Have you ever dreamed about living in a rationalist community, but a group house does not provide enough privacy, and the Bay Area is too expensive? This seems like a possible answer. If we (at least the ones in Europe) could coordinate on the same Italian village and move there, working remotely (at least the ones who are software developers)...
We appear to be reaching remote-work equilibrium, after years of conflicting trends and predictions. The share of open jobs listed as remote on the career site Indeed has held steady between 8% and 8.6% for the past six months.
That’s roughly triple what the rate was in 2019 but markedly less than it was in 2022. Back then, more than 10% of jobs were advertised as remote, and many others were understood to be for obvious reasons.
[...]
Forty percent of applications submitted through LinkedIn are for remote roles, even though those jobs represent only 8% to 9% of listings.
JobHire.AI, which makes an artificial-intelligence tool for job hunters, recently analyzed more than 600,000 users’ applications. It found remote roles are roughly four times harder to get than in-office or hybrid positions.
It feels tempting, but I don’t see it happening. Imagine the practicalities of having a poly relationship in Bratislava. Everyone’s going to treat you as a madman. And that’s trivial compared to having some kind of rationalist co-living arrangement. And that’s Bratislava, a capital. Italian countryside is going to be much worse. Here’s Lucie Philippon complaining about this kind of problems in Paris, as big a city as it gets: https://aelerinya.substack.com/p/in-paris-i-dream-of-lighthaven I am afraid that only Bay Area with its constant influx and large population of weird/autistic people can really sustain that kind of thing.
Hm, I guess I am too conservative in behavior to appreciate this.
My guess is that as long as you don’t do anything outrageous on the streets, people mostly don’t care about what you do at home. (And even if they do, they will round it up to “young-ish people having extramarital sex”, which may be a food for rumors, but it’s nothing extraordinary.)
If we could get 30 rationalists in a village that otherwise mostly contains old people, I think as long as we behave nicely to them (be polite neighbors, don’t make much noise), it would be okay. Taking drugs on the streets or organizing prides or similar things, yeah that would create lots of conflict.
Similarly, if we built something like Lighthaven there, it would only be a problem if it creates noise, or if perhaps the locals would feel that we are spending their tax money on our fun. Even the problem with noise could be solvable in theory by choosing a sufficiently distant and abandoned part of the village.
I guess the crux is how weird people do we expect there, and what do we expect their public behavior to be like. I think that people like me wouldn’t be a problem, I even think that people like the ones I meet at Vienna meetups wouldn’t be a problem… but of course the Bay Area idea of “normal” is a distant galaxy.
That said, I would prefer some vetting for sanity… to put it bluntly, to keep the Zizians out. Not just for the sake of the locals, but for ourselves, too. Generally, no mentally ill people, no homeless people who need a shelter, just because they created a Less Wrong account it doesn’t automatically make them ingroup. But I guess this is my conservative behavior showing...
I like your thinking, but I believe the entire rationalist subculture stems from global agglomeration effects, as seen in the Bay Area, and cannot really live without them. To give an example, I am currently living in Zurich. There are big Google offices here, many crypto startups, Basel with its big pharma is close enough and so is Geneva with its international organizations and CERN. When people talk about possible “Silicon Valley of Europe” it’s either London or Zurich. That being said, there’s an EA coworking space here. Then there are regular EA and ACX meetups, with 5-15 people attending. And that’s it. Definitely not enough to sustain something like Lighthaven. Elsewhere in Europe, I think, the problems with insufficient agglomeration would be even worse.
This sounds horrible, but also...
Have you ever dreamed about living in a rationalist community, but a group house does not provide enough privacy, and the Bay Area is too expensive? This seems like a possible answer. If we (at least the ones in Europe) could coordinate on the same Italian village and move there, working remotely (at least the ones who are software developers)...
Working remotely is the rub, even for software developers (archive):
[...]
It feels tempting, but I don’t see it happening. Imagine the practicalities of having a poly relationship in Bratislava. Everyone’s going to treat you as a madman. And that’s trivial compared to having some kind of rationalist co-living arrangement. And that’s Bratislava, a capital. Italian countryside is going to be much worse. Here’s Lucie Philippon complaining about this kind of problems in Paris, as big a city as it gets: https://aelerinya.substack.com/p/in-paris-i-dream-of-lighthaven I am afraid that only Bay Area with its constant influx and large population of weird/autistic people can really sustain that kind of thing.
Hm, I guess I am too conservative in behavior to appreciate this.
My guess is that as long as you don’t do anything outrageous on the streets, people mostly don’t care about what you do at home. (And even if they do, they will round it up to “young-ish people having extramarital sex”, which may be a food for rumors, but it’s nothing extraordinary.)
If we could get 30 rationalists in a village that otherwise mostly contains old people, I think as long as we behave nicely to them (be polite neighbors, don’t make much noise), it would be okay. Taking drugs on the streets or organizing prides or similar things, yeah that would create lots of conflict.
Similarly, if we built something like Lighthaven there, it would only be a problem if it creates noise, or if perhaps the locals would feel that we are spending their tax money on our fun. Even the problem with noise could be solvable in theory by choosing a sufficiently distant and abandoned part of the village.
I guess the crux is how weird people do we expect there, and what do we expect their public behavior to be like. I think that people like me wouldn’t be a problem, I even think that people like the ones I meet at Vienna meetups wouldn’t be a problem… but of course the Bay Area idea of “normal” is a distant galaxy.
That said, I would prefer some vetting for sanity… to put it bluntly, to keep the Zizians out. Not just for the sake of the locals, but for ourselves, too. Generally, no mentally ill people, no homeless people who need a shelter, just because they created a Less Wrong account it doesn’t automatically make them ingroup. But I guess this is my conservative behavior showing...
I like your thinking, but I believe the entire rationalist subculture stems from global agglomeration effects, as seen in the Bay Area, and cannot really live without them. To give an example, I am currently living in Zurich. There are big Google offices here, many crypto startups, Basel with its big pharma is close enough and so is Geneva with its international organizations and CERN. When people talk about possible “Silicon Valley of Europe” it’s either London or Zurich. That being said, there’s an EA coworking space here. Then there are regular EA and ACX meetups, with 5-15 people attending. And that’s it. Definitely not enough to sustain something like Lighthaven. Elsewhere in Europe, I think, the problems with insufficient agglomeration would be even worse.
Welp.
One problem: people need jobs; most jobs are not full-remote; places with good jobs are expensive.
Another problem: not enough rationalists in general, as a fraction of population.
No easy solution for either.