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An aside, but I don’t understand why there is so much contention about what constitutes good architecture. Buildings are obviously not just for “economic function use”, because humans have human needs beyond economic function and they experience a positive mood from beauty. Beauty makes us value a thing more and makes the beautified thing more memorable. This is all obvious from glancing at cultures in history, understanding psychology, or just common intuition. There is no need to justify any architectural style beyond “I find this sufficiently beautiful” because beautiful things make us happier. You don’t need to scientifically explain why repeated motifs in a building make us happy (does it imitate foliage? Human symmetry?), because if it is beautiful it is beneficial to our emotional state and community. There may be edge cases where it is unclear whether prioritizing function or beauty is better, but this is trivially solved by simply asking its users which they prefer — it is always going to be some balance which is intuitively obvious.
My theory is that the inhuman competition to become a top architect actually selects for inhuman people: strivers who have undeveloped faculties for sensing beauty or intuitive philosophy, and whose architectural values are downstream from their senseless avarice and vainglory. Normal people — the people who create civilization through their balanced moral living, and for whom civilization exists — are disgusted by these people and their creations. Normal people are filtered out of being top architects because they care about beauty and balanced living (the symmetry of seasons): they pass off studying to enjoy a beautiful day or a beautiful girl or a beautiful moment, while the senseless one doubles down on his blueprints.
Yeah this is actually a pretty fascinating take I hadn't thought of before, but I tend to agree.
Same thing with the financial system. The brutal competition means the people who make the rules are way out on the tail of the distribution.
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