Luke Burgis, author of Wanting, said it was very fun talking with @patrickc — Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison — about New Aesthetics at the @ClunyInstitute’s conference last month.

The pairing comes with history: Collison and economist Tyler Cowen — Marginal REVOLUTION, where this post appears, is Cowen’s blog with Alex Tabarrok — have collaborated before, co-authoring a 2019 Atlantic essay calling for a new “science of progress” and launching the Fast Grants program in 2020 to quickly fund COVID-19 research. The “what happened in 1971” question raised later in the conversation refers to the long-running stagnation debate over why a range of economic and technological indicators shifted around that year, terrain Cowen helped popularize with his 2011 book The Great Stagnation.

They discussed:

• The origin story of the New Aesthetics grants, and why he and Tyler Cowen disagree on almost everything aesthetic (1:00)
• Why culture is “stuck,” including the idea that a 1926 Bauhaus building could pass for one from last year (2:30)
• Modernism’s explicit, stated mission to tear down beauty — “they weren’t hiding it” (3:30)
• Solzhenitsyn’s view that while goodness and truth can be faked, beauty “bears within it its own verification” (6:30)
• Whether beauty is objective, including the contrast between Toledo, Spain and Toledo, Ohio (7:30)
• Detroit’s roughly 25 rich years and the Detroit Institute of Arts, compared with Silicon Valley’s 50 years of wealth; “We could do the Silicon Valley art tour in a coffee break” (14:30)
• Whether Y Combinator was secretly modeled on the art atelier (18:30)
• The highest-leverage point for aesthetic renewal, which used to be churches, and what that role might be now (27:00)
• The sacred as an “endangered species,” and Patrick’s alternative theory of what happened in 1971: “we lost the sacred, so we can’t have nice things” (28:30)
• A question about Vatican II and technological stagnation, which Patrick declined to answer; Luke Burgis did not (34:30)
• “Can anyone name a work of art made with AI?” followed by silence (37:30)
• Why Germany is preeminent in music, literature, and philosophy, and why its food is so bad, described as “a demand-side problem” (41:30)
• “Biology is so ugly, man.” Physics is beautiful; biology is “a tower of hacks” (43:30)
• The “anti-beauty conspiracy” of the last century and the latent demand that remains to be unlocked (52:30)
• Patrick’s live reaction to beeswax art (56:30)

Luke Burgis included the link to the conversation and said the YouTube version includes a Brian Eno introduction; Eno is the musician and producer credited with coining the term “ambient music.”

The post Luke Burgis interviews Patrick Collison on aesthetics appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.