Interesting to hear your thoughts. I work in AI safety and my partner is senior at a significant EA aligned org. Yet I find the ambition you describe mostly nauseating and insufferable. You write about the day to day livers a tad condescendingly. But IMO there's a reason that basically all wisdom traditions teach a version of radical selflessness/non-ego/moment-living as the path to enlightenment.
Systemically it might be true that mentally/spiritually healthy, much less notably developed, people don't drive innovation, so there's something to be said for the value of those kind of people to humanity. And as a secular person who's trained and worked in CS, statistics, and ML for decades, I couldn't be more in favor of good measurement, expert analysis, and clear statements of priors and assumptions and values when deciding public investment, be it charitable or government. But God help us if we let those people choose our ideology and moral framework!
Depends on the wisdom tradition--lots of Christians are supposed to be worrying about going to hell all the time, and I can't vouch for Orthodox Jews, but those 600-plus rules seem impossible to follow.
I agree the Abrahamic traditions are on the whole a deep negative. Largely for the failings you note. But, for example, the direct teachings of Jesus (at least as reported in the Bible) fall squarely in the radical selflessness/no ego vein.
It’s not just the tech side. Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom and Nancy Pelosi all came from the hothouse of ambition here. You can also see it in all the Nobel prizes Berkeley and Stanford have. There is a lot more to San Francisco than just tech.
It is interesting to read this as an American. Your description of San Franciscans is accurate….for a small portion of San Francisco. And you acknowledge this in your first footnote. But San Francisco has all together too many regressive “progressives” for it, as a city, to unleash ambition on the United States or the world. Not for nothing has the most ambitious of them all, Elon Musk, long since departed California for the greener pastures of Texas.
Yea. These are the bay area people I’ve known IRL (as for techies, I’ve only known the more normie lumpentech, who are always contractors, not FTE). Music scene folks, “ambitious” about the audio-visual and party experience but not much else.
Musk didn’t leave because of the vibe, he left because the Twitter tax break expired and San Francisco’s gross receipts tax would have precluded him from starting a fintech.
Well, but tax conditions follow the vibe, right? It's full of progressives who hate him and the tech business, that's why they want to tax him so much.
Are you writing about "San Francisco", "Silicon Valley" or "the Bay Area"? You seem to be using all three interchangeably, and they are three very different things. Just as a matter of basic geography, it would seem self-evident that San Francisco, which famously sits at the tip of a peninsula, cannot be a "valley" or a "bay", and trice-versa for Silicon Valley and the Bay Area. But even beyond geogrpahy, in matters of culture, politics, economics and even technology, speaking as someone who's spent most of my life at various times in each of the three, I can attest that San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and the Bay Area are very far from synonymous, and it's not really possible to speak of them as a singular entity as distinct from the rest of California or the country as a whole for that matter.
Nope, Ruxandra got it right - this is a bunch of academic, pedantic hand wringing that shouldn't be taken too seriously. Even Marc Andreessen (a Trump supporter based on the peninsula ffs!) just said in an interview: "I think it might be literally true that San Francisco is the cultural center of the universe." - and he definitely wasn't just talking about the 7x7.
People in the real world SF/SV/Bay Area tech scene don't actually talk the way you're lecturing her to. We regularly use "SF" or "SV" as shorthand for the whole regional tech scene... as do all the SF haters in NYC and elsewhere, fwiw! (And yeah everyone gets the Bay Area isn't homogenous - hell neither is the city of SF) There's no sharp dividing line at the southern border of SF the way there might have been in say 1970s Silicon Valley when all the tech companies were on the peninsula. Sorry if this doesn't line up with the idea of the Bay Area you grew up with or whatever but times change.
Then just say that. Say you're talking about "tech", maybe "Silicon Valley", but not San Francisco or the Bay Area. The culture that you'd find on the Google or Facebook campus is obviously light-years closer to what you'd find in a similar space in Austin than it is to what you'd find in North Beach or Vallejo, which are each at the core of what people consider to be San Francisco and Bay Area culture, respectively.
