I. It might be worth reflecting upon how large part of this seem tied to something like "climbing the EA social ladder".

E.g. just from the first part, emphasis mine
 

Coming to Berkeley and, e.g., running into someone impressive  at an office space already establishes a certain level of trust since they know you aren’t some random person (you’ve come through all the filters from being a random EA to being at the office space).
If you’re in Berkeley for a while you can also build up more signals that you are worth people’s time. E.g., be involved in EA projects, hang around cool EAs.

Replace "EA" by some other environment with prestige gradients, and you have something like a highly generic social climbing guide. Seek cool kids, hang around them, go to exclusive parties, get good at signalling.

II. This isn't to say this is bad . Climbing the ladder to some extent could be instrumentally useful, or even necessary, for an ability to do some interesting things, sometimes.

III. But note the hidden costs. Climbing the social ladder can trade of against building things. Learning all the Berkeley vibes can trade of against, eg., learning the math actually useful for understanding agency. 

I don't think this has any clear bottom line - I do agree for many people caring about EA topics it's useful to come to the Bay  from time to time. Compared to the original post  I would probably mainly suggest to also consult virtue ethics and think about what sort of person you are changing yourself to, and if you, for example, most want to become "a highly cool and well networked EA" or e.g. "do  things which need to be done", which are different goals.
 

For people who consider taking or end up taking this advice, some things I might say if we were having a 1:1 coffee about it:

• Being away from home is by its nature intense, this community and the philosophy is intense, and some social dynamics here are unusual, I want you to go in with some sense of the landscape so you can make informed decisions about how to engage.
• The culture here is full of energy and ambition and truth telling. That's really awesome, but it can be a tricky adjustment. In some spaces, you'll hear a lot of frank discussion of talent and fit (e.g. people might dissuade you from starting a project not because the project is a bad idea but because they don't think you're a good fit for it). Grounding in your own self worth (and your own inside views) will probably be really important.
• People both are and seem really smart. It's easy to just believe them when they say things. Remember to flag for yourself things you've just heard versus things you've discussed at length  vs things you've really thought about yourself. Try to ask questions about the gears of people's models, ask for credences and cruxes.  Remember that people disagree, including about very big questions. Notice the difference between people's offhand hot takes and their areas of expertise. We want you to be someone who can disagree with high status people, who can think for themselves, who is in touch with reality.
• I'd recommend staying grounded with friends/connections/family outside the EA space. Making friends over the summer is great, and some of them may be deep connections you can rely on, but as with all new friends and people, you don't have as much evidence about how those connections will develop over time or with any shifts in your relationships or situations. It's easy to get really attached and connected to people in the new space, and that might be great, but I'd keep track of your level of emotional dependency on them.
• We use the word "community" but I wouldn't go in assuming that if you come on your own you'll find a waiting, welcoming pre -made social scene, or that people will have the capacity to proactively take you under their wing, look out for you and your well being, especially if there are lots of people in a similar boat. I don't want you to feel like you've been promised anything in particular here. That might be up to you to make for yourself.
• One thing that's intense is the way that the personal and professional networks overlap, so keep that in mind as you think about how you might keep your head on straight and what support you might need if your job situation changes, you have a bad roommate experience, you date and break up with someone (maybe get a friend's take on the EV of casual hookups or dating during this intense time, given that the emotional effects might last a while and play out in your professional life - you know yourself best and how that might play out for you).
• This might be a good place to flag that just because people are EAs doesn't mean they're automatically nice or trustworthy, pay attention to your own sense of how to interact with strangers.
• I'd recommend reading this post on power dynamics in EA.
• Read CS Lewis 's The Inner Ring
• Feeling lonely or ungrounded or uncertain is normal. There is lots of discussion on the forum about people feeling this way and what they've done about it. There is an EA peer support Facebook group where you can post anonymously if you want. If you're in more need than that, you can contact Julia Wise or Catherine Low on the community health team.
• As per my other comment, some of this networking is constrained by capacity. Similarly, I wouldn't go in assuming you'll find a mentor or office space or all the networking you want. By all means ask, but also also give affordance for people to say no, respect their time and professional spaces and norms. Given the capacity constraints, I wouldn't be surprised if weird status or competitive dynamics formed, even within people in a similar cohort. That can be hard.
• Status stuff in general is likely to come up; there's just a ton of the ingredients for feeling like you need to be in the room with the shiniest people and impress them. That seems really hard; be gentle with yourself if it comes up. On the other hand, that would be great to avoid, which I think happens via emotional grounding, cultivating the ability to figure out what you believe even if high status people disagree and keeping your eye on the ball.
• This comment and this post and even many other things you can read are not all the possible information, this is a community with illegibility like any other, people all theoretically interacting with the same space might have really different experiences. See what ways of navigating it work for you, if you're unsure, treat it as an experiment.
• Keep your eye on the ball. Remember that the goal is to make incredible things happen and help save the world. Keep in touch with your actual goals, maybe by making a plan in advance of what a great time in the Bay would like, what would count as a success and what wouldn't. Maybe ask friends to check in with you about how that's going.
• My guess is that having or finding projects and working hard on them or on developing skills will be a better bet for happiness and impact than a more "just hang around and network" approach (unless you approach that as a project - trying to create and develop models of community building, testing hypotheses empirically, etc). If you find that you're not skilling up as much as you'd like, or not getting out of the Bay what you'd hoped, figure out where your impact lies and do that. If you find that the Bay has social dynamics and norms that are making you unhappy and it's limiting your ability to work, take care of yourself and safeguard the impact you'll have over the course of your life.

