6 ms·
Duuude, Mister Graham, I've never even heard of this Cambridge, and I seriously doubt it is the intellectual capital of the world. And you know what - you are n
by maxklein 18y ago
Duuude, Mister Graham, I've never even heard of this Cambridge, and I seriously doubt it is the intellectual capital of the world. And you know what - you are not qualified to judge. You've not been to Urumuqi, Jenin, Port Harcourt or Bahia, how can you make a judgement based on having been in two cities?
And furthermore, I take offense at the suggestion that American universities produce the best students. In general, the American engineers I have met have been less skilled than their German counterparts.
American universities produce people with ambition, but that probably has to do more with the American culture than any particular school policy.
Cities do not mould people. People of a certain sort hear about the reputation of a city and they flock there. It's like people hear of china town and go there for chinese food, and pretty soon lots of people are selling chinese food there, because it is where people go for chinese food.
A city influences people, but in a very complex manner. It's an animal ecosystem, and there are hundreds of factors at work that modify and regulate pull and push of a city.
You are seeing cambridge from your peculiar focus. That's not the real cambridge. Imagine some black bum you drive by, imagine how he sees cambridge. For him its not a place of ideas. There is no push towards reading.
What you term the 'city' is the social circle you are in. That's not the city, the city is much more diverse than that. There are crackheads and hos, bums and pimps, bus drivers and lower class korean immigrants. Its not an idea place for those people, it's just home.
A city can gain a reputation, and this reputation can cause a crust of a certain type of person to form in the city, but beneath this layer, every city is made up of normal people.
Sooner or later, the trend will change and the flavour of the crust will change, but beneath it all, life and death of these normal people will continue.
You are mistaking the icing for the cake.
- pg 18y agoSo just to make this a little more precise, which is your candidate for intellectual capital, Urumuqi, Jenin, Port Harcourt or Bahia?
- notdarkyet 18y agoI think you are missing his point, as he said " beneath this layer, every city is made up of normal people". The judgments you are making on those particular areas are relative to the individuals you are associating with.
- rms 18y agoyes, that's very nice but does nothing to refute Cambridge as the intellectual capital of the world.
- notdarkyet 18y agoIt does because the parents entire message was that for the most part, every city is made up of the same ingredients and you cannot dub the city the intellectual capital of the world based on a small subset of experiences with a select group of people. If your entire experience with the city of Cambridge is surrounded with individuals involved in academia, then it would be easy to come to such a conclusion. Having a friend that attends a well known Cambridge institution, I would never title an area based on or around the experiences I had with those individuals while visiting because that would be entirely inaccurate. If that were the case, I could call Cambridge the pseudointellectual and back patting capital of the world (not that those were my experiences, but no less accurate than any of the previous statements).
- rms 18y agoOK -- you are saying that things are much more complicated than being able to dub a city the intellectual capital of the world. It is nearly impossible because humanity is more complex than being reduced to the experiences of one person, but if someone was holding a gun to your head and saying you had to name the world's intellectual capital, what would you name it? There really doesn't seem to be a better one than Cambridge.
- notdarkyet 18y agoNo I wouldn't name Cambridge because "When you walk through Palo Alto in the evening, you see nothing but the blue glow of TVs. In Cambridge you see shelves full of promising-looking books". If intellect was based off of the number of books in ones bookshelf, a few of my friends would be gods amongst men. If the main criteria everyone is using to evaluate whether a city is the intellectual capital is a) how prestigious the cities institutions are and b) how condensed those universities are to each other, then I agree, Cambridge is that location. Any other basis for a decision is entirely subjective and a futile conversation to continue.
- idmkid 18y agoblack bums, lower class korean immigrants... I appreciate German attitudes of precision but with that mentality no wonder you lack immigrant capital.
- ardit33 18y agoJoke of the day: What do you call an european with no sense of humor..... drums... German!! In other news, an immigrant will always feel as second class citizen in most of europe, and Germany has a bad reputation about it. In some parts of East germany there is some Neo-Nazi resurrection, and there is lots of xenophobia. The states it is a total different thing. It depends where you are. In SF i just don't feel foreign at all, as most people I meet actually speak at home another language, or have traveled a lot. There is no visible discrimination, and I feel I could be an american one day. Living in the south, it is a total different thing. You feel foreign, no matter how good your english skills are, BUT, you can actually score points with girls thou (if you are white, of course), as there are not that many europeans around. In germany, they give you this thing called the blue card, so you could slave working on some company, then they kick you out when the time is up, with no path to citizenship. Hmmmm.... No thanks, I just don't feel being used as a disposable thing.
- davidw 18y agoAs another anecdote, here in Austria, which for many things has similar laws to Germany, you can't have dual citizenship, and being born here doesn't confer citizenship on you, as it does in places like the US, or Italy. So our daughter will be Italian and American, despite being born in Austria (not that we would have wanted it otherwise, but still...). I met a German guy in the states, who was born and raised there, considered himself German, but didn't get citizenship until 18 or 19 because his parents were from Turkey.
