I continue to be a strong advocate of New York City. If you think NYC is too expensive (it's cheaper than it was a year ago, and cheaper than SF, and totally Worth It, but yes it's not cheap), Boston is an excellent alternative choice. Right now we're doing our pandemic hideaway in Warwick, NY, about 40 miles NW of the city, but we'll be returning to Manhattan (probably Stuyvesant Town or Chelsea/Union Square area, outside chance of Brooklyn or Upper West Side) in Late Q1 2021.
A number of strong people have recently clustered in Brooklyn in the Fort Greene area.
If anyone is seriously considering NYC and wants to talk to me about it in more detail, happy to answer any questions.
Well, we've just moved from SF to the DC area, so I guess I should comment somewhere with our thoughts on the decision. To be honest, I think Boston is objectively mostly better for us than DC, but personal reasons -- our own family -- are overwhelming the other ones.
On specific points:
I've lived in Boston, NYC, SF Bay, and Oxford. For me, a big advantage of Boston was that most people I knew were clustered in a small area (Cambridge/Somerville or a short cycle away from them). This is radically different from the SF Bay, where people are spread across Berkeley (where UC Berkeley, MIRI, CFAR are), Oakland, SF (where Open Phil and many tech jobs are) and the Peninsula and South Bay (home of Stanford and many other tech jobs) and transport between these areas is mostly slow (esp without a car).
London, NYC, and Berlin have the same issue of people living far apart, but it's mitigated by better transport options than the SF Bay. Oxford has the same advantage as Boston. (NB: I was studying in Cambridge and so had more friends in that area. But at the time, many rationalists who weren't studying at Harvard/MIT also lived near Cam/Somerville.)
Why isn't Boston more popular? (even among the VC crowd)? It just self-evidently seems to the second best place to be. I mean, many Harvard/MIT students I know seem to all want to go to the Bay Area after Boston simply b/c much more happens in the Bay Area (and their friend groups and grouphouses are all there) - and I guess NYC takes second place for "amount of things that happen" and it tends have more communities that are radically open/weird.
Also there used to be the Citadel grouphouse there, but people tend to forget it now.
For lower housing costs, you can also possibly try the outskirts around Boston. I feel Providence is also underappreciated amongst many.
BTW I also appreciate how clean Boston's air is for a major city (there certainly seems to be less car volume here than in NYC or the Bay Area) - https://www.iqair.com/us/usa/massachusetts/boston shows that car traffic contributes less to pollution here than other cities.
On the other hand, the second-best place selects for people who don't care strongly about optimizing for legible signals, which is probably a plus. (An instance of this: In undergrad the dorm that, in my opinion, had the best culture was the run-down dorm that was far from campus.)
From what I understand, the case for Boston is as follows:
A. Similar good things
B. Similar bad things
C. Large/important improvements
D. Small/minor improvements
Big improvements (for me -- YMMV):
1. Boston has two of the world's best few universities very close together. (It's hard to live close to Stanford without studying there, and it's a huge trek from Stanford to Berkeley).
2. There's an obvious Schelling point in Boston for where to live (Camberville), while interesting people/companies/organizations in the Bay are in SF, Oakland, Berkeley, and South Bay/Peninsula.
3. Boston is closer to NYC (and the other big East Coast cities) and Europe.
I'd guess Camberville is significantly cheaper in terms of overall COL than SF but it has similar big city amenities (concerts, opera, museums, huge diversity of events) that Berkeley lacks.
Boston resident here, so I thought I'd add some more points and further emphasize some things.
Paul Graham also supports Boston:
If you are CEO of a venture-backed startup, where would you move your company to outside of CA?
PG: Boston.
He is even more effusive in his essay "cities and ambition" (which incidentally is quite relevant for figuring where rationalists should want to live):
Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder. The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer. What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message there is: you should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you've been meaning to.
...As of this writing, Cambridge seems to be the intellectual capital of the world. I realize that seems a preposterous claim. What makes it true is that it's more preposterous to claim about anywhere else. American universities currently seem to be the best, judging from the flow of ambitious students. And what US city has a stronger claim? New York? A fair number of smart people, but diluted by a much larger numbe
Pretty good governance, as illustrated by the pandemic response.
[edit]
Really?
Third worst state for deaths (all expressed per million population) in the US.
If MA were a country it would have the worst death rate.
Compare MA (1,391 deaths per million) to Taiwan (0.3 deaths per million, none for months) with no lockdown. MA is 4,000 times worse. "Good" is not a word that has any applicability here. I would suggest "disastrous" or "catastrophic" would be more apt. Even Australia at 35 is 40 times better than MA.
I notice a lot of places are delusional about their 'great' covid response.
When I say good governance, I'm comparing to the US as a whole. I agree that many countries did better with the pandemic. Comparing a state to a country, though, is kind of silly when the country can shut its borders but the state cannot. Additionally, you've picked two island countries to compare to, which have additional advantages in securing their borders.
