Here are some other considerations. They sort of overlap yours; but some people might find these frames carve things at a more helpful level of abstraction.
Groundedness: Some people encounter rationality ideas and either go crazy, or do lots of harm to themselves (for example, by working themselves into burnout or depression from a sense of moral guilt). Living locations can be more or less conducive to this. Berkeley seems particularly bad—it’s filled with a pretty trippy aesthetic. It feel unsafe/unwholesome in terms of various problems with homelessness, crime, etc. Oxford is a lot better. It’s small, calm, beautiful, safe and with a very stable and historic culture. Though it’s still not on the Pareto frontier of groundedness.
Proximity to power (or greatness on some other dimension): Hubs are real. People go to San Francisco to start startups, LA to become actors, London to work in finance, DC to work in think tanks… and so forth. For me this was an almost overwhelming consideration in wanting to live near San Francisco. Nowhere else has such a remarkable diversity of ambitious intellectuals; people like Jonathan Blow, Bret Victor, Peter Thiel (yes, I know he left eventually), Elon Musk, Michael Nielsen, the YC crowd, random people like the guy who wrote Thinking Physics and many many others… Whenever I did not live here, I’d pay a lot of attention to where interesting people and projects where located. And a ridiculously high number of roads would lead back to SF.
Here are some other considerations. They sort of overlap yours; but some people might find these frames carve things at a more helpful level of abstraction.
Groundedness: Some people encounter rationality ideas and either go crazy, or do lots of harm to themselves (for example, by working themselves into burnout or depression from a sense of moral guilt). Living locations can be more or less conducive to this. Berkeley seems particularly bad—it’s filled with a pretty trippy aesthetic. It feel unsafe/unwholesome in terms of various problems with homelessness, crime, etc. Oxford is a lot better. It’s small, calm, beautiful, safe and with a very stable and historic culture. Though it’s still not on the Pareto frontier of groundedness.
Proximity to power (or greatness on some other dimension): Hubs are real. People go to San Francisco to start startups, LA to become actors, London to work in finance, DC to work in think tanks… and so forth. For me this was an almost overwhelming consideration in wanting to live near San Francisco. Nowhere else has such a remarkable diversity of ambitious intellectuals; people like Jonathan Blow, Bret Victor, Peter Thiel (yes, I know he left eventually), Elon Musk, Michael Nielsen, the YC crowd, random people like the guy who wrote Thinking Physics and many many others… Whenever I did not live here, I’d pay a lot of attention to where interesting people and projects where located. And a ridiculously high number of roads would lead back to SF.