Cultural Altruism (Hubs)

(...some kind of...) status: I drafted much of this under the influence of hypomania, to the extent that I don't feel like it belongs to me, and I probably won't follow up on it. But maybe other people will see its value for themselves.

Writing about endless grad school makes me think of local hubs. The effective altruists discuss this on the EA Forum.

One thing that the effective altruists don't do (yet, as far as I know) is try to work with culture. They do some movement building, and that does get their values out in the world. But they are more focused on more "tangible" things.

I am personally more interested in culture. I think that's a more natural thing for a religious person to care about than for a secular person. Most EAs are secular.

Cultural altruism would try to understand culture deeply, find the best values, and find effective ways to spread those values. The spreading of those values would be a good in itself, and downstream of them, there would often be other goods. For instance, patience is good in itself, but also produces people who endure and don't react too much to the present moment, which enables them to make long-lasting institutions.

There would be secular goods that came out of cultural altruism. For instance, designing cultures that kept people from choosing anti-natalism, from apathy with regard to X-risk prevention, or from wireheading. A very normatively-uncertain EA might not want to lock in any of their values, thinking that we need a "Long Reflection" to be very, very sure that we have the right ones. But, if we all die before we can engage in that, presumably we are pretty sure there would be no value at that point for anyone to find valuable, or no valuers to find anything valuable. So we at minimum want to bias culture away from things like anti-natalism and apathy with regard to X-risk prevention. And maybe we would think that no rational Long Reflection would yield wireheading as the best outcome for humanity, but it could be something that "just happens" to emerge in our society due to cultural drift. And there are other secular goods, like caring for animals and the environment, which might be threatened by cultural evolution and which cultural altruism could protect. If you're passionate about something now, it makes sense to try to make sure other people are passionate about it, and will be in the long run.

[This post is one that I may link outside this blog. For those from outside, "MSLN" is a natural-theological religious and ethical worldview that I work to develop.]

There would be religious goods. Speaking for MSLN, some goods are preventing hardening; increasing people's love for God; from a more Biblical perspective, connecting people to the God of the Bible so that they love him completely. Just like civilization as a whole, the Church can evolve into better or worse states, from both a secular and a religious or theistic perspective. (In this paragraph, I've focused on Christianity, but in principle cultural altruism could be an interesting pursuit for people from other religions or spiritual traditions.)

Cultural altruism would be a topic. Topics create scenes of interested people, some of whom come to the discussion with fundamental disagreements about values. Multiple different social movements can take up the topic of cultural altruism and thereby participate in the scene of the topic of cultural altruism.

Disagreement is good to prevent Tower of Babel-like scenarios, and scenes are good ways to harbor disagreement. An intentionally self-critical organization might sound like it could be as good as a scene for avoiding blind spots. Maybe better in that it can intentionally avoid blind spots, and scenes lack intentionality on some levels. The advantage of scenes are that they allow individuals to participate but still stand outside any social ties. Scenes can consist of both organizations and individuals.

Cultural altruism as a social thing could be viewed in a somewhat abstract way as having a "Meta" dimension and a "Partisan" dimension. The Meta dimension consists of the institutions (shared expectations), social spaces, people, organizations, etc. that work to make it so that cultural altruism is "one thing" that interrelates. Including something like "we are all human beings who communicate with each other in one community of people in order to arrive at some kind of essential unity in our beliefs, practices and so on". The Partisan dimension consists of the institutions, social spaces, people, organizations, etc. that are sold out to one particular view of reality, and which work to remain unconvinced of other points of view, or even to convert all other points of view to their own.

(Another view of "meta" vs. "partisan", taken from my notes:)

Metans work cooperatively, politely, prosocially, ideally in a coordinated way, agnostic about values, agnostic about methods, inclusive, emphasis on coming to know the truth, opposed to conflict. Partisans are those who want things to be true, or know them to be true but can't explain them to other people yet, or care enough about things to be rude, anti- or asocial, disregarding coordination or consensus, believing in values even if they are unpopular or go against all people being in one harmonious body, emphasizing the truth that is already known and which might be denied by other people in culture war.

One might naively think that the Meta view is the only valid view, and that it is right for us to converge on it directly (optimize for unity, or for the smooth operation of the cultural altruism process, instead of the truth), but it could be the case that one of the Parties is much more in tune with the reality of what ought to be than everyone else, and it would be a huge mistake to turn the Meta view into a Party of its own, suppressing what was actually the right party.

Most people and organizations end up somewhere between Meta and Partisan. Both dimensions are needed and even if we as a culture feel fairly confident and safe in our future / eventual ethical/religious worldview, we should have the discipline to be open to finding out that we are wrong, and thus encourage people to form opposition Parties and to be Partyless critics. Even if we are right, we should be concerned that we might be wrong. We should always feel a virtuous kind of fear.

(Why not say "Meta" and "Mesa" or "Liberal" and "Partisan"? I think that the culture that would say "Meta"/"Mesa" is more in tune with "Meta" vibes and values, and the culture that would say "Liberal"/"Partisan" is more in tune with "Partisan" vibes and values.)

A hub would be a favorable place to site the scene of cultural altruism. In some ways, the Internet is ideal as a hub for that scene (in parallel to how the EA Forum, or Twitter, or whatever else, can be a low-cost, asynchronous, global hub). But in-person scenes have their virtues. For some reason, Silicon Valley, which is made of tech companies, still finds being physically located in the Bay Area to be essential, rather than becoming a purely online presence. I think the Internet is good at providing information on-demand, but is relatively bad at connecting people to each other, so that they can expand each other's minds or find each other's values (as lived out) more deeply compelling than they did before, because of their personal contact. Also, culture is not just what we read or can watch or listen to on our computers (text, images, audio, video and whatever else computers are well-suited to conveying), but also what kind of body language we use, what kinds of semi-intentional responses we make to what people say in the moment, the subtle look of fear, deadness, or delight that is "in our eyes", the kinds of interpersonal bonds we form, physical touch, the way we move together through environments and so on, which computers are not as well-suited to conveying. A cultural hub should be a scene for interested thinkers (or doers) to practice their observation of culture on other people around them, but also on each other. This way, they can understand the full meaning of their own beliefs about which values are good and how to seek those values.

That paragraph raises the possibility of very high quality virtual reality making the physical location of social hubs irrelevant. I don't really know how long it will take for a sufficiently high quality virtual reality to exist, but, maybe it will come about soon, and make locality less relevant. I think that even if I had a really high quality VR headset, I would want to take it off because it was a headset, and also would want to interact with people in my physical environment because, why not? We could view VR and "regular reality" as both being streams of experience (something my basically Berkeleian worldview is sympathetic to) and even in many ways indistinguishable, but I have a "default reality" which I always can connect to ("regular reality"), and which I always have around, and which I can't change as easily as my "optional realities" (VRs). So I'm still localized to some extent. I don't know how that affects considerations of where to locate a hub. Maybe it mostly affects what kinds of people I live with. But then, the people I live with and I could like to live in a place where our near neighbors were a certain way, and then we could find those near neighbors in some place (region, city, town, camp, etc.), and then we get a thicker form of locality and maybe enough to make discussions of physically-located cultural hubs matter.