We all want (I claim) EA to be a high trust, truth-seeking, impact-oriented professional community and social space. Help it be those things. Blurt truth (but be mostly nice), have integrity, try to avoid status and social games, make shit happen.

I think there's a lot of truth to the points made in this post.

I also think it's worth flagging that several of them: networking with a certain subset of EAs, asking for 1:1 meetings with them, being in certain office spaces - are at least somewhat zero sum, such that the more people take this advice, the less available these things will actually be to each person, and possibly on net if it starts to overwhelm. (I can also imagine increasingly unhealthy or competitive dynamics forming, but I'm hoping that doesn't happen!)

Second flag is that I don't know how many people reading this can expect to have an experience similar to yours. They may, but they may not end up being connected in all the same ways, and I want people to go knowing that they take that as a risk and to decide whether it's worth it for them.

On the other side, people taking this advice can do a lot of great networking and creating a common culture of ambition and taking ideas seriously with each other, without the same set of expectations around what connections they'll end up making.

Third flag is I have an un-fleshed out worry that this advice funges against doing things outside Berkeley/SF that are more valuable career capital in the future for ever doing EA things outside of EA or bringing valuable skills and knowledge to EA (like, will we wish in 5 years that EAs had more outside professional experience to bring domain knowledge and legitimacy to EA projects rather than a resume full of EA things?). This concern will need to be fleshed out empirically and will vary a lot in applicability by person.

(I work on CEA's community health team but am not making this post on behalf of that team)

Plausible that this post's comments is not the optimal place for some of this. One may argue that each heading should be it's own comment, but I'm slightly uncertain what mods prefer. 

Skilling up

“to come to the bay over the summer” and “learn stuff and skill up”

I don't think the meatspace value prop you outlined constitutes skilling up. That needs more justification. 

Aligning some social rewards with one's desire to believe true things or to help fix broken stuff seems plausibly critical for some people to keep their eye on the ball, or even to just take themselves seriously. Skilling up is not really related to this, except in the sense that you have to get whatever emotional structure that powers your motivation behind the grind. 

But I've been basically worried that emphasis on giving students quickly legible levers early in their exposure to the movement is sort of looting scholarship from the effective altruism of the future, and the way this post evoked "skilling up" to talk about what it was interested in talking about, which I see as boiling down to networking, really triggered me. 

