Raised by an academic and musician/programmer in Palo Alto, I wanted to start a salad dressing business when I was 13 before Whole Foods had already taken over the country. I would have, but didn't realize I could by olive oil wholesale and buying retail wasn't profitable. It wasn't until I moved to Manhattan that I started my first business at 22. Now, I'm about to get going with something online and am most likely going to move (temporarily) to Israel . Smart, ambitious, talented people and a much lower cost of living than in America. Sometimes being an outsider can be motivating.
"New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer.
What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message there is: you should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you've been meaning to."
"I find every ambitious town sends you a message. New York tells you "you should make more money." LA tells you "you should be better looking." Rome tells you "you should dress better." London tells you "you should be hipper." The Bay Area tells you "you should live better." And Cambridge tells you "you should read some of those books you've been meaning to.""
Yes, bits of this came from that experiment in blogging I tried with Infogami. I thought of mentioning that in one of those prefatory remarks, but mentioning it would have taken more words than the bits in question.
I found it cool as well, and appreciate you linking to that. It's somewhat inspiring to see how someone begins to think about a topic; leads me to stop rejecting my early ideas so ruthlessly.
> Maybe the Internet will change things further. Maybe one day the most important community you belong to will be a virtual one, and it won't matter where you live physically. But I wouldn't bet on it. The physical world is very high bandwidth, and some of the ways cities send you messages are quite subtle.
I wrote this four months ago in an email to a friend of mine:
"San Francisco is definitely a great area, and you should at least visit some day. There's a vibe there that's completely different from anywhere else I've ever been. It is hard to explain. You just go there and you feel it. Things seem possible out there that would be laughed at here. That's the best way I can put it.
Every city that I've been to has a certain feel to it. New York is rude and busy. Portland is relaxed and thoughtful. San Francisco is ambitious and free-spirited. Atlanta is comfortable and complacent. Atlanta's feel was good for growing up, and it is one that's good for growing old if you're willing to play it conservatively and live a life of moderate wealth and complacency. But if you're not, you should go to a city that has a better feel for what your goals are at that stage in your life.
Does that make sense? I'm by no means trying to convince you to go to San Francisco, but for me it was important that I travelled around and discovered the city that had the right feel for me. Portland was very close, and San Francisco is nearly spot on. I have no doubt you'll be somewhat different. Give it a try though, eh?"
Its like PG read my email and decided to write an essay on it.
Actually, you're picking up the last bit wrong..."and join a band" is actually the way the last bit of the message goes. But close enough.
In personals ads in Austin, "musician" is code for "unemployed", because everybody is a musician. You only mention it if you don't have anything better to say about your career.
The values of New York come from Wall Street, which sets the tone for the rest of industry there. The attitude that everything has its price is responsible for the bad reputation that New York and New Yorkers have in the rest of the country.
If you live in New York, in some sense you aren't a citizen of the United States: your residency means that you have a passport to enter the "real" United States.
Another thing about New York: it clearly isn't known for science. The Science Museum in Oakland California would be impossibly out of place in New York. The two main categories of industry in New York are finance and media, broadly conceived (including the arts, television, publishing, fashion, advertising and so on).
Columbia, NYU, and Cooper Union are excellent schools. If they were located anywhere but in the center of the world's media and financial system, they would define that place as an unparalleled academic center.
The problem is that Columbia is situated so far away from the other two, and from the "heart" of the city, that the university simply cannot have the same overarching influence on society that other schools that are better integrated with their surroundings do (like Harvard and MIT with Cambridge).
In addition, it's a matter of pure density- Cambridge and Boston, to a lesser extent, is seen as a college town because of the density of college students living in that area. In New York, college students compose such a tiny percentage of the overall population, and exert such a small influence on everyone else, that they are hardly given a second thought when determining the dominant themes in a city's ideology.
As I recall, the Oakland Science Museum is focused on technology. The American Museum of Natural History is a better museum in many ways, but its focus is entirely different. The Hall of Science seems like a leftover from the World's Fair--I'm probably completely mistaken.
I associate the Hall of Science with cranky aging amateur radio operators on account of the annual hamfests they hold in the vicinity. Those hams seem as if their wives ordered them not to come home until they sell off their old equipment. That's the impression of science and technology you get from the Hall of Science. That impression might be a little hard to convey, so try comparing the discussions on eHam with those on hacker news.
Since we're on the subject of the politeness of New Yorker's and the attitude that everything has its price, in New York, a simple "thank you" might be considered a costly acknowledgment.
Here's a dismal example by hacking standards, but it's still indicative of the attitude. Someone from a financial firm, known for its rating system and price indexes, had a data conversion problem. They were using Matlab--a dismal language with a bastard semantics. One of the functions they were using was Datenum(), which converts dates and times to the number of days since the year zero, in the proleptic Gregorian calendar.
The specification of this function should have been to return a floating point number equal to 1+1/86,400 (in units of days) for a date argument equal to one second after year zero. And in fact, the open source equivalent function in Octave does exactly that. However, Matlab's function differs from this in the 11th decimal place. Their technical support has been silent on the issue.
When I informed the person at the financial firm about this discrepancy, they thanked me for "my comments." In the next sentence, I was informed that that they were redoing their calculations using another method. It was stated as if the decision to do this was an entirely independent judgment, not at all informed by my observations, and completely unrelated to any problems they might have encountered using the previous method. They simply decided to change the way they were doing things, without explanation.
Finding a numerical bug that could complicate the analysis of code that depends on it is not earthshaking. But not stating what informed a decision to avoid the problem altogether is a typical New York attitude. Or perhaps the reluctance to credit others is typically corporate. Correct me if I am mistaken.
I have to agree with Paul Graham's essay on the relative lifelessness of employees: if I were an employee, I simply would have accepted the decision as a completely independent judgment, internalized it and defended it.
Just typically corporate, in my experience. That kind of person uses "I" when "we" would be the correct pronoun, and "we" when "you" would be. When "I" would actually be correct, it'll be capitalized, or attention drawn to it some other way.
I live in Tokyo right now. Everyone is very busy, yet it's obligatory to be polite at all times and with all people (at work). Don't know how it compares to NY though, never been there.
The subsequent "effect you have on the world" is a far better description of the bay area than "power". I think that in terms of actual "power", as in Washington DC power, the bay area is underrepresented for the amount of money there.
New York is made of a dozen little subsections. I see no reason why a concentrated startup community could not form there, much as artist and theatre communities have thrived.
There is definitely a startup scene in NYC. Lot's of groups such as http://wiki.workatjelly.com/. However, there are far fewer tech startups here than in CA. Most of the people I know work on Wall Street, advertising, real estate, law, non-profits/education or something closely related. Back in Palo Alto, I could walk into my synagogue and point to different people who've taken their companies public, in startups or worked for big tech firms. Most NYer's don't even realize SF and LA are almost as far apart as a round trip to Cambridge. Different worlds the two cities.
there is way more than a concentrated startup community in NYC, it's the third most active venture capital market in the world and will soon pass boston and be second only to Silicon Valley
Money and power are interchangeable, and that's what most ambitious people want. Of course, there are other benefits, like the joy of seeing something work, and the satisfaction of making a difference in the world. So most polite people will play up those benefits over the money/power angle.
Fame, hipness, insider knowledge? All either means to an end or cultural by-products. LA is run on power and money - studio execs are the most powerful, and basically run the entertainment biz, but they generally stay out of the limelight. DC runs on political power, plain and simple. Hipness is a by-product of having a very large concentration of young, single people in one place. You'll find brands of hip in every major city.
Ideas as Cambridge's main "industry" is also somewhat of a dubious distinction. Ideas are cheap. Talented people (i.e., the execution of ideas) is the bottleneck.
Nearly, but not quite. For example, Linus Torvalds isn't rich by New York or Silicon Valley standards, but he's quite powerful nevertheless. And Barack Obama isn't particularly rich either, but he's on the brink of being perhaps the most powerful man in the world.
He and his wife did get much richer as he got more powerful, though. (http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2006/09/hospital_offici...). ""She's terrific," added Michael Riordan, who was president of the hospital in March 2005, when Michelle Obama was promoted to vice president for external affairs and had her annual salary increased from $121,910 to $316,962." Hot damn! Did she get two and a half times as effective at "external affairs" over that year?
'Did she get two and a half times as effective at "external affairs" over that year?'
I imagine she did. I'm not exactly sure what "external affairs" entails, but it sounds like the kind of position that would benefit greatly from being politically well connected.
Their existence is a precondition for effecting positive change, but there still must be an "industrial base" to implement them. It turns out that ideas are cheaper than talent, but since the Bay Area has a greater concentration of talent, they dominate in the implementation of ideas.
If the Boston area wants to get ahead in startups, it's going to need to attract more talent than SF. Sadly, I've seen plenty of MIT grads head to Google and Facebook...and some of those kids are going to be starting the next wave of companies...
I agree that the ideas themselves are not worth much. What I meant was this: being able to run 26 miles on foot is not especially useful, but the kind of people determined enough to do that are also the kind of people determined enough to succeed in other ventures.
I've realized now why I always liked living in Los Angeles so much (apart from my family being nearby): 'Los Angeles' was really 'Pasadena', and 'Pasadena' was 'Caltech'. Living in Pasadena near Caltech was like living in Cambridge, only the weather was good and most of the books on people's bookshelves required calculus to understand them fully. (I've also lived in Cambridge, and while I loved all the high-IQ neighbors, there's also a lot of pseudo-intellectual pretension there. Not all books need mathematics, of course, but math is a convenient pin for pricking inflated egos.)
