
The city is a big brain that can solve big problems - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/18/genius/san-francisco-is-smarter-than-you-are-rd
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escape_goat
Moment by moment, the writing is quite decent, but I had to look hard to find
anything of substance here. The fundamental 'conceit' [technical term] of the
essay is incredibly well-worn, and it is surprising to see it reproduced here
so uncritically. There is one substantive and interesting claim, based on
research by two scientists named Wayne Gray and Wai-Tat Fu: “externalized
knowledge is accessed like any other memory, and that we treat ‘memories’ on a
computer screen just like memories in our head.” This is joined to the
suggestion from Edwin Hutchins that the ‘cognitive task’ of navigation at sea
was socially distributed across “several people, charts, papers, clocks, and a
variety of physical instruments.” As ships in truth use GPS, and used radio
beacons before then, and as in truth a single man with a map, a compass and
sextant can _roughly_ determine the position of a ship at sea, this sounds
suspiciously like a thesis that is picking and choosing its own Scotsmen. What
exactly makes a distributed task be _cognitive_ rather than, say, a
computation? I do not think that this is answered, and it seems that the
entire idea never gets beyond an “A implies B, C implies B, therefore A is C”
fallacy.

Anyway, what excites the author is the idea that this external cognitive
process extends seamlessly into the internal cognitive process by way of the
aforementioned findings about externalized knowledge. There is no real notion
beyond that. He believes that as the city population grows larger and denser,
the “genius” of the metaphorical city mind will increase; he cites strong
evidence that this is true, but he attributes the solved logistics and
communications of a large city to that genius, no matter that a mind is
capable of no similar thing. If “people are to cities as neurons are to
brains,” and based on the power-law scaling he mentions, he logically ought to
end with the fear that all large cities will be eventually destroyed by
massive epileptic cascades. Instead, he does the usual soft-shoe across
different scales and concepts to freshen up an old and familiar imagination of
science.

I have no idea why this is about San Francisco, although the golden gate
bridge is quite obviously a corpus callosum.

~~~
shostack
Interesting thoughts--thanks for sharing. If one wished to read further on
this topic, are there any resources you would recommend?

Also, your comment about epileptic cascades made me think... Could it be that
political and socioeconomic struggle and headbutting within a city is a sign
of that?

~~~
indubitably
[http://www.amazon.com/Supersizing-Mind-Embodiment-
Cognitive-...](http://www.amazon.com/Supersizing-Mind-Embodiment-Cognitive-
Philosophy/dp/0199773688)

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dmritard96
"While some of us can name the inventor of the light bulb, does anybody know
who invented the iPhone?"

The iPhone is not an invention. Its an iteration.

~~~
tormeh
Yeah, the smartphone was not such a big leap as it's made out to be. It was
mainly UI. I used to have a Sony Ericsson dumbphone and I had Opera Mini and
Google Maps on it. I ordered train tickets online with that phone.

~~~
jjoonathan
It was as big a leap in UI as it's made out to be.

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lmg643
Strange article. The article is trying to say something about collaboration
and then somehow leaps to cities being good for collaboration.

This claim is made despite abundant evidence that the greatest tech
innovations in Silicon Valley did not occur in the city, but the much more
mundane suburbs and universities.

This trend has largely continued because cities are poor environments for
"innovation" \- higher cost of living, less space for tinkering and equipment,
and lower "neighborly" sentiment which is required for collaboration.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone)

~~~
kaonashi
> … cities … lower "neighborly" sentiment which is required for collaboration

I've found this to be the opposite in comparing cities to suburbs.

If you're referring to the tech startups that created silicon valley, and why
they started where they started, you really can't ignore the subsidized land
granted through the university system.

~~~
alexqgb
The point Jane Jacobs makes about innovation and cities is that old buildings
are essential. Basically, you need clusters of places with cheap rent. If all
the real estate is new and shiny and impressive and nice, it's only going to
be available to businesses that are already firing on all cylinders. And
that's great for them, for a while. But the other point she makes is that
nothing lasts forever. The conditions that make a business work will
eventually change, and in most cases, the kinds of business that worked well
at one time won't be able to adapt to another. They'll just go away.

If the city in which this constant drama is playing out has a decent stock of
old buildings, there's a good chance that there will be another generation of
businesses that are better attuned to the times who are ready to move into the
high-rent districts. But if a city falls prey to short-term thinking and
allows all its cheap neighborhoods to be gobbled up by rapacious developers,
it's going to find itself driving off a cliff in terms of long range economic
viability.

In agricultural terms, getting rid of cheap rents is like eating your seed
stock. In more vivid terms, it's like setting your house on fire to stay warm
in the winter.

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calinet6
This whole idea is similar to the one Robert Pirsig explored in his book Lila,
the less-well-known sequel to his famous "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance."

He explored the idea of evolution at many levels for a whole chapter,
pondering about how the concept of evolution has itself evolved. From pure
energy, atoms "evolved" in a sense. Those atoms accumulated in a sort of
physical evolution into larger bodies; stars, asteroids, and planets. Stars
fused atoms into larger, more complex atoms. Planets congealed and evolved on
a geologic scale, the Earth specifically forming mountains, rivers, oceans. In
that form, molecules evolved further and increased in complexity and
organization into amino acids, and life itself, which evolved in the sense
with which we're more familiar, from single cells, to multicellular organisms,
to a myriad of forms, and finally into sentient humans.