(I can see physical locality being a scarcer and more expensive good which is spent to form connections with people who are more special to us.)

[Maybe the cultural altruists would themselves form a people group and want to have their own locality. I guess this could cut against their cosmopolitanism. But, I would guess that cultural altruism, like being a missionary, is a role that has specific demands, one of which is both a connection with and alienation from established cultures, perhaps all established cultures (being a "third culture" person). So it might make sense for cultural altruists to lend each other support by identifying with each other and forming more committed bonds.]

We might think of cultural altruism as a basically rational thing. So, we examine many different cultures, decide -- are persuaded -- which premises to accept as valid, and then apply sound reasoning to produce an overall view of cultural truth.

I like to think of reason as the interrelationship of all truths. For me, that is done both rationally and intuitively, and the valid data points / pieces of evidence / starting premises for rational/intuitive reason can both be put into words, and not. We gather some of our intuitive premises by interacting with other beings who intuit (humans, or even sometimes animals), absorbing their intuitions intuitively. This may require physical presence. (Maybe not, maybe 100% of this kind of intuition is transmitted through sense experience, which sufficiently good VR can effectively simulate?)

Where would I locate a hub for cultural altruism? Well, I'm not much of a researcher, so I will make the case for where I currently live, and if anyone cares about this topic, they can make the cases for other places and see if any of them seem like clear winners. Then, if there are any people who want to move to those places, they can, and help form the hub.

A hub would at minimum have people living close enough to each other to see each other face to face if they want to. They might build institutions on top of the hub (startups, art groups, educational groups, religious groups, scenes, etc.) if there are enough people and occasion.

A hub should have some way to enter it. For instance, one or more guest houses (perhaps group houses that are guest houses) for people who want to visit, or who want to move there but need to look around for a place to move to.

Perhaps a hub needs some other kind of minimum infrastructure.

A cultural altruism hub would most ideally have a connection to all cultures, past, present, future, in all parts of the world, integrating all of these cultures into its own understanding of what culture should be, and then having an outlet into all the cultures of the present and future world; connecting people face to face to accomplish all of the above. Past cultures accessed through history, archaeology, or other study. Present cultures through face to face contact and media. Future cultures through imagination and educated guessing.

Nowhere on Earth could be that ideal place. But, there could be places that have their advantages in pursuing that ideal, and which could be more ideal than others, making for natural sites for hubs.

Cultural altruism hub in San Diego

(This develops into something more like "cultural altruism hub involving Los Angeles, San Diego, Tijuana, Imperial Valley, Mexicali, Mexicali Valley".)

San Diego is a sleepy place, but has the amenities of a medium-sized American city. I have sometimes wished it were a more passionate place, but what it lacks in passion it makes up for (maybe) in not having distractions. To me it feels like "nothing is going on". Silicon Valley is a hub for technology, LA is a hub for movies and music, New York City is a hub for theater, literature, finance, etc., Boston has a lot of universities, Washington, D.C. has the federal government, Nashville has music. Further, there are places like Portland, OR, and Austin which are "cool places for young people to go and hang out in". (For some reason I don't hear about Chicago but it's probably more exciting than San Diego.)

San Diego (so I read recently) has the largest concentration of US military servicemembers in the US. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but the military is big here. That could count as a distraction for some, or as an opportunity for others, in culturally altruistic work. I don't feel like most culturally-inclined people are into the military that much. By contrast, I could see cultural altruists getting caught up in movies, music, theater, literature, universities, government / politics, and maybe finance and technology. And certainly in "hanging out" like in Portland or Austin.

San Diego is a place that to me feels like a sunset, that mixture of the end of time and endless time that comes at the end of a day. That might be a very subjective, personal thing, but it makes me feel far-sighted, and that vibe might be good for cultural altruism, if it has a longtermist dimension to it.

(Someone from San Diego I used to know said that when he came back to San Diego to visit, he felt a kind of sadness in San Diego.)

I feel like San Diego is a cultural backwater, and that may be helpful for people who need to get away from the present moment and think deeply.

To the west is the Pacific Ocean, which I think has a big influence on San Diego. If you've ever been to the beach and came away with the feeling that the crashing waves make in you, sort of quieted inside, that's a thing that influences San Diego whenever people get back from the beach. The weather is also mild, because of the ocean.

To the east is the mountains and then desert. The mountains are small and manageable as far as mountains go, so it's not hard to make it to the desert. There is affordable semi-desert land about an hour east by car (last I checked a few years ago). (If you need to build your own retreat center, for instance.) There is a desert influence over the city because it often enough has warm or hot dry weather, sometimes hot, dry winds.

While San Diego may be sleepy, there is excitement to the north and south. Los Angeles is a cultural capital. Tijuana is in another country, a developing country (although a higher-income one), is Spanish-speaking instead of English-speaking, and has issues with drug cartels. LA is about two or three hours away. Tijuana is about 30 min to enter, and a few hours to return from, plus whatever moving around you have to do in Mexico.

(According to one site, the highest average crossing time, when returning from Tijuana is 120 min. at 8AM. [One sampled day sometime between April and August 2022, not sure if it's typical.])

Spiritual/religious: San Diego has a reputation as having a nice vibe. Los Angeles does not have a nice vibe. I don't know about Tijuana, since I haven't been there in a long time. Nice vibes connect with nice spirits, for whatever that's worth. San Diego is a fairly religious place. I think along with LA it's the most religious major city on the West Coast. I have casually run into Osho adherents, various kinds of Eastern meditation / martial arts / medicine etc. practitioners, New Age people, Western Buddhists, one or possibly two occult people. I visited Oakland a few years ago and found myself casually running into evidence of a political scene, and I think someone in San Diego might similarly be impressed by evidence of a East/West religious/spiritual fusion scene.

While I have run into Muslims and Baha'is in San Diego, they are not as prominent, and I haven't had much experience with Hindus. I have never encountered a Sikh in San Diego. There are Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses (I put them in this paragraph because some people don't count them as Christian.) There are two main Jewish neighborhoods that I know of.

The Christians in San Diego do not strike me as being above-average in passion or conviction. Whether this reflects more a real spiritual lack or more the "cultural weather", I don't know. (I'm not sure that anything in San Diego is above-average in passion or conviction, at least emotionally -- so if you are going to be passionate or convicted here, you will go farthest by channeling it through something else, like focus or persistence.) I tend to think that the world is less passionate than it should or could be, and this includes San Diego.

(I don't have enough experience with the other religions, to say in their case.)

San Diego has some cultural resources. Balboa Park is sort of like our Central Park, with museums and lots of random spaces worked into it for different activities. It has four fairly large universities, complete with university libraries (SDSU, UCSD, USD, and CSU San Marcos). It has the Athenaeum Music and Arts Library, a private library open to members; membership not too hard to afford. The public library system is adequate. You can check out university library books through the public library system. There are a few used bookstores.

I'm not as much into art or dance, so I don't know how it compares to other places in that regard. I've heard that it is something like a decent regional theater city.

