Astral Codex Ten

Notre Dame

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Notre Dame

Article

Notre Dame is a recurring venue in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between October 04, 2021 and December 17, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “there was active renovation on Notre Dame (which went horribly wrong with an accidental fire)”; “recent restoration of Notre Dame”; “rich donors gave $1 billion to rebuild Notre Dame after a fire”. It most often appears alongside France, AI, Christianity.

Metadata

  • Category: Venues
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: October 04, 2021
  • Last seen: December 17, 2024

Appears In

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.

Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture
October 04, 2021 · Original source
Baumol's Cost Disease and concepts of comparative advantage are critical in here. And you can tell, because actually we _are_ still building, or re-building, a few of these -- there was active renovation on Notre Dame (which went horribly wrong with an accidental fire), and Sagrada Familia is actively under construction. But the cost to employ skilled masons to produce that kind of ornamental stonework has gone up _drastically_ relative to the baseline of what laborers broadly earn. It used to be that if you were a lower class person with the aptitude for engineering, "mason" was probably your best career choice. And you could still choose that! But you also could be any of a dozen other flavors of engineer, and many of those choices would carry considerably less risk of bodily harm, plus many of them have the "bits versus atoms" leverage, such that your work can ultimately produce much more marginal revenue per hour of labor. The fact that the kind of person who might decide to become a mason has that kind of life choice available feeds back into what it costs to hire a mason.
Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House
December 04, 2024 · Original source
All that ornament - the gilded plaster, the cast iron balcony, etc - required trained artisans. These artisans aren’t completely gone - some of them were no doubt involved in the recent restoration of Notre Dame and other similar projects. But they’re no longer organized into giant corporations capable of decorating a whole city. Wolfe:
Links For December 2024
December 17, 2024 · Original source
49: There’s been a Twitter spat over effective altruism. Back in 2019, Peter Singer published an article saying that rich donors gave $1 billion to rebuild Notre Dame after a fire, but that could have saved ~285,000 lives and maybe donors should take that equally seriously. This month, the NYT used “effective altruists are against restoring Notre Dame” as a jumping-off point for its real complaint (it would rather we have "a philanthropy network that gave specifically to social justice movements . . . racial justice groups, climate justice groups and transgender protection groups"). There were several good responses, most notably Dylan Matthews’.
Inline links: Dylan Matthews’
(my own opinion on Notre Dame: although you can come up with a model in which charitable dollars are zero-sum - each dollar I donate to the cathedral doesn’t go to Giving What We Can - this doesn’t really describe charity on the social level, where some donors are more excited about global health and others about national pride. To a first approximation, these things don’t funge, and attempting to capture the tiny bit of value from the ways they do funge isn’t worth making everyone in the world mad at us. Funding Notre Dame is in the top percentile of uses for money, and it feels mean-spirited to snipe at it and not at everything else in the world. People should consider donating a fixed fraction of their income that makes sense to them to effective charity, then feel free to use the rest for whatever they want, including other charity, without getting criticized.)