231–240 of 313 posts
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paulgraham.com has an RSS feed. So it probably just shows up in his RSS reader, and then he submits it.
And here I was wondering why there was no RSS feed on the essays page.
Happy to hear there is one now!
Now how about this question ? What's more noble to try to live somewhere else that encourages intellectual ambition or to try to improve the condition of where you are?
If you want to improve the place you are, great. If you want to create a new system that improves the lot of many many places that suffer from the problems that affect your area, moving to a place that has great innovative energy and people with connections to try new ideas is probably a good first step.
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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…
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. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_sanguinis
I could get sick of any homogeneous personality type, if that's all a city had to offer. I've been bored by money-chasing materialists, superficials, monodimensional "intellectuals",etc. Try it. Try to hang around 1 personality type all day every day and see if it doesn't drive you nuts, no matter your personal proclivities. Best to get a variety, it is indeed the spice...
In Tokyo, I find in my circle of friends perhaps one or two programmers, but also financial services folks, a painter or two, several DJs, advertising, designers, there are so many and no one actually cares what your job is when you are socializing, though perhaps a few of the poorest dis-invite themselves from dinner out more often.
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Places I've lived: 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.
Moscow: You should be rich, or Russian. Preferably both.
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.
Berkeley: You should be more eccentric. Atlanta, so far as I can tell, doesn't have much of a message at all. Having visited Cambridge over spring break, I'm definitely enamored with the intellectual climate there, and will be moving to a nearby city in a few days (with the intention of moving to Cambridge proper when I can afford it). Getting to live in Cambridge is important enough to me that I'm hesitant to even c…
Atlanta: if you can't avoid being pathetic, uneducated, dumb or from the boonies, you should at least try to hide that fact.
San Francisco's message is, like PG said, you should live better.
Marin County (just north of San Francisco): a lot like SF, a little like Silicon Valley, but what is distinctive about Marin is that many of its influential citizens give off the message that you should use spiritual practices to learn never to become angry or hateful and always feel love and compassion for everyone all the time.
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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 w…
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.
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?
Does having an intellectual conversation in cafe in Harvard happens as easily as it does in Paris. How are people of what's going on outside their discipline, or their country? Those are measure I would use.