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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Geeks, Mops, and sociopaths in subculture evolution

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

Visa thread on scenes

Any conversation can be a conference

# A minimum viable scene can be created by two people
### Authors
- [[Visakan Veersamy]]
### Link
[Visakan Veerasamy on Twitter: “what’s a minimum viable scene?if you have two sufficiently obsessive people who are trying to impress and outdo each other in public, two is enoughbut usually it seems that it takes a broader/wider scene to generate 2 such obsessive people… https://t.co/Y5snVVcQWE”](https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1153708306206035968)
 
  

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A Florence is a city with multiple world-class scenes

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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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 intellectual dark energy]]

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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Safi Bahcall on Why You Need to Take Crazy Risks

# Innovators and franchisees
Originally from [[bahcallLoonshotsHowNurture2019]]

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# Safi Bahcall on Why You Need to Take Crazy Risks
The idea of tension between [[Innovators and franchisees]]
Why do ideas get stuck in the lab?
No bridge between the core and the new
Different languages
Core - don’t want clanking noise from nuclear engine 
New - don’t want to be surprised by new torpedo
How do we balance the two?
[Safi Bahcall on Why You Need to Take Crazy Risks — Masters in Business — Overcast](https://overcast.fm/+JWZT3Zx1Q/07:04)

James Bond movies were passed over for years
[Safi Bahcall on Why You Need to Take Crazy Risks — Masters in Business — Overcast](https://overcast.fm/+JWZT3Zx1Q/23:23)

Anesthesia discovered because someone in the lab put chemical on his tongue and thought “oh that’s weird.”
[Safi Bahcall on Why You Need to Take Crazy Risks — Masters in Business — Overcast](https://overcast.fm/+JWZT3Zx1Q/31:39)

Modeling human interactions like phase transitions in materials. 
[Safi Bahcall on Why You Need to Take Crazy Risks — Masters in Business — Overcast](https://overcast.fm/+JWZT3Zx1Q/34:01)

Stake vs Rank - same people, different incentives. In small organization stake is huge rank perks are not there. Look at what hallway conversations are about - projects or politics.
[Safi Bahcall on Why You Need to Take Crazy Risks — Masters in Business — Overcast](https://overcast.fm/+JWZT3Zx1Q/52:22)

[[Vanneavar Bush]] was the master of managing the transfer not the technology. [[National Science Foundation (NSF)]] basically addressing market failures.
[Safi Bahcall on Why You Need to Take Crazy Risks — Masters in Business — Overcast](https://overcast.fm/+JWZT3Zx1Q/52:22)

If you enable people to measure the real world, more people can figure out truth. However you need multiple systems of support for doing that because many people won’t like it.
[Safi Bahcall on Why You Need to Take Crazy Risks — Masters in Business — Overcast](https://overcast.fm/+JWZT3Zx1Q/1:00:51)

## Questions
- [[How do you predict where phase transitions occur in materials?]]
- [[What are the passed-over ideas today?]]
## Thoughts
- [[Discoveries happen when people have the ability to go “oh that’s weird”]]
## Related
This is basically the compressed version of [[bahcallLoonshotsHowNurture2019]]
## Authors
[[Safi Bahcall]]
## Link
[Safi Bahcall on Why You Need to Take Crazy Risks — Masters in Business — Overcast](https://overcast.fm/+JWZT3Zx1Q)

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

Scenes have low barriers to entry

# Scenes push the edge of human capability
 A scene is not just a bunch of people interested in a thing. It’s a bunch of people interested in doing something *new* with a thing. Because [[Scenes are people producing work aimed at impressing and one-upping each other]] the people in them by definition need to be doing something new (at least locally.) How else can you one-up the other people. [[A scene can become world class when it goes from doing things that are locally new to things that are globally new]].

Since [[Frontier-dwellers tend to live in developed places]] it makes it more likely that scenes will happen in developed places and specifically explains the first half of [[Florences require a world-class high-profit discipline and a world-class cultural discipline]].

### Related
- [[A players hire A players and B players hire C players]]



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People giving out grants try to derisk them as much as possible

Einstein would have been stuck in a patent office - failures of paradigm-shifting science

Systemic decay theory of stagnation

We have no flying cars - failures of paradigm-shifting engineering

# To make new things you need to take risks
This is a truism, but why is it actually true? It depends on the assumption that if something doesn’t exist, there is some chance that making it exist will fail and the risk is based on the consequences of that failure, 

### Related
- [[You need to break rules to create new paradigms]]
- [[Knightian Uncertainty]]
- [[Narratives are how we deal with uncertainty]]
- [[Anyone on the knowledge frontier is a bit of a crackpot]]



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A Florence is a location in time and space

# What makes a Florence stop being a Florence?
# 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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# 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

What makes a Florence stop being a Florence?

What makes a Florence stop being a Florence

The Risk Aversion Story

The Dilution Story

The External Factor Story

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