A person’s environment is important. Optimizing one’s environment has been difficult historically, but is quickly becoming easier. This directly improves individuals’ lives by putting them in better environments. It also has the beneficial side effect of boosting collaboration between people aligned on ambitious future visions, increasing the production of important advances. One’s environment is essentially made up of the people in it. Fit with one’s environment can be thought of as social alignment.
Why is social alignment important for an individual?
The city you live in can encourage you to do the thing you’re best suited to doing, when 99% of cities would discourage you.
No matter how determined you are, it's hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It's not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do.
Cities and Ambition, Paul Graham
Note that there are two important implications of Graham’s idea: the individual is better off in a city that encourages their unique interests, and the general society is better when individuals are doing the things they’re born to do instead of what’s expedient.
Living with aligned people makes for a better life at the individual level. It makes it easier to self actualize. What’s really fun to me is programming and reading and writing about technology. I grew up on a farm. Not many people around me were doing those things. When I think back now, my calling has always been clear, to help build the future as an engineer and thinker. But I lost sight of that vision for years at a time. I mimicked my environment subconsciously, and my environment was usually optimized for another kind of life altogether. Self-actualization may be the primary focus of the 21st century if the world continues to progress, displacing concerns like hunger and physical security.
Ultimately, it’s just more fun to be around people with the same interests. It’s thrilling to see people’s faces light up with childlike excitement on Zoom calls in Discords built around a common interest. It feels so good to connect with people who get it, who appreciate the ideas you do.
Why is social alignment important for a society?
At the societal and global level, aligned communities enable collaboration between aligned people, allowing for the creation of ambitious projects. At the other extreme misalignment can be seen in many places in the US.
In San Francisco, there are the techies, and the people who hate techies. There are revolutionary efforts to bring autonomous transportation, in the same place where others are implementing revolutionary decarceration and deprosecution experiments. In the same place that technology is shooting ahead, many are finding that law and order seem to be regressing to a grittier time. Different visions are crashing into each other in the same place, and ultimately nobody’s very happy.
The great scientists and engineers are a treasure. They should be able to have the best environment possible to do their work. They should have environments even more optimized for them than the best we have now in places like the Bay Area.
At the national level, there is serious drag on advancement in areas like nuclear and biotech in the US, though the US has by far the largest collection of technical talent in the history of the world. The US also has federal regulations covering 300 million people. So we’re collecting the best talent in the world and putting it all under the same huge, lumbering bureaucracies. Of course, these agencies do a lot of good, but they represent a compromise between many very different people in a big country. A country at war with itself may not be able to move forward as well as a more united one.
How could this play out?
Of course, you want the happy medium. You want fundamental values alignment, as well as a diversity of backgrounds and approaches. But it doesn’t work to have a city divided between the highest-earning people in the world and people who viscerally hate high-earning people. Something has to give. Low-level tension and conflict permeates that kind of environment.
On a micro level, in the last couple of years, I have participated in a few online communities. They often struggle with an excessive range of interests. When people connect in a higher-bandwidth way, like on a Zoom call, a few people will end up talking about something no one else cares about. Even in an ostensibly aligned small group, there are just fundamentally different ways of looking at the world.
Then I participated in the most values-aligned community I’ve ever been in, 1729. It’s a community of ambitious techno-optimists. Everything I see in that community is at least somewhat interesting to me. And subgroups can form. For example, there is a fitness group in the community. Obviously, there are fitness groups everywhere. But techno-optimist fitness groups? Harder to find, in my experience. This alignment creates a rich exchange of ideas and experimentation and progress, and ultimately better results than people who are united only by an interest in something like “self-improvement”. People work together better when they think more similarly.
More broadly, what has been and will be the progression of ease of environment optimization? When you are plopped onto the Earth at birth, it’s very unlikely that spot will end up being the best place for you. But it can be difficult to figure out what the best place is. It’s easier to just settle, even if you have a nagging suspicion that you’re in the wrong place. So it’s very important that there be a range of high-quality environments available and accessible to each person.
For some time there has been the opportunity to move to a city roughly aligned with your interests: tech startups in SF, finance in NYC and London, entertainment in LA. Things are a bit fuzzy and illegible. People have been working with vague ideas like “SF = tech” or “NYC = finance.”
In the last ten years, the idea of comparison shopping for cities like you would a car became first niche then mainstream. From Nomadlist and the broader digital nomad community, to sizable migrations to Miami, Austin, and NYC in the last few years with people aligning around more specific vibes, not just big blobs of industries. The massive chunk of tech in the Bay Area is breaking into different parts spread across the US.
There are experiments like LaunchHouse and Creator Cabins. We might be seeing the beginning of the mass production of scenes. Lively, intellectually and creatively stimulating communities of practice popping up by the dozen around the world. It’s very easy to form communities online and instantiate them on land. There is a lot of experimentation going on.
For many, especially the young and those working in careers like software engineering, it has become so easy to move. There is the remote work trend, of course. We have seen our social networks become more portable, as it’s become easier and easier to stay in touch at a great distance.
It’s also just easier to learn about cities and what they’re currently like. How would you peek into the current scenes in a country 100 years ago? Now you can browse the city’s subreddit and follow some people living there on Twitter and Instagram.
One version of this grouping of likeminded people is emerging in what has been called The Big Sort, the ideological clustering that has been going on for some time in the US and continues. See Americans are fleeing to places where political views match their own.
In many ways, for many reasons, we are now selecting communities like we would select any other product or service online. We may be starting to move from selecting communities by more detailed specifications than ever to creating communities perfectly matched to our specifications. Ordering a custom city instead of settling for a good-enough city. Crowdfunding the perfect city for you and the 100,000 people in the world most aligned with you.
Where could we end up? We could end up with a vast range of affinity communities, with people of every intellectual and creative niche finding an environment where their talents can be best expressed. Small, tight groups, able to work together better and fight less. It’s a somewhat contrarian idea. But as an American in 2022, honestly it sounds like a relief to escape the constant low-level bitter ideological conflict. And bringing together people with similar goals has proven to be nothing less than magical in places like Silicon Valley and Hollywood.