Why Boston?

I continue to be a strong advocate of New York City. If you think NYC is too expensive (it's cheaper than it was a year ago, and cheaper than SF, and totally Worth It, but yes it's not cheap), Boston is an excellent alternative choice. Right now we're doing our pandemic hideaway in Warwick, NY, about 40 miles NW of the city, but we'll be returning to Manhattan (probably Stuyvesant Town or Chelsea/Union Square area, outside chance of Brooklyn or Upper West Side) in Late Q1 2021. 

A number of strong people have recently clustered in Brooklyn in the Fort Greene area.

If anyone is seriously considering NYC and wants to talk to me about it in more detail, happy to answer any questions.

Well, we've just moved from SF to the DC area, so I guess I should comment somewhere with our thoughts on the decision. To be honest, I think Boston is objectively mostly better for us than DC, but personal reasons -- our own family -- are overwhelming the other ones.

On specific points:

• Industries -- Boston and DC are similar on this axis, I would say, depending on whether you count government as one industry or many (since there are many jobs in DC that come out of government).
• Programming jobs -- Boston is much better. DC has lots of programming jobs, but they mostly pay less and/or are for the military.
• Walkability overall is probably a bit better in Boston.
• Natural disasters -- mostly the same. No blizzards in Maryland/DC.
• Governance -- I don't feel all that qualified to comment. Maryland is probably similar; DC has governance problems due to its unique position as the nation's capital, which makes it illegal for it to govern itself in a few ways.
• Queer and poly friendliness -- I'm not sure how this shakes out. I think Massachusetts is pretty friendly to being gay specifically, but perhaps less tolerant of other kinds of weirdness. When visiting, as someone who grew up in DC, I do feel the "Puritan" vibe a bit. But it's complicated. DC also has pressure to appear "normal," much more so than anywhere on the West Coast. I think in general the Northeast loses here, but maybe not by as much as you'd think. (In my experience, lots of folks who say "The Bay Area is the only place I could live, because of the queer-friendliness!" have only been to two places: the Bay and the Midwest or Utah. The Northeast is  more like the former than the latter, IMO.)
• Multi-unit houses -- Boston definitely wins here. There are a few options in e.g. Takoma Park, but DC in general isn't great for this.
• Schools -- Complicated. Montgomery County has very good schools, but housing prices are unfortunately very closely correlated with school districts here.
• Airport -- DC has not one but three major international airports, one of which is accessible by train, another which will be accessible by train in the next couple years, and a third which has a solid bus corridor.
• Medical care -- Not sure, probably similar.
• Weather -- Maryland summers are hotter, but winters are much less inconvenient, though perhaps less beautiful -- much less snow. YMMV on this. Personally, I strongly prefer East Coast summer to West Coast non-summer. If you've lived your whole life on the West Coast, I predict there are shades of green you have literally never seen.
• Dance and music -- Boston wins at this, although the DC area scene is not shabby either. IIUC, Glen Echo is the largest weekly contradance in the country and probably the world, with typical attendance of over 300. And the Spanish Ballroom is very beautiful. But, we certainly can't compete with the sheer variety and popularity of traditional dance and music in Boston.
• Housing -- DC seems to be somewhat cheaper. We live in exactly the type of 2-bedroom apartment you mentioned, walking distance from the subway and 30 minutes to downtown, and are paying about 1.8k for it. The pandemic doesn't seem to have affected prices as much here, since it's a smaller city with less tech industry. (Plenty of 'essential' workers in government.)
• Urban-to-rural continuum -- That sort of exists here, but DC pushes prices up for a much further radius than Boston does. So you don't get as much of a discount for being rural.

But, for what it's worth to anyone considering this area: we're most likely here for the long haul, and we have a habit of making meetups and building community wherever we go. I suspect having a few solid, unmoveable pillars like Jeff and Julia in a community helps keep it stable despite upheaval. We hope to be similar pillars wherever we end up.

I've lived in Boston, NYC, SF Bay, and Oxford. For me, a big advantage of Boston was that most people I knew were clustered in a small area (Cambridge/Somerville or a short cycle away from them). This is radically different from the SF Bay, where people are spread across Berkeley (where UC Berkeley, MIRI, CFAR are), Oakland, SF (where Open Phil and many tech jobs are) and the Peninsula and South Bay (home of Stanford and many other tech jobs) and transport between these areas is mostly slow (esp without a car). 

