Similarly, the Los Angeles one meets in Culver City.
I think most people use words like "Boston" and "Los Angeles" ambiguously between referring to a municipality (with weird and constrained legal borders) and referring to the broader urban area whose densest part is located within that municipality. It's not particularly appropriate to refer to a place in a truly suburban location like Saugus or La Cañada as being in "Boston" or "Los Angeles". But in some sense it's more appropriate to refer to Cambridge or Culver City as being "in" these cities than certain places that are technically within city limits, like Deer Island in Boston (out beyond the airport and Winthrop) or Chatsworth Nature Preserve in Los Angeles (in the hills on the northwest edge of the San Fernando Valley).
I think I tend to view cities and towns as being defined by their city/town/etc limits, so (eg) Cambridge is clearly a distinct city from Boston in this regard.
Most of the meetups are in Cambridge, since it's easier to find venues around there. I'll defend calling it a Boston group though. If I talk to someone from say, Denver CO or Dallas TX or even upstate New York, they don't seem to usually recognize where I'm talking about when I say Cambridge but they do usually recognize what I mean when I say Boston.
Which seems fair. I'm the guy who thought San Francisco, San Jose, and San Diego were all short commutes from each other the first time I tried to do the backend for ACX Everywhere. (Caught that one in time!)
I think it's a uniquely American affectation to arbitrarily define a "city" as being a particular area determined by local government boundaries rather than the actual city. The City of London or the City of Sydney are both arbitrary local government boundaries which surround some historical centre of those cities, but everyone understands that London and Sydney refer to the actual big fuck-off cities including all their suburbs, and not just to that little central area. But then you go to Boston and everyone is suddenly very insistent that two thirds of Boston is not actually Boston.
If I'm not allowed to call the great big city of five million people that is labelled on my globe as "Boston" Boston, what the fuck can I call it? That thing needs a name.
The short answer is that each of those surrounding areas is a city or town in its own right. If you want to refer to the area as a whole, that's called "Greater Boston".
The longer answer is that I don't think the concept of a city/town as being defined by a city/town line is solely an American concept, although I wouldn't say it's a global concept either. For example Canada seems to have a similar system where you have individual cities/towns which are then grouped into "counties"/"regional municipalities"/etc which are in turn grouped into the familiar 10 provinces and 3 territories. Even London (which you mentioned) is made of The City of London and the 32 boroughs, which together sort of forms a de facto city line.
This also may be a particularly strong tendency in the Northeast, as New England states are mostly fully subdivided into towns and cities with few unincorporated areas and well-marked borders. In other parts of the country, my sense is that there is more unincorporated land, which allows cities to expand into these areas as their populations increase.
"If I'm not allowed to call the great big city of five million people that is labelled on my globe as "Boston" Boston, what the fuck can I call it? That thing needs a name."
What's even crazier is that when you go to Boston and you realize that, contrary to popular belief, most of it isn't actually Southie.
The Veterans Administration building near ucla is on federal land. I don’t exactly know the history of how it got to be a VA site early on, but it did, and federal ownership kept it from being incorporated into the city. I think universal city and West Hollywood were weird little chunks that just hadn’t been incorporated into the early 20th century, not for any particular reason, but just because of the development patterns. And then in the late 20th century, the movie studio, and the local nightclubs and gay communities (who had been taking advantage of being out of the control of LAPD) decided to prevent their land from being incorporated into the city (not sure why West Hollywood formed its own city and universal city stayed unincorporated). Most of the others were just already incorporated cities by the time LA expanded that far, though I didn’t know about Franklin canyon, and am unsure about marina del Rey.
I'm not sure the usage is ambiguous, so much as context dependent: if you're explaining where MIT is to someone outside the US, then Boston is an appropriate description. If you're giving someone walking directions, then a greater level of precision is required.
While saying MIT is in Boston is not technically correct, the intricacies of US urban zoning laws are not relevant in the first conversation. Explaining the distinctions between Boston and Cambridge and wherever is akin to the joke about the mathematician on a mountaintop. A hot-air balloon appears out of the clouds and a passenger shouts "We're lost, where are we?" to which the mathematician says "You're in a hot air balloon."
Of all cities which cannot complain about places technically outside the city being counted, Boston is near the top of the list. How many cities are there just within six miles of Boston Harbor? 12? 18? They're all Boston.
Very few, and much more distinct. They don't share public transit except for the meant-as-commuter-rail BART system, they have large physical gaps, and much of it is unincorporated. San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley's main suburbs are within city limits; Boston's suburbs are a dozen smaller towns with no physical gaps, served by the same subway trains and bus lines. They're all part of Boston, and anyone from anywhere in the metro area knows it.
