[Attention conservation notice: non-rationalist readers, this is incredibly rationalist inside baseball]
[ETA Disclaimer: I know the Seattle rationalist community exists and is cool. However, if the entire Bay Area rationalist community moved to Seattle, many people would probably wind up working at Amazon, and also moving several hundred people is legitimately very hard. Also, the reason I personally am not moving to Seattle is that it seems like it contains far fewer homeschooling parents.]
I have seen several discussions of the fact that rationalists tend to live in the San Francisco Bay Area, in which it is pointed out that the Bay Area housing market is one of the worst housing markets in the country. It seems somewhat irrational to live in such an expensive place, particularly since many rationalists are also effective altruists, who intend to donate a high percentage of their income. Why do we keep living here?
Well, as Willie Sutton said about robbing banks, because that’s where the money is.
Rationalists are disproportionately likely to work in tech. If you’re a weird person who likes computers– particularly if your school history is kind of checkered– software engineering is your best chance to make four or six times the US median income. Of the top places to be a software engineer taking into account the cost of living, #2 is San Jose and #5 is San Francisco. Somehow I think “the San Franciscans should move to the South Bay” was not precisely what everyone was thinking of (however personally beneficial it would be for me).
But of course there are other places on the list. We could, for instance, all live in Seattle, Raleigh, or Portland (#1, #3, and #4). Why don’t we?
For some people, the answer is obvious. They’re students at UC Berkeley or Stanford; they’re an App Academy graduate who has to spend the next year in San Francisco by their contract; they work at the Center for Effective Altruism, which is going through Y Combinator; they work at Open AI; they work at MIRI and CFAR, which need to be near prospective collaborators (MIRI) and students (CFAR). You add together those groups and you get a pretty substantial rationalist/effective altruist community already.
I’m going to hold off for a bit on talking about why the software engineers don’t move and instead talk about why I don’t move. After all, I write for a living. My job is extremely portable. I don’t even have to change out of my pajamas.
The first problem is that my husband works for Google. I could, I suppose, move away from my husband. But there would be various inconveniences. I was sort of planning on having him take the kid for a while (once we have one) so I could get some uninterrupted alone time. My husband’s love language is physical touch and he would probably go mad being married to someone he couldn’t cuddle. He can go outside with me when I’m agoraphobic, which wouldn’t be possible if we lived in the same place. The airfare costs would be horrendous. And I can’t imagine we’d actually save that much on rent: we currently share a room, and my husband would probably be quite unreasonable and insist on having his own room instead of acquiring another permanent bedmate.
Why don’t we both move? After all, Google has offices in places that aren’t Mountain View.
Well: since I work from home, incidental conversations with housemates are a majority of my face-to-face interaction. It is very easy for me to find new rationalist housemates when I need one; in a city without a rationalist community, I’m more likely to room with some stranger and lose the opportunity for social interaction. I currently live within two hours of all my partners except for one, and they can be easily visited over the course of a weekend. When the baby comes, I’ll be able to get advice and support from my friends who like kids (I have perhaps half a dozen), including my housemate. I expect that at least one of my children will have a developmental disability, and I don’t want to put a developmentally disabled child in public school; my friends are planning on running a group unschool, which means I neither have to sacrifice my career to homeschooling nor cough up tens of thousands of dollars in private-school fees. Events I enjoy (such as sex parties and rationalist seder) occur on a pleasantly regular basis. If I have a nervous breakdown, I expect that people besides my husband will be there to take care of me, and he won’t have to worry about caregiver burnout. If I divorce my husband, I expect to have a couch to sleep on until I get back on my feet.
And I’m relatively lucky! For instance, I prefer to do online brainstorming; if you prefer face-to-face meetups, you have to be close to people. I’m not founding a new nonprofit, startup, or other project; again, living close to your cofounders is really helpful (not to mention that in a community you’re more likely to meet your cofounders). I don’t need referrals for jobs. I have a supportive husband and will be able to solve many of my parenting problems with money; for poor parents, especially single parents, a supportive community can be the difference between good parenting and neglect. And so on and so forth.
It’s important to note that many of the benefits of community are altruistic. Referrals for high-paying jobs, brainstorming, living near cofounders, support from friends that lets you save money, and even the happiness of living near friends– these concretely improve people’s ability to improve the world.
