I was talking to someone the other day about the ways in which I’ve noticed the [Berkeley] rationalist community changing. One of the main ways was that group houses seemed to be disappearing. People were getting older, moving away, or just moving into their own houses to have kids. It then occurred to me that it doesn’t seem like this is happening with the EA side of the community. Thinking about it more, it seems to me that EA has a quite strong funnel in the form of student groups. I semi-regularly hear about events, companies, projects, or just impressive people that are coming from EA student groups. Meanwhile I’m not even aware of a rationalist student group (although I’m sure there are some). When I think about where rationalists came from, my answer is 1) EY writing the original sequences, and 2) EY writing HPMOR. It feels like those things happened, tons of people joined, and then they stopped happening, and people stopped joining. Then people got older, and now we have a population pyramid problem. I think this is something of a problem for the mission of preventing AI x-risk. It is of course great to have lots of EAs around, but I think that people that the rationalist community would differentially appeal to would provide a lot of value that EA-learning people would be a lot less likely to provide (focus on AI, obsessive investigation into understanding confusing yet important subjects, etc.). Do others agree with the pattern? Do you also see it as a problem? Any suggestions for what we could do about it? Why aren’t there many rationalist student groups?
Is this really the case? I’m eighteen, and I know a few people here in my age group.
I also didn’t take either of the membership routes you listed. When I was 16.75 (±0.33) years old, I happened upon a Slate Star Codex post (might’ve been this one). I thought "Wow, this blog is great!" so I then proceeded to read all of the SSC backcatalog[1]. Once I ran out of posts, I saw "LessWrong" under SSC’s "blogroll" header, and the rest is history. I didn’t systematically read the sequences[2], but instead just read whatever looked interesting on the frontpage. I had previously read Superintelligence, Thinking Fast and Slow, and Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, so I already had some kind of background exposure to the ideas discussed here.
I was trying to curb my Reddit addiction, so I used SSC, Hacker News (and later, LW) as substitutes. Still do. ↩︎
And I never have. Did read HPMoR, though. ↩︎
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I’ll be thrilled to find out that my premise is wrong!
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Don’t over-index on this particular answer being refutation of your hypothesis! I came to LessWrong via HPMOR, and I’ve thought in the same vein myself (if HPMOR/equivalent = more incoming rationalists, no HPMOR/equivalent = …less incoming rationalists?).
Right now, I’m partly afraid that the room where I hold an ACX meetup next Monday that can hold ~30 people will be too small. I already know from emails that people will attend that haven’t attended any past meetups. Scott’s blog is similar to what EY was doing when he wrote the sequences. It’s a membership funnel. On the LessWrong side, we are now in a situation where there are a lot more resources for community development than there have been in the past. While CEA didn’t want to fund rationality community development, we now have funders who expressed willingness to fund rationality community development. Later this year there’s a retreat for community organisers which includes funding for the travel costs of attendees. If you want to do something to grow the rationality community, the times are great and I want to encourage you to take action.
my AI timelines are short enough that it’s not going to become very pressing
if it does become a pressing problem it will be solved by a new generation of folks who will solve it themselves better than we did because they’ll live in the culture we affected (cf. the Reformation → the Enlightenment → Victornian-era Science → General Semantics → LessWrong pipeline) We could try to do something about it but I think it’s quite likely we’d end up solving the wrong problem because we’d be trying too much to recreate what we needed when we were 20 rather than what new people coming up need. Each of us has to rediscover how to live for ourselves, so our duty is mainly to leave behind lots of clues about things we’ve already figured out to speed them along their way.