I sometimes wonder how lucky the residents of Cambridge, MA are. MIT AND HARVARD... man that is some concentration of intelligence.
Center of the fucking universe!
Plus: highest concentration of intelligence on the Eastern seaboard. It's pretty spectacular.
Minus:
Warning: what follows is my own opinion based on my own experience, and YMMV, but:
Coldness. People don't really connect. They don't really have friends. They don't "hang out," or if they do the conversations are either technical or about the weather. Try to talk to someone about anything emotional, or far out, or speculative, or... anything other than brainy topics or the weather... and you're very, very weird and people look at you funny and go back to the weather.
For the first two years I lived there I thought it was me. Then I had this friend who lived there... total social butterfly, way more than me. After he'd lived there for five years, he had more friends in New York than in Boston. He moved to New York. I went and visited him and after being there for three months he had like twenty friends.
The entire Boston area is cold and anti-social, especially the MIT/Harvard nexus.
Somehow I don't think the specs are going to help, because I don't think it has anything to do with social ability. I got the distinct impression that being friendly was considered a mark of low social class.
I remember in Cambridge I could swing downstairs to the neighborhood bar, find a stranger, and strike up a conversation. Maybe it didn't work half as well as I am recalling, but even then, it was better than DC, where it always turns to "where do you work?" And "a startup" has only slightly more cachet than "I'm unemployed."
From a professional standpoint moving here has been great, but from a personal point of view, I think it's the biggest I've made.
I sometimes wonder if there is some kind of random stochastic effect that's related to where on the social graph you connect initially in a city that determines this outcome.
But I really, really tried. So did my friend, who was far more outgoing than me. Neither of us were able to meet very many people in Boston, or ever to feel comfortable there.