I'd like to register a vote for an extremely boring notion of skilling up, which is: yes, textbooks. Yes, exercises. No, nodding along to a talk 3-10x more advanced than you and following the high level but not able to reproduce it at a low level. No, figuring out how to pattern match enough to flatter sr researchers at parties. Yes (often, or usually), starting hard projects quickly before an outside view would think you've done enough homework to be able to do it well, but the emphasis is on hard. Gaining friends and status may even be distracting! 

Obviously there's a debate to be had about a scholarship/entrepreneurship tradeoff-- my sense is that people think we use to swing too far to the scholarship side, and now there will probably be an overcorrection. (One should also register that few people think getting kickass at stuff looks like locking oneself in a monastary with textbooks, but a longer treatment of the nuances there is out of scope for this comment). 

But no, respectfully, I'm sorry but skilling up was not described in the post. Could you elaborate? 

I think in star wars 8 there was this "sacred texts" situation, you may recall that after listening to luke rant about the importance of the sacred texts, yoda challenged whether he even read them. Luke says "well...", implying that he flipped through them, but wasn't intimately familiar with what they were saying. I'm personally bottlenecked in my current goals by not having knowledge that is sitting in books and papers I haven't read yet! Which says nothing of doing avant garde or state of the art things. I think this post risks entering a kind of genre of message for young EAs, which is "you get kickass at stuff by exposing yourself to people who are kicking ass", and I think that's auxiliary -- yes you need to construct the emotional substructure that keeps your eye on the ball (which socialization helps with), and yes you need advice from your elders from time to time -- but no, you get kickass at stuff by grinding. 

Landscape knowledge

The bay is not necessary for landscape knowledge. 

I could’ve easily ended up digging into, say, MIRI’s research, only to realise very late that I actually think their approach is hopeless.

I (gave an 8 month college try at alignment) managed to form a map of and opinions about different threatmodels and research agendas online. I was at EA Hotel but there was only one other alignment person there and he was doing his own thing, not really interfacing with the funded cells of the movement. The discord/slack clusters are really good! AI Safety Camp is great! One widely cited, high status alignment researcher responded to a cold email with a calendly link. The internet remains an awesome place. 

Clout and reputation

I'm not gonna say clout and reputation are amoral distractions-- I think they're tools, instruments that help everyone do compression and filtering, oneself included. I roughly model grantmakers as smart enough to know that clout is a proxy for plausible future impact at best, so I'm not gonna come here and say status games are disaligning the movement from it's goals.

But jan_kulveit is 1000% right and it warrants repeating: networking and kicking ass are different things. What do I think goodharting on clout looks like at a low level? It looks like the social rewards for simply agreeing with the ideology leaving people satisfied, then they end up not doing hard projects.

Keeping one's eye on the ball

I conjecture that some people 

1. Need consistent social rewards for trying to believe true things or fix broken stuff in order to keep trying to do those things
2. See superlinearly increasing gains in the extra bandwidth of meatspace, or find a ton of value in the information that medium-bandwidth spaces like discord delete. 

I think the bay can be counterfactually very good by increasing the impact of these people! 

But I want the Minneapolis EA chapter to be powerful enough to support people who fail the university entrance exam. I don't want to leave billion dollar bills (or a billion human lives) on the sidewalk because someone wasn't legible or well connected at the right time. Keeping all our eggs in one basket seems bad in a myriad of ways.

People who can keep their eye on the ball, and grow as asskickers, without the bay should probably resist the bay, so that we build multipolar power. One of the arguments for this I have not advanced here is to do with correlated error, the idea that if we all lived together we may make homogenous mistakes, but perhaps another post. 

Networks and caution

We should be cautious about allowing a set of standards to emerge where being good at parties (in the right city) correlates with generating opportunities. 

I won't go into too much detail here, but FWIW I lived in the Bay Area for ~2.5 years and found it somewhat difficult to network or get into various EA/rationalist social scenes (I think I was something of an outlier, but not extremely so). If you don't have a clear pathway to meeting people (such as being invited to work out of an EA co-working space for the summer, or having friends already living out there) you might have a more difficult experience networking/socializing than the post describes.