Yes, that's really what inspired my comment. You're not writing about the "tech side of San Francisco", you're writing about the tech industry generally, which is based in and is often labeled as "Silicon Valley". Silicon Valley as the name implies is a valley, technically, the Santa Clara Valley. Within that valley are all of the cities that spawned the tech industry as we know it, namely Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Santa Clara, and the small cities and suburbs immediately adjacent to them. Decades later, as Silicon Valley spread all around the country and the world, from Redmond, WA to Austin, TX, to Raleigh-Durham, NC, yes it also spread to San Francisco and even Oakland. The most notable example was Twitter, which was subsidized by the city of SF to headquarter in the Mid-Market area in a now-failed attempt to revitalize that area. Salesforce constructed a massive tower downtown, but doesn't have any employees in it anymore.
But the pandemic, remote work, and the general decline of the Bay Area's downtown zones has really reversed whatever claim "San Francisco" and "the Bay Area" ever had to having any sort of significant role in "Silicon Valley". Twitter now X has moved to Texas, and mid-Market and downtown Oakland have both been ceded back to the crime, drugs, insanity and homelessness from which it was hoped tech firms like Twitter would rescue them. The VC's are still on Sand Hill Road, Google is in Mountain View, Facebook Menlo Park, the new star of the show Nvidia is even further south in Santa Clara. It's fine, the overall points in your article are great, it's just inaccurate to use "San Francisco" or "the Bay Area" as a metanym for the tech industry.
Exactly. And E-40 and City Lights predate "tech" even being a thing in San Francisco and the Bay Area by decades, and arguably, we've already hit high-water mark on tech in San Francisco and the East Bay with the loss of Twitter from Mid-Market and the chaos in Oakland.
HP was founded in Palo Alto in 1939 and Shockley Semiconductor in Mt View in 1955. City Lights Bookstore was founded in 1953 and E-40 is...a rapper from the '90s? You really have no idea what you are talking about.
Uh, I think you're comment proves my point. Silicon Valley is Palo Alto and Mountain View, has been for decades and decades. San Francisco is something else, it's not synonymous with the tech industry.
European perspective: The main problem here is the conflict between the "people who strive to greatness" and their allies in the populist/nativist/nationalist faction, that have in common only their hate for left-wingers.
It is not a problem that can be solved withouth a new ideology that can glue together this coalition, like what happened in the left wing with intersectionalism (that was necessary to mantain the alliance between feminists, ethnic minorities, immigrants and academic /intellectual èlites).
In Europe the same happened two centuries ago: The ideology that glued the Liberal Intellectuals, the Aristocracy, the Burgeoise and the Working Class was Nationalism. The problem with Nationalism is that, in the US, you lack both the tools and the intellectual/historical background to form a Nation-based coalition, making all tentatives to create a MAGA Alliance ahistorical at best and inconclusive at worst.
I do not see a clear solution to the coalition infighting without resorting to a new, US-based ideology.
My huge worry here is that, if this coalition will be born, it will be transplanted to Europe and do the same thing Intersectionalism did, creating huge disasters weakening us more.
Because Tech-Rightism, as Intersectionalism, is an American ideology that was born by American people.
If it begans to spread in European èlites decision-making, it would not create a Based Progresspilled movement for shacking European economies, but it would simply turbocharge immigration (helping the intersectional left) and broke down what remains of the European social pact.
And withouth creating any sort of advantage on the short-medium term as stock growth or VC growth.
Right. I don't follow the European scene but things like BLM don't make much sense in a European context.
Immigration is even more dangerous in Europe because you don't have the history of immigration and assimilation the USA has, and you don't have the prosperity that can ameliorate social divisions while people assimilate.
I mean, the US has always been pretty solipsistic. If we're going to make an ideology, we're going to make an ideology, and the fact that it might have unpleasant side effects elsewhere has never been a major consideration--we crashed a whole bunch of Latin American economies that had pegged their currencies to the dollar when we hiked interest rates back in the early 80s.
I don't really think we're going to have an ideology that combines MAGA and Silicon Valley, though. Neither side is particularly good at that kind of ideological wordsmithing, and I really don't think Trump is going to be competent enough to give us the years of prosperity that could cement such a thing the way Reagan did with the 'three-legged stool' of Cold War hawks, businessmen, and Christians.
