Are People in Silicon Valley Just Smarter?

Are People in Silicon Valley Just Smarter?


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Beyond the Coffee Shop

Today, researchers have recognized that the coffee-shop phenomenon is actually just a mirror of what occurs when people move from sparse rural areas to jam-packed cities.

As people begin living atop one another, so too do their ideas. And, as Matt Ridley aptly describes, innovation happens when these crowded ideas "have sex."

Geoffrey West, a physicist from Santa Fe Institute, found that when a city's population doubles, there is a 15 percent increase in income, wealth and innovation. (He measured innovation by counting the number of new patents.)
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But this hyperconnected world is not happening in isolation to other changes.

As I've noted in previous blogs, the number of people connected to the Internet is exploding, going from 1.8 billion in 2010 to 2.8 billion today, and as many as 5 billion by 2020.

The opportunities for collaborative thinking are growing exponentially, and since progress is cumulative, the resulting innovations are going to grow exponentially as well.

Ultimately, these virtual worlds will create massive, global virtual coffeehouses for entrepreneurs to meet, to innovate, to create businesses and solve problems.
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Well... having sex within the family brings genetic degradation, repeating failures in the genes - and I guess the same thing happens with this idea-orgy and memetic degradation

Sorry, I see no fundamental improvements since Neumann, Knuth and PARC, making money is not a reliable measurement for innovation or technical excellence. Sorry, today billions of people don't really need Internet, but clean water and food instead of dying from diarrhea; real hope for the future instead of destroying their environment for luxury furniture, hamburger meat or oil; or right to follow their own faith instead of their invaders'.

Even if they are simply invisible from the Silicon Valley. Maybe, if you want to look farther, should climb to a peak instead of mobbing below. :-)



Russell Martin
If they are so smart, why do they live on a big fault where there is a shortage of water? ;-)


I think they could organize to have the water they NEED - the problem is that they WASTE too much because they can afford a pool and a garden in a desert (a perfect demonstration of being "just smarter", by the way). Or am I completely wrong with this assumption?


Russell Martin 
IMO it’s complicated, Lorand. On the whole there are too many people for the natural hydrology to support. Most of the time there is enough water because of the extensive infrastructure built to support the large population, but because of budgets nothing is over-engineered to deal with every potential drought. In good times people tend to forget the lessons and discipline of lean times.


I guess this is a fundamental problem. We build an infrastructure to run things in "bad times". Then, we must financially sustain it in "good times" by importing more people and stuff. Then a bad time comes again, and the infrastructure must be extended, increasing the stress on the environment. This repeats until either the infrastructure or the environment fails; going down or abandoning something that expensive is "impossible".
I rather see this as a natural pattern and not eventual memory problem... This is why I think "create businesses AND solve problems" statement is ridiculously shallow: business approach is the problem itself (and KILLS true innovation by the way, but that needs a longer explanation).
Thank you and all the best in your quest "helping people..."!