On San Francisco

XXXII

2024.02.04

Whenever everybody says something, everybody is probably wrong. 

Opinions seem to work like mobs, or herds. As more and more people cluster together around an idea, the more likely the next person is to show up as a believer. 

This post serves as both a travel blog of San Francisco and an exploration of herd mentality. 

Confirmation Bias

I don’t think I have to tell my readership that the internet creates echo chambers; it’s not only common knowledge, it’s now the subject of studies and analysis. 

Here’s an interesting example, “Recursive patterns in online echo chambers.” The linguistic crux of the paper is that echo chambers are a product of reinforcement seeking and conflict avoidance; we like to be told we’re right and we don’t like to feel that our ideas are challenged. While, it might sometimes feel like the mass of arguments on the internet indicate that we want our ideas challenged, I would argue that is no challenge at all, in the sense that the person you’re arguing with… well, they’re not actually listening. And, if you’re arguing on the internet, there’s a good chance that you’re not listening, either. 

An implication here is the digitization of herd mentality; we have this compounding fervor when an idea starts to take root. The difference in the probability between seeing one lemming and two lemmings is greater than the difference in the probability between seeing nine lemmings and ten lemmings. 

In other words, given that you’ve seen nine lemmings, you are more likely to see a tenth lemming than you are likely to see a second lemming given that you’ve seen one. The same goes for the number of people who believe you should buy a certain stock or avoid a certain city. 

Capital Cycles

In The Most Important Thing by Howard Marks, one of the concepts he brings up is being wary when everyone already holds the same opinion:

When a stock price is really high and keeps going higher, not only do we have plenty of confirmation bias in the positive price movement and other optimistic shareholders, but the contradicting information isn’t too obvious; after all, it’s not being reflected in the stock price, or the stock would be going down, right? Therefore, the stock must continue going up!

Outside of investors of publicly traded stock, you can see this in Venture Capital hype cycles and even in things as boring as commodities. The latter it’s perhaps most interesting because it results in entire long standing businesses over extending themselves and going under. If fertilizer is expensive, everyone makes a new fertilizer plant, and now there’s too much fertilizer, so fertilizer becomes cheap, and entire fertilizer companies go under. 

Well, the same goes for ideas. Right now, everyone has “bought stock” in the idea that San Francisco is a campsite at the gates of hell; whenever I told anyone I was going to visit, I was almost invariably met with a disturbed face and a simple question laced with genuine concern: “Why?”

The Safe Zone

First and foremost, just like any city, San Francisco has good parts and bad parts. For the first couple of nights I stayed in Central Richmond, a part that was good in the sense that it felt utterly safe. It was, however, “dead,” meaning in 20 something year old jargon that there were not many people out and about.  

Tuesday morning, I went on an hour and fifteen minute run from the place I was staying into Golden Gate Park and saw not one homeless person. 

Not one! 

According to everything I’ve been told, I should have been stabbed at least once on the run. Instead, I got to see this beautiful view: 

Golden Gate Park really is quite the thing; bigger than Central Park and full of art, nature, and people, it was nothing like the postmodern hell scape everyone had told me I would experience.

What a beautiful morning.

Next, I stayed in Hayes Valley, or, more appropriately, at the top of Hayes Valley; all of the restaurants and such were down an iconic sheer SF cliff face of a walk. It was only three or four blocks, but the road felt like it was at a 45 degree angle or more. 

This area was nice, too—around the restaurants, you didn’t see anything more disturbing than you’d see in Ann Arbor. Maybe less, in all honesty. 

The Bad Part

Perhaps part of the negative press around SF is the fact that the “Bad part” spills over onto one of the main thorough ways, market street. 

The “bad part” is largely confined to the Tenderloin district; I’m sure there are a dozen steak related jokes you could make there, but I’m not feeling any of them in particular. 

The bad part is more sad than anything. You don’t feel in danger in the same way that you might feel in danger when there’s someone who wants to deliberately cause you harm. 

Again… it’s really just sad to see. A lot of homeless people and homeless camps. You quickly become intimiately familar with the visual of the Fentynal lean… I’ll let you use google search if you’re unfamilar with the imagery. 

I drove through the Tenderloin to see it and the imagery of human suffering was quite overwhelming.

It overflows onto parts of Market Street, one of the main roads in the city. On Market Street, there are security guards every block and police are a pretty frequent site. It doesn’t feel unsafe to walk there; if anything, again, it is uncomfortable, sad and uncomfortable. 

The City isn’t Doomed

Really, it probably doesn’t take many pictures to blow up a story like San Francisco being a policy failure & decrepit wasteland. Moreover, there is merit to these claims; parts of San Francisco are decrepit, and very clearly, there is a massive, well documented policy failure that was discussed before the negative consequences were fully realized. 

The real kicker might be that, as mentioned, some of the central parts of the city are where the problems are visible. The hard part is that this doesn’t mean that San Francisco is, itself, hell on Earth. It has problems that need to be addressed, more so than many cities, but that doesn’t make it untenable. 

It’s almost like San Francisco has a messy living room that you see right when you walk in, but the rest of the house is kind of cool. Bad first impression, tons of redeeming qualities. 

The most in danger I felt was when I was walking down the Marina side of Webster Street after it rained; yes, I did slip and fall and land on my ass, and yes, a ten year old sitting in a window sill saw and laughed.

Don’t judge a book by it’s cover. Agreeing with what everyone else holds true is how you lose money in investing, and it’s maybe how you lose out on experiences, too. It’s hard to hold nuanced ideas, it’s easy to avoid integrating a piece of seemingly incongruent data and just confirm the bias. 

Life is nuanced, though.

The Highlight Reel

Other than Golden Gate Park, here were a handful of my SF favorites:

-Souvla, a Greek Restaurant with king sized portion of frozen greek yogurt; I had 5 servings in 60 hours on the assumption that the macros were the same as not frozen greek yogurt. 

-Shack15, a co-working space in the Ferry Building that felt more VC than startup founder

-Dumpling Home… Ishaan and I eviscerated 30+ dumplings, and I still had room for the aforementioned Souvla.

I might revisit San Francisco. It was pretty cool. 

It checks the majority of my boxes for what I like in a city. Also, I could see myself finding community, there.

Live Deeply,