I think he's going to faceplant and intersectionalism ('woke') is going to come back with a vengeance.
Good essay, but somewhat flattens the real San Francisco. In particular, citing Gwern and Robin Hanson feels off. Gwern is just moving to SF now and is somewhat of a singular figure, and Robin Hanson is in Virginia.
I have explained before. They are highly influential and read there I do not think it matters where they live. SF culture is in many ways an internet based culture
Thanks for the reply. I understand, and as other commenters have mentioned in various ways, I think you're conflating a particular cultural vein that is represented in SF with the city itself. San Francisco is as much about pride parades, running in Golden Gate Park, and standing in line for ice cream, to pick some items out of a hat, as it is about making a dent in the universe or whatever. Calling it SF culture obfuscates as much as it clarifies, IMO.
Cool work! It made me think many a-time about this Jonathan Haidt video I’m sharing below, especially the parts where he speaks of the “creators” of the main systems of morality (“isms”?) in the West — and their very unique personality traits:
With regard to the village vs river point on COVID: Note that Silicon Valley was *also* concerned about COVID very early, in the days when the news media said COVID was racism
That's not quite how I would put it, as someone born and raised in the Bay Area. If SF was contrarian for its own sake, you would expect them to embrace Trump early, or even follow crackpots like the timecube guy. There's some of that sort of stuff (e.g. Circling is pretty kooky), but not a ton.
There's a difference between contrarianism for its own sake, vs simply taking contrarians seriously and evaluating their arguments.
Insofar as the Valley was early to worrying about COVID, I think it was some combination of:
* Logical reasoning/"first principles" reasoning. Hospitals in China are being overloaded. Serious containment measures aren't being taken. And the US doesn't have plot armor. Therefore, we expect hospitals in the US to also become overloaded, given some time.
* Intuitive grasp of exponential growth. Lack of normalcy bias. The industry is used to disruptive exponential changes. Side note, I recommend reading this wikipedia page, it could save your life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias
* Looking at published numbers from early COVID research.
* Noticing bad arguments for reassurance. "No evidence of community spread in the US." OK, but we're barely testing. (One of Kahnman's classic cognitive biases: "What you see is all there is.") And given observed community spread in other countries, there's no reason to expect that community spread will somehow magically just not happen here. The racism thing is a bit of a red herring. There was COVID-related racism against Asians, which sucked -- that didn't prevent COVID from spreading, though.
* Finally, distrust of authority and assumption of government ineptitude. Maybe the above is just all there is to it. Maybe the CDC doesn't actually have a secret argument for why everything is going to be OK.
Engineer's syndrome doesn't always work. It's a pejorative for a reason. Actually, I think some of your biology disagreements with the rationalists may be a great illustration of how engineer's syndrome can go wrong.
But if there is a logical argument for a given conclusion, it's worth paying attention, even if the supposed experts are downplaying it. If the argument has been discussed for a while, and no one has raised a good counterargument, you might as well accept it as sound. And as for all the "authorities say this is all wrong!" stuff, you can ignore it if it doesn't come with specifics.
The curse of trying to improve your reasoning is feeling continuously aggravated with all the people who *haven't* made any attempt to improve their reasoning.
Yeah. I didn't say contrarian in like a derogatory way. I do agree with you there is an effort to have good epistemics that is independent of whether the position is anti or pro mainstream. But I'd still say there's a bias towards contrarianism
Agreed on all points except the last--the alternative to feeling aggravated with people who haven't made any attempt to improve their reasoning is to shrug at fate and hoard your cash, or try to rip them off--as indeed many Silicon Valley firms are doing!
I was going to make a similar comment on Gwern and on SpaceX being in LA (although I guess you could say it owes its inception to Elons prior success in Silicon Valley) but I agree with your sentiment here — there’s lots of people/companies/ideas that aren’t strictly speaking in SF but they are spiritually of SF
An excellent and penetrating observation: "not for nothing"...the highest achiever in the Brahmin order has decamped from the Golden Gates of San Francisco to a more humanly scaled and far less regressive environment in Texas to pursue greatness. Of course, the implicit ironies are lost on this new Cult of Stalinists, too busy trying to create a new world order.