London, NYC, and Berlin have the same issue of people living far apart, but it's mitigated by better transport options than the SF Bay. Oxford has the same advantage as Boston. (NB: I was studying in Cambridge and so had more friends in that area. But at the time, many rationalists who weren't studying at Harvard/MIT also lived near Cam/Somerville.)

Why isn't Boston more popular? (even among the VC crowd)? It just self-evidently seems to the second best place to be. I mean, many Harvard/MIT students I know seem to all want to go to the Bay Area after Boston simply b/c much more happens in the Bay Area (and their friend groups and grouphouses are all there) - and I guess NYC takes second place for "amount of things that happen" and it tends have more communities that are radically open/weird. 

Also there used to be the Citadel grouphouse there, but people tend to forget it now.

For lower housing costs, you can also possibly try the outskirts around Boston. I feel Providence is also underappreciated amongst many.

BTW I also appreciate how clean Boston's air is for a major city (there certainly seems to be less car volume here than in NYC or the Bay Area) - https://www.iqair.com/us/usa/massachusetts/boston shows that car traffic contributes less to pollution here than other cities.

From what I understand, the case for Boston is as follows:

A. Similar good things

1. Boston has similar urban amenities of the SFBA (colleges, medicine, airport).
2. Boston tolerates the rationalist kind of weirdness (queer and poly).
3. Boston has lots of the activity groups rationalists enjoy (contra dance, kink).
4. Boston has enough rationalists that it's possible to run weekly events and for people to have their own little friendship groups.
5. Boston has plenty of buildings that are suitable for large grouphouses.
6. Tech salaries in Boston are only 10-20% less than the SFBA. 

B. Similar bad things

1. Boston has a very high cost of living ($2800/month for a 2 bed that's 30 minutes from downtown).
2. Boston is within the US, so is at the mercy of US federal politics (i.e. revolution risk).
3. Boston is within the US, so it has similarly insane healthcare costs.
4. Boston has NIMBY housing policies that are unlikely to change.

C. Large/important improvements

1. Boston has far less risk of earthquakes and wildfires.
2. Boston has better non-car transport options. (Although it's unclear how it compares to NYC and how much worse it is than the best cities internationally.) 

D. Small/minor improvements 

1. Boston is much less dependant on the software industry than the SFBA. (I'm unsure if this is important for rationalists, as most of them are software engineers so the main benefit for them is less social homogeneity in their non-rationalist friend groups.)
2. Boston has a lot more elite schools per capita.
3. Boston's architecture is similar to Europe.
4. Boston skews younger than the SFBA (likely due to its elite universities).
5. Boston has 4 distinct seasons.

E. Large drawbacks

1. Boston has the same sky-high cost of living as the SFBA, but only a fraction of the startup scene.
2. Boston has very cold winters.

F. Small drawbacks

1. Boston has summers that are hot, humid and swarming with mosquitoes.
2. Boston still has it's Puritan cultural prudishness.
3. Boston has below average food culture. (Again, probably Puritan influence.)

G. Other differences

1. Boston has the blunt communication style you find in Northeastern US cities.

I can see why some individuals would be better off in Boston, but looking at the bigger picture I can't see how this would be a suitable replacement for Berkeley. It has most of the downsides that people mention (e.g. cost of living, opposition to new housing) when they complain about Berkeley, but can't offer the rebuttal of "yes, but our institutions are already here". 

If someone can spell out the case for moving the main rationalist hub from Berkeley to Boston, I'd like to hear it, but from my perspective it seems like relocating to Boston would be squandering this one-time opportunity to put the hub in the global maxima.

Boston resident here, so I thought I'd add some more points and further emphasize some things.

• The bike infrastructure is really good, and rapidly improving. In fact, there's so much bike infrastructure that I want to make the converse warning: if you are a nervous driver, driving around here can be terrifying because of the bikers.
• The winters can be quite brutal (though they seem to be getting milder). And since Boston is way too far east for its timezone, this means that the winter sun sets very early (think ~4:30pm).
• New England in general, and Boston in particular, is very lovely. If you like the European town aesthetic, this is probably the closest you can get in the U.S.
• The food scene is pretty bad -- food which is both good and cheap basically doesn't exist.
• People here are very young, especially when all the students are in town. Whenever I leave Boston, I'm shocked at how old the people are. 
• Marijuana is legal here. However, the dispensaries can be inconvenient to get to: none have opened yet in Boston or Cambridge. 
• I really love living here, and almost everyone I know also likes living here. The exceptions tend to be Californians, though. Did I mention how brutal the winter is?
• Whatever those Intangible Qualities of a Happy Place are, Boston has them. I'm not sure what gives Boston this feel; I think it's some mixture of excellent green space, good walkability, a sense of history, small-town aesthetic blended with big-city resources, and generally well-educated and competent populace. Think of the anxious feeling you get when you feel like the world is falling apart and there are a million little things coming apart at the seams -- the felt sense of Boston (at least for me) is the polar opposite of that.

