A minor thought: for a while I have struggled to neatly summarize the rationalist/EA/frontier lab/AI-adjacent extended social universe, because it contains multitudes not all of which agree with each other on even the most basic things. Calling it a San Francisco bay area culture is not quite right, and it surely is not a direct continuation of traditional Silicon Valley culture. But it is, very much, a Berkeley culture; it grew out of a blend of Berkeley academics and a unique Berkeley social scene.
I wonder if "Berkeley culture" might become a normal term for referring to this cluster of ideas, people, institutions, and technology development patterns.
- A minor thought: for a while I have struggled to neatly summarize the rationalist/EA/frontier lab/AI-adjacent extended social universe, because it contains multitudes not all of which agree with each other on even the most basic things. Calling it a San Francisco bay area culture is not quite right, and it surely is not a direct continuation of traditional Silicon Valley culture. But it is, very much, a Berkeley culture; it grew out of a blend of Berkeley academics and a unique Berkeley social scene. I wonder if "Berkeley culture" might become a normal term for referring to this cluster of ideas, people, institutions, and technology development patterns.
I think they're gonna call it "the blast radius "
EA emerged from three groups: - moral philosophers in Oxford (MacAskill, Ord) - trans humanist futurists (Yudkowsky, Bostrom) - quants/ traders (Karnfosky, Bankman-Fried) And then grew with 10 years of undergrads, primarily from UK and US elite universities
I think lumping the entire “frontier lab / AI-adjacent extended universe” together into one giant group seems extremely unreasonable to me and I don’t see a good motivation for it other than proactively paving the way for discrediting the independence of any existing expertise