Vyacheslav Matyuhin

An offline community hub for rationalists and EAs

From the application:

Our team is working on the offline community hub for rationalists and EAs in Moscow called Kocherga (details on Kocherga are [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WmfapdnpFfHWzkdXY/rationalist-community-hub-in-moscow-3-years-retrospective)).

We want to make sure it keeps existing and grows into the working model for building new flourishing local EA communities around the globe.

Our key assumptions are:

• There’s a gap between the “monthly meetup” EA communities and the larger (and significantly more productive/important) communities. That gap is hard to close for many reasons.
• Solving this issue systematically would add a lot of value to the global EA movement and, as a consequence, the long-term future of humanity.
• Closing the gap requires a lot of infrastructure, both organizational and technological.

So we work on building such an infrastructure. We also keep in mind the alignment and goodharting issues (building a big community of people who call themselves EAs but who don’t actually share EA virtues would be bad, obviously).

[..]

Concretely, we want to:

• Add 2 more people to our team.
• Implement our new community building strategy (which includes both organizational tasks such as new events and processes for seeding new working groups, and technological tasks such as implementing a website which allows people from the community to announce new private meetups or team up for coaching or mastermind groups)
• Improve our rationality workshops (in terms of scale and content quality). Workshops are important for attracting new community members, for keeping the high epistemic standards of the community and for making sure that community members can be as productive as possible.

To be able to do this, we need to cover our current expenses somehow until we become profitable on our own.

My thoughts and reasoning

The Russian rationality community is surprisingly big, which suggests both a certain level of competence from some of its core organizers and potential opportunities for more community building. The community has:

• Successfully translated The Sequences and HPMOR into Russian, as can be seen at the helpful LessWrong.ru site.
• Executed a successful kickstarter campaign to distribute physical copies of HPMOR (over 7,000 copies).
• Built a community hub in Moscow called Kocherga, which is a financially self-sustaining anti-cafe (a cafe where you pay for time spent there rather than drinks/snacks) that hosts a variety of rationality events for roughly 100 attendees per week.

This grant is to the team that runs the Kocherga anti-cafe.

Their LessWrong write-up suggests:

• They have good skills at building spaces, running events, and generally preserving their culture while still being financially sustainable
• They’ve seen steady increases over time in available funding and attendees
• They’ve succeeded at being largely self-sufficient for 4 years
• They’ve successfully engaged with other local intellectual communities
• Their culture seems to value careful thinking and good discourse a lot, and they seem to have put serious effort into developing the art of rationality, including caring about the technical aspects and incorporating CFAR’s work into their thinking

I find myself having slightly conflicted feelings about the Russian rationality community trying to identify and integrate more with the EA community. I think a major predictor of how excited I have historically been about community building efforts has been a group’s emphasis on improving members’ judgement and thinking skills, as well as the degree to which it emphasizes high epistemic standards and careful thinking. I am quite excited about how Kocherga seems to have focused on those issues so far, and I am worried that this integration and change of identity will reduce that focus (as I think it has for some local and student groups that made a similar transition). That said, I think the Kocherga group has shown quite good judgement on this dimension (see here), which addresses many of my concerns, though I am still interested in thinking and talking about these issues further.

I’m somewhat concerned that I’m not aware of any major insights or unusually talented people from this community, but I expect the language barrier to be a big part of what is preventing me from hearing about those things. And I am somewhat confused about how to account for interesting ideas that don’t spread to the projects I care most about.

I think there are benefits to having an active Russian community that can take opportunities that are only available for people in Russia, or at least people who speak Russian. This particularly applies to policy-oriented work on AI alignment and other global catastrophic risks, which is also a domain that I feel confused about and have a hard time evaluating.

For a lot of the work that I do feel comfortable evaluating, I expect the vast majority of intellectual progress to be made in the English-speaking world, and as such, the question of how talent can flow from Russia to the existing communities working on the long-term future seems quite important. I hope this grant can facilitate a stronger connection between the rest of the world and the Russian community, to improve that talent and idea flow.

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This grant seemed like a slightly better fit for the EA Meta fund. They decided not to fund it, so we made it instead, since it still seemed like a strong proposal to us.

What I have seen so far makes me confident that this grant is a good idea. However, before we make more grants like this, I would want to talk more to the organizers involved and generally get more information on the structure and culture of the Russian EA and rationality communities.