And one more thing: if some people are nervous, wouldn't it be possible to get funded from people who are enthusiastic?

And what I'm describing isn't an individual project full of people who live together; it's coordinating a bunch of people who work on many different projects to move to the same general area. And even if I were describing an individual project full of people who live together, every single failure of such a project within EA is a rounding error compared to the Manhattan Project, for better or worse.

I thought the whole point of EA was that we based our grantmaking decisions on rigorous analyses rather than hunches and anecdotes.

Seems like the kind of thing that should have at least one FTE on it. Is there a reason no one has really put a lot of time into it (e.g. a specific compelling argument that this isn't the right call), or is it just that no one has gotten to it?

How many FTEs are working on this problem?

Additionally, I wonder why there hasn't been an effort to start a more "intense" EA hub somewhere outside the Bay to save on rent and office costs. Seems like we're been writing about coordination problems for quite some time; let's go and solve one.

It is serious, and in my time zone, it wasn't April 1.

Thanks for the advice. To be clear, I'm not certain that a hardcore environment would be the best environment for me either, but it seems worth a shot. And judging by how people tend to change in their involvement in EA as they get older, I'll probably only be as hardcore as this for like ten years.

Thanks for the reflection.

I’ve read about Leverage, and it seems like people are unfairly hard on it. They’re the ones who basically started EA Global, and people don’t give them enough credit for that. And honestly, even after what I’ve read about them, their work environment still sounds better to me than a supposedly “normal” one.

Thanks for the advice. I was more wondering if there was some specific organization that was known to give that sort of environment and was fairly universally recognized as e.g. “the Navy SEALs of EA” in terms of intensity, but this broader advice sounds good too.