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I was trying to figure out why it was that I disagreed with so much of what Michael O Church raised here. Not only is Michael O Church clearly smart and well s

I was trying to figure out why it was that I disagreed with so much of what Michael O Church raised here. Not only is Michael O Church clearly smart and well spoken, but it is simply statistically unlikely to be so often anti-affirmative by accident; not merely disagreeing, but holding a position that is the opposite of (what I believe to be) correct. I came to the conclusion that I probably am seeing a very very different Bay Area than Michael O Church, and filtering the part that I see in a very very different way. I think the reality is that perhaps mass culture is negative in the direction, but not magnitude, described here. But what I see here, in the bay area, is a small tribe, embedded in city of San Francisco, energetically, beneficently, earnestly, relentlessly working and helping each other out, putting their considerable time, capital, and intellect towards building the future and solving our biggest problems. Nowhere else in the world are people really trying to solve these problems. And maybe it's not nearly enough of the bay area, but damn it, people really are trying. Not everyone believes and lives what they say. But I think that, just enough of them, do. Enough to change the world for the better. And it feels, genuinely, like it is happening here, more than elsewhere. It would be a shame if that signal is lost to the noise.

gangst 13y ago
Solve our biggest problems? I'm neutral here, but are you sure that's what is happening in the Bay Area and no where else in the world?
- DaniFong 13y ago
  I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I think natural resource constraints and tribalism / nationalism are the greatest chronic threats we face. Energy tech and communications tech try to solve these, respectively; most funding, research and commercialization appears to happen here (although most deployment happens globally). I've been studying where things are happening from my admittedly skewed vantage point for quite a long time. It does still seem that the vast majority (>60%) of activity is happening in the bay area.
  - justincormack 13y ago
    Thats a very SV response of course. I don't think SV is at the forefront of energy tech, don't have any figures to hand, but I would put Germany way ahead of SV. Communications tech, yeah maybe, but it is very well dispersed now. Social change created by this? Less so, the US is trying to reinforce the existing consumer society through better advertising. Much of the rest of the world is experimenting with using new technology to help change society, from the Arab Spring to M5S and the Pirate Party and so on.
    - three14 13y ago
      This is one of those occasions where it's worth checking the poster's profile. Danielle Fong is "cofounder, chief scientist, lightsailenergy.com" and probably does know a lot of people in SV working on energy tech.
    - DaniFong 13y ago
      Silicon Valley certainly outperforms Germany in new energy tech. It's not even comparable. Germany just spends more on deployment.
      - Retric 13y ago
        There is little need for better energy tech at this point, it's all a question of deployment. Edit: That is to say wind and solar can both be cheaper than coal right now depending on location and how you calculate the cost of money etc. Which means we are over the tipping point and it's just a question of how much and how quickly to invest not the need for some great breakthrough.
        DaniFong 13y ago
        It's not possible to economically power the world with non-fossil fuel based sources based on current prices. We are between a factor of 2 off, optimistically, and more likely a factor of 5 off (floored by extraction and processing costs.) I don't know where you got your data or how you're doing your analysis, but you're incorrect on this one.
- TechNewb 13y ago
  What makes America unique and strong is that few other places attract the amount of international talent that SF, and the US in general have. To my knowledge there is no other city in the world that attracts the amount of international talent that SF or NYC can. That with some of the best universities in the world, with many of them in California, put California, and SF, in a good position for many years to come. Having said that, the world is changing. And we will see other inovation hotspots emerge, but I truly believe without diversity in people, it is harder to have diversity in thought , which can inspire innovation.
  - noloqy 13y ago
    Given the level of attraction of SV, the number of talented people from outside the US would be much greater if it wasn't for the way the US government treats foreigners. If the government doesn't become more receptive to foreigners it is quite clear that SV will never grow to its full potential.
    - 0m 13y ago
      When I post my CV to job-posts, many companies respond to my experience and skill BUT back off when HR says they dont want to deal with the draconian H1B laws. Instead of giving the H1B to the company, the US should follow the European and Australian model and give the H1B to the employee. This will reduce the exploitation by companies when the employee can jump jobs and will also reduce the enslavement at low wages which companies can currently easily get away with (because the H1B is with them).
  - justincormack 13y ago
    London has been a global city for its entire history, and would be in that group. As would Tel Aviv and Singapore.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
noloqy 13y ago
