Van Gogh
Article
Van Gogh is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between February 09, 2021 and December 04, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “But as Van Gogh said about God creating the world”; “style transfer AIs that can make a painting feel more like a Van Gogh”; “arts in the style of Van Gogh or Picasso”. It most often appears alongside America, 1960s America, 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: February 09, 2021
- Last seen: December 04, 2024
Appears In
- Book Review: Why We’re Polarized
- What Are We Arguing About When We Argue About Rationality?
- Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House
Related Pages
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- America (2 shared issues)
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- 1960s America (1 shared issues)
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- 1964 Civil Rights Act (1 shared issues)
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- 3D printing (1 shared issues)
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- Abercrombie & Fitch (1 shared issues)
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- AI (1 shared issues)
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- Ajeya Cotra (1 shared issues)
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- Aldo Rossi (1 shared issues)
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- Alessandro Menini (1 shared issues)
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- Amazon (1 shared issues)
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- American Political Science Association (1 shared issues)
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- Andrew Johnson (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Ezra Klein is great. I know a lot of people throw shade on him for founding Vox. But as Van Gogh said about God creating the world, "We must not hold it against Him; only a master could make such a mistake". Ezra is a master and I was happy to be able to read his Why We're Polarized.
Inline links: Why We're Polarized
This last decade has been good for intuition, because we’ve finally been able to teach it to computers. There are now AIs that can tell dogs from cats, previously an impossible task for a machine. There are style transfer AIs that can make a painting feel more like a Van Gogh, or “more cheerful”, or various other intuitive things. Even text generation programs like the GPTs are conquering intuition - Strunk & White aside, there’s no ruleset for how to write, just better or worse judgment on what word should come next. Since these AIs are just giant matrix multiplication machines, “intuition” now has a firm grounding in math - just much bigger, more complicated math than the usual kind that we call “logical”.
First, the Bauhaus promised architects a promotion from tradesman to intellectual. Some, like Frank Lloyd Wright, had already started such a transition. But the average architect was just someone who knew some stuff about stone and columns and stuff. Rich people would hire one to build them a cool villa, the architect would follow instructions and make whatever cool villa the rich person had requested, the rich person would pay them, and they would make a decent living. But modernism told architects that they were not only brilliant romantic Artists in the style of Van Gogh or Picasso - they were also intellectuals. They should be able to discourse on which styles were bourgeois, which expressed the true meaning of Light and Structure, and so on. Someone who wrote manifestos on the true meaning of Structure is automatically in the upper middle class; they get invited to cooler parties than somebody who just knows things about different types of stone. This was the Bauhaus’ offer to architects, and they leapt at the opportunity.