Of course, most people could probably get the majority of these benefits with only five or ten close friends. (Not all of them though: job referrals depend on having a lot of weak ties, nonfrequent and transitory social relationships, which studies have suggested increase wages and aggregate employment. Weak ties are also useful any time you might like to initiate a relationship, such as with a housemate, cofounder, romantic partner, or coparent.) But my friends– much to my great annoyance– insist on not sharing my set of five or ten close friends, and instead having a set of five or ten close friends of their own, which may or may not overlap with mine. The whole thing grows logarithmically. If we want everyone to have friends– and are not just organizing the whole system for my own personal benefit– it’s going to be a group of a couple hundred people at least.
“Okay,” you might say. “So we move the entire community!”
But let’s examine the typical case: a rationalist who works a job at a non-rationalist company. Let’s say you’re a Googler– as many rationalists are– and you’re looking to move to one of the new rationalist hubs of Raleigh or Portland. As I write this blog post, Portland has one Google job open. Raleigh doesn’t seem to have jobs at all, but Chapel Hill has two jobs open. (Information comes from here.) What happens to the second rationalist Googler who wants to move to Portland?
[ETA: In the comments, Jeff Kaufman points out that Google often is hiring for more than one position from a single ad. This weakens my point; whether rationalist Googlers would swamp the local job market depends on how many positions Google is hiring for in a location, which appears to be unclear.]
Of course, this is a solvable problem. Perhaps the second rationalist Googler can find some equally high-paying job at some other company in Raleigh. But you are going to have to simultaneously solve problems like this for a hundred people, even assuming you have buy-in from all of them. This is really fucking hard.
It is particularly hard for early-career software engineers. A software engineer with more experience has more power: for instance, they can hold out for a job where they work remote. But someone who is relatively early in their career is going to have a significantly harder time getting a job outside of tech hubs.
(Notably, Seattle is enough of a tech hub that it doesn’t necessarily have this problem, as far as I know. However, many of Seattle’s tech jobs are at Amazon, which has a notoriously awful company culture, and it seems to me it is perfectly rational to avoid it.)
Finally, I have to remark that the expensiveness of the Bay Area housing market is somewhat misleading. Of course renting an entire house is quite expensive, but no one rents an entire house. My husband and I pay a little less than the median American household does for housing, because we live in a two-bedroom one-bath house with two roommates. We could probably move to Raleigh and have roommates there, but Raleigh’s lower rents means it has far less of a group house culture, particularly a child-friendly group house culture. Thus I would be unlikely to find such a good setup with such pleasant people.
caryatis said:
The difficulties of those who currently in an area from moving out don’t, of course, affect those who are NOT currently in the area. And that’s a more important question, because rationalists (and potential ones) who are not currently in your social circle are a larger group. Conclusion? Effective altruists who don’t already live in expensive areas should be strongly discouraged from moving to them.
LikeLike
ozymandias said:
Many of the advantages of living in the Bay Area are also advantages of moving there. For instance: increased income for software engineers relative to being employed in e.g. Wisconsin; friends in the Bay Area; a strong network that can connect you to jobs, potential cofounders/partners/parents; the existence of rationalist events.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Sophia Kovaleva said:
Another important thing is the law of supply and demand, which rationalists frequently accuse others of forgetting: if the housing is so expensive, and people are still getting it, it must be darn appealing. And since the idea to move elsewhere when it’s too expensive must be occurring to anyone, the fact that people aren’t doing that unless absolutely having to must indicate that whatever the advantages are, they’re hard to move. And since people from all sorts of social groups are affected by it, the advantages probably span numerous areas of life.
As for me personally, it’s also important to me not just where it’s good to be a tech worker, but also a tech entrepreneur, since I hope to start my own business in future (and secretly dream that it will turn into FAI-building galaxy-exploring death-defying megaempire), and I think that Bay Area is definitely #1 here. If I give on my dreams, and decide that I’m fine with being an employee for the rest of my life, I might move to NYC, since I actually value living in a city with residential high-rises and a good subway a lot, for aesthetic reasons. It might be enough to outweigh the valuing of having a queer and kink community, which, as far as I can tell, is not quite as strong in NYC as I they Bay Area. Also, it’s even more so in Seattle or Portland, right? That might also be a factor for a community with poly trans kinksters overrepresented in it.
