I'm not a regular member of this community, OR a resident of the Bay Area, so apply extreme skepticism to my observations and my suggestions. They are submitted with significant humility.
I don't think there's any practical way to relocate a cultural hub on purpose. It might move on its own, over time, but that will be an incremental process. So, to some degree, I think this discussion is moot. Even if a few huge players announced an agreed upon "Second Hub" I don't think many people would/could just pick up and go there.
Currently both the Amish and the Mormons are more effective at increasing their believer counts then the catholics.
In both cases there's a strong focus on a certain demographic region.
If you see the project of rationality as mainly about spreading what we already have, then being distributed would make sense. If you see it more as being about going from 0 to 1 and evolving new rationalist techniques and models, it's more useful to be concentrated.
Evolving rational thought is about sitting down together and doing hard work. Being in the same location helps with doing hard work together. It also makes it easier to pass knowledge about experiments, both successful and failed along.
4Viliam
An incremental process may still benefit from coordination. If once in a while somebody decides to move to "a place with many rationalists that is not Bay Area", it may help if it is common knowledge that X is the place. So instead of three people moving to Boston, three people moving to Toronto, and three people moving to New Hampshire, we might get nine people moving to e.g. Boston.
But also, if each Catholic lived in a different town, Catholicism would disappear in one generation.
I wonder how much "spreading rationality" actually happens offline. At least I think I haven't converted a single person, regardless of how many local meetups I organized. The local rationalists I know are those who came to the first meetups already being rationalists. It is great to meet each other sometimes, but it is unrelated to spreading rational thought.
Seems to me that as long as the internet debates remain, the recruitment channels will remain untouched, even if we all moved to the same place (which is unlikely to happen). Unless we all lived so close to each other that we would no longer feel a need to go debate online. But I assume there will always be more than one hub; and then there will at least be an online communication between them.
Given our numbers, our situation is more similar to Libertarians than to Democrats, which kinda makes this an argument in favor of New Hampshire. :)
This assumes that people listen to the lonely rational person.
But my actual objection is more like "put your oxygen mask on first". If rationalists are rare, it is important to protect them against burning out, which can be achieved by a supporting environment. And if a rationalist wants to address a local problem, it seems useful to have other rationalists familiar with the same problem, so they can share knowledge, discuss strategies, cooperate. (Which approach is better, probably depends on the specific problem.)
I think here we agree a lot. You don't have to put a sign saying "if yo
I'm not a regular member of this community, OR a resident of the Bay Area, so apply extreme skepticism to my observations and my suggestions. They are submitted with significant humility.
- I don't think there's any practical way to relocate a cultural hub on purpose. It might move on its own, over time, but that will be an incremental process. So, to some degree, I think this discussion is moot. Even if a few huge players announced an agreed upon "Second Hub" I don't think many people would/could just pick up and go there.
- Nevertheless, various fa
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