A weird thing: the Borders in Pasadena is about the same size as any other yet it unfailingly has the books I want to read. Followed by Westwood, Santa Monica and Hollywood.
Interestingly, Moleskine (which is totally "stuff white people like") recently created a Los Angeles City Notebook including a map of "selected" parts of LA. Metropolitan LA is 4,850 square miles, so one wonders where they selected. Answer:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/atwatervillage/2444508587/
I know what you mean about Cambridge. Hanging around Diesel Cafe (okay, Somerville) I saw a lot people hacking on web apps, but also a lot of copies of Derrida and Bhabha carefully positioned on the table so that people would notice them. cringe.
Duuude, Mister Graham, I've never even heard of this Cambridge, and I seriously doubt it is the intellectual capital of the world. And you know what - you are not qualified to judge. You've not been to Urumuqi, Jenin, Port Harcourt or Bahia, how can you make a judgement based on having been in two cities?
And furthermore, I take offense at the suggestion that American universities produce the best students. In general, the American engineers I have met have been less skilled than their German counterparts.
American universities produce people with ambition, but that probably has to do more with the American culture than any particular school policy.
Cities do not mould people. People of a certain sort hear about the reputation of a city and they flock there. It's like people hear of china town and go there for chinese food, and pretty soon lots of people are selling chinese food there, because it is where people go for chinese food.
A city influences people, but in a very complex manner. It's an animal ecosystem, and there are hundreds of factors at work that modify and regulate pull and push of a city.
You are seeing cambridge from your peculiar focus. That's not the real cambridge. Imagine some black bum you drive by, imagine how he sees cambridge. For him its not a place of ideas. There is no push towards reading.
What you term the 'city' is the social circle you are in. That's not the city, the city is much more diverse than that. There are crackheads and hos, bums and pimps, bus drivers and lower class korean immigrants. Its not an idea place for those people, it's just home.
A city can gain a reputation, and this reputation can cause a crust of a certain type of person to form in the city, but beneath this layer, every city is made up of normal people.
Sooner or later, the trend will change and the flavour of the crust will change, but beneath it all, life and death of these normal people will continue.
I think you are missing his point, as he said " beneath this layer, every city is made up of normal people". The judgments you are making on those particular areas are relative to the individuals you are associating with.
It does because the parents entire message was that for the most part, every city is made up of the same ingredients and you cannot dub the city the intellectual capital of the world based on a small subset of experiences with a select group of people. If your entire experience with the city of Cambridge is surrounded with individuals involved in academia, then it would be easy to come to such a conclusion. Having a friend that attends a well known Cambridge institution, I would never title an area based on or around the experiences I had with those individuals while visiting because that would be entirely inaccurate. If that were the case, I could call Cambridge the pseudointellectual and back patting capital of the world (not that those were my experiences, but no less accurate than any of the previous statements).
OK -- you are saying that things are much more complicated than being able to dub a city the intellectual capital of the world.
It is nearly impossible because humanity is more complex than being reduced to the experiences of one person, but if someone was holding a gun to your head and saying you had to name the world's intellectual capital, what would you name it? There really doesn't seem to be a better one than Cambridge.
No I wouldn't name Cambridge because "When you walk through Palo Alto in the evening, you see nothing but the blue glow of TVs. In Cambridge you see shelves full of promising-looking books". If intellect was based off of the number of books in ones bookshelf, a few of my friends would be gods amongst men. If the main criteria everyone is using to evaluate whether a city is the intellectual capital is a) how prestigious the cities institutions are and b) how condensed those universities are to each other, then I agree, Cambridge is that location. Any other basis for a decision is entirely subjective and a futile conversation to continue.
It's lovely how you dissect and dismiss the statement on the basis of being a subjective determination without questioning for a second just what the hell "intellectual capital of the world" means.
I daresay your reading comprehension skills are subpar if you're troubled to detect a subjective declaration in a subjective essay about subjective experience.
Ok, So apparently an ad hominem argument without any valid justification or reasoning is acceptable. I at least tried to support with some sort of criteria or justification for a title. Not from PG, but from all of the commenter's who support the claim.
"I daresay your reading comprehension skills are subpar if you're troubled to detect a subjective declaration in a subjective essay about subjective experience."
Well sadly your reading comprehension skills are subpar because I have been responding to the thread, not the content of the essay. The use of the quote from the essay was used to make the point that the individuals here seem to so easily accept Cambridge as the capital without any mention or rebuttal with criteria or evidence to support.
There seems to be blind support to these claims and no defense for them. Why is it wrong for me to reject a claim but alright for you all to accept it? I seem to be the only one that is attempting to dissect the criteria or claim subjectivity while you give none.
Rather than downmod me and tell me I am wrong, propose reasons why your argument is valid.
What argument? Your complaint is that it's subjective -- I'm saying yes, it is, and everybody else knows that. It's just that nobody cares because the very crowning phrase "intellectual capital of the world" is subjective.
It's like saying "Chicago is the best city in the world to get a hot dog" -- it may not be backed by objective criteria but that does not render it meaningless, and you can find plenty of people ready to make or agree with that claim without a formal argument.
The burden is on you to explain why it makes a difference in the context of the essay, as it's unclear how you distinguish between it and people in the comments agreeing with it -- in neither case is it presented as an objective determination, and yet you're treating it as if it is. (see also:"tilting at windmills")
Joke of the day: What do you call an european with no sense of humor.....
drums...
German!!
In other news, an immigrant will always feel as second class citizen in most of europe, and Germany has a bad reputation about it. In some parts of East germany there is some Neo-Nazi resurrection, and there is lots of xenophobia.
The states it is a total different thing. It depends where you are. In SF i just don't feel foreign at all, as most people I meet actually speak at home another language, or have traveled a lot. There is no visible discrimination, and I feel I could be an american one day.
Living in the south, it is a total different thing. You feel foreign, no matter how good your english skills are, BUT, you can actually score points with girls thou (if you are white, of course), as there are not that many europeans around.
In germany, they give you this thing called the blue card, so you could slave working on some company, then they kick you out when the time is up, with no path to citizenship. Hmmmm.... No thanks, I just don't feel being used as a disposable thing.
As another anecdote, here in Austria, which for many things has similar laws to Germany, you can't have dual citizenship, and being born here doesn't confer citizenship on you, as it does in places like the US, or Italy. So our daughter will be Italian and American, despite being born in Austria (not that we would have wanted it otherwise, but still...).
I met a German guy in the states, who was born and raised there, considered himself German, but didn't get citizenship until 18 or 19 because his parents were from Turkey.
You can find a list of countries that deny citizenship to people born in that country of parents who are not of the "right" blood, yet have lived in the country for many years. It is one of the strongest indicators of institutional racism I can think of that is still in practice in many modern nations.
I agree with what you say, but that list seems mostly to be about countries that grant citizenship to people of a given "ethnicity"/stock that weren't born in the country itself (for instance, if you have an Italian grandparent, you can get Italian citizenship, even if your parents are, say, Brazilian). That's in contrast to countries that deny citizenship to those who are born in the country in question, which is what strikes me as too exclusive.
I use race for dramatic effect. It underscores the societal and cultural differences between the one group of people and the other. I'm sorry to not conform to your American way of never mentioning anything related to race or ethnicity.
Imagine some black bum you drive by, imagine how he sees cambridge. For him its not a place of ideas. There is no push towards reading.
I'm not sure why you felt the need to bring the hypothetical bum's race into it, but I disagree. A bum on the street in Cambridge sits around resenting the fact that all the successful people around him are better educated than he is. A bum on the street in Hollywood, on the other hand, sits around resenting the fact that all the successful people around him are better-looking than he is.
Unless you are in or have been in a similar situation, I don't think either of you are qualified to make an assessment of what the views are of the "bums" in either city. Not everyone has the same goals or expectations in life (not claiming they aspire to be homeless) but making the assumption that individuals become bitter and resent those who either more successful (which is subjective) or better looking (also subjective) is quite a pretentious statement. This attitude perpetuates throughout our society and fuels many of the problems we face today. Maybe that "bum" is simply happy to have survived a childhood surrounded by drug addict parents or none at all, or maybe he is one of your praised intellectuals who went off the deep end with mental illness or was left behind by society. While you corrected the parent for making an ignorant statement for calling the "bum" black, you went on a few sentences later to make an equally ignorant statement by making the assumption he envies those surrounding him.
my favorite is that black guy that hangs before Au Bon Pain that uses flatery to get money: "Young lady", "Big guy", "Pretty lady", could you spare some change?
The same is true of a lot of Boston beggars. I find people in the Boston area generally well-spoken. Education is emphasized a lot, not just in Cambridge.
An MIT student made a documentary a few years back about bums on the street of Cambridge. While the evidence is clearly anecdotal, none gave off the aura you describe. They were completely disconnected from the MIT/Harvard community. Instead, they were entirely engrossed in their own world (and in some cases, how they got there).
This is probably the first time I've ever seen anyone reference my birth-city in a blog post or comment (Urumqi). And I can confirm it's not a startup or intellectual hub, but the Uyghur lamb-kabobs are killer.
You are mistaken in concluding that "normal" people shape a city. The traits that make a city unique are the result of the actions of a minority of its inhabitants.
If your "logic" were accurate, Los Angeles would be no different than Tijuana, for example, considering that most of the "normal" people there are lower class Mexican immigrants.
Allow me to inform you of something essential about PG's essays: they require intelligence to truly understand, to the point that his core arguments will simply sail over the heads of those who lack it.
Evidence of not having the required intelligence includes attempting to refute the core arguments with a myriad of minor points that appear to point out logical flaws, when they only manage to address comparatively minor items of negligible consequence.
