This was an enjoyable take on SF. I experienced something similar, but you described its psychology beautifully. You also captured the bifurcation of wokeism and techno-determinism as the culture war's fault line. Well done. I was inspired to try the letter format as well.
Loved how the first half of this post read. Having been in Australia for the last 12 days and seeing how for the most part people are happy here, the U.S. is unwell. Hoping it will get better in 2025.
I lived in Santa Cruz 1992-1995 and frequently went to SF. But the first time I arrived there was on the Green Tortoise (do you know it?), and it was like driving into the Emerald City for me when I saw Golden Gate. I had been a big fan (still am really) of the Beat writers. I stayed in the “European Guesthouse” and met tons of good folks and had WILD times. I went to City Lights Bookstore like a pilgrim to a shrine, had a round of Anchor Steams at Vesuvio’s and took a piss in Jack Kerouac Alley. I haven’t been back since 1995, and I won’t go. It’d be too heartbreaking; I’d rather keep my memories intact.
Happy New Year David. Interesting to hear your reflections on San Francisco, where my brother has lived for 30 years. He is not as Brighton as me and may have a logo-ed Patagonia jacket :-)
As I read through your assessment of your 2024 predictions and your predictions for 2025, I was wondering why your annual reflections put predictions centre-stage; that is, how do you feel this helps in terms of generating interesting and useful insights?
I guess my question comes in part from my immersion in complexity, where embracing emergence rather than trying to predict - and focusing on things that you selected at the start of the year - seems like a more appropriate approach.
My brother is probably more into prediction than I am too!
Happy New Year! For me, the predictions are a useful exercise in humility—much like a pre-analysis plan in research—that forces me to reflect on why I thought things would turn out a certain way and what the many (complex) factors were that caused them to turn out another way.
When I worked at foundations, colleagues would make insanely confident pronouncements about how the grants they made would change the world. And then things turned out differently, but we never revisited their past expectations. So I respect Open Philanthropy for asking their program staff to make predictions about their grants and revisit them:
Similarly, with so much talk about the future of AI, I appreciate people like Gary Marcus and Miles Brundage making actual bets with specific criteria:
This was an enjoyable take on SF. I experienced something similar, but you described its psychology beautifully. You also captured the bifurcation of wokeism and techno-determinism as the culture war's fault line. Well done. I was inspired to try the letter format as well.
Loved how the first half of this post read. Having been in Australia for the last 12 days and seeing how for the most part people are happy here, the U.S. is unwell. Hoping it will get better in 2025.
I lived in Santa Cruz 1992-1995 and frequently went to SF. But the first time I arrived there was on the Green Tortoise (do you know it?), and it was like driving into the Emerald City for me when I saw Golden Gate. I had been a big fan (still am really) of the Beat writers. I stayed in the “European Guesthouse” and met tons of good folks and had WILD times. I went to City Lights Bookstore like a pilgrim to a shrine, had a round of Anchor Steams at Vesuvio’s and took a piss in Jack Kerouac Alley. I haven’t been back since 1995, and I won’t go. It’d be too heartbreaking; I’d rather keep my memories intact.
I wanted to hear more about your interpretations of what you observed in SF, how the city has changed and how you have changed!
Happy New Year David. Interesting to hear your reflections on San Francisco, where my brother has lived for 30 years. He is not as Brighton as me and may have a logo-ed Patagonia jacket :-)
As I read through your assessment of your 2024 predictions and your predictions for 2025, I was wondering why your annual reflections put predictions centre-stage; that is, how do you feel this helps in terms of generating interesting and useful insights?
I guess my question comes in part from my immersion in complexity, where embracing emergence rather than trying to predict - and focusing on things that you selected at the start of the year - seems like a more appropriate approach.
My brother is probably more into prediction than I am too!
Happy New Year! For me, the predictions are a useful exercise in humility—much like a pre-analysis plan in research—that forces me to reflect on why I thought things would turn out a certain way and what the many (complex) factors were that caused them to turn out another way.
When I worked at foundations, colleagues would make insanely confident pronouncements about how the grants they made would change the world. And then things turned out differently, but we never revisited their past expectations. So I respect Open Philanthropy for asking their program staff to make predictions about their grants and revisit them:
https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/how-accurate-are-our-predictions/
Similarly, with so much talk about the future of AI, I appreciate people like Gary Marcus and Miles Brundage making actual bets with specific criteria:
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/where-will-ai-be-at-the-end-of-2027