A world with pyramids Which would you choose— a world with pyramids, or a world without? Hayao Miyazaki, The Wind Rises beautyevil
To know evil For to know evil, for them, was to know it not by pure intelligence by by experience. Charles Williams, The Mind of the Maker evil
If you look for the light If you look for the light, you can often find it. But if you look for the dark, that is all you will ever see. — Uncle Iroh The Legend of Korra lightdarknessgoodnessevil
Against the survival of the prettiest An Essay by Samuel Hughes www.worksinprogress.co What has emerged here is that although survivorship bias probably does contribute to that to some extent, it is not the main explanation: premodern buildings may on average have been a bit less beautiful than those that have survived, but they still seem to have been ugly far less often than recent buildings are. The survivorship theory sought to explain the apparent rise of ugliness in terms of a bias in the sample of buildings we are observing. There is another kind of bias theory, which seeks to explain it in terms of a bias in the observer, saying for instance that every generation is disposed to find recent buildings uglier than older ones, and that this is why recent buildings seem so to us. This is a complex and interesting idea, which I am not going to assess on this occasion. Suppose, though, that our eyes are to be trusted. If this is so, strange and eerie truths rise before us: that ugly buildings were once rare, that the ‘uglification of the world’ is real and that it is happening all around us. urbanismarchitecturebeauty