Mr. Graham's essays are valuable owing to their QUALITATIVE aspects, not to their total QUANTITATIVE sum . . .
I'm not the cleverest guy in this room. I once took an online IQ test and only got 115. To be fair, lots of questions were things like "What of this has no relationship with Kansas". But I digress...
If a person trying to communicate cannot make his point understood by any but the most intelligent, then he has failed in communicating.
It depends on the point and the audience. If the point is complex enough, then you have to give up on conveying it to certain people. If the audience is smart enough, you reach past the lowest common denominator.
Indeed, the best way to write something that lasts for ages is to write something that ordinary people reject, bright people don't really understand, and the smart fall head over heels in love with. That's what keeps Plato in business. No one knows what he was saying exactly, but the really smart guys running the universe can't help but be charmed by it.
I wonder if 'the point is complex enough, then you have to give up on conveying it to certain people' is true.
That Feynman could explain fairly abstract physical concepts such that laypeople could understand them may imply that one needs to understand the 'complex point' better before trying to explain it.
Wittgenstein started one public lecture with a disclaimer to the effect, "This will not be one of those popular science lectures where you come out of the talk thinking you understand a topic that you understand nothing about."
With all due respect to Feynman, if at the end of his lectures lay people couldn't do the math behind the physics he described, they didn't really "understand" it. They understood a simplified picture of it that captured most of the important details in a really vivid way. But they were still missing something important.
That said, you're right. In the general case, we shouldn't allow ourselves the "out" of "oh, this is soooo complex that I can't speak clearly" without some pretty damn strong motivation. It's just that in this particular case, I didn't think the essay was especially jargon laden, so the OP's comment seemed misplaced. How much more simply can one explain that cities affect how you think?
First, the fact that cities beneath everything else are all comprised of ordinary people means nothing. It has always been the top that detemines the direction everyone else goes. It doesn't change anything PG wrote. How many in Padua, or say, Florence, were anything else but ordinary when the Renaissance unfolded? It has always been the top that makes history and changes things for everyone else.
Your comment is a little like saying there is no difference between Honda and Ford, since they are both composed largely of steel and aluminum and plastic. And this is the reason there is an enormous distance between Germany and America. In Germany there is no top, just droids coming and going. In America there is very decidely a top. About everyone else, PG was not making any remark.
America has a serious Middle Education problem, but American Universities are indeed, second to none.
Also, don't talk ecosystem. It means so much to so many people these days, it has come to have no meaning.
You are also incorrect in stating that most any city has the circle someone would want to belong to, that someone just needs to look for it. This is far from the truth. There are many cities in which you could not find certain circles in which to exchange ideas, if your life depended on it.
One thing that seems missing is the notion of cities within cities. Los Angeles and Silicon Valley (which I'm familiar with) cannot be treated as monoliths. Instead you have districts in which one subculture dominates others.
In Orange County you may have areas that are dominated by unemployed housewives with lots of money. But you may have areas around a University that have a completely different flavor. Comparing Westwood (UCLA) to Boyle Heights (Ghetto) is a pretty stark contrast.
But I understand your meaning - similar to what Richard Florida and others are saying about self selecting societies.
At least people like me who live in the middle west can a) put themselves near an academic setting and b) can feed as much off of digital connectedness as possible to offset the effect.
Did it really have to be said that he was considering cities in the aggregate, and specifically the things that distinguish them as opposed to the things they have in common?
I'm picking on you, but several people have made similar points. I think we all know that any given city has different communities within it with different values, levels of affluence or lack thereof, etc. Did it really need to be made explicit?
I think Paul's right here, but there is one point that always irks me when he's talking about location: It comes off as assuming that the singular goal of your life is to start a successful startup and that having a successful startup makes you a great person.
While we're throwing out city memes, here's what I'd peg my beloved Berlin: Break the rules.
That's the wrong question. This is about culture, not tallying. Berlin is special because it's a chaotic city in a country of orderliness.
I started writing a list, but it doesn't do it any justice. Just like listing 10 big companies won't circumscribe the feel of Silicon Valley, a list of goofiness won't peg Berlin. But hang out in Kreuzberg for a weekend and you'll get it. :-)
Berlin is still living on the energy from the wall coming down almost 20 years ago. The west side was long a quirky occupied island hundreds of kilometers behind the iron curtain and the east was the first place where people rebelled and started down the path that reunited the city.
(Note: I've visited 28 countries and lived in 8 cities, so this isn't just cheering for the home team.)
Wouldn't breaking the rules, if it were truly that general, result in something more substantial than goofiness? And if it's just goofiness, perhaps a better way to put it would be "break the social conventions".
It might seem like I'm being contentious just for its own sake, but I'm not. It's precisely the thing that most irks me about Western Europe: the attitude of "don't break the rules". Europeans seem to like to break rules that are obsolete or largely inconsequential (e.g. about drugs and sexuality). And they're very proud of that. But the big and important rules, like those of business and broad social order, are universally accepted to the point where they are seen as morals.
It's a mix here. There's definitely a bohemian atmosphere (in many, not all parts of the city), but reducing that to sex and drugs isn't really fair. It extends to arts, street culture, work environments, etc. I think I see what you're getting at though, so I'll give a few specific examples of rules that are broken here:
- "Living in a big cultural center is expensive." It's cheap here. I don't know of any other western cultural center where that's true. 3.5 million people and there's a housing surplus. This has a huge effect on the city.
- "You need a lot of money." A side-effect of the above, there's a real de-emphasis on having cash here.
- "You should have a normal job." For good and bad, there's not much big industry in Berlin. Most of my friends either work independently or in relatively small companies. Most of those companies aren't startups in the sense that we use the word here, but small businesses that do well enough.
- "You need to grow up." You can still go out here when you're 30. Or 40. And it's not weird. And it doesn't mean you're not professional. Similarly, there doesn't seem to be the taboo against founding a startup over 30 (I'm 27 and one of the younger guys at the meetups I've been going to.).
A lot of people left West Berlin when the city was divided and a lot of people left East Berlin right after reunification. The massive housing surplus that resulted caused housing costs to sink and cheap housing made the city a mecca for alternative culture. Cost of living probably doesn't even hit a quarter of Paris or London.
Here's an article from 6 years ago that's somewhat dated, but still gives you a feel for things good and bad:
we are running a music-related startup out of berlin (soundcloud.com) and it's really great in terms of costs & quality of life. If you're in Berlin, make sure you have business elsewhere, because the city in itself is quite poor. It's almost like outsourcing to east Europe, but you have a lot of credibility in the west still...
Cities also tell you about the lifestyle (and speed) - new york is all about speed, people dont have time. while i noticed that atlanta is laid back. also each city might have multiple message depending which pocket you are - for example if you are on a broadway in new york then you will definitely have different feeling, if you are in hollywood then along with fame you will feel hypocrisy (may be) and creativity. big cities always have multiple message with different kind of ambitions.
I have also noticed that one kind of person will normally go for the city that suit his/her personality (due to experience and the way they have been brought up), for example a person brought-up in new-york will most possibly won't like atlanta and vice-versa. the reason being NY guy is used to speed, he just cant take anything slower, if the train is scheduled at 7.13am then he has to be on platform on time, while a guy in atlanta will get anxiety if he goes to NY and have to rush his life with everyone else.
City with laid back attitude also tells you that people over there dont care for money but that doesn't mean people dont make enough money (in fact they enjoy money at the fullest), on the other side people from the city of speedy lifestyle always feel like they dont have enough money even though they make good money, this is partly due to the cost of living and the culture where everyone wants to make more money.
Also people from laid back city are not in-secured the way people are from busy places like NY, London, Bombay, Tokyo etc. People from laid back city dont worry about what will happen tomorrow, but people from city like NY and Bombay are constantly worrying about tomorrow, it drives them crazy if they are not planning their life/career in advance.
I think the biggest shift in deciding where to live is happening "online" rather than "offline". I am an online nomad.
I never lived and never will live in MySpace. I do not like the MySpacians message (Hey lets try to see who has more friends and hookups).
I sometimes spend time at Facebook. I lived there for a little while until I realized I am not so much into keeping in touch and I had no friends in the few hours I spent in college. When they open their borders, that's when I found that I do not like the Facebookies message (You should throw more pies and send more kisses)
I vacationed at Twitter, but it is not really my cup of tea. I still dont get their message (Life is a popularity contest).
So Where do I live? Well, I live mostly in HN. Although I sometimes get into arguments with the habitants, I have yet to find another city that beats the intelligence, vibe, energy and support I witness here. I take a daily ride to Techcrunch City and NYT, but I make sure I come back home to HN and mingle with the people who live here.
There seems to be this popular belief that admitting you are influenced by your environment is a sign of weakness. I just gave a presentation for my ethics class was on why the "trolley problem" is a logical fallacy. My argument was that you could create a system to flip the switch that completely circumvented the individual as a moral agent. For example, you could create a system whereby the individuals on the track could bid ebay-style on which direction the switch should be flipped. Or, alternatively, you could create a system whereby the direction of the switch was determined by a dice, with a 5/6 chance of the single individual being killed and a 1/6 chance of the other five individuals being killed. I then argued that A) social systems, not only individuals, should be considered to be moral agents and B) the morality of a system should be judged based on the behaviors it promotes via its extrinsic rewards. So, for example, the ebay-style system would be a universe that encouraged its inhabitants to create things of value for others so that they could bid their way out their predicament, whereas the dice-toss universe would be completely amoral as it would neither encourage nor discourage any set of behaviors. To me the lesson of the Milgram experiments, the Asch conformity tests, the Stanford Prison Experiment, etc. is that moral decisions are the result of both the individual's intrinsic nature and their external environment (inc. extrinsic rewards). So the trolley problem has always struck me as a false dichotomy because it assumes that the only two options are for a single individual to flip the switch either left or right, which implies that morality is completely intrinsic within the individual and the external environment plays no role, even though this is completely counter to what social psych teaches us.
