All Roads Lead from Prague | Hacker News Reader

All Roads Lead from Prague

the-american-interest.com

34 pointsHooke22 comments

The subhead: A new book by Michael Gordin shows how 16 months in Prague formed a young Albert Einstein—and the shape of science, politics, and intellectual history to come.

What I dont understand is that so many of the world's great intellectuals lived in beautiful cities and towns. University towns often are really pretty with quaint buildings both in Europe and the East Coast.

Then how did SV manage to do well? Butt ugly warehouses and suburban office buildings.

Haha. It’s ugly for sure but it’s the people that matters.

Other than Stanford, I don't think that SV really has educational institutions as its driving force.

A lot of amazing research and startups come out of UC Berkeley, and while they are on the fringe of the Bay Area and arguably outside of it UC Santa Cruz and UC Davis do very interesting research in bio chemistry and materials

I wouldn't consider Santa Cruz to be part of SV and definitely not Davis. There are plenty of significant educational institutions in the Bay Area and even more if you expand the net to Northern California, but SV's prominence is driven more by the location there of early tech companies than any educational drivers outside of Stanford (although Stanford is very important).

I disagree, I think education is one of the foundational pieces of what created SV and helps maintain is tech ecosystem. There was something that got those early tech companies to be here in the first place and I don't think it was just luck.

My opinion is that there are 3 main drivers and that top tier education is one of the most important ones.

They go like this:

Higher education that has enough gravity to aggregates diverse 'cutting edge' people from a variety of pursuits.

A reason for those smart people to stay that isn't just money. I think that's lifestyle and access to nature. You have the ocean, mountains, wine country, and relatively good weather.

The last is capital, I think saying companies is putting the cart before the horse. When I say capital I don't just mean startup capital. The ecosystem has to also have liquidity. There are lots of areas that have one of the 3, but very few that have all of them.

Does the SV attract "many of the world's great intellectuals"?

I would argue that, today, the definition of great intellectual involves ability to make money for investors and shareholders.

This is not meant to be flippant, judgmental, or snide. Greatness and intellectualism is tied to net worth in society today.

While I can agree that people do tend to think that good equates to rich, I don't think being able to make money makes you somehow intellectual or great. Sure, people conflate these things in general but that doesn't make it the fact of the matter because people think it.

This is similar to how some people view the law as being a moral compass for right or wrong. While a lot of people do tend to view doing something illegal as doing something wrong, it's not actually true that just because you're doing something illegal you are doing something wrong.

So what you said is true in that people see it that way, not in that it actually is that way, or ought to be that way. I think your comment sort of conflates this disinction whether intentionally or unintentionally, hence the downvotes.

It's 100% unintentional.

I meant that is the perception, not the reality. I should've worded that better, apparently.

The perception in pop culture is that wealth equates intellectual greatness.

I think you're conflating doing well in "status games" (academia) with doing well in wealth creation (SV).

The entirety of Western academic thought is a “status game”?

Western Civilization stopped building beautiful buildings more or less after WWII, which is when the SV was created.

SV did well because it was one of the first places that didn't enforce non-competes.

i think perception of novelty and 'quaintness' depends on where you grew up. As someone from the UK, Oxford and Cambridge are, yes, absolutely beautiful: but they were built for the education of, and sponsored by kings and society's elite. They're pretty good places to live, but they're not amazing at least by modern standards. They're also not the source of the UK's industries, which have historically been based in perhaps still quaint by new world standards, but much less idyllic cities like Manchester and of course London, where labor and markets are strong.

The most beautiful cities in the UK are beautiful externally, but very hard to live in unless you want to live a very specific kind of life out in the countryside or are very rich. They're either very expensive, or very quiet and usually both.

From my perspective having worked between the UK and the US for 6 years: California has amazing amenities, and housing tends to be cheaper than London, especially outside of San Francisco. The cities are much dirtier and scarier, but the weather is incredible and natural beauty when you leave the cities is amazing.

I think it's easy to have a positively skewed picture of Europe as a non-european because of how drastically different 'bad' or 'common' places look. It's similar for me when I visit the US. We have endless Victorian housing estates that were built for the very poor that look like fairytale cottages to those from across the ocean.

Ultimately, though I think industry in north california is a product of the money and workers that live there, rather than its attractiveness as a place to live as with other industrial booms.

SV during its initial rise was mostly orchards.

As a Brit who's been to SV a few times, I don't get the typical American disdain for the scenery. Stanford University is absolutely beautiful and so many of the neighborhoods I saw in Palo Alto were lined with trees and full of beautiful houses. You have a great hilly backdrop and even the 280 through Los Altos is gorgeous. There are endless blocks of offices and more modest housing too, of course, but I think the majority of British cities look a lot worse than what the Bay Area has to offer – they're not all as gorgeous as Cambridge, Oxford or Bath. Forgetting the horrific cost of living, I'd rather live amongst the scenery of SV than on the outskirts of Reading, Guildford, or Manchester, say.

They area around SV is quite beautiful, but certainly the cities are boring as hell.

German University of Prague.

If you can read German or know how to use Google translate https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Universit%C3%A4t_Pr...

Insigniestreit.... Czechoslovakia, "victim" of ww2...

What is the meaning of this comment and "victim"? Was not Czechoslovakia victim of Nazis?

If you translate from the German wiki and from the history of this German University in Prague before ww2, the "raid" might not have been so random, greedy and unjustified as history books might want you to believe. But such comments are not welcome on HK

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