LikeLiked by 3 people
tcheasdfjkl said:
Yeah, the question “why do you live in such an expensive place”, and a lot of answers to it, also applies to lots of people who are not rationalists.
It’s not just tech jobs that are easiest to find in the Bay Area. The concentration of wealth that exists here is a magnet for all kind of employment. I once overheard a conversation between people who were looking for jobs in restaurants or something, where they were lamenting that in other places it’s cheap to live but hard to find a job, whereas in the Bay Area it’s really easy to find a job but there’s nowhere to live. And a Lyft driver in Berkeley told me he actually lived in Sacramento – he just came down to the Bay Area on weekends to drive here, because there was so much more business available here that it outweighed the overhead cost of driving back and forth.
So even for people who can barely afford to live in the Bay Area, it’s still worthwhile to be here because work is so much more plentiful here.
I also agree that the liberal culture matters a lot. And the diversity.
The physical features of the place itself are sort of a mixed bag in my opinion – SF is <333, Berkeley and Oakland are nice, the South Bay is a boring wasteland, traffic is incredibly awful and aggravating, weather is pretty much as close to perfect as you can get, diverse nature is available (forests and hills and beaches right here, mountains and deserts and skiing and beaches with swimmable water close enough for a weekend trip) – but the positives on that list are also important for a lot of people. (Personally, I fall in love with cities and have a strong preference to live in a city with which I have fallen in love, which is basically SF or New York (Moscow’s also on that list, but there are many reasons I don’t actually want to live there).)
LikeLiked by 1 person
Max 🐍 said:
Yes, the housing market is rational on average in the long term. But as the saying goes, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. I think you’re trying to disprove the existence of housing bubbles.
LikeLike
rocketgarden said:
As a Seattlite involved in the rationalist community, I feel obligated to note that we already have a decent sized group up here. Come and join us!
LikeLike
ozymandias said:
If there’s unschool coop plans I’d be happy to move!
LikeLike
quanticle said:
I would also note that working for Amazon is *hardly* a requirement for moving to Seattle. In addition to Microsoft, which still has roughly 3x the software engineers that Amazon has, Google, Facebook, Dropbox and Twitter all have significant (e.g. >100 employees) offices here. And our startup scene, while not as frothy as the Bay’s, is thriving.
LikeLiked by 1 person
ozymandias said:
If you try to move the entire Bay Area rationalist community to Seattle, some people are probably going to wind up working for Amazon.
LikeLike
Nothingnessbird said:
The people in the sEA-rat community who work for Amazon aren’t actually all miserable, though. Turns out it’s a gigantic company, and the office politics and culture really vary by what area you work in. And trust me, we’re not advocating the entire Bay area rationality community to move here. But the post felt like a treatise on why you, specifically live in the Bay, not why other people do, and it felt particularly dismissive of the Seattle community.
LikeLike
ozymandias said:
This is not a post about why I am not moving. It is a post which uses me as an extended example. I don’t think I’m a sufficiently brilliant and beloved individual that everyone wants to read a thousand words justifying my decision not to grace them with my presence.
If you don’t think the Bay Area rationalists should move elsewhere, then this post is not arguing with you. I have in fact been involved in several discussions with people who think we should.
LikeLike
sconn said:
I’m from Seattle, but don’t live there and will probably never move back. One of the reasons is that it’s not cheap to live there either! Another one is the same as the argument against moving anywhere: the older you are, the more roots you have probably put down in the place where you are. Social circles are difficult and tedious to build, especially if you are anywhere on the autism spectrum as many techies are. I feel, at thirty years old, lucky to have found a place to live where Spouse and I have both jobs AND friends, which at various points in my life I haven’t had.
And for people just graduating college and looking for a place to live? Well, I can definitely see a rational benefit in going to a place that has a large established rationalist community (or any type of preferred community) rather than one where you’d have to build one yourself, or one where the community is so small as to be difficult to navigate. Seattle is probably great for this, and I hear NYC is too. But it’s not like all places are equal in this respect.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Matthew said:
A couple of admittedly partly-contradictory things…
1. If the rationalists who do move to the Bay area are disproportionately programmers, you’re going to get a misleading sample of rationalists. This is not to say that programmers aren’t over-represented, but they’re over-represented less than your immediate social circle is leading you to believe.