Anyway, this was sort of a very long was of saying that I like the idea that people should consciously choose their environment because they realize that their environment does have a very real effect on their actions.
I agree. I think pg's essay is spot-on. However, I don't believe that choosing where you live is as simple as saying, e.g., "I want to be an academic" and thus you move to Cambridge.
What if, say, your spouse is really into acting and loves the Los Angeles area... it might be very hard for them to find the same happiness in Cambridge, just as you might be harder-pressed to be as academic as you want to be in L.A.
I think a fair question is, if, for whatever reason, you can't move to an area that would well-support your ambitions, what can you do to improve your environment? Surely the best answer isn't "nothing, just resign yourself to live your life in obscurity and failure"...
I think this site is a good way to link people with similar interests. it's an online software for sharing time lines about basically anything (you make them yourself).
www.dipity.com
I just made an account, and I think that shring time lines is really a good way to talk and exchange a lot. I truly think people will meet through these things. it's a social network that's surely more meaninful than myspace or facebook, cause it's made to exacge information (in a pretty user friendly way). it's sharing information instead or pure fame or coolness (or throwing pies and presents).
add me I'm "smoothboom" and I just started a time line about memetics if you're interested.
You sound like a bitter Bostonian who was priced out of New York because you couldn't afford to pay rent on your studio in Alphabet City.
And as a Bostonian, I'd expect you to have enough cerebral instinct to be less transparent with your intuitive writing style. But alas, you all to easily portray your hometown's sad trace of pragmatism by holding ideology over realistic execution, hence why you were probably priced out of NY to begin with.
Another down year on Wall St., yet my bonus alone still affords the Cambridge flat you so wish you could afford to purchase. Hope you grow up some day, and find yourself, cities aside pal.
"A friend who moved to Silicon Valley in the late 90s said the worst thing about living there was the low quality of the eavesdropping."
I can totally relate to that, as an acquaintance of mine from Boston and I echoed very similar sentiments about where I live (Atlanta). There are some great universities and brilliant people here, but you really have to actively seek them out. I'm still amazed how drastically the average quality of my interactions with people dropped when I first moved off campus. It seems to be almost a win or lose situation in regards to motivation: seeing other people involved in their projects, even if they are not in the same field, helps me to stay focused, but if I find myself surrounded by vapid conversation all day long, it actually has a negative effect.
"Oxford and Cambridge (England) feel like Ithaca or Hanover: the message is there, but not as strong."
There seems to be a lot of ambition in Ithaca, but the focus is on the collective rather than the individual. The messages that Ithaca sends are "make the community a better place, help the less fortunate, buy local food from the farmers market and co-ops, support local artists and musicians, attend community festivals and events, bond with your neighbors, and support the local schools and public transportation. Also, distrust authority."
This is reflected by the fact that the two most popular bumper stickers are Coexist (spelled out of religious symbols) and "Ithaca, NY: Ten square miles surrounded by reality."[1] And despite the fact that if you drive ten miles in any direction (except along the lake) you'll run into people living in trailer parks, the town itself is actually a surprisingly nice place to live.
The town support individuality, but only to the extent that your individuality helps bring out the individuality in others. The message seems to be that you can start a startup and we'll support your efforts to become successful, but not so successful that you drown out the voice of the rest of us.
If a collective cannot be ambitious, then it follows that a corporation or a web community cannot be ambitious. And yet that does not seem quite right. Or are you saying rather that a town could be ambitious, but that Ithaca does not seem to fit the mold?
PG fails to mention that Cambridge (and Sommerville, the emerging hipster/cheaper alternative) is like an island in the middle of a puritan city.
Boston, in large, give the message of "old money rules". Where you were born, where is your summer house (Martha Vineyard, Cape Cod, or Maine?), seems to the most important thing.
And coorporates rule, so you have to play by their game: meaning you have to be one of them, in the boys club, have some gray hair, be decent at golf (or pretend to like it), in order to be considered good at busniness.
Boston/Cambridge is great if you are in academia, or doing research, but doing anything practical, or startup it is not that place to be.
Young ambitious people move somewhere else, the rest is stuck in academia, or living the 9-5 life clinging to the coorporate life, maybe they will manage up in the ladder (or rat race).
Adding, I also have met very smart people in Cambridge, but talk is cheap, and there is a lot of it in there. Everybody has an opinion about everything, but when it comes to action, there isn't much.
I wish the spirit of Boston were anything so romantic as "old money rules." Actually there are hardly any of those people left. The Thurston Howells have all died, and their trustafarian kids have long since moved to Berkeley or Boulder. Except for Cambridge, Boston doesn't send any message at all that I can pick up.
The message I get from Boston is "know your history". Pretty much every block has a centuries-old story behind it, and someone there who wants you to know what that story is. I don't think it's a coincidence that the National Genealogical Society is headquartered there.
If you are in biotech, Cambridge is at par with the bay area when it comes to startups. As a life scientist, walking around Kendall square is sheer energy
Explain how the grammar is sound? And I mean that seriously because I want to be well written.
It seems like it should be:
"Or would you?" - so that what follows 'or' is the converse of what was said.
Or
"Wouldn't you?" - without the 'or' to denote skepticism.
And while we're on it, nix the first 'a' in "wearing a jeans and a t-shirt..."
Please understand that this isn't said out of pedantry, but out of love for this essay. We should all be taught to understand the implications of what a place says to us, on us. It should be part of any formal education.
Quibbling over grammar in our casual posts is lame, but this essay deserves to be in a book one day, printed and in wide circulation, so please understand my intention.
I must admit the descriptions you give for Amsterdam, London, Barcelona sound off to me. I think you have to live or spend a lot of time somewhere before you can understand it's 'message', if it has one
I lived in Amsterdam for half a year ten years ago. It's very walkable and beautiful. You walk the streets and people smile at you. It's a happy place. I think the message is something like, "Be happy."
Also, I believe it's the only country in Europe except for the UK where everyone speaks good English. In most big cities in Europe you will eventually find someone who speaks English, but in Amsterdam the odds that it will be the first person you approach are no worse than in London or California.
I remember dialing a wrong number in Amsterdam a number of years ago, and the woman responded, in nearly perfect English, without missing a beat. I was impressed.
> Also, I believe it's the only country in Europe except for the UK where everyone speaks good English. In most big cities in Europe you will eventually find someone who speaks English, but in Amsterdam the odds that it will be the first person you approach are no worse than in London or California.
Stockholm is similar -- most people speak good English.
Amsterdam is one of the biggest tourist destinations in Europe, no wonder about the quality of their English (although this applies to the whole of Netherlands, not just Amsterdam).
I hear the Danes speak excellent English too, but I haven't been to Denmark myself.
As I understand it, the reason the Dutch speak English so well is that a lot of American television is shown there...still in English, but with Dutch subtitles. So kids grow up essentially in a semi-immersion program of English as a second language, which gets reinforced later in life due to tourism and English being the current effectively most common language.
Having spent some time in Tokyo, I must say that the most striking thing for me was that at any moment of the day, the streets are flooded with people going too and fro. It was amazing.
-m
"... Melbourne: You should spend more money on clothes ..."
No it's more like...
Melbourne: You live in the sports capital of a sports crazed country. You should go to the footy, the cricket, tennis and don't forget some new duds on cup day.
London: "You should have been here 150 years ago" is essentially "you should be more aristocratic". I think that signal is strong in London. I have been at dinner with friends who started arguing about how far they had to commute on the tube (as a proxy for social class.) The English pretend to the world that it doesn't matter but it seems to matter deeply to them. This seems to be an English hidden rule; that is how the discussion started.
You hit the nail on the head: This whole essay is based on a false premise (which nonetheless is strongly believed by PG). Cambridge only seems to be a "smart" town if your social group consists of people associated with MIT, and you're only likely to end up in that social group if you were part of the middle class when you moved there.
Tel Aviv: You should be moving faster. A lot faster.
Dublin: Be wittier then smart.
Melbourne: I agree. Its a confused message that definitely has to do with sports not clothes.
Being a native Western Pennsylvania, and living more of my adult life in Pittsburgh than anywhere else, I'll take that as a compliment :).
I moved to NYC with my wife right after we were married, and loved every minute of it. But decided to return here to raise our kids after they were born.
An interesting thing about Pittsburgh is the number of large non-profits of every kind, especially considering the reduced population. The major industrial titans that made their fortunes here in decades past (Carnegie, Mellon, Heinz, etc.) have left behind many cultural institutions like libraries, museums, universities, parks, hospitals, etc. that are still well funded and high quality.
You'll find some of that in NYC (even from some of the same benefactors) but Pittsburgh I think has a higher cultural dollars/resident ratio. This is a wonderful thing in terms of raising children. My kids think hanging out at the zoo, library, conservatory, kids' museum, etc. is a perfectly common thing to do. I think in NYC (and other cities?) you could find many of the same things, but it would not be possible to enjoy them in a leisurely manner, or afford family yearly membership passes.
I've met nice people everywhere I've lived. Somehow, and I'm not sure why, it seems just a little bit easier to meet nice people in Pittsburgh. Whether it's the checkout line in a supermarket, in a restaurant or bar, or just hanging out, people generally seem friendly and engaging.
(The day after a Steeler's loss, of course, all bets are off.)