Popular art/entertainment wise, if you really want to go out, there's usually something to do, and major bands usually have a stop here. The open mic scene used to be fairly strong, before the pandemic, but I think is not so strong right now. There is one "major league" team (baseball), and some "minor league" level professional sports. San Diego may be a real center of craft beer and Southern California-style Mexican food. There are a decent number of cafes.

There are a number of immigrant communities. I'm guessing mostly the same as in other US cities. (I've run into Middle Eastern, East African, other African, some Carribbean, Southeast Asian, East Asian, Mexican and Central American, other Latin American, Russian, Pacific Islander, and Indian.) Some of these have noticeable cultural presences (radio stations, festivals, businesses).

There is an African-American community. I would guess that it is of average vibrancy and size as compared to other US cities of the same size. [It is big / vibrant enough to support a weekly print newspaper (San Diego Voice and Viewpoint), and another online periodical (San Diego Monitor News).]

There are American Indians / Native Americans. There are some reservations in the back country. [They may sometimes have public events going on or other ways to interact with them.]

San Diego used to be more conservative than liberal, but it has been shifting "blue" and strikes me as a basically moderate place. It shouldn't be too hard to find liberals (in the "vote Democrat" sense) and conservatives ("vote Republican") as well as moderates and apolitical people. I don't think San Diego is the best place to find intellectualized politics (like the kind of people who care a lot about the distinction between "left" and "liberal" or between "neoconservative" and "paleoconservative") although I would guess there are some people one could find here who are into that.

As mentioned above, there is a large military presence.

San Diego is definitely a car-oriented place. Traffic isn't too bad (better than LA). It is possible to get around via mass transit if you have a lot of time on your hands. Walking isn't too bad, if you have the time, although there are some areas (like I would guess in most American cities) that were not very well-designed for pedestrians.

Cost of living is fairly high, (although not as high as in the Bay Area or New York), so if you were to move here, you would hopefully find a job with high-enough wages. It's possible to get by on SSI in San Diego (~$1,000 a month), if you're thrifty (and maybe adventurous). $20,000 to $25,000 might be a more realistic budget for what you spend on yourself each year, if you're living a simple but reasonable lifestyle.

(There are probably things I'm missing.)

Practical summary so far: San Diego combines the amenities of a medium-sized metro area with a sleepy vibe and a certain distance from where "things are happening". There are probably other places in the US like it. Where it might have an advantage on other such places is its access to Los Angeles and Tijuana. In San Diego, one can look to the farther future. In LA, to the present or nearer future and to part of the cultural industry. In Tijuana, a taste of the developing world. This does strike me as a pretty strong combination, which might make San Diego a contender for a hub for cultural altruism.

Applications to other cities: Some similar places that stand out in my mind: Montreal (French, English, sort of close to New York City (~6 hrs by car), may be easier to immigrate to than US), somewhere in the Balkans (Orthodox, Catholic, secular, Muslim, somewhere between developed and developing), somewhere in India (Hindu, different kinds of Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Muslim, developing world) -- maybe in or near Mumbai as a parallel to Los Angeles. (San Diego has secular, Catholic, Protestant, Anglophone, Latin American, developed, developing.)

Some other major cultures maybe not covered by San Diego plus the above: Chinese, Japanese, Buddhist, Taoist, African, especially African tribal, Aborigine, maybe others. It depends on how strong of representation you want. San Diego has some Chinese, Japanese, Buddhist, Taoist, African, possibly some African tribal although maybe not. But not necessarily a really strong presence of any of those (as far as I've seen casually), compared to other parts of the world.

(Where Singapore meets Malaysia, there's a significant binational, developed-developing boundary. According to Wikipedia, Malaysia is majority-Muslim, with a significant Buddhist minority (and Christianity, Hinduism, and Chinese folk religions between 10% and 1%). Singapore has a Buddhist plurality, and significant secular, Christian, and Muslim minorities, (and Taoism and Hinduism between 10% and 1% each). *** It sounds pretty good for a hub location, except I'm not sure about freedom of speech / freedom to proselytize which the US is pretty good at, and I think probably Mexico as well. Cultural altruism might engage in troublesome speech, or directly pursue, or accidentally seem to pursue, activities that amount to proselytizing, on some level. Wikipedia makes it seem that Singapore is okay with religions "propagating" themselves, and Cru (Christian evangelical organization) has a public website for their efforts there. Cultural altruism could certainly have political and social dimensions and the government of Singapore could conceivably not like that or suppress that. It looks like Malaysia is a secular state that defines its majority population (Malays) as Muslim, and as recently as 2012 there were tensions over fears that Christians might be converting Malays. So Malaysia might be a riskier place to site a cultural altruism hub. *** However, San Diego (and to a lesser extent LA) may be biased by its blanket of safety. A "blanket of riskiness" might be a good influence on the kind of multidisciplinary thinking and relating that a cultural altruism hub engages in, to balance out a kind of overly-chill and/or timid SoCal/US vibe. (Tijuana helps to balance this out, but maybe not as strongly as other parts of the world.)) I feel like I'm going beyond my intuitions in recommending Singapore-Malaysia, like I'm not making a serious suggestion, but that feeling may significantly or entirely come from my integration into the San Diego / USA / Western habitus that I'm used to responding to. *** As noted later in this post, Singapore may be more open to visiting (not requiring visa) than the US or even Mexico.)

(Indonesia, at least superficially, looks interesting. The national ideology (pancasila) is about "unity in diversity", and is sort of secular and sort of religious. A similar mix of religions as Malaysia. Indonesia has a long history of religious syncretism, which fits a cultural altruism hub. (I think Malaysia has this too, but possibly there are differences between Indonesia and Malaysia that might make one more favorable than the other.) Indonesia is relatively close to Singapore, but not as close as Malaysia.)

I'm not sure if there are other ways to see into the future other than the San Diego way. (Assuming that San Diego is uniquely good at the "sunset" style of relating to the future, maybe there are other styles.) If there are, that would be a factor for other cultural altruism hubs. (The Bay Area is maybe an obvious alternative, or any other EA/rationalist hubs. Note that San Diego is about a day away from the Bay Area by car or train, or a relatively short plane flight away.)

(I'm very used to the vibe I get from San Diego, and it's a bias. Every place has a vibe, and every vibe is a bias. Maybe the best approach to balance things out would be to find a cultural center that feels like a different phase of time, like the beginning of day, or an ongoing noon-time. Possibly LA or Tijuana feels like an ongoing noon-time, and balances out San Diego?)

Also, what about rural life? That's something San Diego is not as good at. Possibly somewhere in the Balkans or India would be better at that. But rural life is different in different countries. (Actually, there is a farming community about 1.5 hours east by car, in the Imperial Valley, and also one across the border from the Imperial Valley in Baja California.)

Mentioning air travel opens up the possibilities for cities to connect with distant places. For instance, maybe people in the Bay Area could fly to Tijuana, and the Bay could be a hub. I just looked up flights [sometime between April and August 2022] from LA to Tijuana and they were about $65. San Francisco to Tijuana look to be about $150. That's one way. But taking the San Diego Trolley to the San Ysidro crossing could be as low as $2.50, at the very most possible $6. The time cost of going to the airport and waiting for a flight, and actually flying (from LA or SF) is probably comparable to taking mass transit to the border, or possibly greater. Obviously San Diego is at a disadvantage to LAX (and SFO) for most other international destinations.

