Comment by neilv
8 days ago
> It's not that the average person is any less tribal up there, but because Silicon Valley contains such a high concentration of people testing ideas in the world, it selects for people that must regularly re-evaluate their biases or fail.
Is this true?
based on my travels to many parts of the world, yes. being mis-aligned with reality has very real, negative, consequences when building companies, and therefore people here are forced to be more truth-seeking.
(not all ofc - i would say this forcing function applies to < 1% of the population in SFBay, but that is still a far greater concentration than anywhere else i've seen).
i find similar truth-seeking-ness in long-term investors. cultures that are more short-term oriented, and who have less feedback from the market, seem to deviate away from truth-seeking because the forcing function becomes weak: you aren't quickly penalized for being wrong.