Still, within the US Massachusetts has one of the highest death rates. The other similar states are NY, NJ, and CT, and these deaths primarily came from poor control of the outbreak at the very beginning. My understanding is that this was primarily a failing at the national level, where the US had incredibly limited testing capacity due to a combination of poor choices at the CDC and counterproductive pressure from the White House. The coronavirus got ahead of us, and the whole Northeast corridor was pretty hard hit. Where I am giving the Boston area credit, and especially Cambridge/Somerville, is in the level of local response. The state and these municipalities weren't going to be able to fix the testing problem and it took longer than I would have liked for them to realize that the CDC was not going to be filling it's role, but once they did their response was very good.
Okay, a few months later, and I was wrong. I do think we have decent governance, but our handling of the pandemic has been crummy even in situations where we should have been able to do better.
As another Massachusetts native (from the exurbs, not the Hub of the Universe), currently living in SF, I agree with most of this. However, you're seriously underrating the significance of blizzards. Even in ordinary times without global warming driving the extremes higher, blizzards sufficient to shut down the subway for a day or two were roughly annual. Now you get even worse storms every year or three, and that may increase. Hurricanes also have increased in severity and frequency IIRC (nope, checked, that's false; neither severity nor frequency has inc...
I noticed the prudishness, but "rudeness" to me parses as people actually telling you what's on their mind, rather than the passive-aggressive fake niceness that seems to dominate in the Bay Area. I'll personally take the rudeness :).
I know that Boston has prestigious hospitals, but I'm unclear how to usefully compare the health they deliver.
One thing I can compare is the ease of getting blood tests. Most states allow residents to order blood tests via privatemdlabs.com, Life Extension, etc. But MA is one of the states that prohibits that, meaning that if you want tests that an average doctor thinks are unneeded (as I often do), it can be costly and time consuming to find a doctor who will sign off on them.
The bitterness of the pill does not prove the effectiveness of the medicine in it.
MA is third worst state for COVID death in the US. Third, after NY and NJ - and unlike NY and NJ, MA does not have an excuse of having NYC in it. Against that background, the claim that MA has good governance (re: COVID) requires extraordinary proof.
Here are my notes for "Why (and why not) Montreal": https://bit.ly/AISMontreal Note that my notes are not directly about comparing to other cities. ex.: I'm not saying Montreal > Boston; I don't know
This is in terms of AI safety, I also have a more general one about best city for personal survival, but it's pretty drafty
In college we had a set of signs we posted for common concepts. You might point at the sign that said "lexical semantics" as convenient way to indicate that a discussion had fallen into that particular trap, and we had signs for many circumstances. The sign with the largest impact, however, was "move to Boston". Twelve years later it's worked surprisingly well, and ~85% of my friend group is now here.
I'm also seeing a lot of discussion among Bay Area friends about moving. With the pandemic, fire season, and high rents, it's not surprising! I wanted to expand on a comment I left about why I like Boston.
In no particular order:
Boston has a wide variety of industries, many of which are quite strong: it's one of the top cities for biotech, medicine, and education. This variety makes it easier to have friends in a range of fields, there's interesting cross pollination, and there's less risk that a bust in one industry will take the whole city down with it.
There are good programming jobs. Many companies have offices here to be more attractive to (especially MIT) students, and I feel like I have a lot of options. Pay is a bit below the Bay Area, but not by much.
Good options if you don't want to have a car. Many walkable areas, lots of bikes on the road and decent bike infrastructure, and good public transit (for the US).
Minimal natural disasters. Not an earthquake area, plenty of rainfall, easy to avoid flood zones, no wildfires. Hurricanes happen, though they pretty much are only an issue right on the water. Occasional blizzards.
Pretty good governance, as illustrated by the pandemic response. I live in Somerville, and we shut down more quickly and have opened up more slowly than most of the US. Masks have been mandatory since late April. School is and has been fully remote, but they're still distributing school lunches. They distributed laptops and hotspots to any families that needed them. Non-pandemic governance seems generally good as well.
Queer and poly friendly. For example, MA was the first state to allow same-sex marriage (2003) and Somerville was the first city in the country to issue polyamorous domestic partnership (2020).
There are a lot of multi-unit houses and large old houses that are suitable for use as group houses, for people that like that.
Good schools. MA is typically ranked top in the country for K-12.
Very close to a major international airport (BOS). And you can get there on public transit.
Good medical care. The craziness of the US health insurance system aside, Boston has some of the best hospitals in the country. If someone gets an unusual disease and needs specialist care, they can probably get it here.
The weather goes through proper seasons, with winters that are cold enough and summers that are warm enough to give real variety. Spring and fall are also really beautiful.
The traditional dance and music scene, when there's not a pandemic, is excellent.
While housing is some of the most expensive in the country, it's substantially cheaper than the Bay Area or NYC. A 2-bedroom within easy walking distance to the subway and a half hour commute to downtown was ~$2.8k/month pre-covid.
There's a nice continuum from relatively urban areas (which of the above is discussing) out into Western Mass / Southern VT / NH for people who want different tradeoffs around density/cost/closeness vs space/thrift/isolation.
The biggest downside by far is housing costs. Other downsides include darkness in winter, cold in winter if you don't like that, and that for many industries it is near the top but not the top.
(I also grew up in Boston, my family is still in the area, and I'm close with them. Even if Boston was substantially worse I would still consider living here for this sort of personal reasons. While I feel like the above is written fairly, I'm probably biased in Boston's favor.)