Hacker News Reader

Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

"I don't know how that assumption would correlate with SV. The Peninsula and the SR237 triangle aren't known for their creative diversity"

It isn't an assumption. There's a lot of literature backing up the association (for a popularization, read Where Good Ideas Come From, by Stephen Pinker).

In any case, for many years the city was a bedroom community for Silicon Valley -- people worked in the valley, and lived in the city for the diversity and culture (which is part of the reason we have Caltrain). San Francisco has always been a draw.

View on HN

Thanks for the tip. I'll give it a read when I have some time. Still, questions linger. Artis live up and down the coast from Santa Cruz down to LA. There are even art towns/communities -I don't see a lot of innovation coming from there. Sure, artwise they may be avant guarde, but proponents of progress (aside from social change) and drivers of innovation, I don't see that. If anything, they seem to tend towards conservatism when it comes to progress.

Now, engineers and scientists might enjoy and even admire artists for their literary imagination, expressiveness, showship, fame, etc. In popular culture, perhaps perpetuated via the products of these same artists, people tend to stereotype engineers as socially inadequate and dull. So that's a bit ironic. Personally, I think it's somewhat incidental. Engineers and scientists have some of the 'artist' in the old Renaissance sense of the word, but they are primarily innovators and not expressive artists.

No, that's not the right history. Caltrain is the remains of the old Southern Pacific commute lines; the SP brought people FROM the peninsula INTO San Francisco to work during the day, and back to their peninsula bedrooms in the evening. After WWII, San Francisco headed downward. By the 1960s and 1970s crime and disorder were so bad that only the very rich could live in San Francisco. Large employers moved their "back offices" to the suburbs, and in-commuting fell. Startups in the 1970s and 1980s had to be in Silicon Valley, because few decent engineers would have dreamed of living in the disgusting city, and they didn't want to commute to it either. Freeway traffic in the 1970s and 1980s was almost entirely INTO the city in the morning, back to the Peninsula in the evening; working in the Valley where one lived made that unnecessary. Only in the last few years has it become common to live in San Francisco and work in Silicon Valley, as San Francisco has recovered and become a vastly better place to live.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com