I love San Francisco dearly. I love the optimism, the energy, the earnestness, the ambition. But most of the time, the culture here isn’t really what I need to make progress in my research. Often, it’s actively harmful.
The main thing I struggle with is deliberateness. Deep research requires a slower pace than tech industry work. Others are moving very quickly, and conversation often implies that I should be too. It often feels hard to give longer-term ideas time and space to develop while living in this social context. When I talk to people about what I’m thinking about or where I’m stuck, the questions they ask are usually about action, motion—and, often, incrementalism. Sometimes the stereotypical bias to action can be very helpful, even for a researcher! But often these framings aren’t what’s needed. Often I just need to sit with the problem for another hundred hours. And what I need from a conversation partner is a provocative question, a creative reframing, a thoughtful reference, etc.
Another issue is the prevailing relationship to understanding. People here like to be knowledgeable, in the sense of being able to discuss topics at parties or blog about them. But there’s often a pervasive shallowness at play. The social epistemics of what it means to know something are weak, instrumental. People want to understand something enough to use others’ results, not necessarily to discover something new. When I say “what does it mean to learn something?” my epistemics are very different from almost all my conversation partners here. This means conversation here rarely helps—and in fact often distorts my sense of what I’m looking for.
Social capital dynamics here are misaligned with what I’m aiming for. People are celebrated for shipping, for growing, for huge $ amounts, for going viral, etc. Those things are all fine, but they’re not exactly what I’m doing. My big achievement for a month might be to understand some important new detail of a research project. This culture is not terribly excited about that.
Rob Ochshorn pointed out something interesting: the Bay Area food culture sure seems to value deliberateness. “Slow food”, after all! Also consider John Muir, an absolute hero of the region, and the associated Sierra Club. It’s interesting that these subcultures can co-exist. Maybe I can give myself an infusion of these “slower” cultures while still playing in the tech scene.
Conversation with Rob Ochshorn, 2022-03-20