- delackner 18y agoYou can find a list of countries that deny citizenship to people born in that country of parents who are not of the "right" blood, yet have lived in the country for many years. It is one of the strongest indicators of institutional racism I can think of that is still in practice in many modern nations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_sanguinis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_sanguinis
- hugh 18y agoImagine some black bum you drive by, imagine how he sees cambridge. For him its not a place of ideas. There is no push towards reading. I'm not sure why you felt the need to bring the hypothetical bum's race into it, but I disagree. A bum on the street in Cambridge sits around resenting the fact that all the successful people around him are better educated than he is. A bum on the street in Hollywood, on the other hand, sits around resenting the fact that all the successful people around him are better-looking than he is.
- notdarkyet 18y agoUnless you are in or have been in a similar situation, I don't think either of you are qualified to make an assessment of what the views are of the "bums" in either city. Not everyone has the same goals or expectations in life (not claiming they aspire to be homeless) but making the assumption that individuals become bitter and resent those who either more successful (which is subjective) or better looking (also subjective) is quite a pretentious statement. This attitude perpetuates throughout our society and fuels many of the problems we face today. Maybe that "bum" is simply happy to have survived a childhood surrounded by drug addict parents or none at all, or maybe he is one of your praised intellectuals who went off the deep end with mental illness or was left behind by society. While you corrected the parent for making an ignorant statement for calling the "bum" black, you went on a few sentences later to make an equally ignorant statement by making the assumption he envies those surrounding him.
- menloparkbum 18y agoThe bums in Cambridge are almost always white.
- lg 18y agoJenin - you should build more bombs.
- cglee 18y agoThis is probably the first time I've ever seen anyone reference my birth-city in a blog post or comment (Urumqi). And I can confirm it's not a startup or intellectual hub, but the Uyghur lamb-kabobs are killer.
- maxklein 18y agoI've been to Urumuqi. Nice place. The Urumuqi men have a reputation for selling marijuana together with their meat though.
- mroman 18y agoYou are mistaken in concluding that "normal" people shape a city. The traits that make a city unique are the result of the actions of a minority of its inhabitants. If your "logic" were accurate, Los Angeles would be no different than Tijuana, for example, considering that most of the "normal" people there are lower class Mexican immigrants. Allow me to inform you of something essential about PG's essays: they require intelligence to truly understand, to the point that his core arguments will simply sail over the heads of those who lack it. Evidence of not having the required intelligence includes attempting to refute the core arguments with a myriad of minor points that appear to point out logical flaws, when they only manage to address comparatively minor items of negligible consequence. Mr. Graham's essays are valuable owing to their QUALITATIVE aspects, not to their total QUANTITATIVE sum . . .
- maxklein 18y agoI'm not the cleverest guy in this room. I once took an online IQ test and only got 115. To be fair, lots of questions were things like "What of this has no relationship with Kansas". But I digress... If a person trying to communicate cannot make his point understood by any but the most intelligent, then he has failed in communicating.
- earthboundkid 18y agoIt depends on the point and the audience. If the point is complex enough, then you have to give up on conveying it to certain people. If the audience is smart enough, you reach past the lowest common denominator. Indeed, the best way to write something that lasts for ages is to write something that ordinary people reject, bright people don't really understand, and the smart fall head over heels in love with. That's what keeps Plato in business. No one knows what he was saying exactly, but the really smart guys running the universe can't help but be charmed by it.
- comatose_kid 18y agoI wonder if 'the point is complex enough, then you have to give up on conveying it to certain people' is true. That Feynman could explain fairly abstract physical concepts such that laypeople could understand them may imply that one needs to understand the 'complex point' better before trying to explain it.
- slakinduff 18y agoDumb. First, the fact that cities beneath everything else are all comprised of ordinary people means nothing. It has always been the top that detemines the direction everyone else goes. It doesn't change anything PG wrote. How many in Padua, or say, Florence, were anything else but ordinary when the Renaissance unfolded? It has always been the top that makes history and changes things for everyone else. Your comment is a little like saying there is no difference between Honda and Ford, since they are both composed largely of steel and aluminum and plastic. And this is the reason there is an enormous distance between Germany and America. In Germany there is no top, just droids coming and going. In America there is very decidely a top. About everyone else, PG was not making any remark. America has a serious Middle Education problem, but American Universities are indeed, second to none. Also, don't talk ecosystem. It means so much to so many people these days, it has come to have no meaning. You are also incorrect in stating that most any city has the circle someone would want to belong to, that someone just needs to look for it. This is far from the truth. There are many cities in which you could not find certain circles in which to exchange ideas, if your life depended on it.