I don't think using "optics" as a reason to shift away from the Bay is great. Many of the critiques you seem to be gesturing at would still ham away at EA regardless (potentially because it's an easy narrative to pick on or because it's easy to associate the movement's funding with Silicon Valley). 

I also think using the association between EA and Oxford Uni seems counterintuitive to me; people seem to often associate Oxford with "elitism".

As your fellow Cantabrigian I have some sympathies for this  argument. But I'm confused about some parts of it and disagree with others:

• "EA hub should be on the east coast" is one kind of claim. "People starting new EA projects, orgs, and events should do so on the east coast" is a different one. They'd be giving up the very valuable benefits of living near the densest concentrations of other orgs, especially funders. You're right that the reasons for Oxford and the Bay being the two hubs are largely historical rather than practical, but that's the nature of Schelling points; it might have been better to have started in the East Coast (or somewhere temperate, cheap, cosmopolitan, and globally centrally located like Barcelona), but how are we going to all coordinate to move there? The options that come to mind (Open Phil, FTX, CEA, and/or others move there, or coordinate to do so together?) seem very costly — on the order of weeks or months of the entire organization's time.
• By the commonly held view that AI is by far the most important cause area, it's fine that the Bay is an EA hub despite the tech industry being its only non-Schelling-point reason to be a hub.
• For better or worse, Berkeley is also a hub for community-building now; tons of student organizers spent this summer there. Again, they go there for the recursive common-knowledge reason that other people will also be going there, so there'd have to be some (costly?) coordinated shift probably driven by a major org.
• Seems slightly like cheating to count all those universities (or indeed all those cities) as part of the same hub. Oxford and London are way closer than any of Boston, DC, and NYC are to each other. It seems like a place can be a hub if it would be physically easy for any two people living in it to meet every week. Boston, NYC, and DC are not close enough to qualify. Pointing out the cause area networks that each of these cities have, and cumulatively counting them against the Bay "merely" having the AI industry, makes it seem more likely than it is that the entire East Coast could achieve the kind of Schelling status that Berkeley has. (Indeed, notably the Bay Area EA community is overwhelmingly located specifically in Berkeley, supporting the idea that physical proximity is very important.)
• Generally I really like the East Coast lifestyle (insofar as it differs from the Bay's) and am figuring out how to articulate it. Maybe it's that people are a little more ironic. Maybe it's that having to Uber basically everywhere in the Bay is dystopian. That being said, lots of EAs like the outdoors, and the East Coast is much worse than the Bay Area for hiking etc.
• One thing that I like about Boston relative to the Bay is the relatively horizontal social/professional structure: it feels like, in the Bay, there's a pretty clear status pyramid and a pretty clear line of who's in the elite circle (access to the top workspaces), while it's looser and chiller in Boston. But it seems like this results from the Bay being a major hub and Boston being less of a hub. E.g., once a certain office space opens in Cambridge, I expect some of these dynamics to reappear, and if Boston became as booming as Berkeley, I think a pyramid would likely start to become more apparent as well. (Sad.)

I'm in favor of informing people of the potential strengths of different cities so they can make a better informed decision, but this post reads like trying to convince rather than inform.

In a world where EA takes off (and it already is), there is room for many hubs. I think there needn't be a scarcity mindset about picking the best place. I think EAs should be trying to seed the movement kinda everywhere—lowest-hanging and juiciest fruit first. Live where you want, I say, and let the existing EA architecture be a point to help you determine where that is, but not the only point.

While I'm at it, I think the argument that university density matters for EA culture and organisation positioning is untrue. It matters for research, in which case those researchers can go there... But they already would have, toward the university they want to do the PhD or grad degree at. What actually matters for everyone else is where people want to go once they are out of university.

Most people don't want to graduate and then feel they are trapped in their university town for want of community elsewhere. They want to go live their lives in the city and culture that works for them. I suspect this is why the bay area, DC, NYC, Boston, and London have become hubs. They are just good places to live depending on what type of person you are. But, cities and tastes evolve, so I expect that other up-and-coming cities (Austin TX is one I am working on) will become EA hubs too as EAs just decide to live where they would like to live. Not where to "be EAs" but where to truly live.

I also think the hub problem will probably work itself out if the people in cities who already like EA start doing EA things, where they are already. You don't have to move to a current hub to do good work, or necessarily even the best work you can do. Maybe living in a nonhub and trying to do good work is even a part of your good work in the longterm, because of societal effects.

It's funny because I agree with your premise while also disagreeing. There are definitely other places worth living as an EA than the bay. But you still have a sort of scarcity mindset about hubs, claiming that these established east coast cities are where other cause areas are now centered, and therefore that is where all the EAs should go.

