Why Paul Graham is wrong about New York City

This line scares me.

Yes anyone can have an idea. In fact everyone has ideas. The catch is that they range from disastrously false to powerfully true.

A place that:

1. Values ideas in the abstract (and not just their shiny tangible fruits), and

2. Is skilled in the art of investigating the truthfulness of a proposition (dialectic),

will arrive at truer and therefore more powerful beliefs, faster. If Cambridge offers more of that to people than elsewhere, then PG is right. Since the rebuttal doesn't seem to comprehend this, it serves for me as one more data point that PG is right.

Pay attention in case you missed it - PG taps out an article in Cambridge about how ideas are valued there more than anywhere else, and someone not in Cambridge writes a rebuttal that seems to hurriedly elbow right past the big idea, about ideas.

Now, as far as why the idea capital and the startup capital aren't (currently) one in the same. Well, have you ever noticed that not all ideas are about startups? And some very powerful ones at that. Like...

- ideas about the limits of human potential, technically and ethically.

- ideas about how to properly wield rationalism and empiricism

- ideas about what is good (to be sure, if your idea here isn't just an incremental advancement but a disruptive one, it can result in your imprisonment and execution rather than your IPO).

- maybe a few trillion others

So you can see why it will be hard for the capital of ideas to be the predominate home of any single occupation. Add to this, that powerful ideas tend to motivate people who manage to believe in them to the point of conviction. So if an idea motivates someone to execute their plan - their plan to reform education, their plan to work with the poor, their plan to save the whales for god sakes not just their plan for another effing startup, am i clear? - then they won't always be executing there in Cambridge. That doesn't mean that ideas are antithetical to execution.

But I would still buy this man a beer, because PG's article seemed true, but brutally so. And if such a thing had been said about my mother and she had heard it, it would be right to rise indignantly to say, "Scoundrel, take that back!" Of course the honest thing would be to later educate her on the truthfulness of those very same points, but in a more gentle and loving way.

So Charlie, I reject your reasoning but applaud your chivalry.

Cambridge may be more about ideas than anywhere else, but it also seemed home, more than anywhere else, to people doing scholarship for scholarship sake and to people who had subjugated significant ideas to serve their little ideas.

Again and again I ran into people studying great thinkers and great thoughts for no greater reason than that they had never been out of academia, didn't want to leave, and were using these thinkers and thoughts as fodder for their thesis (job application) in order to get a professorship that would shield them from the outside world forever.

Encountering those sickly sorts will leave any results oriented person, like Charlie, wary.