2. Assuming one agrees that raising the sanity waterline is a valuable thing to do, then it is important to *not* frame all advice for aspiring rationalists in ways that are only useful if they programmers. The majority of the population is not programmers. This is still true even if you only think raising the sanity waterline is realistic for people of above-average intelligence.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Jonathan Wallis said:
Seattle has a large and thriving rationalist community, and a bunch of people there don’t work for Amazon. Microsoft, Google, and Facebook all have offices up there, and there’s a bunch of startups too. Another of my Seattle Rationalist Web-Dev friends works for Drop Box. There’s lots and lots of tech work. It’s probably not even majority Amazon.
LikeLike
Nothingnessbird said:
This read like “why I, Ozy, live in the Bay,” not why rationalists do. It also seems to display a certain amount of advantage related to social status.
Seattle actually has a substantial rationality and EA community. Our recent slate star meetup had around 50+ people, with plenty of newcomers. Our weekly meetups have a regular attendance. I’d honestly say there’s a much more prosocial atmosphere in Seattle than the Bay area. We certainly aren’t in need of any Project Hufflepuff to be friends. And Seattle was even quoted at #1 in the post. I’m not sure why Ozy is being so flippant about the Seattle community, but from our perspective we’re doing pretty great.
LikeLike
ozymandias said:
To be fair, the reason Project Hufflepuff is in the Bay Area is (AFAIK) because we have so many people that there were lots of people that were interested, not particular flaws of the Bay Area in general. (It’s also possible you’re unaware of the flaws Ray would identify in your community; I certainly have no idea what Project Hufflepuff is supposed to be solving, although I wish it quite well.)
LikeLike
Max 🐍 said:
A close reading of this article reveals that the reason you don’t live in Seattle is… because Google Portland isn’t hiring and because Amazon, specifically, sucks.
LikeLike
ozymandias said:
No, the reason I don’t live in Seattle is that so far Seattle doesn’t seem to have made plans for a group unschool.
LikeLike
fermatas-theorem said:
If you heard about a group that was making plans, would that change your decision? Would it have to be a strictly rationalist unschool, or would a non-rationalist or mixed group unschool also satisfy this requirement?
LikeLike
ozymandias said:
If I heard about a group making plans, I would strongly consider moving to Seattle if the plans seemed likely to not fall through and the unschool’s educational philosophy seemed to match up well with mine (for instance, I’d want some amount of explicit reading and math teaching). Non-rationalist or mixed-group unschools are good if I expect they’re generally aligned with my values and if it seems like the parents are autistic-friendly. If this is a real prospective unschool rather than a speculative question, feel free to message me or email me to talk about it! (There is another reason I am reluctant to move to Seattle, but I don’t want to talk about that on a public forum. I suspect it is resolvable, however.)
LikeLike
Jeff said:
As someone in the rationality community who just moved from Seattle to the Bay, I want to say that the Bay Area doesn’t have a monopoly on cool rationality peoples. At the recent Project Hufflepuff Unconference, it was exciting to see the bay area community work on some longstanding problems. However, it was noteworthy that most of the problems identified do not exist in the Seattle community, and I hear they also are less present in Boston and New York. I’m excited to get to know what the Bay Area communities are like, but I think it’s worth pointing out there are costs as well as benefits of being so large and spread out.
LikeLike
Vadim Kosoy said:
> But my friends– much to my great annoyance– insist on not sharing my set of five or ten close friends, and instead having a set of five or ten close friends of their own, which may or may not overlap with mine. The whole thing grows logarithmically.
I think you meant “exponentially”?
LikeLike
ozymandias said:
No, because friends often overlap.
LikeLike
Vadim Kosoy said:
OK, but why logarithmically? Why not power law or anything else?
LikeLike
andrewflicker said:
Logarithmic growth is the general model for the growth in number of vertices in a connected graph as the number of new edges increase linearly with a given probability of connecting to either an existing vertex or a “new” one.
LikeLike
sniffnoy said:
Hm, I would have just put it down to founder effect (as you sort of implicitly note when you mention CFAR and MIRI).
Interestingly, Zvi suggests here that concentrating at all probably has negative effects.
LikeLike
ozymandias said:
I agree that there are negative effects to concentrating. I disagree that the negative effects are worse than the positive effects are good. There are lots of practical benefits to concentrating: for instance, all the benefits I get from living near other rationalist parents only occur when there are other rationalist parents in the same place. In a smaller community, I would be very likely to be the only rationalist parent. Same for anyone else with unusual interests.
