Claims

Paul Graham, in his blog post titled “Cities and Ambition”, seems to be suggesting that we would benefit greatly from moving to our Industry hub. 80khours writes in its blog post, that people should move to Silicon Valley for Tech, LA for Entertainment, New York for Finance etc. Peter McIntyre of 80khours says that just visiting an EA hub can lead to a significant change in your career or life.

In this essay we see what we stand to gain by moving or visiting a hub.

Industries cluster in certain areas

Three-quarters of the US entertainers live in LA. Anyone who wants fame, or who wants to be part of the entertainment industry seems to want to be here. Youtubers, Sitcom folks, Instagram models, Talk-show hosts etc., flock this neighborhood. A quick look at the top Youtubers suggest that many of them live in LA (David Dobrik, Amanda Cerny, Logan Paul and the like). Sitcoms such as “Modern Family”, “The Big Bang Theory”, “Last Man Standing”, “House M.D”, are all filmed here in LA. The hot and happening talk shows such as “The Late Late Show With James Corden”, “Jimmy Kimmel Live”, “Conan”, “The Ellen DeGeneres show” etc. are taped in and around 20 minutes from LA.

However, we do observe that “Last Week Tonight”, “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah”, “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert”, are taped in NYC. And looking at the genre I half expect “Saturday Night Live” would also be taped in NYC (AND IT IS). That’s odd, that these are not in LA according to our initial hypothesis. But they are still clustering. All these shows are politically charged and seem to want to be in NYC (TOGETHER). Maybe it is the timezone with Washington that brought them to NYC or the type of audience that they need for their show. I don’t know. I can only speculate.

Such clustering is not only found in the entertainment industry but also in several other industries. Take arts for example. 30% of the worlds most important works of art are from Florence. Looking at the Finance world, we see that New York seems to be the “Banking Capital of the World”. New York houses the Largest Revenue Investment Bank’s Headquarters (Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Chase, Morgan Stanley, BofA).

The Tech giants Apple, Facebook, Google, EBay, UBER, Lyft, Nvidia, Intel, KLA, Applied Materials, HP, Adobe, Instagram, Whatsapp, Snap, Twitter, Netflix, Y-combinator, Tesla, Airbnb, PayPal, SpaceX, Stripe, Udacity are some of the top tech companies that come to mind and surprisingly are all Headquartered in this region called the Silicon Valley in California. Somehow Amazon and Microsoft are not mainly in the Silicon valley. They do have a small presence there though.

Silicon Valley is also be considered as the startup capital, taking into account that all those companies listed above were once a startup and now continue to have their headquarters there. Silicon Valley also has the highest funding in cumulative dollars for startups. A whopping 140bn$ (from 2012 to 2018), dwarfs it’s competitor in the US (Boston) by almost 4 times. And not surprisingly, it is home to one of the biggest (by revenue) startup incubators, Y-combinator.

Even if the hub you are in is not as popular as Silicon Valley, it still seems to cluster. In Netherlands for example, Eindhoven is considered the high-tech city. ASML, Philips and NXP are all headquartered in the same region. In addition many contracted medium sized companies working for these giants and recruitment agencies are also in this city. Just 100km away, you will not see much of a sign of this high-tech environment. If you want jobs in this high-tech industry, Eindhoven seems to be the only possibility whereas if you want jobs in off-shore then no point in being close to Eindhoven. When I lost my job last winter, the opportunities pointed straight and to the one and only high-tech city, Eindhoven. Period.

Clustering happens locally. Clothing stores, supermarkets, restaurants, hotels cluster in cities as well. I have seen PUMA, NIKE, Reebok, and Adidas showrooms literally SIDE BY SIDE. Same thing with shirt brands like Louie Philip, Peter England, Van Heusen and Raymonds. In the city where I live, there are three to four Turkish stores where we get Indian spices. Each of them are within 100ft of each other, and nothing else in the entire city. Two of them are owned by brothers and are located literally adjacent to each other.

Most interesting for me is the EA community and if they are clustered and if so, where they are clustered. I consider organizations are EA if 80khours has recognized them here, or if they are on the 80khours job boards, or if GiveWell suggests them as effective charities. From these we have the following list for SF area: 80khours (SF, Oxford), GiveWell (San Francisco), Open Philanthropy project (San Franscisco), 80khours (Oxford and SF), OpenAI (SF), MIRI (Berkeley), Center for Applied Rationality (Berkeley), AI Impact (Berkeley), Animal Charity Evaluator (Berkeley without any office space), Animal Equality (US UK),

The following for UK area: Center for Study of Existential Risk (Oxford), Future of Humanity Institute (Oxford, UK), Global Priorities Institute (Oxford), Sentience Institute (London), Giving What We Can (Oxford), Founders Pledge (London), Centre for Effective Altruism (Oxford). Against Malaria Foundation (St. Albans UK), Sightsavers (U.K), Founders Pledge (London).

