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

It is feasible to consciously cultivate a scene of frontier openers

Long lived organizations need culture keepers

Scenes have low barriers to entry

Xerox PARC was not that impressive as an institution

# §Scenes
- [[Scenes are people producing work aimed at impressing and one-upping each other]]
- [[Scenes form around a shared sense of what is celebration-worthy]]
- [[Scenes push the edge of human capability]]
- [[World-class cities do not necessarily have world-class scenes]]
- [[A Florence is a city with multiple world-class scenes]]
- [[Scenes push the edge of human capability]]
- [[Effective scenes are smaller than Dunbar’s number]]
- [[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 minimum viable scene can be created by two people]]
- [[A scene can become world class when it goes from doing things that are locally new to things that are globally new]]
- Scenes are susceptible to [[Legibility poisoning]]
- [[Scenes form around a shared sense of what is celebration-worthy]]

### Related
-

### References
- [[Visa thread on scenes]]
- [[Geeks, Mops, and sociopaths in subculture evolution]]
- [[Taste for Makers - PG]]
- [[What makes a scene with Alex Danco]]
- [[Third Places as community builder]]
- [[Visakan Veerasamy]]’s notes on scenes: [Roam Research – A note taking tool for networked thought.](https://roamresearch.com/#/app/visakanv-public/page/IAfI_5S9h)



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Environment shapes our thoughts

Where to Live

The Atomic Bomb Considered as Hungarian High School Science Fair Project - SSC

# Cities and Ambition - PG
- Ambitious people want to go to great cities
- Great cities send the message that you should try harder
	- NYC says - “you should make more money”
	- Cambridge says - “You should be smarter”
	- SV says - “you should have more power”
	- Berkeley says - “you should live better”
- City messages matter a lot
	- Thought experiment of nonexistent Milanese Leonardo ([[Taste for Makers - PG]]
- Cities are physical groups of people 
- Argues that it’s going to be a long time before the internet has the same properties because the physical world is high bandwidth
- Cities deliver messages subtlely through things you see and overhead
- Discouragement is stronger than encouragement in the same way that people have [[Loss Aversion]]
- It’s hard to keep working on something that nobody around you cares about
- Professors are second class citizens in the Bay Area and NYC until they start a company or make money
- Someone starting a company in NYC would feel like a second class citizen
- Only cities that are an ambition hub send messages
- In 2008 SF’s message was “you should live better” and PG predicted that it would change if enough startups moved there
- In 1300 Paris may have had the “be smarter” message but now it has a “do things with style” message
- London has a faint “you should be more aristocratic” message
- List of messages
	- Wealth
	- Style
	- Hipness
	- Attractiveness
	- Fame 
	- Political power
	- economic power
	- intelligence
	- Class 
	- Quality of life

Some things on the list are newer, some are falling off
- Cities filter people and provide a trust network so you can nudge who’s good. This is only necessary in fuzzy areas.
- For crisp areas like physics, it’s easier to see who’s good and you can pull them into a small department.
- Being in a great city is important in the beginning and middle of your career
- You can’t know a city’s message until you hear it so you should try living in several different cities
- When governments control universities they spread out resources geographically and prevent clustering
### Published
5/2008
## Questions
What does it take to change what message a city sends?
How many different messages are there?
## Thoughts
## Related
## Authors
- [[Startup = Growth]]
## Link

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Cities and Ambition - PG

We need to disentangle technology from tech

Grahamian Startup

Taste for Makers - PG

The Four Quadrants of Conformism - PG

Novelty and Heresy - PG

What you can't say - PG

Startups are the upper left corner of the divergent-convergent lean-fat 2x2

Good quotes

How to Write Usefully - PG

Life is Short - PG

Notes from Chicken Dinner January Singapore + Ambition

Schlep Blindness

Startup Canon

The Hierarchy of disagreement is a categorization of different ways of disagreeing

# Startup = Growth
#### Published
#### Authors
- [[Paul Graham]]
#### Link
### Related

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§Scenes

§Florences

# 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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Benʼs working notes

Taste for Makers - PG

Published

Questions

Thoughts

Related

Authors

Link

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