I lived in Pgh. for 6 years (7th-12th grade), and my family still lives there. That's a very good point about the cultural institutions -- though in my experience, they're woefully underattended. It's possible to hang out at the zoo, conservatory, science museum, etc. ...but my family was thought to be a bit odd for actually doing so. (Of course, we lived in the wealthy suburban soccer mom part, not the university-intellectual part, so that's probably why. Neighborhoods have messages, too.)
Heh, that's the advantage of our boys still being young (4 and 6 now, 2 and 4 when we first moved here). They don't know any better than to think those activities are perfectly normal. We have successfully brainwashed them so far, and by the time they hit teenage peer pressure, it might be too late to undo the "damage" of a cultured mind :).
The "under attended" part isn't all bad. Our boys can run around a little bit in Phipps Conservatory, for example, without many negative glances.
We do live in a city neighborhood, so that might account for some of the difference.
Columbia SC: Uh, the culture is pretty much centered around it's mid-tier University of South Carolina, which is a party-hardy Frat/Sorority vibe. So, I guess it says "YEEE-HAAAAW! More beer, Bo!"
Hartford, CT: Unless you can calculate the death of a 55 year old smoker with no major medical history within a margin of error, the city says "There's NY below and Boston above, take your pick, pay your toll, and have a nice day."
Raleigh-Durham, NC: Duke University, UNC, Wake Forrest, North Carolina State, Shaw, and various other colleges all within around 20 interstate exits of each other. I guess it would say "study hard, and find job at IBM, Sony-Ericsson, or Cisco." Not too much entreprenurial spirit here, I guess because the tech giants gobble them up with nice offers right out of college.
Columbia, SC doesn't really send any strong messages. Only the young people in the area have anything to do with USC, normally, so not even the frattiness comes across that strong.
College football tailgating, however, is a state-wide sport.
aston, are you from SC? I'm from Greenville (which sends the message, "How can we be more like Atlanta?", or at least it did when I last lived there 14 years ago). Small world.
The message in Charleston definitely has something about aristocracy and the value of old money, while the message in the rest of the coastal towns generally involves fishing. Except Myrtle Beach, where the message is, "Y'all come on down for a visit, and leave your money when you head back up north."
Weird. I lived three blocks from Furman. It was my playground, growing up. We played video games in the student center using change fished out of the fountain beside it, flirted embarrassingly with the college girls, skateboarded and biked all over, and regularly got kicked out after the campus closed for the day (for those unfamiliar with small Southern Baptist liberal arts schools, or at least Furman, they close all of the gates except the main gate at 10PM and only allow students in).
Speaking of Bob Jones, no one ever believes me when I explain that it has a "date room", wherein couples sit together in a chaperoned room, with a Bible-width space in between. Which explains why Bob Jones girls are such a terror when they do manage to escape the watchful eyes of the school.
Garberville, CA: Hey, man, you should give to the community and help me get some weed.
Wolfeboro, NH (smalltown New England summer resort): You should pretend it's 1962 like all the retirees do.
Waltham, MA (Brandeis University): Go back to NYC when you graduate.
Cambridge, MA: You should be more educated.
I chose "educated" over "intelligent" largely because I lived closer to Harvard. When I go to the MIT side of Cambridge I would switch the two. In and around Harvard you see a strong vein of people who aim for the prestige of higher education over the knowledge it brings.
The middle-aged people dream of sitting in a musky study debating high-falutin mish-mash over a nice port. The college-aged kids dream of sitting in a coffee shop debating their PHIL101 papers. They seek _established_ education.
I know this doesn't speak for every aspect of Cambridge, which I did love living in for a few years, but the too-strong emphasis on the appearance of education as opposed to the knowledge you gain helped me move to take a job in San Mateo (shameless plug: RockYou.com).
Disclaimer: I am not your average anything. My move to San Mateo from Cambridge is via Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand. I speak Mandarin but I'm English/German. Take what I said with a healthy grain of wacky salt.
The only place I've had that feeling that "education" was more important than knowledge in Cambridge was actually directly on the Harvard campus. But I completely agree.
There are two strains of culture in Cambridge, "you should be smarter" which is why I love living here. And "you should have two PHDs" -- which is very different and unfortunate message. It's almost the opposite of the Valley, which speaks so reverently of the Harvard drop-out.
The best thing that those of us who live in Cambridge could do is keep the culture focused on ideas and less on diplomas.
I live in Columbus, OH and as I read PG's essay I was wondering what Columbus tells you. And seriously, I just kept thinking about one thing: "You should play college football."
College football is king in the Bus, and the players and coaches are our royalty.
It's kind of a scary thought, but I'm as big a Buckeye fan as anyone else, so I'm partly to blame. But I also admit that I don't want to live in a place where this is the best thing we have to offer.
The truth is, I love Columbus for all many reasons: close friends, a great job, the Wexner Center, and of course, Buckeye football. It's a scary thought to pick up and move to SV. I often think about Spielberg, Lucas, Kaufman, and Coppola all hanging out together in the 70s. I desperately want to be a part of a group like that, but for startups.
If you've never lived anywhere else, you owe it to yourself to move on. I grew up in Columbus, and while it was a nice place to be a kid, I could never live there today. Too sheltered.
And trust me...the valley isn't scary. It's nothing but a gigantic suburb, punctuated with office parks. Sure, the housing is hideously expensive, and there are freakishly rich people everywhere, but otherwise, the place won't present a challenge to you. San Francisco, on the other hand, is a different world....
I actually grew up in the burbs of Raleigh and then Dallas, I didn't come to Columbus until college.
The thought of moving to SV is scary exactly because of the expense, especially when I have a decent paying job here that I love. It would be foolish to abandon that, right? (I guess this illustrates the differences again between the two areas: Columbus would answer "Yes!" and SV would answer "No!")
I should mention that Columbus does have industries other than Buckeye Football. If you're passionate about insurance, this is the place to be. Of course, who is really passionate about insurance?
As far as deciding a city's worth based on personal experiences, it's always going to be just that: personal. But I can't deny the influences of cities on my individual life.
Being an OSU student, I have to agree with you, but to be fair, I think Columbus also has some more interesting things to say, depending on where you live.
Brewery district: You should drink better beer.
Short north: You should be more artistic (in terms of both art and "sophisticated" things like wine-tasting).
Anywhere near High Street: You should hear more live music.
Honestly, Columbus has a thriving music, art, and gay community, and I think that makes it kind of a cool city. There's this very strange dynamic of party-going OSU students, diverse foreign-exchange OSU students, sports-crazy Ohioans, business-minded corporate-types, and aesthetic art aficionados.
Maybe, most of all, the message of Columbus is that diversity is good.
That is a much better message, I think you're probably right. Really, I love Columbus, and I'm disappointed whenever someone says that there is nothing to do. There are always a ton of events and cultural experiences to enjoy, you just have to make the effort to look.
Perhaps Columbus could find it's own specific niche within high-tech? I've been impressed by the Tech Columbus initiative.
Diversity is never good, though. That's such a lame stereotype of our time. Diverse cultures are dying cultures. But I agree, that's totally the message of Columbus. It's trying so hard to be the most "diverse" and "gay-friendly" place in the Midwest. But the gayness is tired and such a stereotype. It's like, "Enough already!" You'd never see straights behaving like that, or parading around so obsessively. It's gross. I shouldn't be required to like, accept, or tolerate it -- because I don't.
Paul, what specific activities do you recommend for listening to a city? You mentioned general eavesdropping and walking around residential areas in the evenings; any others?
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 281 ms ] threadHappy to hear there is one now!
We'll see how it goes. I'm psyched.
New ideas easily win over any sort of ambition:
But cities are too distracting for really new ideas:
In order for them to happen, you need the quiet of some sort of island (in any sense).
(BTW, where are you coming from, exactly? The isle of GB, and the isle of Lisp, right?)
What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message there is: you should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you've been meaning to."
From two years ago here: http://web.archive.org/web/20070102025129/http://paulgraham.... :
"I find every ambitious town sends you a message. New York tells you "you should make more money." LA tells you "you should be better looking." Rome tells you "you should dress better." London tells you "you should be hipper." The Bay Area tells you "you should live better." And Cambridge tells you "you should read some of those books you've been meaning to.""
I detect an opportunity...
"San Francisco is definitely a great area, and you should at least visit some day. There's a vibe there that's completely different from anywhere else I've ever been. It is hard to explain. You just go there and you feel it. Things seem possible out there that would be laughed at here. That's the best way I can put it.
Every city that I've been to has a certain feel to it. New York is rude and busy. Portland is relaxed and thoughtful. San Francisco is ambitious and free-spirited. Atlanta is comfortable and complacent. Atlanta's feel was good for growing up, and it is one that's good for growing old if you're willing to play it conservatively and live a life of moderate wealth and complacency. But if you're not, you should go to a city that has a better feel for what your goals are at that stage in your life.
Does that make sense? I'm by no means trying to convince you to go to San Francisco, but for me it was important that I travelled around and discovered the city that had the right feel for me. Portland was very close, and San Francisco is nearly spot on. I have no doubt you'll be somewhat different. Give it a try though, eh?"
Its like PG read my email and decided to write an essay on it.
You should be younger and hipper and enjoy indie music.
In personals ads in Austin, "musician" is code for "unemployed", because everybody is a musician. You only mention it if you don't have anything better to say about your career.
New York is just busy -- if you are as busy as everyone else, wasting time with "Please" and "Thank you" would strike you as rude.
If you live in New York, in some sense you aren't a citizen of the United States: your residency means that you have a passport to enter the "real" United States.