Driving from LA to Tijuana might be somewhat competitive. Gas and maintenance costs for the car would make it more expensive than SD mass transit, and the time cost could be a bit more. Mass transit from Mid City San Diego to the San Ysidro Port of Entry is somewhere around 1.5 to 2 hours (but starting downtown or further south can be less). Driving from what looks on the map like central LA (downtown?) is about 2.5 hours. Driving from Mid City San Diego is about 0.5 hours (and again, could be less if you live further south in San Diego County).

Crossing back into the US takes a few hours, depending on time of day or whatever affects the number of people trying to cross. This is true for all overland travel, but maybe isn't as true for air travel? That might reduce some of San Diego's advantage.

Maybe a better way to implement the San Diego hub would be to have people living in LA and Tijuana as well. Cultural altruists could live in non-hub places and be "correspondents" online to share information about their local cultures, or could come to a hub to share their experiences in person.

One major caveat with hubs is that they are provincial / can over-represent what is near to them. There's that famous picture of the US as seen by a New Yorker. I know more about New York than I have a reason to because it is a cultural hub where writers like to set things. (I have never been there myself.) I suspect that there is something parallel going on with the Bay, London, Oxford/Cambridge, etc. (EA or rationalist hubs) and that this will affect how they shape the future.

The Internet is sort of like the perfect hub (except that it isn't face to face). It contains subhubs which can be just as provincial as a city.

I think hubs are very attractive if you're trying to build your own culture or community somewhat apart from the world. But, cultural altruism both would want to do some of that, and also be very aware of what is going on in (ideally) all the cultures of the world. So over-centralizing would be counterproductive. So, as much as San Diego (or other places) may have natural advantages allowing for convenient hub-building, they need "correspondents" to correct the tendency toward bias built into that convenience, and maybe cultural altruism hubs don't need to be as big as those for EA (or even less so as big as Hollywood or Silicon Valley). Instead, it's better to have many correspondents.

One kind of correspondent is the "wandering correspondent" or the outsider. These people go to different cultures and don't belong to any of them. Cultural altruism might ought to cultivate or preserve a sense of otherness within its sameness, or outsiderness even if it can have belonging.

A place like Tijuana is useful to a San Diegan because it could give the San Diegan some of the sensitivities for how a developing country works. They might gain a list of hypotheses to ask of any developing country situation. But, these would only be questions, and would have to be answered by the specific reality of whatever other developing country a San Diegan was thinking about.

Cultural altruism would attempt to influence the cultures of the world, and the best way to do that would be vulnerably, with the cultures affecting the cultural altruists back. (Try to reduce power as broken relationship.)

What if people from the developing world want to participate in the cultural altruism hub? It's difficult for them to immigrate to most or all developed nations, but maybe not so difficult to immigrate to Mexico (would have to check on this[*]). If so, they could live in Tijuana, and while they might not be able to cross the border, cultural altruists in San Diego could meet them in person relatively easily by themselves crossing. The San Ysidro crossing (westernmost between San Diego and Tijuana) is one of the busiest international border crossing points in the world, so that gives an idea that many people live that kind of lifestyle. (A failure mode of having developing world people move to Tijuana would be that over time, they would lose touch with their home countries and become more Mexican, or even more American. So maybe this would make more sense for developing world people who aren't relied on as the only sources of information about their home cultures.)

[* This Quora link makes it sound like, with an income, it's not hard to legally immigrate to Mexico, and I have a hard time imagining it could be easier to legally immigrate to the US. I tried figuring out this Quora link about Canada, for reference, and am left with the rough sense that it's easier than the US, but harder than Mexico. Tourist visas for US and Mexico both last 180 days, which is good enough for a lot of people. (Tijuanans who want to visit San Diego could do so, although it would be more of a process than for San Diegans to visit Tijuana.) ... ... I came across this post by Luke Eure about how Kenyan visas to go to US don't get processed due to staffing shortages / lack of interview slots at th US embassy in Nairobi. This suggests that there is a difference between de facto and de jure openness to visiting. I'm not sure one way or the other whether Mexico is really de facto more willing/able to process visas than the US. Immigration to US (rather than visiting) does still seem to be significantly harder than to Mexico de jure, to the point that I still guess that it's easier de facto to move to Mexico even if Mexico has some difficulty processing people. But maybe there could be more research done here. Eure's post mentions that Singapore was a workable destination for people from Kenya wanting to visit an EA event. Singapore apparently doesn't require a visa.]

Are there good places in Baja California for futuristic thinking, for developing world people who want to do that? (Places that are relatively safe, peaceful, and/or disconnected from the present moment.) There is open land in Baja California, and cost of developing it is (I would assume) more reasonable than in the US, so maybe a kind of retreat could be built there. Or maybe existing developments can be bought or rented. A quick search engine check gives a result saying non-Mexicans can buy land in Mexico (even near the border or ocean), but it's a little more complicated (according to this 2021 page: https://wise.com/us/blog/buy-property-in-mexico).

Are the geographical characters of Los Angeles, San Diego, Tijuana and the Imperial Valley going to stay the same in the long run? It isn't completely clear.

San Diego will probably always be a relatively pleasant place to live, but water shortages may make it a more expensive place to live (same with Los Angeles). San Diego will probably always be a sleepy place to live (relative to such national/global capitals as LA, Bay Area, Washington, D.C. and New York City), and I don't see the military leaving (a nice natural harbor).

Los Angeles may be a less culturally important city, because the film industry may weaken. As it becomes easier to make decent-looking low budget films, and to the extent that Hollywood films are poorly-written, it may become the case that low budget filmmakers increasingly make better films than Hollywood, more profitable relative to initial investment, and even ones that are more popular. Low budget filmmakers don't need to be as connected to networks of finance. But, it's true that they would need a pool of acting and production talent, which may naturally centralize in hubs, and LA will remain one. But it might not have to be as much "the center" of US filmmaking.

(Filmmakers, and their equivalents in theater, for that matter, could model themselves on bands. They practice for the love of it, and work together over the years. This way, directors don't have to find a bunch of new actors for each project. Some "photorealistic" filmmaking or theater requires faces that "look right", but more "theatrical" or "minimalist" filmmaking or theater, not so much. So that could remove some of the need for a hub. Do people want to watch the latter kind of movies that much? (Sounds like some kind of art film.) Maybe not for now, but culture is likely to go somewhere, and people get tired of whatever's mainstream sometimes.)

I'm not completely sure why there needs to be, or will be in the long run, a music industry, because music can be made by hobbyists that sounds pretty good, and they don't need any more personnel than the members of the band. But, I can see that if you want to make a lot of money in music, you need support staff, which you have to find somewhere. And also scenes are always good for the development of music, and scenes and hubs are very similar, often the same thing. So I think LA will probably remain a hub for music, but maybe not "the" center of music on the West Coast. On the other hand, LA is the second-most-populous metro area in the US, and my default assumption is that that will stay about the same in the future. So maybe it would be the biggest music hub on the West Coast, just because of that.

