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Do you love Berkeley, or do you just love Lighthaven conferences?
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Screwtape
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Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
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A LessWrong community-interest post relevant to rationalist community dynamics and decision-making biases; tangential to AI safety but useful for understanding the epistemic culture around the EA/rationalist Berkeley hub.
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lesswrong
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Practical
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Summary
This post examines the cognitive error of conflating a physical location (Berkeley) with the vibrant community experiences found at rationalist gatherings like Lighthaven. It argues that the 'active ingredient' in transformative social experiences is concentrated interaction with interesting people, not geography, and warns against making major life decisions based on this confusion.
Key Points
- •People often misattribute the magic of rationalist conferences to the venue or city, when the real value comes from temporary concentrated gatherings of like-minded people.
- •Moving to Berkeley expecting to replicate conference-like experiences is a common mistake among rationalists, leading to disappointment.
- •The 'active ingredient' in transformative social experiences is the people and the intensity of interaction, not geographic proximity.
- •This is a broader lesson about distinguishing proximate causes (location) from actual causes (community density and intentional gathering) when making life decisions.
- •The post cautions against making irreversible lifestyle changes based on a misdiagnosis of what made a peak experience valuable.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| Lighthaven (Event Venue) | Organization | 40.0 |
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x This website requires javascript to properly function. Consider activating javascript to get access to all site functionality. Do you love Berkeley, or do you just love Lighthaven conferences? — LessWrong Practical Personal Blog 82
Do you love Berkeley, or do you just love Lighthaven conferences?
by Screwtape 15th Dec 2025 6 min read 4 82
Rationalist meetups are great. Once in a while they're life-changingly so. Lighthaven, a conference venue designed and run by rationalists, plays host to a lot of really good rationalist meetups. It's best-in-class for that genre of thing really, meeting brilliant and interesting people then staying up late into the night talking with them.
I come here not to besmirch the virtues of Lighthaven, but to propose the active ingredient isn't the venue, it's the people. (The venue's great though.)
I. In which someone falls in love with Lighthaven
The following example is a composite of several real people, with the details blurred a bit.
He found HPMOR and reread it multiple times. Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres was relatable in a way characters before HPMOR just weren't relatable. He went to his first rationalist meetup, LessOnline in Berkeley, and had an absolutely amazing time, flowing from neat conversation to neat conversation, staying up late into the night talking to strangers who, by the end of the weekend, felt like instant friends. For a few days, it felt like there was nothing between him and just enjoying life. Perhaps he flies back home with great memories, and visits again and again for other events. Each one is an amazing experience.
So he packed up and moved to Berkeley. The rent was high, he had to get a new job, but man there were so many awesome people! Now he'd live the life of the mind more.
Except, well, half of those people weren't Berkeley locals. Many of those instant friends actually lived hundreds of miles away in cities like Austin, or Seattle, or New York; some of them weren't in America at all.
Also, a lot of frictions appeared. Like, LessOnline provides, as part of the cost of the ticket, delicious catered lunches and dinners. If you live in Berkeley and don't work for, say, Google, you are not provided delicious catered lunches and dinners without having to think about it anymore. Even if his new friends are in the Californian bay area, [1] some of them live in San Jose, or San Francisco. That is close enough to be on cheap public transit, but it's not "walk out your front door" levels of easy to get to. Relaxing fairy lights and comfortable low couches don't come with the apartment no matter how exorbitant the rent. He has a job, and so must spend much of his days doing other things. Even when he's free, sometimes the people he wants to talk to are busy with something else and so he can't spend time with them.
The travel expenses for other conferences at Lighthaven are cheaper at least. P
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