Lol. Damn, the 0 interest rate era/tech bubble really made you guys cocky didnt it

I grew up surrounded by literally rocket scientists and some of the top minds in biochemistry and mechanical engineering as neighbors. Incredibly intellectual people. I did not grow up in California.

Its not like the Bay Area is the only place with smart people.

Say what?

Switzerland (or possibly Slovenia) has the highest STEM PhDs per capita.

There are many counties and cities in the US with higher PhD rates than any of the Bay Area counties. Most have major R1 unis, but not all.

SV is the VC capital of the world. I'll give you that. But, that's not even remotely the same as being the intellectual capital.

(And that’s not a knock on NM. I being it up as an example of an area that isn’t rarely bright up in these conversational circles)

I'd assume the intellectual capital makes the most intellectual property

There aren't many places where very smart people from all over the world move. New York is one, London used to be one, Bay Area is one. There are a lot of smart people in the bay area.

My eyes rolled straight into the back of my head.

I agree that an 'intellectual' (as a social class construct) might require similar socially oriented individuals to feel like they're among equals. I have no respect for such 'intellectuals'. I have a great deal of respect for people who are curious about the world around them and love to make new and wonderful things and think novel ideas.

I find that those two groups rarely overlap.

Yeah, mine too. It's hard for me to take these kinds of arguments seriously in 2023. I'm willing to concede that geographic proximity was necessary for collaborative intellectual work, but the internet has changed that milieu. I also don't think it was true pre-internet, as Einstein himself showed.

Linus Torvalds didn't need to be in the Bay Area of California when he created the Linux kernel, yet it didn't happen without a massive amount of collaboration enabled by the internet. Solzhenitsyn, after he emigrated to the USA after getting deported by the Soviet Union, continued his intellectual work and writing in Cavendish, Vermont which was and is extremely isolated. And that was pre-internet!

In a more lightweight form - what would you, as somebody interested in the matter, consider good criteria for "being the intellectual capital of the world" and what place would fit them?

I'd say such a place would need to be geared toward minimizing anything that could hinder intellectual capacity. The SF Bay Area (as I learned firsthand) is not such a place; the constant stress of financial insecurity does not bode well for intellectual pursuits. I don't know if any such place really exists, for pretty much the same reason - certainly not here in the US.

In short, it'd need to be someplace where people could engage in intellectual pursuits for their own sake, and where the results of those pursuits are freely available to everyone - no censorship, no profit motives, no IP restrictions, nothing except the free creation and exchange of knowledge.

I firmly believe that any city which institutes a land value tax and uses it to fund a citizens' dividend / universal basic income is much more likely to become an intellectual capital than a city which does not. Land speculation is the major contributor to socioeconomic inequality and consequently the major obstacle preventing cities from being truly amenable to intellectual pursuits (rather than the current status quo of financial pursuits). Directly addressing it - by requiring landowners to internalize the opportunity costs they otherwise externalize onto the rest of society - is IMO the most crucial step toward allowing people to engage in intellectual pursuits without fear of failure and without being bound by concerns like profitability.

Culturally, San Francisco, Seattle, and Boston strike me as good candidates once they address the above; the first of those three to implement LVT+UBI is the one I'd bet on becoming the "intellectual capital of the world". I'm personally hoping Reno evolves into such a candidate, but that's one hell of a long shot :)

What I learned very quickly is that it's rather difficult to stay intellectually engaged when even a six-figure salary is paycheck-to-paycheck living in a studio apartment.

I moved back to Reno shortly before COVID, and since doing so I've found myself to be much more productive. The "intellectual capital of the world" can shove it.