It's not clear what effect AI will have on music. (In this paragraph, I'm thinking of "prosaic", "narrow", or "tool" AI, a kind of "laminar" progression from what we have now.) Could really sophisticated AI make unimaginably good synthetic music that no humans will be able to surpass, putting all human musicians out of work? If so, would music have to be expensive? It could be even cheaper than it is now. Is cheap music as enjoyable as expensive music? I would say, no. Really expensive music might make you feel regret for having paid so much, but really cheap music is something you can gorge yourself on to the point that you have "heard it all" and find none of it special. We already have way more cheap recorded music than we really need, and maybe it's just me, but I'm not that into music anymore. But, I would be interested in being in a band. Or maybe hearing my friends play their music. Maybe AI will just kill off the professional / industrial version of music by being so ridiculously good at that. Still, if I had to pick a place to find musicians on the West Coast, LA is still where I would expect to find the most. (Maybe a lot of this paragraph also applies to the movie industry.)

Mexico will probably become less of a developing country over time (approach "developedness", whatever that is), and Tijuana will generally reflect that. I don't know how long that process of development may take. There may come a day when another city becomes a more favorable place to site a developed/developing boundary hub. Probably if Mexico is not "developing" anymore, a lot of other countries may not be either, that currently are, and the "developing nation" dimension to culture may be less important than, say, the Mexican, Ghanaian, Indonesian, Pakistani, etc. dimensions, or the "non-Western" dimensions. A big unknown for me is how immigration will work in the future, so if Mexico is currently a (relatively) good place for developing country people to immigrate to relative to immigrating to the US (something I would guess is true as of now), I don't know how much of an advantage that will be in the future.

The Imperial Valley may remain a farming community, but that depends on the availability of water. And that depends on whether California cities become serious about developing alternatives to Sierra snowpack, groundwater, and the Colorado River. Things like (even more) conservation, recycled water, or desalination. A cultural altruism hub, for its own sake, might lobby Southern California cities to free up water for the Imperial Valley, so that there would still be a rural community to study. I least expect that the Imperial Valley farming commmunity will be what it is in 100 years, compared to the other three population centers considered for this hub, but I don't think it has to go away.

[From a casual look at Calexico Chronicle headlines on Twitter, it looks like the Imperial Valley may be or want to be a lithium mining area. Also, it produces solar power.]

This all is thinking in terms of "business as usual" future. But the future may not be "business as usual". There are some extreme futures that make the project of a cultural altruism hub irrelevant or impractical. If AGI kills all humans, for instance. If for some reason civilization collapses to the point that no one can afford to centralize in one area to do this kind of work, then the hub would be impractical, although cultural altruism probably would remain very important, just as religion (traditional cultural altruism?) has been very important throughout human history.

But, there are civilizational declines or "soft collapses" in which the project might still be viable and relevant, and similarly the future in which AGI is dominant may not rule out things like locality, geography, and human culture.

Here is a scenario in which that may be the case: If AGI doesn't kill us all, it's probably because it will have been deliberately aligned with human interests. One way to do that is to make it fundamentally attuned to the will of specific humans who are in control of them. To me, as a non-AI expert, this sounds kind of simple to implement. Another way is to make an AI that pursues some kind of "human values", independent of any individual or group of individuals controlling it. This sound, to me, a non-AI expert, harder to implement. One problem is that we don't know which values to give the AI, and once we do, it might not be trivial to implement them in a way that the AI can understand. (Trying to train it for a bunch of different things instead of just one.) But, a solution that at least to me at first glance simplifies this is something like optimizing the AGI to maximize / safeguard more or less "one simple thing", our agency. Basically, the AGI tries to be a libertarian one. The AGI may prevent us from doing things like kill each other (which eliminates the victim's agency) or enslave each other, but it may leave us free to have to figure out whether to pursue a variety of values that don't threaten agency, as we see fit.

A secular person may say "well, that's the 'end of history' as far as I'm concerned", but some might not. For me, as a religious person, there is a huge amount of "history" left, which is, are people seeking God, enough and in the right way? Deliberate thinking about culture, and altruistically altering it, sound basically as relevant as ever. An agency-seeking AGI might allow for a kind of spiritual X-risk (something which causes a large amount of people to die the "second death").

Returning to a secular perspective, we might ask if this AGI would be "a human agency-seeking entity for all time, which could never change", or would it be something that humans could alter if they wanted to? Is it in the definition of "agency-seeking" to allow humans to alter the AI? Maybe, but to the extent of making it not be agency-seeking anymore? I don't think that agency-seeking can't limit the agency of people to make it not be agency-seeking anymore. However, the transition to AGI is going to be done, not in a "frictionless vacuum", but in the political world we live in, and it does seem odd that a group of technocrats can decide to force their agency-maximization-of-all-people on all people for maybe all time, even if it is a radically libertarian thing, because that in itself is an abrogation of their agency. Also, the political world is significantly captured by interest groups. Also, it is a conservative (keep things the same) and traditional (extend precedent) kind of world (keep institutions going rather than starting replacements). So I could easily see the actual agency-maximizing AGI being trained to respect human political will. Maybe it wouldn't maximize the agency of individuals, but rather political bodies.

If that's the case, then politics remains relevant, maybe "for all time", and human cultural drift becomes a powerful factor in determining what the AGI ends up doing, far into the future. It might become the case that human political and cultural problems become the major, or only, bottleneck for altruism.

I mentioned locality and geography above. Technological development may make it so that humans don't have to live in any particular place. Or so much of our lives will be lived online that the local world won't have much, if any, relevance to culture. Then, the hubs will be online. (I wonder what analogies there might be to siting a local hub when thinking about "siting" an online hub. Are there strategically valuable ways to draw people together, maybe? Are there hubs that are, more, or less, adjacent to other ones? How does adjacency in a more or less purely social space work, as compared to geographical adjacencies? Maybe something to look at in another post.)

But it could be a long time before that happens. We might choose not to adopt all of that technology. If we do, technology adoption is not instantaneous, and is slowed by social factors. Some of us, or many of us, might deliberately reject living our lives entirely online. It's true that AGI would be individually far more intelligent than everyone else on Earth, but the amount of "compute" in all the people on Earth might exceed that in AGI sufficiently that the AGI would need us to make a lot of decisions for it, and so we would still work, and we might need to be physically close to whatever processes happen at a specific location. We might be physically constrained on how much compute we can devote to AI, or we might simply decide not to give AI all the compute we possibly could, because we preferred to work, and for that matter, preferred locality and geography in themselves.

