EA - Say “nay!” to the Bay (as the default)! by Kaleem

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Say “nay!” to the Bay (as the default)!, published by Kaleem on September 6, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. & move to the East Coast instead TLDR: The Bay Area isn’t a great place to centre the EA community in the US. The East coast, between Boston and Washington DC, is a much better place because of the number of top universities, its proximity and accessibility to other EA-dense spots, its importance with respect to biosecurity and US policy, and how much money and time it would save the EA community overall. Views are my own and not those of my employer. Epistemic status: 70 sure %? Based on a comment I made on a different post. Intro: Whilst institutions and individuals who are already based in the Bay may be best placed there, especially those whose focal area is AI safety, those creating new programs, new organisations, and new events should seriously consider instead choosing an East Coast city as their homebase. The current paradigm was not established intentionally or strategically and there are strong reasons to pause, reevaluate, and shift forthcoming resources and institutions to other locations. My Claim: The American EA community should be centred around the East Coast 0. Context: The EA community, broadly speaking, has two hubs - the Bay Area (which has Constellation, Lightcone, a number of EA org headquarters, and multiple all-EA living facilities) and Oxford (which has Trajan House, Whytham Abbey, and ). According to the 2020 EA survey, 52.3% of the EA community live in the US and UK, so this makes sense. Furthermore, the Bay Area was the most EA-populated ‘city’, with 100 (of 1163) respondents living there. However Oxford only had ~50 respondents living there, compared to London, which was the second most populated city with ~80 respondents. How these hubs came into existence was largely not strategic in terms of EA community-building in a global sense: Oxford is a hub because that is where the philosophers who formalised EA were living at the time, and subsequently where a large proportion of of EAs were found early on in the movement’s history. The Bay is where some American EAs were when they learned about EA, and became a gathering point which then got more attractive as EAs started focusing on AI, as the Bay is a global hotbed for AI research. So, here are my 5 reasons (in decreasing strength) that support my claim: 1. The East Coast is better for University outreach EA community builders have historically thought (and continue to think) that universities are the best place to do EA outreach. Furthermore, we’d argue that extremely prestigious, highly ranked universities are especially good places to do this. I think it is very likely that moving to the East Coast is likely to be much more impactful for anyone interested in on-the-ground EA and longtermist community building which focuses on top-universities. Here is Juan’s cerebral case for Cambridge, Massachusetts being important. Here is a table with top 100 ranking universities at undergraduate level in the Bay compared to the east coast: Global University Ranking (undergrad only) University Name US News '22QS '23THE '22Mean The East Coast has: Harvard 1523rdMIT 2153rdYale1218913thPrinceton1616713thColumbia6221113thJohns Hopkins9241315thCornell22202221stNYU30392632ndBoston University 651086278th Brown112636480thWhereas the West Coast has: Stanford 3343rdUC Berkeley 427813th There are too many different specialties to do a subject-by-subject comparison between the two cities when it comes to graduate programs, so I will also just present “overall global graduate program rankings” and “US law school” rankings. US Law school ranking University Name Ranking The East Coast has: Harvard 4MIT NAYale1PrincetonNAColumbia4Johns HopkinsNACornell12NYU7Boston University 17BrownNAWhereas the West C...