Where is the best physical place for PARPA?

# §Florences
- [[People who aspire to  be world-class flock to do groundbreaking things  flock to Florences once they become well known]]
- [[A Florence needs accessible low-cost-of-living lifestyles]]
- [[Florences require a world-class high-profit discipline and a world-class cultural discipline]]
- [[A Florence is a city with multiple world-class scenes]]
- [[A city can become a Florence multiple times]]
- [[Florences are going to have a lot of inequality]]
- [[Florences pull in people of multiple disciplines]]
- [[A Florence is a location in time and space]]
- [[Florences are sticky]]
- [[Singapore could become the Florence of the 21st Century]]
- [[There are concrete things that can be done to attract misfits]]

### Questions
- [[What made Florence a Florence?]]
- [[Why do people go to a Florence?]]
- [[What is the difference between a Florence and simply a ‘top city?’]]
- [[What makes a Florence Sticky For People?]]
- [[What makes a Florence stop being a Florence?]]
- [[How often do people realize a Florence while it is still a Florence?]]
- [[What makes a Florence start being a Florence?]]
- [[Has anybody studied what made Paris Paris?]]

### References
- [[Taste for Makers - PG]]



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A scene can become world class when it goes from doing things that are locally new to things that are globally new

People who aspire to  be world-class flock to do groundbreaking things  flock to Florences once they become well known

§Scenes

It is feasible to consciously cultivate a scene of frontier openers

What made Florence a Florence?

Wide vs deep networks and Clusters with respect to DARPA

What makes a Florence stop being a Florence?

§Florences

Florences pull in people of multiple disciplines

What is the difference between a Florence and simply a ‘top city?’

Why do people go to a Florence?

There are concrete things that can be done to attract misfits

# A Florence is a city with multiple world-class scenes
There are many cities with single world-class scenes - Montreal for Deep learning, Honolulu for Surfing, etc. We could call these Scene cities. But it’s the *convergence* and *intersection* of scenes that makes for a Florence. The feeling of a Florence is one where Leonardo Da Vinci rubs shoulders with Machiavelli.  Where Howard Hughes rubs shoulder with Humphrey Bogart. 

Remember, [[A scene is world-class if people who want to do new ambitious things in a discipline try to join it from around the world]]

This is a useful criteria because it suggests two things:
1. An algorithm for whether a place what a Florence in the past (for example, it made me realize that 1930’s LA was probably a Florence) 
2. A necessary condition for creating a Florence - you need to start with at least one scene.



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# A Florence is a location in time and space
Florence the City is no longer a Florence the Concept. 

Paris in the late 19th century was a Florence but Paris is not a Florence now nor was it a Florence in the mid 16th century. However, Paris may also have been a Florence in the 13th century, which suggests that [[A city can become a Florence multiple times]].

There are several consequences of this assertion. 
- When you’re talking about A Florence, you must say time and place - “15c. Florence” not just “Florence” even if the time is implicit. Similarly you can’t just say a period - “The Renaissance” because the Renaissance didn’t happen everywhere.
- You should be able to draw increasingly tight bounding boxes on both the time and place. The tighter the bounding boxes, the easier it should be to find causality. These tight bounding boxes can help answer [[What makes a Florence stop being a Florence?]] and [[What makes a Florence start being a Florence?]]



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Florences require a world-class high-profit discipline and a world-class cultural discipline

# A Florence needs accessible low-cost-of-living lifestyles
Cultural disciplines often do not pay well except at the very top and [[Florences require a world-class high-profit discipline and a world-class cultural discipline]] so if that cultural discipline is not going to be forced out there need to be a way for them to live in the Florence.

Contrast to SF where the rent has forced out all the artists. 



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A Florence is a location in time and space

# A city can become a Florence multiple times
You can point to NYC as a Florence for people who wanted to build new governments in the late 18th century and then as a Florence for artists in the 1970’s.

Abstractly, this makes sense because cities wax and wane but have a permanence about them. Therefore there are basically a finite number of options for potential Florences.



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# Florences are going to have a lot of inequality
Because [[Florences require a world-class high-profit discipline and a world-class cultural discipline]] they will have people both making a fuck ton of money and people scraping by. 

It raises the question of whether you can have an egalitarian Florence.



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# Florences are sticky
People tend to *stay* in a Florence even if they came for a specific job. 

Contrast that to places where people do “a tour of duty” where they go and work there for a few years and then go back to wherever they were from.  The original pull to a Florence may be the idea that someone was going to do a tour of duty but at some point that tour is extended more and more …

This raises the inevitable question:
[[What makes a Florence Sticky For People?]]



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# Florences pull in people of multiple disciplines
Florences pull in people of multiple disciplines because [[A Florence is a city with multiple world-class scenes]]. People want to be part of the scene so they go to the city.  ([[Geeks, Mops, and sociopaths in subculture evolution]]  ) People will only go to the place if they know about the scene so this is true only at a certain point in the city’s evolution. 

~~Hong Kong~~ and Singapore are currently a place where world-class Finance people want to go but people of other disciplines are pretty meh on them. 