Interesting and insightful. I’m always curious to see non-Americans’ impressions of us (I guess that self-centeredness is part of my national birthright…). I’m curious how you’d compare SF to other parts of the US, if you’ve visited other parts long enough to have formed an opinion? Keep up the great work, always looking forward to your new stuff.
Jeez, What's with all the pedants in the comments?
I thought this was a wonderful exploration of how a particular subculture is associated with a particular place and how that subculture has grown into a nationally significant force.
I lived in SF between 2010 and 2020, working in startup land, and all the stuff about greatness, grandiosity, and discounting the mundane rings true. The blending of the personal and professional, the normalcy of defining oneself in terms of one's contribution to a grand vision of progress. I was part of it. It was thrilling to go to random meetups and parties and have hours-long debates with whip-smart people about philosophy, ethics, politics, science, etc. I don't think you could get that experience anywhere else, at least offline.
I've also come to see a disturbing disconnect between the small minority of cognitive elites creating our future and everyone else who'll be forced to live in it.
Big cities usually have a multiple of different subcultures just from their size.
If this had been about NYC, there would be people chiming in that she really meant Manhattan, arguing that only certain parts of Manhattan *really* count...
Interesting to hear your thoughts. I work in AI safety and my partner is senior at a significant EA aligned org. Yet I find the ambition you describe mostly nauseating and insufferable. You write about the day to day livers a tad condescendingly. But IMO there's a reason that basically all wisdom traditions teach a version of radical selflessness/non-ego/moment-living as the path to enlightenment.
Systemically it might be true that mentally/spiritually healthy, much less notably developed, people don't drive innovation, so there's something to be said for the value of those kind of people to humanity. And as a secular person who's trained and worked in CS, statistics, and ML for decades, I couldn't be more in favor of good measurement, expert analysis, and clear statements of priors and assumptions and values when deciding public investment, be it charitable or government. But God help us if we let those people choose our ideology and moral framework!
Yes, whether these values are good or not remains to be judged by the reader!
Merely observing here...
Depends on the wisdom tradition--lots of Christians are supposed to be worrying about going to hell all the time, and I can't vouch for Orthodox Jews, but those 600-plus rules seem impossible to follow.
I agree the Abrahamic traditions are on the whole a deep negative. Largely for the failings you note. But, for example, the direct teachings of Jesus (at least as reported in the Bible) fall squarely in the radical selflessness/no ego vein.
It’s not just the tech side. Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom and Nancy Pelosi all came from the hothouse of ambition here. You can also see it in all the Nobel prizes Berkeley and Stanford have. There is a lot more to San Francisco than just tech.
yes, it's probably a generalised ambition. But I wanted to talk about rationalism etc, which are very specific to the tech sphere.
It is interesting to read this as an American. Your description of San Franciscans is accurate….for a small portion of San Francisco. And you acknowledge this in your first footnote. But San Francisco has all together too many regressive “progressives” for it, as a city, to unleash ambition on the United States or the world. Not for nothing has the most ambitious of them all, Elon Musk, long since departed California for the greener pastures of Texas.
Yea. These are the bay area people I’ve known IRL (as for techies, I’ve only known the more normie lumpentech, who are always contractors, not FTE). Music scene folks, “ambitious” about the audio-visual and party experience but not much else.
Musk didn’t leave because of the vibe, he left because the Twitter tax break expired and San Francisco’s gross receipts tax would have precluded him from starting a fintech.
Well, but tax conditions follow the vibe, right? It's full of progressives who hate him and the tech business, that's why they want to tax him so much.
Are you writing about "San Francisco", "Silicon Valley" or "the Bay Area"? You seem to be using all three interchangeably, and they are three very different things. Just as a matter of basic geography, it would seem self-evident that San Francisco, which famously sits at the tip of a peninsula, cannot be a "valley" or a "bay", and trice-versa for Silicon Valley and the Bay Area. But even beyond geogrpahy, in matters of culture, politics, economics and even technology, speaking as someone who's spent most of my life at various times in each of the three, I can attest that San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and the Bay Area are very far from synonymous, and it's not really possible to speak of them as a singular entity as distinct from the rest of California or the country as a whole for that matter.