Another thing about New York: it clearly isn't known for science. The Science Museum in Oakland California would be impossibly out of place in New York. The two main categories of industry in New York are finance and media, broadly conceived (including the arts, television, publishing, fashion, advertising and so on).
And I can't really say that Science and Oakland go together all that way in my mind either.
I associate the Hall of Science with cranky aging amateur radio operators on account of the annual hamfests they hold in the vicinity. Those hams seem as if their wives ordered them not to come home until they sell off their old equipment. That's the impression of science and technology you get from the Hall of Science. That impression might be a little hard to convey, so try comparing the discussions on eHam with those on hacker news.
Here's a dismal example by hacking standards, but it's still indicative of the attitude. Someone from a financial firm, known for its rating system and price indexes, had a data conversion problem. They were using Matlab--a dismal language with a bastard semantics. One of the functions they were using was Datenum(), which converts dates and times to the number of days since the year zero, in the proleptic Gregorian calendar.
The specification of this function should have been to return a floating point number equal to 1+1/86,400 (in units of days) for a date argument equal to one second after year zero. And in fact, the open source equivalent function in Octave does exactly that. However, Matlab's function differs from this in the 11th decimal place. Their technical support has been silent on the issue.
When I informed the person at the financial firm about this discrepancy, they thanked me for "my comments." In the next sentence, I was informed that that they were redoing their calculations using another method. It was stated as if the decision to do this was an entirely independent judgment, not at all informed by my observations, and completely unrelated to any problems they might have encountered using the previous method. They simply decided to change the way they were doing things, without explanation.
Finding a numerical bug that could complicate the analysis of code that depends on it is not earthshaking. But not stating what informed a decision to avoid the problem altogether is a typical New York attitude. Or perhaps the reluctance to credit others is typically corporate. Correct me if I am mistaken.
I have to agree with Paul Graham's essay on the relative lifelessness of employees: if I were an employee, I simply would have accepted the decision as a completely independent judgment, internalized it and defended it.
The subsequent "effect you have on the world" is a far better description of the bay area than "power". I think that in terms of actual "power", as in Washington DC power, the bay area is underrepresented for the amount of money there.
Fame, hipness, insider knowledge? All either means to an end or cultural by-products. LA is run on power and money - studio execs are the most powerful, and basically run the entertainment biz, but they generally stay out of the limelight. DC runs on political power, plain and simple. Hipness is a by-product of having a very large concentration of young, single people in one place. You'll find brands of hip in every major city.
Ideas as Cambridge's main "industry" is also somewhat of a dubious distinction. Ideas are cheap. Talented people (i.e., the execution of ideas) is the bottleneck.
Nearly, but not quite. For example, Linus Torvalds isn't rich by New York or Silicon Valley standards, but he's quite powerful nevertheless. And Barack Obama isn't particularly rich either, but he's on the brink of being perhaps the most powerful man in the world.
I imagine she did. I'm not exactly sure what "external affairs" entails, but it sounds like the kind of position that would benefit greatly from being politically well connected.
Ex-presidents make a boatload of money, though. Books, speaking engagements, etc. That's a direct result of their power.
If the Boston area wants to get ahead in startups, it's going to need to attract more talent than SF. Sadly, I've seen plenty of MIT grads head to Google and Facebook...and some of those kids are going to be starting the next wave of companies...
Interestingly, Moleskine (which is totally "stuff white people like") recently created a Los Angeles City Notebook including a map of "selected" parts of LA. Metropolitan LA is 4,850 square miles, so one wonders where they selected. Answer: http://www.flickr.com/photos/atwatervillage/2444508587/
And furthermore, I take offense at the suggestion that American universities produce the best students. In general, the American engineers I have met have been less skilled than their German counterparts.
American universities produce people with ambition, but that probably has to do more with the American culture than any particular school policy.
Cities do not mould people. People of a certain sort hear about the reputation of a city and they flock there. It's like people hear of china town and go there for chinese food, and pretty soon lots of people are selling chinese food there, because it is where people go for chinese food.
A city influences people, but in a very complex manner. It's an animal ecosystem, and there are hundreds of factors at work that modify and regulate pull and push of a city.
You are seeing cambridge from your peculiar focus. That's not the real cambridge. Imagine some black bum you drive by, imagine how he sees cambridge. For him its not a place of ideas. There is no push towards reading.
What you term the 'city' is the social circle you are in. That's not the city, the city is much more diverse than that. There are crackheads and hos, bums and pimps, bus drivers and lower class korean immigrants. Its not an idea place for those people, it's just home.
A city can gain a reputation, and this reputation can cause a crust of a certain type of person to form in the city, but beneath this layer, every city is made up of normal people.
Sooner or later, the trend will change and the flavour of the crust will change, but beneath it all, life and death of these normal people will continue.
You are mistaking the icing for the cake.
It is nearly impossible because humanity is more complex than being reduced to the experiences of one person, but if someone was holding a gun to your head and saying you had to name the world's intellectual capital, what would you name it? There really doesn't seem to be a better one than Cambridge.
I daresay your reading comprehension skills are subpar if you're troubled to detect a subjective declaration in a subjective essay about subjective experience.
"I daresay your reading comprehension skills are subpar if you're troubled to detect a subjective declaration in a subjective essay about subjective experience."
Well sadly your reading comprehension skills are subpar because I have been responding to the thread, not the content of the essay. The use of the quote from the essay was used to make the point that the individuals here seem to so easily accept Cambridge as the capital without any mention or rebuttal with criteria or evidence to support.
There seems to be blind support to these claims and no defense for them. Why is it wrong for me to reject a claim but alright for you all to accept it? I seem to be the only one that is attempting to dissect the criteria or claim subjectivity while you give none.
Rather than downmod me and tell me I am wrong, propose reasons why your argument is valid.
It's like saying "Chicago is the best city in the world to get a hot dog" -- it may not be backed by objective criteria but that does not render it meaningless, and you can find plenty of people ready to make or agree with that claim without a formal argument.
The burden is on you to explain why it makes a difference in the context of the essay, as it's unclear how you distinguish between it and people in the comments agreeing with it -- in neither case is it presented as an objective determination, and yet you're treating it as if it is. (see also:"tilting at windmills")
drums...
German!!
In other news, an immigrant will always feel as second class citizen in most of europe, and Germany has a bad reputation about it. In some parts of East germany there is some Neo-Nazi resurrection, and there is lots of xenophobia.
The states it is a total different thing. It depends where you are. In SF i just don't feel foreign at all, as most people I meet actually speak at home another language, or have traveled a lot. There is no visible discrimination, and I feel I could be an american one day.
Living in the south, it is a total different thing. You feel foreign, no matter how good your english skills are, BUT, you can actually score points with girls thou (if you are white, of course), as there are not that many europeans around.
In germany, they give you this thing called the blue card, so you could slave working on some company, then they kick you out when the time is up, with no path to citizenship. Hmmmm.... No thanks, I just don't feel being used as a disposable thing.
I met a German guy in the states, who was born and raised there, considered himself German, but didn't get citizenship until 18 or 19 because his parents were from Turkey.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_sanguinis
I'm not sure why you felt the need to bring the hypothetical bum's race into it, but I disagree. A bum on the street in Cambridge sits around resenting the fact that all the successful people around him are better educated than he is. A bum on the street in Hollywood, on the other hand, sits around resenting the fact that all the successful people around him are better-looking than he is.
SF bums are not that pleasant.
If your "logic" were accurate, Los Angeles would be no different than Tijuana, for example, considering that most of the "normal" people there are lower class Mexican immigrants.
Allow me to inform you of something essential about PG's essays: they require intelligence to truly understand, to the point that his core arguments will simply sail over the heads of those who lack it. Evidence of not having the required intelligence includes attempting to refute the core arguments with a myriad of minor points that appear to point out logical flaws, when they only manage to address comparatively minor items of negligible consequence.
Mr. Graham's essays are valuable owing to their QUALITATIVE aspects, not to their total QUANTITATIVE sum . . .
If a person trying to communicate cannot make his point understood by any but the most intelligent, then he has failed in communicating.
Indeed, the best way to write something that lasts for ages is to write something that ordinary people reject, bright people don't really understand, and the smart fall head over heels in love with. That's what keeps Plato in business. No one knows what he was saying exactly, but the really smart guys running the universe can't help but be charmed by it.
That Feynman could explain fairly abstract physical concepts such that laypeople could understand them may imply that one needs to understand the 'complex point' better before trying to explain it.
With all due respect to Feynman, if at the end of his lectures lay people couldn't do the math behind the physics he described, they didn't really "understand" it. They understood a simplified picture of it that captured most of the important details in a really vivid way. But they were still missing something important.
That said, you're right. In the general case, we shouldn't allow ourselves the "out" of "oh, this is soooo complex that I can't speak clearly" without some pretty damn strong motivation. It's just that in this particular case, I didn't think the essay was especially jargon laden, so the OP's comment seemed misplaced. How much more simply can one explain that cities affect how you think?
First, the fact that cities beneath everything else are all comprised of ordinary people means nothing. It has always been the top that detemines the direction everyone else goes. It doesn't change anything PG wrote. How many in Padua, or say, Florence, were anything else but ordinary when the Renaissance unfolded? It has always been the top that makes history and changes things for everyone else.
Your comment is a little like saying there is no difference between Honda and Ford, since they are both composed largely of steel and aluminum and plastic. And this is the reason there is an enormous distance between Germany and America. In Germany there is no top, just droids coming and going. In America there is very decidely a top. About everyone else, PG was not making any remark.
America has a serious Middle Education problem, but American Universities are indeed, second to none.
Also, don't talk ecosystem. It means so much to so many people these days, it has come to have no meaning.