I think there's quite a strong divide between the creators and the consumers of (low level) technology, even in San Francisco (even though I've never been there). From what I can tell, there is a shift going on in the sense that the number of consumers will grow relative to the number of creators. This all is the (natural) consequence of the successes of SV. These days, enough kids aspire to be the next Zuckerberg, rather than the next great sports player. These kids will move to SV and consume existing technologies, in the sense that they will follow a couple of a rails tutorials and build the "next great webservice" by combining a couple of the patterns they've learned and create a twitter-bootstrap website that goes along with it. They may create some trivial extensions and post it to Github, but that's about as far as their direct contribution to technology goes. This isn't necessarily bad, some of the world's problems will be solved by this new generation of entrepreneurs. The presence of more high level developers may also make SV even more attractive to the developers that can actually create cutting edge technologies, which would make SV an even 'richer' place in the sense of talent. However, the number of times I hear people say "I've wasted 4 years at university, and wish I dropped out after the first month" makes me think that they have not understood what university is all about, and makes me wonder if they will be among the ones pushing forward the frontier of technology.
- roguecoder 13y ago
  I think the fault in your last paragraph falls to universities. I have a liberal arts degree and have never once questioned the value of my education or its applicability to my work. I learned how to learn, how to understand the ideas of others and developed a broad base from which to understand modern society, whereas the CS graduates I know learned many concrete facts that are useless in their day-to-day lives.
  - p_l 13y ago
    I think that there's a significant number of people who didn't do the learning you apparently did, and instead tried a let's call it "vocational" approach. Funnily enough, such approach is at the core of the jokes about a so-called "humanist" studies leading to a job at McDonald's - the difference being that you can usually get by enough to start in STEM fields. The other group of people complaining about university, to whom I sometimes belong, is grumpy due to how easy it is to be self taught, even if you might miss some of the more theoretical stuff that you won't use unless you work on a harder problem than most software in the world. Sometimes it's not even about education as much as it is about finances - I quite often found myself looking at job ads and thinking "I could do the job right now if I dropped uni, and I would have no more problems with money".
strlen 13y ago
I wanted to stay out of the whole Michael Church discussion: it is unfair, because I read the original article as a cry for help or expression of sadness by the original author, not part of anything more systematized. However, I'll say this: for a theory to be useful it has to be internally logically consistent, but internal consistency is insufficient. The theory is usually applied to a mix of tautologies (independent of experience /perception) and observations (dependent on experience/perception) In Michael's case his theory is logically consistent within itself, but 1) his axioms (about what ones' goals should be, what to seek in life, what constitutes fulfillment in work, etc...) seem wildly different from mine 2) what he has experience seems to trend towards the negative side and while not unheard of is, is definitely atypical in terms of the chain of events (hence our gut response which is to say "is he really talking about the same Bay Area/same Google/same software industry?") 3) even so, his perceptions of events seem to be very different from how I might perceive the same events. I think that's why many people see Michael as while hyper-graphic (a common trend amongst many other Internet posters), clearly intelligent, insightful on technical topics (I'm a bit biased in this case, being a caml fan as well), but find his conclusions in discussions of the industry, management, and of entrepreneurship to be a bit bizarre. (Donning a flame retardant suit, I am a bit reminded of Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science -- or other theories of a "computational universe": it is interesting and there are no internal contradictions, but I'm at at loss at how it could be broadly applicable or how it supersedes existing scientific and mathematical theories).
seanmcdirmid 13y ago
This is the standard red pill/blue pill paradox, which one do you want to take? Reality can be very subjective. I sometime see what Michael sees, but I can understand why others don't.
- DaniFong 13y ago
  Are you claiming that it's the true reality? If you want, you can trek down to specific parts of Kabul, or the Tenderloin, or South Bronx, or San Quentin, and see horror upon horror that bespeaks the devils within our phenotype. But you can see far more greatness, goodness, and humanity if you so choose. Which shall it be?
  - FD3SA 13y ago
    The key distinction here is that travelling to those places as a successful entrepreneur is worlds apart from being born there, without any genetic or environmental advantages to help one escape such a fate. Michael is speaking from a broad base of experience, one that is not just a hero's epic of one success after another with a token failure before the ultimate victory. From the heroic perspective (PG, Zuck, Gates, etc.), every setback is but a small dip before eventual triumph. These people sincerely believe that anyone can do what they have, and as a result their worldviews are extremely limited and naive. In a way, they cannot know the other side of the story, because they have never experienced any other outcome. The cold truth is that the situation Michael describes is reality for the vast majority of the working world. The darling VC-fund kids are a tiny minority, selling hopes and dreams to the masses in exchange for their servitude as employees who will never join their ranks. It is very hard to see the system as a whole when one is so deeply immersed in one side of it. VC startups will not save the common man. If anything, they will put him out of work and ask him to "retrain", putting him in massive debt for an entry level position making far less than his previous job. All this being said, I am extremely optimistic for the future, but I understand that the US requires significant structural reform if everyone is to benefit from technology. Not everyone can be a successful startup founder or programmer, and as soon as we accept that, we can move onto an earnest conversation about what needs to be done to make a better future for all, elite and commoner alike.

