EA - Announcing: the Prague Fall Season by IrenaK

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Announcing: the Prague Fall Season, published by IrenaK on July 29, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. tl;dr: We invite the broader EA/Rationality community to spend this fall in Prague. There will be a high concentration of global EA/Rationality events, workshops, retreats and seminars happening in and around Prague. While the events alone are interesting, we believe there will be additional benefits for staying around for a longer period of time and an opportunity to talk, create and meet caused by the higher density of people in one place. We will have a large coworking space available in Prague for people to work from and socialize. We also want to share with the world what we like about Prague and the local community. Prague seems to be a good place for thinking about hard problems - both Albert Einstein and Johannes Kepler made substantial progress on their fundamental research while living in Prague. We think you would enjoy being part of the Prague Fall Season if you: Want to spend an extended period of time this fall with other like-minded people, concentrated in one area, building momentum together. Are interested in exploring cities, cultures, and aesthetics different from the US or UK hubs. Are curious about the Czech EA/Rationality culture and want to spend some time with us. Want to work on some of the projects based in Prague. Want to experience what it’s like to live and work in Prague. If you are interested you can: Apply for a residency. Apply for one of the jobs based out of Prague. Apply to work from our new office space. Apply for a CFAR workshop. . or just visit us and we will figure it out! Why Prague? The events happening in Prague this autumn provide a Schelling point.Prague is a second-tier EA Hub, smaller than London or the Bay area, but comparable or larger than probably any other city in continental Europe. Prague has a thriving local EA community, a newly established alignment research group, ~20 full-time people working in/with high-impact organizations (eg Metaculus, ESPR, ALLFED, CFAR), and about a hundred people in the broader EA and rationalist communities. We aim for the Season to bring in on average additional 30-60 people staying for longer, and a few hundreds of shorter-time visitors, who will participate in some event and stay for a few days before or after. In our experience, Prague is a very good place to live - it has the benefits of a modern large city, while being walkable or bikeable, offering a high quality of living, and overall unique aesthetics and vibes (meaningfully different from other similar hubs); a likely fit for some creative high-impact people who seek a change in their environment. I often get questions about why there is such a big concentration of successful and interesting people in the Czech Republic, especially in the EA/Rationality community. My answer usually goes something like this. On a more serious note, we are quite excited about some of the virtues of the local EA/Rationality culture and would like to share them with the global community. If I were to summarize some of the key ones, they would be: Doing what's needed - one secret superpower we aim for is to do what needs to be done, even if the quests are not shiny and glittering with status. Sanity - Prague often feels like a more sane and more grounded place, which has distinct advantages and disadvantages; for example, if you feel you are too steady and unambitious or want to upend everything in your life, the vibes of Silicon Valley or the Bay area are likely better for moving in this direction. In contrast, if you feel the pressure of the competition for attention, networking, or similar source of stress is distracting you from useful work and you would benefit from having some time with less of that, Prague may be better for a few month...