### Case Studies
Paris and Florence were places that pulled world class people in multiple disciplines. Florence pulled artists, inventors, merchants, writers. Paris pulled in artists, inventors, chefs. 

A repeated pattern seems to be that [[Florences require a world-class high-profit discipline and a world-class cultural discipline]]

### Questions
- Are there counterexamples to this?
	- Are there examples where we think of somewhere as being a Florence but it is monodisciplyinary?
	- Are there examples where somewhere pulls in multiple disciplines but we don

### Related



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A Florence needs accessible low-cost-of-living lifestyles

Florences are going to have a lot of inequality

Scenes push the edge of human capability

# Florences require a world-class high-profit discipline and a world-class cultural discipline
One story is that the place needs to be built on a high-margin industry. That high-margin industry leads to people with a lot of money who then want to flaunt it. They flaunt it by patronizing artists and scientists and donating to universities.  People then come to that place both to try to become whales and to feed off of the scraps from the whales. 

Is this pattern dependent on non-violent profit disciplines? Even in the ancient world, the examples (Athens) seem to be places associated with trade instead of war (Macedonia and Sparta.)  [[Culture is explanatory dark matter]]

Places where this pattern matches
- 15c. Florence (Banking/Art+Science)
- 16c. Amsterdam  (Trade/Art)

This requirement explains why early 21st century Berlin is not a Florence. It has a lot of world-class cultural disciplines but no world-class high profit discipline. 

If this is true, there is also an inherent tension around prices. World class cultural disciplines do not often pay well. The average artists, writers, inventors, etc do not traditionally make a lot of money. Therefore in order to be in a place they need inexpensive costs of living. On the other hand, if a place has a world-class high-profit discipline it means that there are going to be a bunch of people making a bunch of money. When people make a bunch of money in one place, prices tend to increase. These increased prices make it hard for the world-class cultural discipline to exist. 

This narrative has two consequences:
First is very practical: [[A Florence needs accessible low-cost-of-living lifestyles]]

Second is that  inevitably [[Florences are going to have a lot of inequality]]. 

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# Has anybody studied what made Paris Paris?
- Progress studies slack doesn’t seem to have anything.



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A scene is world-class if people who want to do new ambitious things in a discipline try to join it from around the world

# How often do people realize a Florence while it is still a Florence?

### Related
- [[Geeks, Mops, and sociopaths in subculture evolution]]

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Maverick work is lonely and DARPA provides peers and community

# People who aspire to  be world-class flock to do groundbreaking things  flock to Florences once they become well known
People wanting to be there for the sake of the *place* instead of just a specific job. Specific jobs and roles can pull people anywhere. 

Can there only ever be one Florence at a time? London, New York City, etc. are definitely world class but only San Francisico dominates the cultural narrative. This criteria makes the requirements more strict but ‘feels’ more like what we mean. There are many cultural narratives however, so the definition of what dominates a cultural narrative may change. 

The “groundbreaking things” piece is important because [[World-class cities do not necessarily have world-class scenes]]. Additionally, this is neither necessary nor sufficient for a Florence because scenes can be undiscovered (though maybe less so with the internet). 

### Related
- [[A scene is world-class if people who want to do new ambitious things in a discipline try to join it from around the world]]
- [[A Florence is a city with multiple world-class scenes]]



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Rohit Jha Conversation 14/3/20

Singaporean multiculturalism vs US multiculturalism

# Singapore could become the Florence of the 21st Century
- [[What made Florence *Florence*?]]



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Cities and Ambition - PG

# Taste for Makers - PG
Practical question: How do you make good stuff
- Taste is not just personal preference. If taste was just personal preference then everyone is already perfect and you can’t get better at design.
- Good design is simple
- Good design is timeless
- Good design solves the right problem
- Good design is suggestive
- Good design is often slightly funny
- Good design is hard
- Good design looks easy
- Good design uses symmetry
	- This may just be simplicity
- Good design resmbles nature *because nature has been optimizing for a long time*
- Good design is redesign
- Good design can copy
- Good design is often strange
- Good design happens in chunks 
	- Florence had a bajillion good artists but Milan had none
	- Go to the people doing great work
- Good design is often daring
### Published
February 2002
## Questions
- How do you know if a design is timeless? Just don’t conform to fashion? 
## Thoughts
## Related
## Authors
- [[Startup = Growth]]
## Link
[Taste for Makers](http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html)

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# What is the difference between a Florence and simply a ‘top city?’
- [[Florences require a world-class high-profit discipline and a world-class cultural discipline]]
- [[A Florence is a city with multiple world-class scenes]]
While a top city doesn’t actually need to have any scenes  



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Scenes are people producing work aimed at impressing and one-upping each other

# What made Florence a Florence?
What made Florence so absurdly productive during the 15th century?
ie. What made Paris the center of culture during the 19th century?