The following for other areas: Evidence Action (Washington DC), Helen Keller International (Washington D.C), Give Directly (NYC), Poverty Action Lab (Cambridge, MA, US), Good Food Institute (Washington D.C, US), Center for Global Development (Washington D.C, US).

So for the EA community it looks like the clustering does happen in UK (Oxford, London) and San Francisco area. These regions are the only regions that host the annual EA conferences, not surprisingly.

Great (clustered) hubs attract super-productive and ambitious people

A small portion of clustered regions somehow seem to be crazy productive.

The world’s ten largest urban economic regions hold only 6.5% of the world’s population, but account for 57% of patented innovations, 53% of the most cited scientists and 43% of economic output. This suggests that, in terms of innovation and economic output, the people in these regions are about eight times more productive than the average person. — 80000hours (Consider changing where you live)

As seen earlier, LA is hands-down one of the largest entertainment hubs. When you take a look at the biggest-subscriber-count-Youtubers today, you notice that many of them were not originally from LA and that they moved to LA in hopes of becoming big one day. David Dobrik moved to LA from Illinois to pursue his Vine Career. He was poor as hell when he moved to LA. At the time he moved to LA (at the age of 19), groceries of 25$ was a lot of money for him. Fast forward to today, he can be seen buying his friends Lamborghini’s even. He has 6 million views everyday on his Youtube channels and has risen to 15 million subscribers in a matter of 4 years.

Lily Singh, another Youtuber moved in December 2015 to LA all the way from Toronto, Canada. Today she is the first woman late night talk show host. Liza Koshy from Houston (today has 18 mill subs), Lele Pons from Miami (15 mill subs), Logan and Jake Paul (20 mill subs) from Ohio, etc., moved to LA to further their career and they peaked (in subs) during their time in LA.

NYC, the home to the largest investment banks in the world, attracts people who are ready to give up “everything” to make money. Investment Bankers are expected to work 28 days a month and 100 hours a week. You are expected to be available on call 24x7 (literally) by the senior managers. No one gives a damn if your brother is getting married; the job comes first. And only by being this guy are you able to earn a whopping 1.2m$ a year when you are 36 years old.

Silicon Valley, the largest funding hub for startups, attracts the best as well. The current internet giant Facebook in 2004, was passed on by Battery Ventures from Boston after which they moved to Silicon Valley and the rest is history. Silicon Valley is also home to Y-combinator, the startup incubator that produces the hottest startups such as Airbnb, Gitlab, Twitch, Reddit, Dropbox, Stripe etc. Not surprisingly it has a 1% acceptance rate (150 out of 10000 applications), which is lower than Hardvard’s.

Again, the most interesting for me is the EA community. SFO and UK are home to some of the greatest EA organizations such as GiveWell which has moved about 160m$ in 2018 to charitable organizations, and Against Malaria foundation which moved about 40m$ last year to help reduce Malaria deaths in poor African countries. Both SF and UK seem to attract ambitious people from around the world to work in these organizations.

Peter McIntyre who co-founded EA Australia, which has raised over 3M$ for EA work, seems to have found his way as director of Recruiting in 80khours, Oxford. Brenton Mayer who also co-founded EA Australia, is now in 80khours in Berkeley as Co-head of Coaching. Tara MacAulay, who saved a million dollars a year to the hospital she was working at, moved to Oxford and later to CEA as part of her work as a chief in the Centre for Effective Altruism. There are another 6 similar stories of “ambitious people” who have moved to these hubs all the way from Australia.

Somehow, irrespective of the type of industry, ambitious people seem to want to go to great hubs and in many cases (as shown above) became great or even greater, while in the hub. So should we move to a “great hub”?

Persuasion: It matters the type of message the city sends you

How much does it matter that we move to a “great hub”? It appears to be a lot.

As mentioned earlier, Florence is estimated by UNESCO to have 30% of the world’s most important art. How did Florence alone produce so much art when Milan is just as big as Florence and would have had similarly genetically capable people? It appears that if you were born in Florence then you had a better chance of producing art than when you were in Milan. Somehow if you were in Florence your values became: “ART is important”, and not as much when you were in Milan. In other words (somehow), people in Florence seem to be persuaded to pick up ART almost as if by virtue of being in that place.

