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

Stripe press could provide low touch support to a community of frontier openers

Scenes push the edge of human capability

# A scene can become world class when it goes from doing things that are locally new to things that are globally new
## Related
- [[A Florence is a city with multiple world-class scenes]]
- [[People who aspire to  be world-class flock to do groundbreaking things  flock to Florences once they become well known]]



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A Florence is a city with multiple world-class scenes

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

World-class cities do not necessarily have world-class scenes

A place is world-class in a discipline if people who want to be world class in that discipline feel like moving there is the best thing they can do for their career prospects

# 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
There are two preconditions here: 
1. The scene needs to be doing things that are worth joining from around the world.  [[A scene can become world class when it goes from doing things that are locally new to things that are globally new]]
2. People need to *know* about what the scene is doing from around the world.

Precondition #2 may not be necessary. It may be possible that we only recognize the scenes as world-class after the fact. [[How often do people realize a Florence while it is still a Florence?]]



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§ARPA model

DARPA works on programs that go against the established paradigm

Online ARPA Community

DARPA facilitates idea sex both between PMs and Performers

DARPA is a coordination mechanism

# Maverick work is lonely and DARPA provides peers and community
[[Presenting to peers regularly encourages you to get shit together]] as a general rule, but when you’re working on weird things it is harder to find those peers. DARPA helps solve this problem because [[A large part of a DARPA program manager’s job is focused network building]]. 

Since it is harder to find peers when you’re working on something weird, you might decide that it is just not worth the effort. In that case you may move more slowly than if you did have peers ([[Connections create new knowledge]].)

[[Adam Wiggins]] pointed out that a big value add of early batches at [[Y Combinator]] was the feeling of community around doing something weird. 



### Related
- [[The peer review and citation system incentivizes people to work on things that other people think is interesting]]
- [[People who aspire to  be world-class flock to do groundbreaking things  flock to Florences once they become well known]]
- [[Scenes are people producing work aimed at impressing and one-upping each other]]



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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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# What made Florence a Florence?
# 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 intellectual dark energy]]
- 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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# World-class cities do not necessarily have world-class scenes
[[A place is world-class in a discipline if people who want to be world class in that discipline feel like moving there is the best thing they can do for their career prospects]] and [[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]]. Both attract ambitious people from around the world but the *flavor* of that attraction is different. 

This may hint at what is happening in San Francisico as of March 2020 - it is still world-class in technology, but the technology scene is no longer world class because people aren’t really pushing the edge. [[Scenes push the edge of human capability]]



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Benʼs working notes

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

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