Two cities that Scott was interested in which are missing: San Jose and Los Angeles (both in California). Furthermore, I had also identified 11 other cities outside the USA that could also potentially tag along:
- Sofia, Bulgaria
- Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada
- Tbilisi, Georgia
- Vilnius, Lithuania
- Bucharest, Romania
- Zurich, Switzerland
- Cairns, Australia
- Melbourne, Australia
- Jakarta, Indonesia
- Kuta, Indonesia
- Tokyo, Japan
If you're reading this and live in (or close enough) any of these 13 cities you may also want to add it yourself!
San Jose is up for grabs. The usual meetup location is not hosting one; we’re both overworked this month and not a particularly good fit for this request.
I'd be very interested in follow ups to these, as well as follow ups to prior voting guides. Did the supported positions pass? A few years later, did they turn out to have been worth voting for?
For the New York one, you might want to clarify -- that's 20 John St, 4th floor. Please don't go bothering one of the other floors. :P
(Also, while it does say "New York, NY", I do feel like it is worth being explicit -- this is 20 John St in Manhattan, not in Brooklyn. If you're in Brooklyn, you've gone to the wrong place!)
Consider Chase Oliver if you don't live in a swing state. It helps the Libertarians keep ballot access, and offer an alternative to both bigotry and wokeness: freedom.
I believe that we're better off with continued gridlock in the federal government than with either party in control. Because of this, and because I live in New Hampshire, I plan to vote a straight Democratic ticket for federal offices. But if you agree with me and you live in a red-leaning state, then I encourage you to vote a straight Republican ticket.
My logic here is that the only scenarios I need to bother considering are the ones in which some race is decided by one vote. Otherwise, the outcome is the same no matter how I vote. In federal races, New Hampshire is a pretty blue-leaning state (but we're big here on ticket-splitting and our state government is currently Republican-dominated). We're not quite a *safe* state: it's not likely Trump or any Republican congressional candidate will win in NH, but it's not crazy. But still, if any of these races are close, it's probably indicative of a red wave nationally. And if that happens, then my best hope for creating gridlock is to vote blue. But if I lived in a red state, then, mutatis mutandis, I'd be voting Republican.
What's a bit surprising to me is that I had to work the logic of this strategy out for myself. I've never seen anyone else point it out, when it's the kind of thing that seems like it ought to be common knowledge in rationalist circles.
> My logic here is that the only scenarios I need to bother considering are the ones in which some race is decided by one vote. Otherwise, the outcome is the same no matter how I vote.
There is a weird game-theoretic aspect to voting though. Superrationally, everyone ought to vote their conscience, because if everyone really voted their conscience, then they would get the candidates they want. Non-superrationally, if you were the only sentient person on planet Earth and everyone else was a P-zombie, you'd be better off staying at home, because voting wouldn't be worth the effort when the P-zombie vote is going to overwhelmingly drown out yours anyways. This is called the paradox of voting.
> Superrationally, everyone ought to vote their conscience, because if everyone really voted their conscience, then they would get the candidates they want.
But that isn't an option here because there aren't any candidates I want and there's no "gridlock" ballot option. So I need to reason in the face of bounded uncertainty about what other voters are going to do to determine what ballot choices are most likely to lead to my preferred outcome.
I'm intrigued and excited to see where this winds up. Looking forward to helping out at the Philly meetup!
The "Boston" meetup is in Cambridge. Honestly we* should rebrand as a Cambridge-based meetup group because we have ~never met in Boston proper.
*as in the ACX Boston meetup group
Similarly, the Los Angeles one meets in Culver City.
I think most people use words like "Boston" and "Los Angeles" ambiguously between referring to a municipality (with weird and constrained legal borders) and referring to the broader urban area whose densest part is located within that municipality. It's not particularly appropriate to refer to a place in a truly suburban location like Saugus or La Cañada as being in "Boston" or "Los Angeles". But in some sense it's more appropriate to refer to Cambridge or Culver City as being "in" these cities than certain places that are technically within city limits, like Deer Island in Boston (out beyond the airport and Winthrop) or Chatsworth Nature Preserve in Los Angeles (in the hills on the northwest edge of the San Fernando Valley).
Cities are weird, I agree.
I think I tend to view cities and towns as being defined by their city/town/etc limits, so (eg) Cambridge is clearly a distinct city from Boston in this regard.
