Added June 28: Blake Borgeson comments below,

Update: After a lot more discussion and thinking things over, MIRI has decided against relocating away from the Bay Area, unless a new impetus comes along to move some time in the future.
Mainly, ongoing/propagating strategic updates are behind this decision. We're more uncertain about our strategy overall following our 2020 strategy update (https://intelligence.org/2020/12/21/2020-updates-and-strategy/#3), so we’d rather not pay a big up-front move cost based on a prediction about what we expect MIRI to look like 2 or 5 years from now. Related to the same strategic updates, over the next 12 months or so we plan to experiment with placing less of an emphasis on staff working from our Berkeley base, and expect some staff to live and work from other places.
Separately, in the background, considerations against our recent favorite places became stronger:
Bellingham is far away from big cities, and it seemed increasingly like MIRI would be more isolated there than we wanted. Also, we became more concerned about low light levels during winter months.
The area around Peekskill has some of the highest Lyme disease incidence in the US, and it seems possible this is a high enough risk of disability to cause us to want to avoid it. We were still investigating this when we ended our location search.
Who am I? I’m a MIRI board member, and was in recent months leading/coordinating this MIRI relocation decision process, which is now complete.
Thanks for all the feedback in these comments, in emails, and on Facebook. I (and probably others) read all of it I could find, and it was important input for us.

Original post:

MIRI is moving (with high probability)!

We haven’t finalized a location yet, but there’s a good chance we’ll make our decision in the next six weeks. I want to solicit:

Feedback on our current top location candidates.
Ideas for other places that might fit our criteria.

I’m also interested in a more general location-optimizing discussion. What are your general thoughts on where you’d like to live, and have they changed any since the hub conversations Claire began in September and November? If a new rationality community hub sprang up at any of these locations, would you be tempted to join? Is there a different place you’d prefer (either personally, or for the community)?

Anything from 'statements of perso...

Tyler Alterman

Tyler Alterman

Tyler Alterman

Tyler Alterman