationalist or EA party or other space and just already have a ton in common with the other people there. We have natural things to talk about, and there’s some useful amount of pre-vetting that happens via a self-selection process that seems to shed many of the “smart nice sane people” would are otherwise fairly incompatible with much of rationality and EA (for example, high contextualizers who are uncomfortable talking about ideas in isolation from the social consequences of talking about those ideas).
Haha, I guess if I liked parties that would be a draw. As it is, I’ve been collecting people like this for years and have a solid friend group who I can have these conversations with regularly. But maybe post-pandemic I’ll take a turn at being a rationalist socialite down in San Fran and see if I like it.
I honestly have no idea what non-college, non-rationalist parties are like, but if I just compare the two, rationalist parties have significantly less drinking, often have more accommodations for people with sensory processing issues, and almost always have waaaay more conversations about AI alignment.