You are also incorrect in stating that most any city has the circle someone would want to belong to, that someone just needs to look for it. This is far from the truth. There are many cities in which you could not find certain circles in which to exchange ideas, if your life depended on it.
In Orange County you may have areas that are dominated by unemployed housewives with lots of money. But you may have areas around a University that have a completely different flavor. Comparing Westwood (UCLA) to Boyle Heights (Ghetto) is a pretty stark contrast.
But I understand your meaning - similar to what Richard Florida and others are saying about self selecting societies.
At least people like me who live in the middle west can a) put themselves near an academic setting and b) can feed as much off of digital connectedness as possible to offset the effect.
I'm picking on you, but several people have made similar points. I think we all know that any given city has different communities within it with different values, levels of affluence or lack thereof, etc. Did it really need to be made explicit?
While we're throwing out city memes, here's what I'd peg my beloved Berlin: Break the rules.
I started writing a list, but it doesn't do it any justice. Just like listing 10 big companies won't circumscribe the feel of Silicon Valley, a list of goofiness won't peg Berlin. But hang out in Kreuzberg for a weekend and you'll get it. :-)
Berlin is still living on the energy from the wall coming down almost 20 years ago. The west side was long a quirky occupied island hundreds of kilometers behind the iron curtain and the east was the first place where people rebelled and started down the path that reunited the city.
(Note: I've visited 28 countries and lived in 8 cities, so this isn't just cheering for the home team.)
It might seem like I'm being contentious just for its own sake, but I'm not. It's precisely the thing that most irks me about Western Europe: the attitude of "don't break the rules". Europeans seem to like to break rules that are obsolete or largely inconsequential (e.g. about drugs and sexuality). And they're very proud of that. But the big and important rules, like those of business and broad social order, are universally accepted to the point where they are seen as morals.
Maybe it's different in Berlin?
- "Living in a big cultural center is expensive." It's cheap here. I don't know of any other western cultural center where that's true. 3.5 million people and there's a housing surplus. This has a huge effect on the city.
- "You need a lot of money." A side-effect of the above, there's a real de-emphasis on having cash here.
- "You should have a normal job." For good and bad, there's not much big industry in Berlin. Most of my friends either work independently or in relatively small companies. Most of those companies aren't startups in the sense that we use the word here, but small businesses that do well enough.
- "You need to grow up." You can still go out here when you're 30. Or 40. And it's not weird. And it doesn't mean you're not professional. Similarly, there doesn't seem to be the taboo against founding a startup over 30 (I'm 27 and one of the younger guys at the meetups I've been going to.).
Here's an article from 6 years ago that's somewhat dated, but still gives you a feel for things good and bad:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/02_23/b3786132....
I have also noticed that one kind of person will normally go for the city that suit his/her personality (due to experience and the way they have been brought up), for example a person brought-up in new-york will most possibly won't like atlanta and vice-versa. the reason being NY guy is used to speed, he just cant take anything slower, if the train is scheduled at 7.13am then he has to be on platform on time, while a guy in atlanta will get anxiety if he goes to NY and have to rush his life with everyone else.
City with laid back attitude also tells you that people over there dont care for money but that doesn't mean people dont make enough money (in fact they enjoy money at the fullest), on the other side people from the city of speedy lifestyle always feel like they dont have enough money even though they make good money, this is partly due to the cost of living and the culture where everyone wants to make more money.
Also people from laid back city are not in-secured the way people are from busy places like NY, London, Bombay, Tokyo etc. People from laid back city dont worry about what will happen tomorrow, but people from city like NY and Bombay are constantly worrying about tomorrow, it drives them crazy if they are not planning their life/career in advance.
I never lived and never will live in MySpace. I do not like the MySpacians message (Hey lets try to see who has more friends and hookups).
I sometimes spend time at Facebook. I lived there for a little while until I realized I am not so much into keeping in touch and I had no friends in the few hours I spent in college. When they open their borders, that's when I found that I do not like the Facebookies message (You should throw more pies and send more kisses)
I vacationed at Twitter, but it is not really my cup of tea. I still dont get their message (Life is a popularity contest).
So Where do I live? Well, I live mostly in HN. Although I sometimes get into arguments with the habitants, I have yet to find another city that beats the intelligence, vibe, energy and support I witness here. I take a daily ride to Techcrunch City and NYT, but I make sure I come back home to HN and mingle with the people who live here.
Me too.
Nice observation, the virtual city. The result of choice, not circumstance.
There seems to be this popular belief that admitting you are influenced by your environment is a sign of weakness. I just gave a presentation for my ethics class was on why the "trolley problem" is a logical fallacy. My argument was that you could create a system to flip the switch that completely circumvented the individual as a moral agent. For example, you could create a system whereby the individuals on the track could bid ebay-style on which direction the switch should be flipped. Or, alternatively, you could create a system whereby the direction of the switch was determined by a dice, with a 5/6 chance of the single individual being killed and a 1/6 chance of the other five individuals being killed. I then argued that A) social systems, not only individuals, should be considered to be moral agents and B) the morality of a system should be judged based on the behaviors it promotes via its extrinsic rewards. So, for example, the ebay-style system would be a universe that encouraged its inhabitants to create things of value for others so that they could bid their way out their predicament, whereas the dice-toss universe would be completely amoral as it would neither encourage nor discourage any set of behaviors. To me the lesson of the Milgram experiments, the Asch conformity tests, the Stanford Prison Experiment, etc. is that moral decisions are the result of both the individual's intrinsic nature and their external environment (inc. extrinsic rewards). So the trolley problem has always struck me as a false dichotomy because it assumes that the only two options are for a single individual to flip the switch either left or right, which implies that morality is completely intrinsic within the individual and the external environment plays no role, even though this is completely counter to what social psych teaches us.
Anyway, this was sort of a very long was of saying that I like the idea that people should consciously choose their environment because they realize that their environment does have a very real effect on their actions.
What if, say, your spouse is really into acting and loves the Los Angeles area... it might be very hard for them to find the same happiness in Cambridge, just as you might be harder-pressed to be as academic as you want to be in L.A.
I think a fair question is, if, for whatever reason, you can't move to an area that would well-support your ambitions, what can you do to improve your environment? Surely the best answer isn't "nothing, just resign yourself to live your life in obscurity and failure"...
Any suggestions about how to make better online environments for people who care about similar things?
add me I'm "smoothboom" and I just started a time line about memetics if you're interested.
You sound like a bitter Bostonian who was priced out of New York because you couldn't afford to pay rent on your studio in Alphabet City.
And as a Bostonian, I'd expect you to have enough cerebral instinct to be less transparent with your intuitive writing style. But alas, you all to easily portray your hometown's sad trace of pragmatism by holding ideology over realistic execution, hence why you were probably priced out of NY to begin with.
Another down year on Wall St., yet my bonus alone still affords the Cambridge flat you so wish you could afford to purchase. Hope you grow up some day, and find yourself, cities aside pal.
I can totally relate to that, as an acquaintance of mine from Boston and I echoed very similar sentiments about where I live (Atlanta). There are some great universities and brilliant people here, but you really have to actively seek them out. I'm still amazed how drastically the average quality of my interactions with people dropped when I first moved off campus. It seems to be almost a win or lose situation in regards to motivation: seeing other people involved in their projects, even if they are not in the same field, helps me to stay focused, but if I find myself surrounded by vapid conversation all day long, it actually has a negative effect.
There seems to be a lot of ambition in Ithaca, but the focus is on the collective rather than the individual. The messages that Ithaca sends are "make the community a better place, help the less fortunate, buy local food from the farmers market and co-ops, support local artists and musicians, attend community festivals and events, bond with your neighbors, and support the local schools and public transportation. Also, distrust authority."
This is reflected by the fact that the two most popular bumper stickers are Coexist (spelled out of religious symbols) and "Ithaca, NY: Ten square miles surrounded by reality."[1] And despite the fact that if you drive ten miles in any direction (except along the lake) you'll run into people living in trailer parks, the town itself is actually a surprisingly nice place to live.
The town support individuality, but only to the extent that your individuality helps bring out the individuality in others. The message seems to be that you can start a startup and we'll support your efforts to become successful, but not so successful that you drown out the voice of the rest of us.
[1] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Coexist-bumpersticke...
Boston, in large, give the message of "old money rules". Where you were born, where is your summer house (Martha Vineyard, Cape Cod, or Maine?), seems to the most important thing. And coorporates rule, so you have to play by their game: meaning you have to be one of them, in the boys club, have some gray hair, be decent at golf (or pretend to like it), in order to be considered good at busniness.
Boston/Cambridge is great if you are in academia, or doing research, but doing anything practical, or startup it is not that place to be.
Young ambitious people move somewhere else, the rest is stuck in academia, or living the 9-5 life clinging to the coorporate life, maybe they will manage up in the ladder (or rat race).
Adding, I also have met very smart people in Cambridge, but talk is cheap, and there is a lot of it in there. Everybody has an opinion about everything, but when it comes to action, there isn't much.
Johann Sebastian Bach lived around there.
Being picky about the grammar here, but shouldn't it be 'Or would you?' ?
It seems like it should be:
"Or would you?" - so that what follows 'or' is the converse of what was said.
Or
"Wouldn't you?" - without the 'or' to denote skepticism.
And while we're on it, nix the first 'a' in "wearing a jeans and a t-shirt..."
Please understand that this isn't said out of pedantry, but out of love for this essay. We should all be taught to understand the implications of what a place says to us, on us. It should be part of any formal education.
Quibbling over grammar in our casual posts is lame, but this essay deserves to be in a book one day, printed and in wide circulation, so please understand my intention.