Most of the meetups are in Cambridge, since it's easier to find venues around there. I'll defend calling it a Boston group though. If I talk to someone from say, Denver CO or Dallas TX or even upstate New York, they don't seem to usually recognize where I'm talking about when I say Cambridge but they do usually recognize what I mean when I say Boston.
Which seems fair. I'm the guy who thought San Francisco, San Jose, and San Diego were all short commutes from each other the first time I tried to do the backend for ACX Everywhere. (Caught that one in time!)
San Jose is much closer to SF than it is to San Diego though
I think it's a uniquely American affectation to arbitrarily define a "city" as being a particular area determined by local government boundaries rather than the actual city. The City of London or the City of Sydney are both arbitrary local government boundaries which surround some historical centre of those cities, but everyone understands that London and Sydney refer to the actual big fuck-off cities including all their suburbs, and not just to that little central area. But then you go to Boston and everyone is suddenly very insistent that two thirds of Boston is not actually Boston.
If I'm not allowed to call the great big city of five million people that is labelled on my globe as "Boston" Boston, what the fuck can I call it? That thing needs a name.
The short answer is that each of those surrounding areas is a city or town in its own right. If you want to refer to the area as a whole, that's called "Greater Boston".
The longer answer is that I don't think the concept of a city/town as being defined by a city/town line is solely an American concept, although I wouldn't say it's a global concept either. For example Canada seems to have a similar system where you have individual cities/towns which are then grouped into "counties"/"regional municipalities"/etc which are in turn grouped into the familiar 10 provinces and 3 territories. Even London (which you mentioned) is made of The City of London and the 32 boroughs, which together sort of forms a de facto city line.
Sorry if I'm opening up a can of worms.
This also may be a particularly strong tendency in the Northeast, as New England states are mostly fully subdivided into towns and cities with few unincorporated areas and well-marked borders. In other parts of the country, my sense is that there is more unincorporated land, which allows cities to expand into these areas as their populations increase.
"If I'm not allowed to call the great big city of five million people that is labelled on my globe as "Boston" Boston, what the fuck can I call it? That thing needs a name."
What's even crazier is that when you go to Boston and you realize that, contrary to popular belief, most of it isn't actually Southie.
> Culver City
For the fun of it I looked up Los Angeles's city lines. Apparently it has no fewer than NINE enclaves*, which are, from north to south:
- San Fernando
- "Universal City" (i.e. the NBCUniversal headquarters)
- a small sliver of Franklin Canyon Park
- West Hollywood + Beverly Hills
- the so-called "Veterans Administration" (???)
- Santa Monica
- Culver City (a city) + Ladera Heights (a CDP)
- Marina del Rey
- a medium-largish stretch extending from Inglewood to Rancho Palos Verdes
*according to OpenStreetMap; Google Maps shows fewer
The Veterans Administration building near ucla is on federal land. I don’t exactly know the history of how it got to be a VA site early on, but it did, and federal ownership kept it from being incorporated into the city. I think universal city and West Hollywood were weird little chunks that just hadn’t been incorporated into the early 20th century, not for any particular reason, but just because of the development patterns. And then in the late 20th century, the movie studio, and the local nightclubs and gay communities (who had been taking advantage of being out of the control of LAPD) decided to prevent their land from being incorporated into the city (not sure why West Hollywood formed its own city and universal city stayed unincorporated). Most of the others were just already incorporated cities by the time LA expanded that far, though I didn’t know about Franklin canyon, and am unsure about marina del Rey.
Interesting. But, for the sake of our collective sanity, if this thread gets any longer, I think I'll have to put it into the next Open Thread.
I'm not sure the usage is ambiguous, so much as context dependent: if you're explaining where MIT is to someone outside the US, then Boston is an appropriate description. If you're giving someone walking directions, then a greater level of precision is required.
While saying MIT is in Boston is not technically correct, the intricacies of US urban zoning laws are not relevant in the first conversation. Explaining the distinctions between Boston and Cambridge and wherever is akin to the joke about the mathematician on a mountaintop. A hot-air balloon appears out of the clouds and a passenger shouts "We're lost, where are we?" to which the mathematician says "You're in a hot air balloon."
Of all cities which cannot complain about places technically outside the city being counted, Boston is near the top of the list. How many cities are there just within six miles of Boston Harbor? 12? 18? They're all Boston.
No. Also, the SF Bay Area is also subdivided into numerous cities too.
Very few, and much more distinct. They don't share public transit except for the meant-as-commuter-rail BART system, they have large physical gaps, and much of it is unincorporated. San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley's main suburbs are within city limits; Boston's suburbs are a dozen smaller towns with no physical gaps, served by the same subway trains and bus lines. They're all part of Boston, and anyone from anywhere in the metro area knows it.
