Hello! A few of the Stanford Effective Altruism community members as well as people from other schools want to live together over the summer in the Bay Area. The current plan is to extend the lease for the house shown above that some of us currently live in (AKA "Ithaca"), though depending on how much interest there is we may have to find another place in the Bay Area (as I am writing this, we still have yet to reach "critical mass" for this house though, which can house up to 13 people). So if you are interested, please fill out the form!
<aside> 💡 SIGNUP / INTEREST FORM IS HERE: https://forms.gle/fHoEXiAUfifMecci8
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<aside> 💡 LOCATION Ithaca is located at 788 TALISMAN CT IN PALO ALTO (a few miles from Stanford Campus). If we don't renew the lease for Ithaca (dependent on how many people we get), we will find SOMEWHERE ELSE IN THE BAY AREA (ideally close to Stanford).
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<aside> 💡 DATES Regardless of whether we live at 788 Talisman or somewhere else, we will aim to occupy a house from JULY 1st (ish) TO MID SEPTEMBER (ish). Though this is subject to change based on what works best for everyone, and you can potentially live in Ithaca for only part of this time. Ithaca will also have limited housing space for the month of June (please indicate in the form if you would need to move in before July).
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<aside> 💡 RENT Rent is ~$1000 ON AVERAGE AMONG 13 PEOPLE, but THIS WILL VARY BASED ON THE ROOM you choose and the demand for various rooms other people have (we will likely use a bidding process to find the optimal room allocation, which gives you autonomy to set your rent and choose your room). E.g. in the current allocation of rent, there are 3 rooms going for <$500 per month (an alcove, shed, and garage), and if you are willing to live in a double, you are likely going to pay <$1000 per month. If you want a single it will likely be >$1000. If we have to find a different place to live, we will aim to pay as little as possible, ideally close to $1000 per month per person.
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<aside> 💡 COVID POLICY There is also a micro-covid policy--we use an online tool (microcovid.org) to measure the riskiness of various gatherings, and we pay a tax to everyone else in the house based on the risk and the price of a micro-covid that we agreed upon ($0.05 per micro-covid, this amounts to maybe tens of dollars exchanged among house members). If you are vaccinated, that amounts to your tax being ~0. If everyone is vaccinated, though, this policy will likely be deprecated.
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<aside> 💡 HOUSEMATES 4 of the current Ithaca residents are interested in continuing to live in Ithaca (though not all confirmed yet). Two of these are Stanford EA organizers (Jack Ryan, Sydney Von Arx), one is a UCSB senior (Noa Nabeshima), one is a MIRI intern from Caltech (Mark Xu). Additionally, there is a Stanford freshman, senior, and a grad student who each will likely live in Ithaca.
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<aside> 💡 CULTURE Historically, Ithaca house culture has included lighting talks on topics house members are interested in, project/homework collaboration, daily vegan house dinner, optimization of house chores/meals/fair house policies, as well as interesting and fruitful discussion of the type you might see on the EA forum or LessWrong.com for example about existential risks, high impact career planning, the future/technological development, AI/AI safety, cryptocurrency/trading, applied rationality/productivity, philosophy, animal welfare, etc. Though culture is definitely subject to change!
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Contact me at [email protected] if you have any questions or want to meet some of your potential house mates!