gangst 13y ago

Solve our biggest problems? I'm neutral here, but are you sure that's what is happening in the Bay Area and no where else in the world?

DaniFong 13y ago
I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I think natural resource constraints and tribalism / nationalism are the greatest chronic threats we face. Energy tech and communications tech try to solve these, respectively; most funding, research and commercialization appears to happen here (although most deployment happens globally). I've been studying where things are happening from my admittedly skewed vantage point for quite a long time. It does still seem that the vast majority (>60%) of activity is happening in the bay area.
- justincormack 13y ago
  Thats a very SV response of course. I don't think SV is at the forefront of energy tech, don't have any figures to hand, but I would put Germany way ahead of SV. Communications tech, yeah maybe, but it is very well dispersed now. Social change created by this? Less so, the US is trying to reinforce the existing consumer society through better advertising. Much of the rest of the world is experimenting with using new technology to help change society, from the Arab Spring to M5S and the Pirate Party and so on.
  - three14 13y ago
    This is one of those occasions where it's worth checking the poster's profile. Danielle Fong is "cofounder, chief scientist, lightsailenergy.com" and probably does know a lot of people in SV working on energy tech.
  - DaniFong 13y ago
    Silicon Valley certainly outperforms Germany in new energy tech. It's not even comparable. Germany just spends more on deployment.
    - Retric 13y ago
      There is little need for better energy tech at this point, it's all a question of deployment. Edit: That is to say wind and solar can both be cheaper than coal right now depending on location and how you calculate the cost of money etc. Which means we are over the tipping point and it's just a question of how much and how quickly to invest not the need for some great breakthrough.
      - DaniFong 13y ago
        It's not possible to economically power the world with non-fossil fuel based sources based on current prices. We are between a factor of 2 off, optimistically, and more likely a factor of 5 off (floored by extraction and processing costs.) I don't know where you got your data or how you're doing your analysis, but you're incorrect on this one.
TechNewb 13y ago
What makes America unique and strong is that few other places attract the amount of international talent that SF, and the US in general have. To my knowledge there is no other city in the world that attracts the amount of international talent that SF or NYC can. That with some of the best universities in the world, with many of them in California, put California, and SF, in a good position for many years to come. Having said that, the world is changing. And we will see other inovation hotspots emerge, but I truly believe without diversity in people, it is harder to have diversity in thought , which can inspire innovation.
- noloqy 13y ago
  Given the level of attraction of SV, the number of talented people from outside the US would be much greater if it wasn't for the way the US government treats foreigners. If the government doesn't become more receptive to foreigners it is quite clear that SV will never grow to its full potential.
  - 0m 13y ago
    When I post my CV to job-posts, many companies respond to my experience and skill BUT back off when HR says they dont want to deal with the draconian H1B laws. Instead of giving the H1B to the company, the US should follow the European and Australian model and give the H1B to the employee. This will reduce the exploitation by companies when the employee can jump jobs and will also reduce the enslavement at low wages which companies can currently easily get away with (because the H1B is with them).
- justincormack 13y ago
  London has been a global city for its entire history, and would be in that group. As would Tel Aviv and Singapore.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

noloqy 13y ago

I think there's quite a strong divide between the creators and the consumers of (low level) technology, even in San Francisco (even though I've never been there). From what I can tell, there is a shift going on in the sense that the number of consumers will grow relative to the number of creators. This all is the (natural) consequence of the successes of SV. These days, enough kids aspire to be the next Zuckerberg, rather than the next great sports player. These kids will move to SV and consume existing technologies, in the sense that they will follow a couple of a rails tutorials and build the "next great webservice" by combining a couple of the patterns they've learned and create a twitter-bootstrap website that goes along with it. They may create some trivial extensions and post it to Github, but that's about as far as their direct contribution to technology goes. This isn't necessarily bad, some of the world's problems will be solved by this new generation of entrepreneurs. The presence of more high level developers may also make SV even more attractive to the developers that can actually create cutting edge technologies, which would make SV an even 'richer' place in the sense of talent. However, the number of times I hear people say "I've wasted 4 years at university, and wish I dropped out after the first month" makes me think that they have not understood what university is all about, and makes me wonder if they will be among the ones pushing forward the frontier of technology.

roguecoder 13y ago
I think the fault in your last paragraph falls to universities. I have a liberal arts degree and have never once questioned the value of my education or its applicability to my work. I learned how to learn, how to understand the ideas of others and developed a broad base from which to understand modern society, whereas the CS graduates I know learned many concrete facts that are useless in their day-to-day lives.
- p_l 13y ago
  I think that there's a significant number of people who didn't do the learning you apparently did, and instead tried a let's call it "vocational" approach. Funnily enough, such approach is at the core of the jokes about a so-called "humanist" studies leading to a job at McDonald's - the difference being that you can usually get by enough to start in STEM fields. The other group of people complaining about university, to whom I sometimes belong, is grumpy due to how easy it is to be self taught, even if you might miss some of the more theoretical stuff that you won't use unless you work on a harder problem than most software in the world. Sometimes it's not even about education as much as it is about finances - I quite often found myself looking at job ads and thinking "I could do the job right now if I dropped uni, and I would have no more problems with money".

strlen 13y ago

I wanted to stay out of the whole Michael Church discussion: it is unfair, because I read the original article as a cry for help or expression of sadness by the original author, not part of anything more systematized. However, I'll say this: for a theory to be useful it has to be internally logically consistent, but internal consistency is insufficient. The theory is usually applied to a mix of tautologies (independent of experience /perception) and observations (dependent on experience/perception) In Michael's case his theory is logically consistent within itself, but 1) his axioms (about what ones' goals should be, what to seek in life, what constitutes fulfillment in work, etc...) seem wildly different from mine 2) what he has experience seems to trend towards the negative side and while not unheard of is, is definitely atypical in terms of the chain of events (hence our gut response which is to say "is he really talking about the same Bay Area/same Google/same software industry?") 3) even so, his perceptions of events seem to be very different from how I might perceive the same events. I think that's why many people see Michael as while hyper-graphic (a common trend amongst many other Internet posters), clearly intelligent, insightful on technical topics (I'm a bit biased in this case, being a caml fan as well), but find his conclusions in discussions of the industry, management, and of entrepreneurship to be a bit bizarre. (Donning a flame retardant suit, I am a bit reminded of Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science -- or other theories of a "computational universe": it is interesting and there are no internal contradictions, but I'm at at loss at how it could be broadly applicable or how it supersedes existing scientific and mathematical theories).

seanmcdirmid 13y ago

This is the standard red pill/blue pill paradox, which one do you want to take? Reality can be very subjective. I sometime see what Michael sees, but I can understand why others don't.

DaniFong 13y ago
Are you claiming that it's the true reality? If you want, you can trek down to specific parts of Kabul, or the Tenderloin, or South Bronx, or San Quentin, and see horror upon horror that bespeaks the devils within our phenotype. But you can see far more greatness, goodness, and humanity if you so choose. Which shall it be?
- FD3SA 13y ago
  The key distinction here is that travelling to those places as a successful entrepreneur is worlds apart from being born there, without any genetic or environmental advantages to help one escape such a fate. Michael is speaking from a broad base of experience, one that is not just a hero's epic of one success after another with a token failure before the ultimate victory. From the heroic perspective (PG, Zuck, Gates, etc.), every setback is but a small dip before eventual triumph. These people sincerely believe that anyone can do what they have, and as a result their worldviews are extremely limited and naive. In a way, they cannot know the other side of the story, because they have never experienced any other outcome. The cold truth is that the situation Michael describes is reality for the vast majority of the working world. The darling VC-fund kids are a tiny minority, selling hopes and dreams to the masses in exchange for their servitude as employees who will never join their ranks. It is very hard to see the system as a whole when one is so deeply immersed in one side of it. VC startups will not save the common man. If anything, they will put him out of work and ask him to "retrain", putting him in massive debt for an entry level position making far less than his previous job. All this being said, I am extremely optimistic for the future, but I understand that the US requires significant structural reform if everyone is to benefit from technology. Not everyone can be a successful startup founder or programmer, and as soon as we accept that, we can move onto an earnest conversation about what needs to be done to make a better future for all, elite and commoner alike.