I think we are used to technological-adoption gradients inherited from a past of scarcity and competition, but there are enough people who are non-adopters of technology or late adopters, who simply wouldn't care about making the world more efficient, and would deliberately reject technological change if they weren't made to by survival constraints. When I look at the "S-curve of technology adoption", I am pretty certain that the people represented by the leftmost and rightmost parts of the graph really care about a given technology, whether opposed to it or in favor of it, but the middle part, I think, is more into what is socially acceptable or convenient, and could align just as well with the left or the right of the graph. So, as "technology" (taken as a reified whole) provides for people more, they need less loyalty to it as a value (because values ask for more of people, and the people don't need as much more from technology which would give flesh to their value of it) [they don't need any more "technology" so they don't have to consciously value it], and could align more with whatever other values there are, without necessarily ceasing to adopt all of the technology that supports that indifference to "technology".

--

Another thought: simulating different lifestyles. This should have some effect on culture. Tijuana gives an unsimulated developing country city. Imperial Valley an unsimulated American rural area. Similarly with San Diego and LA. But what about trying to survive off the land? That should do something to a culture. In the US, people generally don't have to survive off the land. But there are areas where it's more practical (or called-for) to do so. (There may be areas outside the US that are favorable for this pursuit.) If you can afford to buy a large-enough plot of land, you can site a community there that tries to live in a primitive, self-sustaining way. Probably best if it's socially isolated (more of a "correspondent" place).

--

Mexicali. I didn't know very much about Mexicali before beginning this post. But, it is a fairly large city (~600,000 people), located just south of the US/Mexico border near the Imperial Valley. It has a manufacturing sector. Maybe the cultures of manufacturing sectors or industrial cities are different in some way than those of other cities or rural areas? It sounds plausible. (LA has its ports, which are another industrial influence.)

--

Possible Northeast US hub. I don't know that area very well, but looking on Google Maps it looks like Wilmington, DE is maybe an interesting site for a hub, because it's on the train lines to Washington, D.C. and New York, roughly equidistant. Access to two different elite cultures. Also not far from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, with Amish and other agriculture. A different rural America from Imperial Valley. It looks like it's not far from some bays, which might have interesting cultures. Maybe not far from some Southern culture (Maryland or Virginia).

Would it make sense to have this Northeast hub as well as a Southwest hub? If so, why not another one centered in Indianapolis (Chicago and Midwestern and Southern cultures). Or in the Seattle-Vancouver area? Detroit and Toronto? If there are too many hubs, it weakens the centralization benefit of hubs. I'm not sure exactly how to limit things. One could ask "is there any way to have correspondents in New York, Washington, LA, etc. rather than siting a hub to try to capture those attractive locations?"

If I were most concerned with accurately understanding and affecting the US, I would certainly want something like the Indianapolis hub. But, maybe I would rather focus on global concerns. If the Southwest hub allows for better access to the Global South (via Tijuana), then that makes it advantageous for understanding and affecting the world. Likewise, the Northeast hub, by connecting to Washington and New York, connects to power structures (power cultures) that affect the whole world, so it is of that level of strategic value. In fact, if I were a Southerner or Midwesterner concerned about the under-representation of Southern or Midwestern values in the future, I might want to mainly try to send correspondents to the Southwest or Northeast, so that they would be part of that conversation directly, rather than trying to create a parallel culture of cultural altruism, to reduce cultural "shear".

In comparing the Northeast with the Southwest, I think one advantage of the Southwest is that Tijuana has a lower cost of living than San Diego, LA, New York, Washington, or (I'm assuming) anywhere in between New York and Washington.[*] So, if someone from the Southern US wants to send a representative to a cultural altruism hub, and they have a limited budget, they could fund more people in Tijuana than they could in the Northeast. As US citizens, those sent people could cross the border and access San Diego and LA. There would be the usual inconvenience of crossing, but it would be a lot more affordable than flying to the Southwest (or even the Northeast) on a regular basis, and possibly less time-consuming. I would assume that many people in the Northeast have enough money that they could fund people in San Diego or LA (or Tijuana), if they want to be represented there.

([*]: Tijuana's cost of living is close to half that of San Diego. The other hub cities mentioned (LA, New York, Washington, Bay Area) are about as expensive or more expensive than San Diego. (All this as of April 2022). *** *** All of those numbers came from Expatistan, but then I experienced a glitch on that site (I think) which calls it into question somewhat. So then I checked out World Cost of Living Calculator, which said that Tijuana's cost of living was more like a third that of San Diego. SD's relationship to LA, NY, DC, and the Bay seemed comparable to Expatistan. So I guess the numbers on Tijuana are probably somewhat fuzzy. *** Now I should see if I can find another cost of living site to see how it compares. worlddata.info says that cost of living in Mexico is one half of that of the US. San Diego and Tijuana could plausibly both be at the more expensive ends of their respective countries, so maybe that makes the Expatistan number sound good. *** Numbeo comes up with 130k MXN in San Diego for a 50k MXN lifestyle in Tijuana (in Tijuana, spend about 38% of what you do in San Diego) *** I'm going to quit at this point and say that Tijuana is somewhere between a third and a half as expensive as San Diego, and, also remember that "your mileage may vary".)

(If you want to legally immigrate to Mexico, you have to have a savings balance and/or monthly income above a certain amount. According to Mexperience.com, the monthly income required comes out to ~30,000 USD or ~55,000 USD per year to become a permanent resident, depending on whether you apply within Mexico, or at a consulate in another country, respectively (temporary residency is less). I'm not sure why there's so much of a difference. I would guess that you have to apply for residency at a consulate when you first go, but if you are already living in Mexico and to extend your temporary residency or upgrade to permanent residency, maybe you can apply in Mexico and get lower rates. *** This required income reduces the cost-effectiveness of living in Tijuana, especially at the $55,000 a year price point, but on the other hand, as noted elsewhere in this post, you can stay up to 180 days in Mexico as a tourist, and that would give you the full benefit of the low cost of living compared to the US. People who want to fund developing world people in Tijuana may have to pay them more, but maybe that's good (attracts a certain kind of talent / allows the people they hire to send back remittances or something like that). I was going to write "a better kind of talent", but people who aren't motivated as much by money have something valuable just in that and offering more money will decrease the proportion of that kind of people in a culture. *** Before you can get a permanent resident visa, you need to hold a temporary resident visa for 4 years (according to Where the Road Forks). These don't have as high an income requirement, as mentioned above (specifically ~$33,000 at a consulate and ~$18,000 in Mexico, according to Mexperience.com). So that makes it more affordable to start to settle in Tijuana. *** One thing I missed on Mexperience.com earlier was that to add on dependent spouses or minors is about $900 (consulate) / $500 (in Mexico) per person of required income per month. *** Another point from Mexperience.com is that you can use a savings balance instead of a monthly income. ~$45,000 / ~$25,000 for temporary residency, ~$180,000 / ~$100,000 for permanent residency, dependent spouse and minor ~$900 / ~$500.)

I think practically what I would do is advertise the attractive features (and potential downsides) of different areas or ways of approaching cultural altruism hubs, all the considerations given in this post, and let individuals decide where to relocate. The advantages and disadvantages decide, more than any one individual. It's better for these hubs to be scenes, and scenes involve decentralized decision-making.

--

What would be the minimum size of a viable cultural altruism hub?