Gary, IN: Lock the doors. Do not stop.
Macon, GA: You know, Atlanta is just up the road, right?
Elko, NV: The only winners are the house and the mine owners.
Milwaukee, WI: Fourth place is just fine, given enough beer.
Clearly, I need to hang out in better cities.
Barcelona: Party naked but watch your backpack.
Toronto: Buy land north of here.
Amsterdam: There's no work done here at all.
London: Next time, bring more money.
Also, I believe it's the only country in Europe except for the UK where everyone speaks good English. In most big cities in Europe you will eventually find someone who speaks English, but in Amsterdam the odds that it will be the first person you approach are no worse than in London or California.
Stockholm is similar -- most people speak good English.
Amsterdam is one of the biggest tourist destinations in Europe, no wonder about the quality of their English (although this applies to the whole of Netherlands, not just Amsterdam).
I hear the Danes speak excellent English too, but I haven't been to Denmark myself.
I have, and here's what they've said to me:
Pittsburgh: You should be nice.
New Jersey: You should be in New York.
Los Angeles: You should go outside.
Phoenix: You should go inside.
Detroit: You should be glad you have a good job.
Tampa: You should buy a new pair of flip flops for dinner Saturday night.
Sydney: You should spend more money on real estate.
Melbourne: You should spend more money on clothes.
London: You should have been here 150 years ago.
Davis, CA: You should leave Davis, CA.
Mountain View, CA: We're not the Barrio (any more).
Toledo, OH: We're close to Detroit.
Bowling Green, OH: Attend a real university with your real high school friends!
Columbus, OH: Love Ohio State football (and basketball, if the season's wrong).
brooklyn: you should be hipper
cambridge: you should be smarter
berkeley: you should only eat organically grown vegetables
tokyo: you should be japanese
san francisco: you should become as crazy as most everyone else, but not quite as crazy as the homeless people
No it's more like...
Melbourne: You live in the sports capital of a sports crazed country. You should go to the footy, the cricket, tennis and don't forget some new duds on cup day.
London: "You should have been here 150 years ago" is essentially "you should be more aristocratic". I think that signal is strong in London. I have been at dinner with friends who started arguing about how far they had to commute on the tube (as a proxy for social class.) The English pretend to the world that it doesn't matter but it seems to matter deeply to them. This seems to be an English hidden rule; that is how the discussion started.
If you are merely rich, your money can be easily taken from you by more powerful person in Moscow.
And if you didn't know, Russian is a second class citizen in Russia.
All in all, one message per city is insufficient. It all depends on the people around you.
Being a native Western Pennsylvania, and living more of my adult life in Pittsburgh than anywhere else, I'll take that as a compliment :).
I moved to NYC with my wife right after we were married, and loved every minute of it. But decided to return here to raise our kids after they were born.
An interesting thing about Pittsburgh is the number of large non-profits of every kind, especially considering the reduced population. The major industrial titans that made their fortunes here in decades past (Carnegie, Mellon, Heinz, etc.) have left behind many cultural institutions like libraries, museums, universities, parks, hospitals, etc. that are still well funded and high quality.
You'll find some of that in NYC (even from some of the same benefactors) but Pittsburgh I think has a higher cultural dollars/resident ratio. This is a wonderful thing in terms of raising children. My kids think hanging out at the zoo, library, conservatory, kids' museum, etc. is a perfectly common thing to do. I think in NYC (and other cities?) you could find many of the same things, but it would not be possible to enjoy them in a leisurely manner, or afford family yearly membership passes.
(The day after a Steeler's loss, of course, all bets are off.)
Perhaps it's even more noticeable because I live in SF now, especially in the Marina filled with mostly pretentious folks.
The "under attended" part isn't all bad. Our boys can run around a little bit in Phipps Conservatory, for example, without many negative glances.
We do live in a city neighborhood, so that might account for some of the difference.
Minneapolis: You should be nice
Providence, RI: You will eat well.
LA: You should look better or be more famous, preferably both.
Chicago: You went to the wrong fraternity
Columbia SC: Uh, the culture is pretty much centered around it's mid-tier University of South Carolina, which is a party-hardy Frat/Sorority vibe. So, I guess it says "YEEE-HAAAAW! More beer, Bo!"
Hartford, CT: Unless you can calculate the death of a 55 year old smoker with no major medical history within a margin of error, the city says "There's NY below and Boston above, take your pick, pay your toll, and have a nice day."
Raleigh-Durham, NC: Duke University, UNC, Wake Forrest, North Carolina State, Shaw, and various other colleges all within around 20 interstate exits of each other. I guess it would say "study hard, and find job at IBM, Sony-Ericsson, or Cisco." Not too much entreprenurial spirit here, I guess because the tech giants gobble them up with nice offers right out of college.
Columbia, SC doesn't really send any strong messages. Only the young people in the area have anything to do with USC, normally, so not even the frattiness comes across that strong.
College football tailgating, however, is a state-wide sport.
The message in Charleston definitely has something about aristocracy and the value of old money, while the message in the rest of the coastal towns generally involves fishing. Except Myrtle Beach, where the message is, "Y'all come on down for a visit, and leave your money when you head back up north."
Visited Bob Jones as a kid -- "You know you're going to hell, right?"
Speaking of Bob Jones, no one ever believes me when I explain that it has a "date room", wherein couples sit together in a chaperoned room, with a Bible-width space in between. Which explains why Bob Jones girls are such a terror when they do manage to escape the watchful eyes of the school.
I live in Honolulu. It's a miracle that I make it out of bed in the afternoon.
Logan, UT: You should be one of us.
Denver, CO: You should be healthier.
Portland, Oregon: Be alternative just like everyone else.
San Francisco: We're so hip and important.
Padova, Italy: That was a long, hard work week, let's have a drink in the piazza and get a pizza afterwards.
Innsbruck, Austria: ... something in the Tirolean dialect that I completely failed to grasp, involving skiing ...
Wolfeboro, NH (smalltown New England summer resort): You should pretend it's 1962 like all the retirees do.
Waltham, MA (Brandeis University): Go back to NYC when you graduate.
Cambridge, MA: You should be more educated.
I chose "educated" over "intelligent" largely because I lived closer to Harvard. When I go to the MIT side of Cambridge I would switch the two. In and around Harvard you see a strong vein of people who aim for the prestige of higher education over the knowledge it brings.
The middle-aged people dream of sitting in a musky study debating high-falutin mish-mash over a nice port. The college-aged kids dream of sitting in a coffee shop debating their PHIL101 papers. They seek _established_ education.
I know this doesn't speak for every aspect of Cambridge, which I did love living in for a few years, but the too-strong emphasis on the appearance of education as opposed to the knowledge you gain helped me move to take a job in San Mateo (shameless plug: RockYou.com).
Disclaimer: I am not your average anything. My move to San Mateo from Cambridge is via Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand. I speak Mandarin but I'm English/German. Take what I said with a healthy grain of wacky salt.
There are two strains of culture in Cambridge, "you should be smarter" which is why I love living here. And "you should have two PHDs" -- which is very different and unfortunate message. It's almost the opposite of the Valley, which speaks so reverently of the Harvard drop-out.
The best thing that those of us who live in Cambridge could do is keep the culture focused on ideas and less on diplomas.
Orlando, FL: Subprime.
Space Coast, FL: God's Waiting Room
Chicago: There's nothing wrong with second place.
Stockholm, Sweden: You're not clean enough!
Rio Grande Valley, TX: Play your cards right and some day you could be middle class!
San Antonio, TX: To the newly minted soldiers/airmen/sailors/marines- welcome back to the real world!
Las Vegas, NV: Be at least 21 and on vacation.
Terre Haute, IN: South side of Chicago, without the rest of it.
College football is king in the Bus, and the players and coaches are our royalty.
It's kind of a scary thought, but I'm as big a Buckeye fan as anyone else, so I'm partly to blame. But I also admit that I don't want to live in a place where this is the best thing we have to offer.
The truth is, I love Columbus for all many reasons: close friends, a great job, the Wexner Center, and of course, Buckeye football. It's a scary thought to pick up and move to SV. I often think about Spielberg, Lucas, Kaufman, and Coppola all hanging out together in the 70s. I desperately want to be a part of a group like that, but for startups.
And trust me...the valley isn't scary. It's nothing but a gigantic suburb, punctuated with office parks. Sure, the housing is hideously expensive, and there are freakishly rich people everywhere, but otherwise, the place won't present a challenge to you. San Francisco, on the other hand, is a different world....
The thought of moving to SV is scary exactly because of the expense, especially when I have a decent paying job here that I love. It would be foolish to abandon that, right? (I guess this illustrates the differences again between the two areas: Columbus would answer "Yes!" and SV would answer "No!")
I should mention that Columbus does have industries other than Buckeye Football. If you're passionate about insurance, this is the place to be. Of course, who is really passionate about insurance?
As far as deciding a city's worth based on personal experiences, it's always going to be just that: personal. But I can't deny the influences of cities on my individual life.
Brewery district: You should drink better beer.
Short north: You should be more artistic (in terms of both art and "sophisticated" things like wine-tasting).
Anywhere near High Street: You should hear more live music.
Honestly, Columbus has a thriving music, art, and gay community, and I think that makes it kind of a cool city. There's this very strange dynamic of party-going OSU students, diverse foreign-exchange OSU students, sports-crazy Ohioans, business-minded corporate-types, and aesthetic art aficionados.
Maybe, most of all, the message of Columbus is that diversity is good.
Perhaps Columbus could find it's own specific niche within high-tech? I've been impressed by the Tech Columbus initiative.