Nope, Ruxandra got it right - this is a bunch of academic, pedantic hand wringing that shouldn't be taken too seriously. Even Marc Andreessen (a Trump supporter based on the peninsula ffs!) just said in an interview: "I think it might be literally true that San Francisco is the cultural center of the universe." - and he definitely wasn't just talking about the 7x7.
People in the real world SF/SV/Bay Area tech scene don't actually talk the way you're lecturing her to. We regularly use "SF" or "SV" as shorthand for the whole regional tech scene... as do all the SF haters in NYC and elsewhere, fwiw! (And yeah everyone gets the Bay Area isn't homogenous - hell neither is the city of SF) There's no sharp dividing line at the southern border of SF the way there might have been in say 1970s Silicon Valley when all the tech companies were on the peninsula. Sorry if this doesn't line up with the idea of the Bay Area you grew up with or whatever but times change.
Sounds like you don't know much about San Francisco or the Bay Area beyond as it relates to the tech industry.
I am mainly referring to the culture specific to tech circles!
Then just say that. Say you're talking about "tech", maybe "Silicon Valley", but not San Francisco or the Bay Area. The culture that you'd find on the Google or Facebook campus is obviously light-years closer to what you'd find in a similar space in Austin than it is to what you'd find in North Beach or Vallejo, which are each at the core of what people consider to be San Francisco and Bay Area culture, respectively.
Have you read the first footnote?
Yes, that's really what inspired my comment. You're not writing about the "tech side of San Francisco", you're writing about the tech industry generally, which is based in and is often labeled as "Silicon Valley". Silicon Valley as the name implies is a valley, technically, the Santa Clara Valley. Within that valley are all of the cities that spawned the tech industry as we know it, namely Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Santa Clara, and the small cities and suburbs immediately adjacent to them. Decades later, as Silicon Valley spread all around the country and the world, from Redmond, WA to Austin, TX, to Raleigh-Durham, NC, yes it also spread to San Francisco and even Oakland. The most notable example was Twitter, which was subsidized by the city of SF to headquarter in the Mid-Market area in a now-failed attempt to revitalize that area. Salesforce constructed a massive tower downtown, but doesn't have any employees in it anymore.
But the pandemic, remote work, and the general decline of the Bay Area's downtown zones has really reversed whatever claim "San Francisco" and "the Bay Area" ever had to having any sort of significant role in "Silicon Valley". Twitter now X has moved to Texas, and mid-Market and downtown Oakland have both been ceded back to the crime, drugs, insanity and homelessness from which it was hoped tech firms like Twitter would rescue them. The VC's are still on Sand Hill Road, Google is in Mountain View, Facebook Menlo Park, the new star of the show Nvidia is even further south in Santa Clara. It's fine, the overall points in your article are great, it's just inaccurate to use "San Francisco" or "the Bay Area" as a metanym for the tech industry.
Right. E-40 and City Lights bookstore lefties don’t exactly overlap with tech.
Exactly. And E-40 and City Lights predate "tech" even being a thing in San Francisco and the Bay Area by decades, and arguably, we've already hit high-water mark on tech in San Francisco and the East Bay with the loss of Twitter from Mid-Market and the chaos in Oakland.
HP was founded in Palo Alto in 1939 and Shockley Semiconductor in Mt View in 1955. City Lights Bookstore was founded in 1953 and E-40 is...a rapper from the '90s? You really have no idea what you are talking about.
Uh, I think you're comment proves my point. Silicon Valley is Palo Alto and Mountain View, has been for decades and decades. San Francisco is something else, it's not synonymous with the tech industry.
A large enough city will contain multiple movements, I think.
European perspective: The main problem here is the conflict between the "people who strive to greatness" and their allies in the populist/nativist/nationalist faction, that have in common only their hate for left-wingers.
It is not a problem that can be solved withouth a new ideology that can glue together this coalition, like what happened in the left wing with intersectionalism (that was necessary to mantain the alliance between feminists, ethnic minorities, immigrants and academic /intellectual èlites).
