diegocaleiro comments on How to choose a country/city? - Less Wrong

11 Post author: joaolkf 02 November 2013 01:48AM

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Comment author: MathiasZaman 02 November 2013 01:25:47PM 8 points [-]

What might help is making a comprehensive list of things you're looking for a in a country, assign importance to each of those things and then see which country rates highest in the important categories.

Going of you post I'd say:

  • Ability to complete phd (rated high, let's say around .80 or .90)
  • Rational/secular population (rated moderately high .70)
  • Values self-expression (.70)
  • Happiness (also rather high, maybe .80)
  • Relative closeness to other countries (I don't know, maybe .50 or .60?)

And I'd also add a couple of more (and if you start thinking about it, you'll probably come up with a lot more):

  • Language barrier
  • Socio-economic system
  • Political situation
  • Public transport
  • How good you feel about the country

Apart from doing this, I'd also gather a lot of anecdotal data from people who live in those countries and especially people who moved to those countries or studied there.

Comment author: diegocaleiro 02 November 2013 09:54:14PM 2 points [-]

Also keep in mind that sometimes, what you are looking for in a country is highly correlated with people being from elsewhere. So the people will be the kind of people who are "willing to move for reason X" and those tend to be interesting people. If that is the case for you, as it is for me, you have to increase importance of multicultural metropolitan areas, and decrease the importance of big cities which almost have no foreigners.