This type of persuasion, aka absorption of values of a region, seems to be found in great hubs. Will MacAskill, founder of 80khours and Centre for Effective Altruism, writes here about his experience of going through Y-Combinator (moving to Silicon Valley):

But at group office hours, I’d often feel like one of the least competent people in the room; and the organization I was helping run was doing merely fine by YC startup standards. This pushed me to work even harder and optimize my time even further. —Will MacAskill

Being in the startup hub seems to have pushed Will towards working harder than he normally does on his startup. (Somehow), he felt persuaded, to become even better and rise up to YC startup standards.

Persuasion not only happens in great hubs but happens everywhere. When I play basketball on Sunday, I am persuaded to practice before the next time, so that I don’t suck at the court as much. I feel persuaded to not eat alone in a restaurant, possibly because I only see people in groups laughing and “having a good time”. It is just tough and feels wrong even, to eat alone. I am persuaded to have a girlfriend when I am around couples giggling, holding hands and PDAing.

I feel persuaded to absorb the values of people around me. It does not matter what I “truly want”, persuasion has a way of overriding my values even. Despite knowing that I cannot be fired and that the job I currently have is only until I switch careers, I continue to spend additional hours, stress about doing a good job and getting the appreciation of my peers. I am being persuaded to absorb the values of my peers (“you need to do good work otherwise you suck”) despite having way more important things to work on. I cannot not care about delivering results in said time (because my colleagues seem to care). I can’t help but feel bad when I get a shitty appraisal (even though I am going to remain in this career only for a year or two).

An STM has talked about such persuasions in his IIT days and Master’s days, where he tried to not care about grades and internships. I used to wonder, why it was so hard to behave differently, when he “truly wanted” to behave differently. I guess I understand now that people are not in full control of their values. And to a good extent (as evidenced above), persuasion seems to be “winning”. I was still going to be at the mercy of my surroundings.

Persuasion might not be the best thing for us in all cases. But the not-so-good-persuasion is not an incurable disease. It seems to continue to haunt you until the memory lasts or exists. Last month when I went to India, I didn’t care about working harder at work at all. Hell, I didn’t care about improving my basketball-skills either. And I started caring about a whole lot of other different things “characteristic of that city” that I went to.

If we want to be great like the artists of Florence in the 15th century, we should probably move to the hub Florence, because (Paraphrasing PG) if someone in Milan with the same natural ability as Leonardo Da Vinci (from Florence), couldn’t beat the force of persuasion, do you suppose you can? Why fight the force, when you can use it to propel you in the right direction!

We should aim only for the greatest hubs (in our field), as that is where the ambitious people are at. That is the persuasion we need. And that is the persuasion that seems to drive Will MacAskill and hopefully us, to work even harder than we usually do ON THINGS THAT ARE TRULY Priority 1.

Other benefits of moving to a Great Hub

There seems to be more to moving to a great hub than just the persuasion. I have experienced first hand what working with smart people can do to you. If they are in your team that is freaking great. Just the feedback they provide can teach you things that you can’t learn from a book. But they don’t even need to be in your team. They just need to be around. For example, I randomly approached top people in my old company who I had 0 contact with and they were more than willing to guide me in work related tasks.

Money is another advantage of moving to great hubs. It is usually higher than in a non-great hub. Average pay of a data scientist in California is around 150k$. Average pay of a data scientist in Netherlands is 80k$. And if you end up at places like Facebook and Apple it is expected to go as high as 180k or 190k, for the first year even. The story is similar with other industries as well. A friend of mine who was an Investment Bank Analyst, went from his job in India to a job in New York. His salary went from roughly 25k$ in India to 180k$ in New York.

Networking, future possibilities and exit opportunities seem to be other crucial advantages. Milan Griffes who worked for GiveWell (SF) informs that prior to working there he was in Michigan and not familiar with the EA community at all. And that when he considered leaving GiveWell after 2 years in the HUB, three of the opportunities, including the one he accepted was enabled by his EA network. Needless to say there are parallels to this in other Great hubs such as LA as well.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it appears that moving to a GREAT HUB such as SF for EA, NYC for Finance, Silicon Valley for tech and startup scene etc., seems to be a great idea, considering dimensions such as persuasion, work-ethic, ambitiousness, learning best practices, money-wise, networking and future possibilities.

In the case that we are not able to move to such a great hub, we should atleast surround ourselves with like minded people and should atleast plan “regular” visits or attend conferences to absorb or recharge the values provided by the said GREAT HUB.

An account of 14 people who decided to take a trip to the EA hubs Oxford and SF region is presented here. Of these 14 people 12 thought it would increase their overall impact. 9 of them moved to one of the hubs. Many of them informed that taking this trip changed their plans of what they should be working on. Such seems to be the power of a Great Hub. Peace!

P.S

This essay was largely inspired by Paul Graham’s “Cities and Ambition” and an STM’s “How to Get Perusaded”.

Further reading: