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Comment by playing_colours | Hacker News Reader

“Anathem” by Neal Stephenson describes monastic communities dedicated to studying mathematics.

I sometimes entertain an idea, if a similar monastic community can work in our world - assuming they would be less strict than in the book. Such isolated retreats would be beneficial for rebuilding focus, finding calm and comfort, without noisy distractions, so one could focus most of their time on studying mathematics.

Definitely, nowadays isolated monasteries would not be convenient for doing actual research, as the access to Internet is a must.

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I've heard the Recurse Center is like that.

> What we do. The Recurse Center is a self-directed, community-driven educational retreat for programmers in New York City.

https://www.recurse.com/

Does anyone have any experience with them?

I don’t, but Julia Evans does. She gave it rave reviews and wrote quite a bit about the experience. See the final paragraph here: https://jvns.ca/about/

It seems like a great experience, and if I were at a different stage of life I would likely pursue it.

She's where I heard about them :) Forgot to credit her by name.

I would gladly join something like this. I don't care about money, I just need about $50/day to survive where I live. I have notes on hundreds of inventions that may never see the light of day. I don't even have time to watch Khan Academy videos to refresh me on the college calculus I need to solve some of the equations. Because I've spent every day the last 20 years struggling to make rent and my passion is on life support.

I've honestly given up at this point. Without some kind of alternative to whatever all this is, I consider the startup world to be an evolutionary dead end. I give it a very solid vote of no confidence and consider it so far removed from the world that we could have made that it's now actively suppressing any kind of real innovation.

There is an example of a community like this in Turkey:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nesin_Mathematics_Village

We already have such a concept, ever been to a remote research university grad school campus?

I have not, but it sounds like it can be a good option :)

I have not. Can you name a few?

Isn't that tied to being a grad student or an academic teacher?

I wish there was something like this for random adults. I hate the structural assumption in our society that only people on the academic track are capable of doing deep intellectual work. Being in academia, or even in orbit of academia, comes with a lot of irrelevant responsibilities and spatial constraints, making it not cost-effective for someone who already ended up in the private sector.

Oh my, this is literally my retirement plan.

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