In Europe the same happened two centuries ago: The ideology that glued the Liberal Intellectuals, the Aristocracy, the Burgeoise and the Working Class was Nationalism. The problem with Nationalism is that, in the US, you lack both the tools and the intellectual/historical background to form a Nation-based coalition, making all tentatives to create a MAGA Alliance ahistorical at best and inconclusive at worst.
I do not see a clear solution to the coalition infighting without resorting to a new, US-based ideology.
My huge worry here is that, if this coalition will be born, it will be transplanted to Europe and do the same thing Intersectionalism did, creating huge disasters weakening us more.
why would it do the same thing intersectionalism did?
Because Tech-Rightism, as Intersectionalism, is an American ideology that was born by American people.
If it begans to spread in European èlites decision-making, it would not create a Based Progresspilled movement for shacking European economies, but it would simply turbocharge immigration (helping the intersectional left) and broke down what remains of the European social pact.
And withouth creating any sort of advantage on the short-medium term as stock growth or VC growth.
Right. I don't follow the European scene but things like BLM don't make much sense in a European context.
Immigration is even more dangerous in Europe because you don't have the history of immigration and assimilation the USA has, and you don't have the prosperity that can ameliorate social divisions while people assimilate.
I mean, the US has always been pretty solipsistic. If we're going to make an ideology, we're going to make an ideology, and the fact that it might have unpleasant side effects elsewhere has never been a major consideration--we crashed a whole bunch of Latin American economies that had pegged their currencies to the dollar when we hiked interest rates back in the early 80s.
I don't really think we're going to have an ideology that combines MAGA and Silicon Valley, though. Neither side is particularly good at that kind of ideological wordsmithing, and I really don't think Trump is going to be competent enough to give us the years of prosperity that could cement such a thing the way Reagan did with the 'three-legged stool' of Cold War hawks, businessmen, and Christians.
I think he's going to faceplant and intersectionalism ('woke') is going to come back with a vengeance.
In what reality did Elon remove censorship, in the US or anywhere else?
I mean, at least of RW people? I know people have been saying that now there is censorship of LW views... do you think that's the case?
Good essay, but somewhat flattens the real San Francisco. In particular, citing Gwern and Robin Hanson feels off. Gwern is just moving to SF now and is somewhat of a singular figure, and Robin Hanson is in Virginia.
I have explained before. They are highly influential and read there I do not think it matters where they live. SF culture is in many ways an internet based culture
Thanks for the reply. I understand, and as other commenters have mentioned in various ways, I think you're conflating a particular cultural vein that is represented in SF with the city itself. San Francisco is as much about pride parades, running in Golden Gate Park, and standing in line for ice cream, to pick some items out of a hat, as it is about making a dent in the universe or whatever. Calling it SF culture obfuscates as much as it clarifies, IMO.
Yeah I see. I explained in the first footnote I'm referring to tech culture
Nice ending. It reminded me of Becker's book, The Denial of Death.
Achieving immortality will likely diminish the intensity of the drive to leave a legacy.
Thank you!
Cool work! It made me think many a-time about this Jonathan Haidt video I’m sharing below, especially the parts where he speaks of the “creators” of the main systems of morality (“isms”?) in the West — and their very unique personality traits:
https://youtu.be/CMjvYSKODrk?si=uEhiIfGkufz1zY-5
thanks!
With regard to the village vs river point on COVID: Note that Silicon Valley was *also* concerned about COVID very early, in the days when the news media said COVID was racism
https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/13/21128209/coronavirus-fears-contagion-how-infection-spreads
https://news.google.com/search?q=pandemic%20racist%20before%3A2020-03-01
Yes, I think SF holds the "contrarian" personality type in high regard, which means they tend to sort of oppose The Village from various directions
That's not quite how I would put it, as someone born and raised in the Bay Area. If SF was contrarian for its own sake, you would expect them to embrace Trump early, or even follow crackpots like the timecube guy. There's some of that sort of stuff (e.g. Circling is pretty kooky), but not a ton.
There's a difference between contrarianism for its own sake, vs simply taking contrarians seriously and evaluating their arguments.
Check out this XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/793/
Insofar as the Valley was early to worrying about COVID, I think it was some combination of:
* Logical reasoning/"first principles" reasoning. Hospitals in China are being overloaded. Serious containment measures aren't being taken. And the US doesn't have plot armor. Therefore, we expect hospitals in the US to also become overloaded, given some time.