The evolution, however, has not stopped as we normally assume. Instead, humans
are and have been only atomic parts of the phase of evolution in which we're
currently taking part, where we surpass the limits of our biology and evolve
in a social way, and then a technological way, to form a being far greater
than any single one of us. We are networked like a giant brain would be, we
have information from the far reaches of the world at our fingertips, the
ability to coordinate and execute incredible feats, and surely the ability to
grow and spread and prosper as never before.

This is the evolution of the universe. Each phase happens at a more and more
rapid pace than the one before, and each increases in the complexity and
capability of the organism as a whole. For some reason, despite entropy and
the supposed tendency of the universe to randomize, it turns out it has a
surprising tendency to organize in spite of itself.

So yes, the city is in essence a big brain that can solve big problems. The
whole world is, and all of history has been leading up to this. What will we
do with it?

Here are two appropriate images.

1\. Neurons as compared to cities: [http://laughingsquid.com/wp-
content/uploads/cityneuron3.jpg](http://laughingsquid.com/wp-
content/uploads/cityneuron3.jpg) 2\. Neurons as compared to the distribution
of galaxies in the universe:
[http://3rdeyevisionblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/neuron-g...](http://3rdeyevisionblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/neuron-
galaxy.jpg)

Take them as you will. Is it a perfect analogue? Of course not, but it is a
striking fractal self-similarity that illustrates the types of structures that
tend to form in the universe. Who is to say that a city is not a form of
brain; or the globe, networked in much the same way? Or the universe for that
matter, massive clusters connected by vast filaments of matter held together
by gravity and energy itself?

Each part, at every scale, centers around the transfer and storage of
information. What is this thing, this universe, that has formed these patterns
at so many levels?

It's fun to think about.

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PavlovsCat
> While some of us can name the inventor of the light bulb

Okay, quiz time, no using the internet: who invented the light bulb?

~~~
gry
I'll bite. It has a storied history...good stuff.

[http://www.unmuseum.org/lightbulb.htm](http://www.unmuseum.org/lightbulb.htm)

~~~
tree_of_item
> no using the internet

------
bane
Just a counter point, whenever anybody wants to solve _really_ hard problems,
the think tank, lab, whatever that's setup to do the solving is very rarely
near a city.

~~~
Snail_Commando
For what it's worth [ _]_ , I'm pretty sure CERN(/LHC), ESRF, SLAC Nat.
Accelerator Labs, Lawrence Livermore, Lawrence Bekeley, Sandia, Princeton
Plasma Phys. Lab, Brookhaven, Fermilab, Argonne Nat. Lab, TRIUMF, Sudbury
Neutrino Observatory, Oak Ridge, Research Triangle Park, various institutions
within the Max Planck Society, Institute for Advanced Study, Bell Labs, Xerox
PARC, RAND Corporation, (and likely many others...), all have/had facilities
within (at most) 100 km of a city with a population of at least 150,000
people. Several of these institutions are within commuting distance of major
world cities.

In the set of nation state funded research facilities (e.g. funded by US Dept.
of Energy, European Research Council, etc.) I'm willing to bet that most of
the facilities are _more often_ relatively near cities (greater than 150K
pop). Many (high energy / high capital cost) facilities, employ on the orders
of 1-10K staff alone.

[ _]_ (... and that Basic Science, High Energy Physics, Computational Science,
Basic Tech, Corporate Research, and/or Public Policy/Economic/GeoPol research
are the hard problem spaces you are alluding to...)

~~~
bane
> have/had facilities within (at most) 100 km of a city with a population of
> at least 150,000 people.

I mean, yeah, _everywhere_ is basically within walking distance if you change
the definition around enough.

I've actually spent a bit of time at towns near big labs, and for the most
part these are not the kinds of big cities solving problems the article is
trying to assert. They're sleepy little towns, many of which barely have a
building over 2 stories. In fact, I live 20 minutes from a major biomed lab. I
definitely do not live in a major city. 20 year ago people would have called
this entire area "farms".

The article is positing that _Cities_ , BIG Cities, are the places hard
problems get solved. Not places withing an hour drive of a big city. CERN,
ESRF, SLAC, etc. aren't _in_ major cities of their respective countries.
150,000 people is not a big city. If the supposition was correct, it would
make sense to set these kinds of hard problem solvers in your densest, most
populated cities. NYC would be thick with labs, Paris, Tokyo and London would
all be centers of major Research facilities.

I think the Soviets got it right with not being coy about what these places
are: наукогра́д "science cities". For example, Tri-cities, WA is a "farm" town
that only exists because one of the biggest U.S. nuke labs was built there. It
was built there because it's out in the middle of nowhere. ORNL is a 2.5 hour
drive from Nashville. Brookhaven, 1.5 hours.

My point is that cities don't solve hard problems. Cities merely bring
efficiency that can be a useful tool in aiding this process. It'd be hard and
more expensive to build something like the LHC without good infrastructure in
place to move all the equipment in, so of course you're going to have good
transit links and communications infrastructure etc. But the LHC wasn't built
in downtown Paris was it?

[] (... and that Basic Science, High Energy Physics, Computational Science,
Basic Tech, Corporate Research, and/or Public Policy/Economic/GeoPol research
are the hard problem spaces you are alluding to...)

yeah basically. Let's be real honest here, the kinds of "problems" the Bay
Area seems to spend most of it's time solving appear to be mostly figuring out
how to extract the maximum amount of money out of fairly uninteresting
technical implementations designed to let people chat and share cat pictures.
In other words, money for engineering, not problem solving.

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applecore
This is the first time I've seen this metaphor applied to San Francisco, and
not New York.

~~~
hueving
The article is about intelligence, not narcissism. :)