- [[People who aspire to  be world-class flock to do groundbreaking things  flock to Florences once they become well known]]
- [[A Florence is a location in time and space]]
- [[A Florence is a city with multiple world-class scenes]]
- [[Florences pull in people of multiple disciplines]]
- [[Florences are sticky]]
- [[Florences require a world-class high-profit discipline and a world-class cultural discipline]]
- [[A city can become a Florence multiple times]]

There’s also a sense that places are primary in something and secondary in other things. For example, LA and NYC feel secondary in tech industries but equally primary in fashion. 

### Case Studies from the present
Let’s think about the exceptional places in the world today and why people wanted to go there.
- San Francisco is the center of the software industry and weird discursive projects. World class people who want to build software, fund software, and collaborate with weird people do. Locally, Berkeley and Stanford both pull in world-class academics who has an interest in commercializing things. 
	- It pattern matches against the high margin industry leading to people donating to universities
	- The tech billionaire version of patronizing might be angel investing
- Los Angeles pulls in world class people who want to be part of the fashion industry (is this true?) and movie, tv, and content production industry generally.
	- Do world class technology people go there?
- New York pulls in world class people in Finance, Writing, Theater, Music, Art (is this still true? Probably in Brooklyn), Fashion, 
	- How important are the colleges 
	- Julliard seems important 
	- It pulls 
- London pulls in world class people in Finance, technology, cooking, 
	- It  feels like the proximity
- Boston for people in biotech, academic minded research people 

### Case Studies from the Past
- Amsterdam in the 17th century?
- Tokyo in the 1980’s?
- Prague at some point?
- Vienna in early 20th century
- Edenborough during the 18th Century
	- Smith
	- Hume
	- Hobbes
- Athens in 2nd Century AD

### Observations from cursory Case Studies

- None of these places seem to pull in people for manufacturing but many got their start doing that
- Being centers of trade seems really important

Is the fact that these places tend to center around industries a cause or an effect or both? The industry clusters may also be an artifact of how I’m defining “world class” because I think of world class as people who want to be the best at what they do.  Thinking more it’s how I perceive these people’s decision making process around somewhere being “the place to be” without sacrificing their careers.

In the early 21st century, it feels like there are many world-class cities but San Francisco

- [[A Florence needs accessible low-cost-of-living lifestyles]]
- [[Florences are going to have a lot of inequality]]

### Research Questions
- [[Has anybody studied what made Paris Paris?]]
- [[How often do people realize a Florence while it is still a Florence?]]
- [[Why do people go to a Florence?]]
- [[What is the difference between a Florence and simply a ‘top city?’]]
- What are other historical examples of places?
	
- Is there something in the nature of the high margin industry? ie. Silk was probably a high Margin industry but you didn’t see a cultural center there
- I wonder if the people who did the research for civilization V would know more
- Are there necessary cultural preconditions or does it change? [[Culture is explanatory dark matter]]
- Are they always coupled to a specific new thing?
- Has anybody mapped the top cities over time?
- Could you strictly look at net immigration to a city? High-skilled immigration?

### Related
- [[A minimum viable scene can be created by two people]] and the idea of scenes in general. 



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Florences are sticky

# What makes a Florence Sticky For People?
### Some Hypotheses
- Density of connections.  People who feel well connected to a place want to stay there.



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# What makes a Florence start being a Florence?

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# What makes a Florence stop being a Florence?
Two hypotheses are the classic stories about being killed by your own success.  One has to do with increased risk aversion and one has to do with dilution.

### The Risk Aversion Story
1. [[A Florence is a city with multiple world-class scenes]] and [[Scenes push the edge of human capability]] so Florences at first are coming out with crazy new things.
2. These scenes will necessarily be experimenting, taking risks, and failing. [[To make new things you need to take risks]] ([[Safi Bahcall on Why You Need to Take Crazy Risks]]) 
3. Once the scenes become *recognized* as world class, the expectations on them will increase.
4. The intense pressure to produce amazing things will cause risk aversion and kill new-thing creation.  The Florence will become a franchise. ([[Innovators and franchisees]]).
5. Once a Florence becomes a franchise, it is no longer a Florence - it’s just a world-class city. ([[World-class cities do not necessarily have world-class scenes]])

### The Dilution Story
1. [[A Florence is a city with multiple world-class scenes]]   - at first these scenes are small ([[A minimum viable scene can be created by two people]] and [[Effective scenes are smaller than Dunbar’s number]].) 
2. But [[A scene is world-class if people who want to do new ambitious things in a discipline try to join it from around the world]] so obviously more people will continue to join the scenes. 
3. This can go on for a while - the scenes can split and create new scenes, the core scene can ignore the extra people.
4. At some point though, the scenes may get overwhelmed by scenesters and the city stops being a Florence but instead is just a World-class city. [[World-class cities do not necessarily have world-class scenes]]

### The External Factor Story
There’s also a story where factors external to the nature of The Florence are what cause it to stop being a Florence. If [[Florences require a world-class high-profit discipline and a world-class cultural discipline]] is true, Economic forces that kill the world-class high-profit discipline will also kill the Florence. 

These need case studies 



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# Why do people go to a Florence?
They go to be part of the scenes. Because [[A Florence is a city with multiple world-class scenes]]

### Case Studies 
- San Francisco in the early 21st Century



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