* Intuitive grasp of exponential growth. Lack of normalcy bias. The industry is used to disruptive exponential changes. Side note, I recommend reading this wikipedia page, it could save your life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias
* Looking at published numbers from early COVID research.
* Noticing bad arguments for reassurance. "No evidence of community spread in the US." OK, but we're barely testing. (One of Kahnman's classic cognitive biases: "What you see is all there is.") And given observed community spread in other countries, there's no reason to expect that community spread will somehow magically just not happen here. The racism thing is a bit of a red herring. There was COVID-related racism against Asians, which sucked -- that didn't prevent COVID from spreading, though.
* Finally, distrust of authority and assumption of government ineptitude. Maybe the above is just all there is to it. Maybe the CDC doesn't actually have a secret argument for why everything is going to be OK.
Engineer's syndrome doesn't always work. It's a pejorative for a reason. Actually, I think some of your biology disagreements with the rationalists may be a great illustration of how engineer's syndrome can go wrong.
But if there is a logical argument for a given conclusion, it's worth paying attention, even if the supposed experts are downplaying it. If the argument has been discussed for a while, and no one has raised a good counterargument, you might as well accept it as sound. And as for all the "authorities say this is all wrong!" stuff, you can ignore it if it doesn't come with specifics.
The curse of trying to improve your reasoning is feeling continuously aggravated with all the people who *haven't* made any attempt to improve their reasoning.
Yeah. I didn't say contrarian in like a derogatory way. I do agree with you there is an effort to have good epistemics that is independent of whether the position is anti or pro mainstream. But I'd still say there's a bias towards contrarianism
Agreed on all points except the last--the alternative to feeling aggravated with people who haven't made any attempt to improve their reasoning is to shrug at fate and hoard your cash, or try to rip them off--as indeed many Silicon Valley firms are doing!
But neither Gwern, Robin Hanson, nor SBF are San Franciscans....
They are in spirit tho
I was going to make a similar comment on Gwern and on SpaceX being in LA (although I guess you could say it owes its inception to Elons prior success in Silicon Valley) but I agree with your sentiment here — there’s lots of people/companies/ideas that aren’t strictly speaking in SF but they are spiritually of SF
Yes!
An excellent and penetrating observation: "not for nothing"...the highest achiever in the Brahmin order has decamped from the Golden Gates of San Francisco to a more humanly scaled and far less regressive environment in Texas to pursue greatness. Of course, the implicit ironies are lost on this new Cult of Stalinists, too busy trying to create a new world order.
They figure 'good riddance to bad rubbish', I think. It may bite them in the behind after a while, but that remains to be seen.
On visas for high-skilled workers, I commend this discussion to everyone here:
https://hollymathnerd.substack.com/p/about-h-1b-visas
Thank you!
Interesting and insightful. I’m always curious to see non-Americans’ impressions of us (I guess that self-centeredness is part of my national birthright…). I’m curious how you’d compare SF to other parts of the US, if you’ve visited other parts long enough to have formed an opinion? Keep up the great work, always looking forward to your new stuff.
I haven't visited other parts!
It’s a lovely country I highly recommend it!
Maybe “greatness” isn’t so great!
Jeez, What's with all the pedants in the comments?
I thought this was a wonderful exploration of how a particular subculture is associated with a particular place and how that subculture has grown into a nationally significant force.
I lived in SF between 2010 and 2020, working in startup land, and all the stuff about greatness, grandiosity, and discounting the mundane rings true. The blending of the personal and professional, the normalcy of defining oneself in terms of one's contribution to a grand vision of progress. I was part of it. It was thrilling to go to random meetups and parties and have hours-long debates with whip-smart people about philosophy, ethics, politics, science, etc. I don't think you could get that experience anywhere else, at least offline.
I've also come to see a disturbing disconnect between the small minority of cognitive elites creating our future and everyone else who'll be forced to live in it.
Big cities usually have a multiple of different subcultures just from their size.
If this had been about NYC, there would be people chiming in that she really meant Manhattan, arguing that only certain parts of Manhattan *really* count...