Speaker unverified: belief

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…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? I have a few thoughts on this, and I don't know if I have an answer to the actual question, but I can add some context. I don’t necessarily think that I’m the best person to ask about this–– a better person to ask would be an architect who can talk about how design and taste have evolved over the course of the 20th and 19th centuries. Generally, I don't have a huge amount of opinion on aesthetics; to the extent that I do tend to favor simple minimalist, clean lines. One of my favorite pieces of construction is this bridge called Saglinatobel, which is built in Switzerland. It’s the banner on my Twitter account, and it's this really simple minimalist tiny curve of concrete that's exactly in the shape it needs to be to resist the forces acting on it. So to some extent, to me, it's like you're asking, “Why did aesthetics change from like worst aesthetics to better aesthetics?” That's obviously not what I actually think, but I just want to shed some light on where I'm coming from. Do you want to separate out the question a little bit because I think it's more of a question about why modern buildings have less ornamentation. Not necessarily that they're ugly per se, but I think there's a really lot of really beautiful modern architecture. Again, an architect would be a better person to ask about this, but I will sort of muddle my way through using light and space and form to like create these big interesting open big impressive open spaces that create a lot of interesting shapes. A big expansive space is what they're really going for to be a good example of this. So you look at the new Terminal for the Portland airport, which has this big giant mass timber roof, which isn’t a usual way of building these big large-spanning structures, but it's really neat, it’s interesting, and that's a lot of what you see these days. A lot of architecture is focused on this, and that's been pretty common throughout history, right? If you like cathedrals, it's like they're trying to create these big impressive spaces using light and stuff to create this impressive space that feels like the Pantheon. It's the same thing. I think it's really about how you want to separate out the question of “Why it’s ugly” (which I do not necessarily agree with) and “Why does it not have so much?” Why is there so much less ornamentation is a little bit more defensible.…

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