Using the California hub as an example, we could say that LA needs to have a population living in it full-time in order to tap into the movie and music scene (L), there needs to be a population who travel to LA from San Diego sometimes (SL), a population who travel to Tijuana sometimes (ST), and a population who live in San Diego full-time (S). Populations SL, ST, and S could be the same, if all the people in San Diego want to keep up with both LA and Tijuana.

I would say that's the minimum set-up, although maybe we could switch L for T (instead of people living in LA, people living in Tijuana, for a minimum hub). [Later: I'm not sure why you even need L or T for the bare minimum hub.] How many people does it take to make a viable hub? My subjective guess is that probably all the roles need to be filled or the hub won't work. The total number (L + S) also needs to be above a certain amount or the scene is likely to spontaneously fade out. What is the minimum viable value of L + S? If I consult my gut, I would say that under 15 is more likely to fade out than to grow spontaneously, 15 to 30 is maybe equally likely to fade out as to grow spontaneously, 30 to 100 is more likely to grow spontaneously than to fade out spontaneously, and increasingly so the more you get above 100. (Everything is finite, so at some point above 100 it would stop growing spontaneously, but I don't know what value to pick for that.)

(This is an area where people with more experience with community building would know better.)

A more cohesive and motivated group can keep from fading out longer at lower population sizes. Also this group would get the best returns on the hub structure, by integrating everyone's experiences more deeply. A scene should eventually involve people who are not integrated or only casually motivated, but at first, to seed something like this, it might be good to have people who are more connected and motivated. However, there is a danger of becoming insular that way. (A "cult" that's too hard to join.) Probably it is best to just have more people seeding it, if you can afford to.

--

Could there be some connection to reducing tensions between governments in the long term, through cultural altruism and cultural altruism hubs?

Right now (as of drafting this section, 9 May 2022), there is a war going on in Ukraine which could be seen as the clash of civilizations. Russia might have an extra incentive in fighting the US, because they don't like liberal culture, and liberal dominance. The US thinks that Putin is an abuser of human (liberal) rights. What if the US and Russia could talk about what is so good and bad about liberalism, and come to an agreement to mitigate the harms of liberalism, or illiberalism, as the case may be, and then not look at each other as evil? They really are evil, both of them, at least when they do the bad things that come along with liberalism / illiberalism. They are right to be concerned about each other and their reaching for power. But they could come to see each other as, though never the same, at least functionally safe for each other and their own people.

Now, the trick is, what exactly am I referring to (de re) when I said "the US" and "Russia" in that last paragraph? Am I talking about Biden and Putin? Biden is "here today, gone tomorrow", given that at most he'll be in office 8 years. And the US government is not nearly so coherent as to be something any one person is totally in control of. Putin may be more representative of "Russia", in terms of him being able to decide to go to war in Ukraine based on his personal feelings. But even assuming Putin has total power in Russia, Putin came from somewhere, has history, was taught things, and had to convince people around him to do what he wants, has to understand the gradients of Russian psychology, and that psychology comes from somewhere, has history, has been taught things.

Because I don't know that much about politics and government, I will try to be vague and broad and say "elite culture" is the main determinant of "the US" and "Russia". Exactly who goes in "the elite", I don't know. But, wherever leaders come from in a country, and whatever scenes they have to pass through on their way to power, that's elite culture (a broad definition). Whatever the elite culture experiences, however they interpret that experience, however they were educated, however they relate to each other interpersonally, what their collective traumas were, even perhaps whatever food and music they like, etc. has some bearing on how politics and government work in a given culture, and thus what kinds of decisions are made by entities we can call "Washington", "Moscow", or "Beijing".

The US has a lot of soft power. How is it so powerful? One possibility is that it, without realizing it, hitched its wagon to hedonism and preference satisfaction, the gradients of humans getting what they naturally want, "freely". (This view somewhat descends from How The West Was Won by Scott Alexander.) So rock music is "liberation", is the destruction of tradition, is "be a generic human with drives who likes to feel". Western rock and pop went around the world. When you are liberated, you are a liberal and you like the US, perhaps. But what are you liberated from? And when you get what you feel like, maybe what you feel like is enslaving you.

The US is a country founded on pleasing its people -- which is great in the short run (for a few centuries, maybe), but worrisome if you think that there's something worth fighting for besides humans' natural hedonism and preference satisfaction. People tend to find something fishy or weird with wireheading, but why? It's just hedonism and preference satisfaction taken to a logical extreme. Maybe we have some intuitive sense that there's something more to value than just hedonism and preference satisfaction, and the thought of wireheading is weird and extreme enough that we can see in enough relief how it could be bad. Things like pretty sunsets and not having to wait in line at the grocery store too long just seem like "living the good life". But wireheading takes the whole "get what you want and feel good" idea too far.

But I think in American culture, or, in my California left/liberal world, wireheading is one of the few things that maybe we would think is "too far". Francis Fukuyama, in The End of History thought (sorry I can't cite which page) that California was the most "post-historical" part of the world. [Internet Archive's PDF copy has on p. 319 "in the most post-historical part of the United States, California" -- most post-historical part of the US, not of the world.] Maybe that means, the place most accepting of "the good life of getting what you want and feeling good", where everything is chill and everything is okay. I feel like sometimes, here in California, we are drifting toward being "post-consciousness", that on many levels we will cease to be human beings, lacking personal histories, and will be unable to comprehend many emotional realities, and cease to care, a kind of depersonalized "beautiful nihilism".

The rest of the world, or parts of the rest of the world, looking at that, are horrified. The reaction that we still have to wireheading, they have to "America". America is just wireheading that hasn't finished getting there. They don't want to be America, and they are horrified that we are able to use our soft power to addict them, "liberate" them, and depersonalize them, so that we go down the same drain with America, all a homogenized soup of pleasure and emptiness.

How much of the rest of the world really thinks this? I don't know, but supposedly it's the kind of thing that goes into "Russian propaganda against the West", which I assume does convince some people and probably does have some connection with how Russian elite culture actually thinks.

The thing about soft power is that it is powered by gradients of human nature, and thus the rock bands in America and Britain need have no idea what they are doing, what their influence is having to undermine traditional cultures. The basic idea of rock is all it takes to get loose and get copied. Whenever someone goes to try to make it in Hollywood, they tend to have little or no intention to prop up US soft power. They just want to make money or be famous, or pursue their art, and Americans just want to feel good, or uplifted, or whatever they get out of movies. Americans can be very insular, and for some weird reason the rest of the world is obsessed with America and can't take their eyes off us. And we just go about producing powerful entertainments that please us and satisfy our preferences. But then they get out in the world and influence the world.

So that means that the US hardly thinks about what it's doing culturally, it just does it. And so we are in a position where "power is a broken relationship" -- we are powerful because we don't understand what we're doing. We don't hear back from the people we are talking to. They are obsessed with us, but we are not obsessed with them. So we are not shaped by them. We are the conversation, and they are listening. They can go our way, but we won't and seemingly can't go theirs. We are the way of the future, and the future will inevitably come. And we are the culture of inevitability, which is seemingly the most successful culture, the one which supplants all other cultures.