Paul Graham also supports Boston: 

If you are CEO of a venture-backed startup, where would you move your company to outside of CA?

PG: Boston.

What's the rationalist scene there like? Meetups? Socializing?

Pretty good governance, as illustrated by the pandemic response.
 

[edit]
Really? 
Third worst state for deaths (all expressed per million population) in the US. 
If MA were a country it would have the worst death rate.

Compare MA (1,391 deaths per million) to Taiwan (0.3 deaths per million, none for months) with no lockdown. MA is 4,000 times worse. "Good" is not a word that has any applicability here. I would suggest "disastrous" or "catastrophic" would be more apt. Even Australia at 35 is 40 times better than MA. 

I notice a lot of places are delusional about their 'great' covid response.

As another Massachusetts native (from the exurbs, not the Hub of the Universe), currently living in SF, I agree with most of this. However, you're seriously underrating the significance of blizzards. Even in ordinary times without global warming driving the extremes higher, blizzards sufficient to shut down the subway for a day or two were roughly annual. Now you get even worse storms every year or three, and that may increase. Hurricanes also have increased in severity and frequency IIRC (nope, checked, that's false; neither severity nor frequency has increased.)

Other drawbacks over the West Coast:

• Boston summer sucks. Firstly, mosquitos; if you've lived there your whole life you are underrating how nice it is to have no mosquitos, and also probably underestimating how mosquito-free the West Coast is. Secondly, humidity. On the West Coast you can step into the shade and have the temperature instantly drop ten degrees or more (°F). No such luck in New England; you can't escape the heat from a Boston summer without air conditioning or a properly-enclosed basement. Open a window and you're hosed.

• Prudishness. Norms around public intimacy are way more restrictive. None of it is given legal force, but the Puritan culture is still around. "Do what you want, but don't make me pay attention to it" is the puritanical liberal ethos and it's still the prevailing view in New England. (Probably less bad in the big city than in the subdivisions or in Worcester, where I spent most of my time, but it's still there.) This also means that the 'weirdness point budget' is lower, but I'm unsure quite how much lower due to urban/rural confounders on the anecdata I have. (This is a pretty significant adjustment for the other direction as well; my best friends on the West Coast have almost all been East Coast transplants.)

• Rudeness. I am pretty certain this is substantially, though not entirely, a result of the previous point. In Massachusetts, it's considered impolite to waste stranger's time with pleasantries, rude to involve yourself in stranger's problems or conversations, and generally normative to assume other people are looking out for themselves and won't appreciate you getting involved. At its more extreme, this produces the terrifying pedestrian dynamics, where the accepted way to cross in a crosswalk is to look carefully for speeding cars and if none of them look like they're speeding too much to be capable of stopping for you, walk out into the crosswalk and dare them to blink first. This is a hard cultural shift to navigate and will probably produce isolation in people who are used to West Coast norms. (This is actually one where I still prefer the East Coast norms after a decade on the Left Coast, but it's a flaw for most people considering the move.)

I know that Boston has prestigious hospitals, but I'm unclear how to usefully compare the health they deliver.

One thing I can compare is the ease of getting blood tests. Most states allow residents to order blood tests via privatemdlabs.com, Life Extension, etc. But MA is one of the states that prohibits that, meaning that if you want tests that an average doctor thinks are unneeded (as I often do), it can be costly and time consuming to find a doctor who will sign off on them.

The bitterness of the pill does not prove the effectiveness of the medicine in it.

MA is third worst state for COVID death in the US. Third, after NY and NJ - and unlike NY and NJ, MA does not have an excuse of having NYC in it. Against that background, the claim that MA has good governance (re: COVID) requires extraordinary proof. 

 

Here are my notes for "Why (and why not) Montreal": https://bit.ly/AISMontreal Note that my notes are not directly about comparing to other cities. ex.: I'm not saying Montreal > Boston; I don't know

This is in terms of AI safety, I also have a more general one about best city for personal survival, but it's pretty drafty