EA is not tiny anymore, and it is okay to stop acting like it and start spreading out.

My take on this:

1. Some of these arguments are good. I'm biased because I don't like the Bay Area vibe.
2. It's very bad that the movement is focusing outreach on elite universities. Proximity to them should not be a criterion. We should invest in less elitist communities that can make the movement more diverse.
3. It'd also be much better if, like you said about reputation, EA also hedges its bets on more hubs than currently exist, and in more countries - particularly in ones that aren't in North America or Western Europe.
4. I'd also like to challenge the claim that AI people should be centered in the Bay and that most cutting edge and important AI research happens there:

• It's true that OpenAI and Anthropic are there, but Deepmind is mostly in London and other non-US sites, Google Research is scattered all over, and so is Meta AI.
• Out of the top 20 universities in AI according to CSRankings (results in the link may change in the future), only one is in the Bay Area - Stanford. In comparison, there are 5 on the East Coast, 7 in China, and one is even my own university here in Israel, which is also a tech hub.
• It's true that those don't give a picture of AI safety research in academia, but there's not a lot of it anyway. Some at Berkeley (Bay Area) and some at Oxford, with new faculty members appearing in other places now, but not necessarily in the Bay Area.

Hey, I'm sorry to be harsh, but your reasons are not very good. This whole post reads like rationalization.

I say this while also agreeing with your conclusion: I lived in Boston, NYC and DC for a long time, have a bunch of friends in various East Coast EA groups. The East Coast is a great place for effective altruism already :) -- I'm in DC and the DC group is really good (as referenced in https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9uPMWPZg8mqmcAhhL/selfish-reasons-to-move-to-dc)

The main reason I think the Bay is a bad place is that it has a culture bubble, which causes people to be out of touch with the actual problems in the world. It makes sense for people interfacing with tech and AI to be proximate to Silicon Valley but nothing else.

I am a big fan of living in DC and I think EA should absolutely have a bigger presence there -- it should probably be the #2 largest hub.

I am also a fan of diversifying EA in general, starting more spin-off movements (like Progress Studies) and building mini-hubs in more cities.  Furthermore, I'm pessimistic about California's future: I grew up here, but I'm moving away to Colorado later this month because I can't see a good life for myself in the too-expensive Bay Area.

All that said -- if you are a longtermist who thinks that AI risk is the biggest and most pressing X-risk, the case for keeping the primary EA hub in the Bay Area (to influence the top labs which are actually developing AI, and to recruit top tech researchers who can work directly on AI alignment) is totally ironclad IMO, and it's important enough to overcome all the familiar complaints about rent, crime, remoteness, etc.  I and many other EAs do feel like AI is the most important issue by a noticeable degree, so "there are more cause areas centered on the East Coast" is not worth much to me.

tl;dr, I think we should aim to diversify a little, keeping the Bay Area as the primary hub, just not by such an overwhelming margin.

Thanks for writing this, it's nice to see some thinking around US national strategy (something that's been really missing!). 

I think the main question that feels unanswered is: in a world where we agreed with / acted upon this claim, what changes?

It feels to me like Boston/NYC/Washington DC are all on their ways to becoming Hubs, with an uptick of coworking spaces, new organisations being founded, EAG(x)'s being hosted, and growing and more professionalised community building. It sounds the communities there are also thriving. 

The one exception is the "spend the summer in the Bay" meme for longtermists, I'm not sure to what extent people are spending time in the East Coast cities (perhaps you have more insight here?)

Unfortunately, founder effects are all too strong. MIRI was looking to decamp from the Bay to Bellingham, Washington a year or so ago, to save money and encourage people to move to a lower-COL area, but ended up quietly abandoning this because having the established community was just too important.

I do think it'd be good to have a "cheaper" alternative EA city to avoid turning away EAs who have/want kids. Maybe Philadelphia or Chicago would be a good place for a few orgs to coordinate to move to, especially with both cities having top-tier universities?

Thank you for your post--it was an interesting read, even if I don't entirely agree.

I don't think centering the EA community around a particular geographic location is the best path forward. As someone who lived in Utah for many years, I've seen it with the LDS Church. Utah is the center of the universe for them, and members who live outside of it often feel very isolated and tend to go inactive. Obviously EA is a very different kind of community, but some things still hold constant when dealing with human social interaction. 

I think EA is a process, philosophy and community that benefits all human beings, and all sentient life, not just young professionals who live in the BosWash corridor (or the Bay for that matter). Spreading U.S. EA individuals, organizations, and research across cities, states, and regions will bring a diversity of perspectives and influences that will help make this a more well-rounded movement. 

I don't think we need a "Utah." EA is a philosophy for the whole country. 

(My epistemic status -- 60%. I'm still uncertain about this)