Brian Potter: evaluation

Transcript context

…Tyler Cowen was interviewed by Patrick Collison and one of the things Tyler Cowen said was that there should be more blogs focused on one particular area or issue and just kind of raise the salience of it and help drive insight and understanding of it. I feel like you've done that really well with Construction of Productivity and I'm curious as to what other areas would you like to see the blogs that do for their area what you have done for construction productivity–– which is taking a broader view of what's happening, what the trends are, and trying to add more insight to professional problems. Oh, good question. Yeah, I feel like there's so much about this I was complaining about. I think a very underrated problem is this giant Civilizational machine that takes in raw materials and spits out finished goods and services and high quality of life. Nobody really knows how it works and mostly how it works is completely undocumented. It does not exist in written information anywhere, and the information that is written down is maybe in one particular company’s shared drive or something like that. There are no instructions for building a Toyota, and it might be very hard to kind of recreate that if you needed to, but just in general, I would like to see somebody do something similar for manufacturing, especially since so much manufacturing knowledge has been lost to this move to China and other places where labor is cheaper. There's just so much information about how things get built and manufactured that just isn't written down anywhere or isn't written down anywhere accessible. You see kind of people share the same small number of resources for how these things work over and over again. I asked a few people who I thought would know about it, “Is there any book written that actually explains what it’s like to get something built in china or what building things in china are actually like, and they're all like, “No, I don't know any source that exists. ” There are a few blogs that describe their particular experiences, which end up being overly valuable resources, but there's no general source of available information for how any of that works. So yeah, I just think that documentation of how the civilization machine functions are just wildly under-invested in which I guess is true for documentation in general right? Nobody wants to do that because the payoffs are far in the future and uncertain, and the costs are upfront. So it's not surprising to me that it doesn't exist, but I do think that you know in general terms, people are really very interested in understanding how things work and if you can explain how something works, even if it seems like a fairly niche topic, you can get quite a bit of attention. So for anybody who works in manufacturing, I think you would find quite a bit of success if you started writing things about how it functions. Interesting. Okay, excellent. To listeners who know about manufacturing, do spin up your substacks. Dwarkesh Patel Okay, so this is part two of my conversation with Brian Potter. The first conversation was really interesting, and then afterwards, I realized that I’d forgotten to ask Brian about this really interesting theory that Scott Alexander and others have written about. Brian is the perfect person to talk to about this. So, I took the convenience of asking him to come on again. The question is basically, “Why does modern architecture just look so much uglier than things that were built 100 years ago or 200 years ago?” You would have thought that due to increases in technology and the build-up in new ideas and designs that things would become prettier. But if you look at a building that was built in the last 100 years, it just looks like a cylinder or a rectangle of glass and concrete. But if you look at things that were built before, you’d see things like Sagrada Familia or intricate cathedrals or even these skyscrapers that have all these flourishes, ornaments, and all these decorations. So Brian, what is going on? Why are things so much uglier now?…

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