LikeLike
trentzandrewson said:
Not really related: what does an unschool look like? I’ve read a decent amount about unschooling in my life, and generally it seems too unstructured to run a group unschool. Though I associate ‘unschooling’ with the most radical permutation of it (e.g. not teaching children to read and they pick it up themselves as late as early adolescence), while you might have a different image.
LikeLike
Aapje said:
My impression is that the teacher’s role is to mentor and facilitate. So the teacher tries to entice the kid and help when (s)he is stuck on a task. For example, many parents already teach their kids to read using books with pictures of things and the names of those things written next to the pictures.
Unschooling then consists of having those books available and supplying more challenging material (like proper comic books with entire sentences) once a certain level of literacy has been achieved.
LikeLike
trentzandrewson said:
Yeah, I’m familiar with the framework in which unschooled kids learn to read. It’s just that this framework seems highly unsatisfactory in terms of having children learn to read before, say, eight. (I have read plenty of homeschooling websites — not even specifically unschooling ones — that argue you shouldn’t even try to teach kids reading before age 8-12.) I have, in anti-schooling communities (which attract people whose parents saved them from the system just as much as they attracted those who didn’t), encountered people who learned to read as late as 15.
However, Ozy’s preferred homeschooling variant is one that avoids the ‘well, my not-intellectually-disabled child is 10 and nowhere near reading, thisisfine.jpg’ situation. Which I strongly endorse. I have also read a million internet debates on whether this is tru-unschooling or not and the usual conclusion was no, so I wanted to clear up if this was unschooling-with-taught-reading or unschooling-with-reading-at-12.
LikeLike
Aapje said:
@Trent
Some kids learn to read before school. My personal assumption is that unschooling works better the more intelligent and inquisitive the kid is. I think that if kids are not mentored to want to learn key skills at a reasonable age, either the teacher has failed or the kid is not suitable for the schooling concept.
I’m not a huge fan of the community around unschooling, because there seem to be a lot of Utopians, who see unschooling as a perfect system that automatically gets the best out of people.
Then again, the traditional school system is hardly perfect. However, I fundamentally don’t trust children to know what is best for them and believe strongly in that individuality should not be maximized, but rather, that people should conform to a certain level (or society cannot function well).
LikeLike
trentzandrewson said:
@Aapje:
“Some kids learn to read before school.”
I’m familiar with their existence, having been one. 😛
But ‘self-directed reading in toddlerhood’ is an outlier. We have empirical data on this, and the median age an unschooled-without-taught-reading child learns to read is eight and a half. I’m not sure how strong the selection pressure for intelligence amongst unschoolers is, if there’s any at all (I used to assume there was, but later coincidentally met some unschoolers offline and found them to have the same intelligence distribution as the general population), so I don’t know if this is when 90-110 IQ kids learn to read when self-directed or when 110+ IQ kids do, but I’d expect children with especially low IQs or relevant disabilities (dyslexia) to have been excluded from the study population.
LikeLike
ozymandias said:
Sudbury schools. (We’re probably going to do more math/reading in the early years than a true Sudbury school though.)
LikeLike
sconn said:
Imagine a space filled with books, computers, tools, Legos, scientific equipment, whatever. A few adults are around to help show interested kids what to do with these supplies, mediate disputes, help people having trouble, etc. Some days the kids might work together to build something or cook something, using what they know at their various skill levels. Other days they might scatter to different spots to read or work on something independently.
I have four kids and we’re mostly unschooling at this point. There’s a lot you can do with more kids that it’s hard to do with one, so group unschooling is probably better than trying it with an individual kid. (Also, you know, social skills. Which you need practice to get good at.)
LikeLike
Rachael said:
Will you still be happy living in one room when you have kids?
LikeLike
Jeff Kaufman said:
> As I write this blog post, Portland has one Google job open.
Google’s job postings aren’t very clear, but typically the company posts one “job opening” under which it hires a lot of people. For example the “Software Engineer, Cambridge” job [1] represents maybe several dozen open positions across many teams.
[1] https://careers.google.com/jobs#!t=jo&jid=/google/software-engineer-355-main-st-cambridge-ma-02142-usa-859760014&
LikeLike