That said, I think for many EAs, visiting the Bay Area for at least some period of time is a great idea.

You got a lot of flak this post, and I think many of the  dissenting comments were good (I strongly upvoted the top one). I also think some specific points could be better argued, and it'd be quite valuable to have a deeper understanding of the downside risks and where the bottom-line advice is not applicable.

Nonetheless, I think I should mention publicly that I broadly agree with this post. I think the post advances a largely correct bottom-line conclusion, and for the right reasons. I think many EAs in positions to do so, for example undergrads/grad students over the summer, people with remote jobs, and people who can afford to take a break in between jobs, should seriously consider spending time in EA hubs.* I further think that many of the main reasons to do so are covered in this post, so this post is broadly right for the right reasons.

(If you read the dissenting comments carefully, none of them really contradicts this message. However I'm worried that the "vibe" of those comments will end up dissuading many EAs from seriously considering this in their option set). 

* As far as I understand it, the SF Bay Area (Berkeley specifically) is the best hub for some important EA subfields, most notably AI alignment work and longtermist community building. 

This probably speaks to my own biases and perspectives, but my initial reaction to "come to the bay over the summer" involves several thoughts:

• The bay? You mean the San Francisco area? What is with this in-group lingo? It feels sort of like the San Francisco version of View of the World from 9th Avenue.
• I'm not going to quit my job just to hang out in a new city for a summer. I need to earn money for food, shelter, and clothing.
  • Also, there is the factor that "my word is my bond" and I don't want to abandon my colleagues/boss/team after I made a commitment to them.^[1]
• Maybe this is mainly targeted at undergraduate students, who are more likely to have a few months of time over the summer with no commitments. But in that case how do they have the money to do what is basically an extended vacation? Most students aren't earning much/any money. 
  • Maybe this is only targeted at students who have wealthy families willing to fund expensive adventures.
  • Or maybe this is mainly targeted at students with fields of study that involve well-paid internships and student work, like a multi-thousand salary for being an intern at Google.
  • Or maybe there are some kind of travel grants people can apply for.
• Maybe this is primarily targeted at people who do remote work and have no family  commitments or other commitments. Okay, then I guess it is fine. I can imagine how it is really beneficial for a not-tied-down EA to be in a densely packed environment with other EAs, especially other EAs that have access to resources.

1. ^{^}

   Maybe according to strict utilitarianism I should abandon them, but in terms of virtue that seems horrendous. I don't want to be the kind of person who breaks his word whenever it is convenient; I want to have a really high bar for breaking my word.

I think you're understating how gatekept the inner ring offices are.

I'm happy to host couchsurfers.

I love that you wrote this because I grappled with a slightly bigger version of this, which was 'move to the Bay,' and I wasn't able to get a detailed theory of change from the people who were recommending this to me.

I think point 4 is especially interesting and something that motivated my decision to move (essentially, 'experience Berkely EA culture'). Ironically, most people focused on the first three points (network effects). I do think I'm unsure whether point 4 (specifically, the shift towards maximization, which feels related to totalising EA) is a net positive. Though perhaps by "theory of change" you really just meant the effect of coming to Berkeley, and not claiming that coming to Berkeley is net positive for one's impact?

Now that people are leaving the bay, I'd be pretty interested to see an "exit survey" of what people found most valuable about their stay in the bay and whether they think the visit was worth it (in terms of time, money, etc) ex-post

Adding a comment from an exchange me and Luise had on this post.

The benefits of going to the Bay are probably also highly cause area contingent imo. For example, someone who does animal welfare I would imagine to have significantly less benefit than someone doing AI technical/community building. If the original post seems very alien to your understanding of the Bay, it may be because the benefits (especially 1, 2 and 3) simply do not exist on the scale for your cause area. I'm fairly confident on this statement.