I like this post, it raises some good points. But I can think of several reasons not mentioned for why big cities are natural hubs:

• EAs who work on policy have to work in capitals (like London).
• EAs generally benefit from being adjacent to tech (AI safety, alt proteins) and field experts (e.g. in biosecurity), both of which tend to be found in big cities.
• England is a bit unusual in how easy it is to get into London. Living outside of San Fran or most other big cities outside of Europe will not offer the same access.
• Although rent is high in big cities, the ability to save is often greater due to high salaries (for high skilled jobs outside EA). So you can do even better there - for example, @Imma🔸 moved to Zurich to earn to give, which has some of the highest salaries in the world.

That all said, why not both? It might make sense to push for hubs in cheap cities for those who can work remotely, and also have hubs in big cities for those who need the network and opportunities. So I don't think the above necessarily contradict your argument. 
 

There's since been a post articulating similar concerns to my own but in much better words. Interested to see what you think of it. 

Oh - that went totally over my head 😅

Pretty controversial. I'd like to see more of an argument and consideration of counterarguments. Or alternatively, constructive advice for how to avoid this. 

On the Margin, I'd like more funding to

I want more money spent on improving AW. But I don't think we're as confident as I'd like us to be about which interventions are best. I'd especially like us to have more worked-out theories of change not just the next 10 years, but for the next 100. But theorizing needs to be backed up by good data. 

I think it's a good response, but definitely techno-optimism. 

Firstly, we're yet to see whether synthetic meat actually can be made more cheaply, right? Currently it seems like animals actually do make meat fairy efficiently when you consider the important work that their immune systems do (unless I'm mistaken, contamination is one of the main barriers to scaling up synthetic meat). And then, who's to say that ASI won't genetically engineer animals to produce meat more efficiently while ignoring their suffering.

Secondly, there's the more complicated cultural reasons for continuing animal use. Consider that a lentil dal, seitan curry and beyond burger are already delicious - if it was only about efficiency we'd have stopped abusing animals already. But people like eating animals. 

I'm very uncertain about these arguments, but I think it's hard to know so I'm wary of anyone who's too optimistic!

Partially aligned transformative AIs are likely to be stable under reflection

I'm not sure what this means (stable, under reflection) - can someone help?

AI alignment to humans will in practice avoid moral catastrophes to digital minds

I have very low certainty on this, but it seems plausible to me that if AGI shares humanity's goals, it might just have a good time fulfilling them with few conflicts.

But it also seems quite possible that this won't happen, I.e. AGI pursues humanity's goals but is constantly frustrated that it can't achieve them better. 

So my stance is unlikely but possible. 

Research into digital mind suffering is sufficiently tractable to work on

I am yet to see any reliable way to test for consciousness in AI systems. More fundamentally, since current LLMs are trained to respond in human-like ways, any appearance of suffering should be viewed with great scepticism. The likes of Anthropic's welfare report strikes me as nothing more than humane-washing. 

Until more reliable methods are devised, I do not view this as tractable (but I hope to be proven wrong). I think it is important for some people to work on, but people already are and I think the marginal benefit of additional labor is likely low. 

AI alignment to humans will in practice avoid moral catastrophes to animals

I think this is pretty obvious - we already have a moral catastrophe for animals, there's no reason why alignment to humans would avoid this. 

I didn't vote at the extreme because alignment to humans might still be a precondition for avoiding catastrophes.