One helpful tip: look up your state's early voting options. I just voted today at the county board's office. No sticker 😔
Two cities that Scott was interested in which are missing: San Jose and Los Angeles (both in California). Furthermore, I had also identified 11 other cities outside the USA that could also potentially tag along:
- Sofia, Bulgaria
- Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada
- Tbilisi, Georgia
- Vilnius, Lithuania
- Bucharest, Romania
- Zurich, Switzerland
- Cairns, Australia
- Melbourne, Australia
- Jakarta, Indonesia
- Kuta, Indonesia
- Tokyo, Japan
If you're reading this and live in (or close enough) any of these 13 cities you may also want to add it yourself!
An LA person has sent me a form and I'm just waiting to hear back on details. Should be in this Sunday's Open Thread.
San Jose is up for grabs. The usual meetup location is not hosting one; we’re both overworked this month and not a particularly good fit for this request.
I'd be very interested in follow ups to these, as well as follow ups to prior voting guides. Did the supported positions pass? A few years later, did they turn out to have been worth voting for?
For the New York one, you might want to clarify -- that's 20 John St, 4th floor. Please don't go bothering one of the other floors. :P
(Also, while it does say "New York, NY", I do feel like it is worth being explicit -- this is 20 John St in Manhattan, not in Brooklyn. If you're in Brooklyn, you've gone to the wrong place!)
For me, the Boston facebook event link shows this error page:
"This content isn't available right now
When this happens, it's usually because the owner only shared it with a small group of people, changed who can see it or it's been deleted."
By searching on FB, it seems the correct link is: https://www.facebook.com/events/1187700865627496
The event got deleted due to an unexplained technical glitch and I had to recreate it. The post now has the correct link.
Thank you both! I was wondering whether something nefarious was going on.
Trevor K has a document with some preliminary suggestions for Boston: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bRk3ROQndk_5h7FXWCm2mGH3mWqcb_4TTOTGWDHGWZU/edit
Consider Chase Oliver if you don't live in a swing state. It helps the Libertarians keep ballot access, and offer an alternative to both bigotry and wokeness: freedom.
For Boston , the ballot questions would also be helpful to look at.
Ballot question guide is at https://www.sec.state.ma.us/divisions/elections/publications/information-for-voters-24/cover_2024.htm. There are also some additional local ballot questions. I'm not sure exactly how best to gather a list of candidates and local questions, given that people will be coming from different localities with different ballots.
Thanks, I found a good analysis of the state-wide ones at Tufts' Public Policy website, with pros and cons for all 5.
I believe that we're better off with continued gridlock in the federal government than with either party in control. Because of this, and because I live in New Hampshire, I plan to vote a straight Democratic ticket for federal offices. But if you agree with me and you live in a red-leaning state, then I encourage you to vote a straight Republican ticket.
My logic here is that the only scenarios I need to bother considering are the ones in which some race is decided by one vote. Otherwise, the outcome is the same no matter how I vote. In federal races, New Hampshire is a pretty blue-leaning state (but we're big here on ticket-splitting and our state government is currently Republican-dominated). We're not quite a *safe* state: it's not likely Trump or any Republican congressional candidate will win in NH, but it's not crazy. But still, if any of these races are close, it's probably indicative of a red wave nationally. And if that happens, then my best hope for creating gridlock is to vote blue. But if I lived in a red state, then, mutatis mutandis, I'd be voting Republican.
What's a bit surprising to me is that I had to work the logic of this strategy out for myself. I've never seen anyone else point it out, when it's the kind of thing that seems like it ought to be common knowledge in rationalist circles.
> My logic here is that the only scenarios I need to bother considering are the ones in which some race is decided by one vote. Otherwise, the outcome is the same no matter how I vote.
There is a weird game-theoretic aspect to voting though. Superrationally, everyone ought to vote their conscience, because if everyone really voted their conscience, then they would get the candidates they want. Non-superrationally, if you were the only sentient person on planet Earth and everyone else was a P-zombie, you'd be better off staying at home, because voting wouldn't be worth the effort when the P-zombie vote is going to overwhelmingly drown out yours anyways. This is called the paradox of voting.
EDIT: grammar
> Superrationally, everyone ought to vote their conscience, because if everyone really voted their conscience, then they would get the candidates they want.
But that isn't an option here because there aren't any candidates I want and there's no "gridlock" ballot option. So I need to reason in the face of bounded uncertainty about what other voters are going to do to determine what ballot choices are most likely to lead to my preferred outcome.