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Museums? Please try to be serious. How many times have you been in your city's museum? How much smarter did it make you? Is West Branch more intellectual than other Iowa farm towns, because it has the Hoover Presidential Library?
I don't know what many people in this thread are smoking, but it's obviously something good.
The answers are NYC, DC, SF, Chicago, and Boston.
Minneapolis, Denver, and Seattle are not in the conversation if we are factoring in universities, museums, economy, and average intelligence.
This might be the vaguest thread concept I've ever seen on CD outside of "what's the best city in the U.S.?", but it seems many here are just using anecdotal experiences of meeting one person from a certain city, and then if that person was intelligent, then their home city is intelligent.
I'd put Seattle there. Tech people are very intelligent and educated.
Sorry but can't include D.C. as an idea incubator outside of politics. SF, Boston, NY, Austin,
You can't be serious. Exclude DC but include Austin? I would say Austin is up there in terms of patents, but DC overall has a fuller roster of highly educated individuals and is crazy saying it is just government.
DC attracts the best legal minds across the country.
DC attracts the best in Economics/ Finance, education, history... all around it attracts more highly skilled/educated individuals than Austin.
Again, Austin has a very well educated populace. It ranks well in percent of degrees received and is probably in the top 10 for# of patents. But as a whole Austin isn't this worldly educated city like Boston or DC that some keeps trying to lump it together with.
Austin is always trying to distance itself from its State but it's hard to do that when it's the capital. It's the capital of a state leading the charge on banning books. Despite the high percentage of degreed individuals there is still a significant contingent of insular thinking, backwoods, alternate facts, infowars following crowd.
What makes Austin stand out more is that it is in Texas. In the Northeast corridor it would be one of many.
Location: That star on your map in the middle of the East Coast, DMV
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Another separating factor for DC is the "intellectual class" of it's immigrant population by percentage of the regions total immigrants. It's only rivaled by SF, Boston on a percentage basis in that aspect. I'd expect Minneapolis and Seattle to also have good percentages of this.
There are idiots everywhere. A lot of the smart cities listed like Boston, DC and Seattle are full of idiots, sometimes in higher proportion than more modest cities.
I don't know what many people in this thread are smoking, but it's obviously something good.
The answers are NYC, DC, SF, Chicago, and Boston.
Minneapolis, Denver, and Seattle are not in the conversation if we are factoring in universities, museums, economy, and average intelligence.
This might be the vaguest thread concept I've ever seen on CD outside of "what's the best city in the U.S.?", but it seems many here are just using anecdotal experiences of meeting one person from a certain city, and then if that person was intelligent, then their home city is intelligent.
True, I was going to say that I met several—like, 8 or 9–intelligent and creative individuals from Detroit, but I met them all at a college in a different city, so ....
I think there's a very common conflation between educated and intelligent.
Most of the cities mentioned in this thread are commonly associated with high educational attainment. However, it's always been a bit irksome to me when folks use that as an exclusive measure of intelligence.
I'm of the opinion that intelligence is complex, and there are different types of aptitudes that make up a well-rounded intelligent person. Some cities excel much more in scientific/technical intelligence, some excel more in artistic/creative intelligence, and others still in social/emotional intelligence.
None of those are exclusive to any one city, and it's certainly more broad-ranging than the cities with the most PhDs per capita.
Intelligence is evenly distributed through the population. But migration shifts the balance. People oh high creative or productive capacity are drawn to the centers of art,science and commerce, i.e., the cities.
So the correct answer is, the cities with the greatest power to attract intellectuals.
Intelligence is evenly distributed through the population. But migration shifts the balance. People oh high creative or productive capacity are drawn to the centers of art,science and commerce, i.e., the cities.
So the correct answer is, the cities with the greatest power to attract intellectuals.
I would even go further and say that locals everywhere are almost equally boring and it's the transplants that make the difference.
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