I am both pessimistic and optimistic about culture. I think we are headed down the drain, and in some respects I have sympathies with traditional cultures in their rejection of liberalism. But I am optimistic because I don't think we have to keep going down the drain, and we can stop doing that, if we listen to all the people in the world, so that they can teach us their values. One risk of "cultural altruism", especially in hubs, is that it might gather together cultures and then be a blender that homogenizes all of them. I don't know if this homogenization is entirely avoidable, and perhaps in some ways could be good (maybe there are values that all humans should have). But, while hubs are risky that way, they do provide the opportunity for non-American/non-Western cultures to try to talk back to the seats of soft power. Russia (/ "Moscow") or China (/ "Beijing") could try to influence popular and elite cultures in the US by sending "cultural missionaries" to try to explain to Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Washington, and New York what is so dangerous about liberal power and liberal drift, why exactly Communism or the Russian soul is better in alignment with the true good values than liberalism, and why liberal power, soft and hard, is a dangerous and irresponsible thing, is a bunch of rich Westerners who affect the rest of the world, and the future, in ways they don't understand -- people who don't know what they're doing.

Being a missionary is a two-way street, and liberal influence would make its way back to Moscow and Beijing, but from their perspective, at least it's a two-way street and not what, it seems, is closer to a one-way street where America -- or human drives -- speak without being willing and/or able to hear.

People who are good at talking win when there's a norm of "we do things by talking". When people become unable to talk, they resort to violence. When liberalism is, effectively and where it counts, unable or unwilling to hear what the traditional or illiberal wish they could say -- then they will resort to violence at some point, to express what they can't say. But if we really let people try to change our culture, and we don't shut them out (or shut them up), then they do not have to use violence to get their way, and there could be fewer tensions internationally. Cultural altruism and cultural altruism hubs could be access points for non-Western entities to try to speak to Western culture, thus reducing their need to be violent. What if "Moscow", "Beijing", and "Washington" (and all other synecdoches like those) could trust each other? If the whole cultures of each city could trust the cultures of others? Maybe this is partially or wholly attainable.

--

Well, thinking optimistically, getting national governments involved in this could be a good thing. But, consider China's Confucius Institutes, which have been accused of being propaganda arms of the Chinese government. Chinese culture should have a seat at any table of global culture. But should the Chinese government? The Chinese government has its own "biological" interests (protecting its own survival, furthering its own power for power's own sake). These are not necessarily aligned with finding the truth of the best cultural values. It is good to have governments at the table -- they are part of culture. But governments have a unique ability to overrepresent themselves because they have so much money and power.

Any decentralized hub can be accessed by anyone -- that's part of the virtue of it. It might be possible to use something like ostracism against the Chinese government (or the US government). But a clever government could co-opt / bribe, or infiltrate other cultural units. Maybe this is unlikely enough to happen that it can be dealt with ad hoc if and when it does happen. Like, effective altruism could have been infiltrated by government agencies, and, as it grows, it becomes an even bigger target for that. But maybe it won't happen.

If it does happen with effective altruism, and at worst-case it takes the life or soul of EA away (either of which is death), then we could look back on EA's life and remember with honor the many things it did accomplish, especially the useful thoughts it created, in its lifetime when it was really itself. Those thoughts can help a successor movement get off the ground more easily, I would think. So, with a "cultural altruism" movement, a lot of the good it could do would be when it was relatively small and quiet. Cultural altruism goes beyond any one movement, just as effective altruism goes beyond the current effective altruism movement. So even if one movement got infiltrated, and lost its soul and thus was not trustworthy or trust-producing anymore, a new movement which had a truth-seeking soul could emerge, be credible, become known as credible, and carry the torch of the cultural altruism topic. Perhaps the scene could carry on throughout the transition. The topic is eternal and the scene is perhaps very long-lasting, even if movements, or even nations, come and go.

A cultural altruism hub would attract both "soldiers" and "scouts". Scouts would be looking for the truth and would be representative agents of people who value the truth but don't have the resources to sort through all the different perspectives. Soldiers would be trying to convince scouts of things, or convince each other of things. For a hub to work, scouts would have to put forth as much effort as soldiers, and exert a kind of influence over the culture. (This is basically the tension between "meta" and "partisan" interests as mentioned above.) Scouts would be able to exert soft power by not taking seriously distortionary effects of soldiers' lawyerly advocacy. They would also be advocates for good communication norms.

I would expect there to potentially be a kind of an arms race, where national governments like the US, Russia, and China, sent in people and tried to develop more sophisticated arguments and cultural artifacts, to favor purely national-political interests, in the guise of promoting national-cultural interests. And the "metans" or "scouts", and regular people in the scene (including less-assiduous, -competitive, and/or -resourced "soldiers"), would learn to filter out such propaganda.

The scouts, or any "scout/soldier hybrids", might work to improve the arguments of the underresourced. For instance, if a member of an Amazonian tribe were debating a Roman Catholic, the Catholic would have Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, maybe Aristotle, plus hundreds or thousands of past and present professional Catholic theologians to use for her defense. The Amazonian tribe member might have what he remembered of what his extended family taught him. He might have a big problem finding flaws in her arguments, just because over the centuries, the Catholics have heard many counterarguments to their views and have come up with responses. But that doesn't mean that Catholicism is right and the Amazonian tribe is wrong. It could just mean that the tribe never had the worldly resources to come up with a really robust and sophisticated defense of itself. This is where cultural altruists, trying to be scouts, but using soldier moves, could try to strengthen the Amazonian case.

--

So San Diego is conveniently across the border from a (somewhat dangerous) Mexican city that's somewhat easier to immigrate to than the US, and to the north of San Diego, there's Los Angeles, a center of the film and music industries. To the east of San Diego there is a rural area in the Imperial Valley and south of that there is a rural area and an industrial and urban area in the Mexicali Valley. Silicon Valley is a day's drive away from San Diego.

[Also the San Joaquin Valley is about a day away, for a perhaps different rural environment.]

Washington, D.C. and New York are not too far from each other, and somewhere in between could also be a hub. We see a route by which non-American/non-Western thinking can get access to the elite culture of the most powerful country on earth, by way of San Diego.

[A route whereby the northeast and southwest work together.]

There need to be other hubs, or "correspondents", to gather influence from all different parts of the world.

I keep nervously wondering if I've written something that is biased in favor of Southern California because I live here, but I think that the principles in this post should be helpful in deciding whatever place a hub should be located, if there is a better place.

--

Added note:

I was reading in National Geographic (December 2002, "The Hawaiians", by Paul Theroux), and came across this quote (p. 16):

--Watching the sail bellying in the wind, Skipper Bertelsmann said to me, "This canoe represents family. It's about sharing -- history, values, culture, kuleana [responsibilities], kōkua [help]. Sailing a long distance, the canoe becomes our island. We have to learn to live and work together in harmony. These are values that are translated to land. On land, think 'canoe.'"--

Traditional Polynesian sailing, makes people into a different kind of person on land or at sea -- perhaps a distinctively Hawaiian person. It may be necessary to do something like that to understand Hawaiian values. Cultural altruists may have to physically live as a certain people group, with the people, to understand.