Obama Presidential Center

[Digital Planets]

I'd much rather have a park than something like that in my neighborhood, tbh.

It's real crime is against your eyes. I rather liked Daley's old system of iron fences, marble and flower boxes tbh. That's a winning recipe. Not a building shaped like an Ikea lamp.

Ikea lamp? That doesn't sound so bad. Give it a few years and it'll come apart on itself though.

[Dysmastan]

Of course not.

Just carve his face into every other tree in the park. It'll save the trees; most likely it will be cheaper too!

[Petrasylvania]

They'll need armed guards for the Obama Library.

[Ifreann]

They'll need armed guards for the Obama Library.

They'll need to use suppressors.

[Xerographica]

A fair point. Charity and altruism kind of poke a hole in your "people only pay for what they think is useful to them" theory Xero.

So does the fact that people often lack the knowledge to know what is and is not useful. I will give an example. Let's say someone decided that they wanted to create a perpetual motion machine. This of course would be highly useful to society if we could get it to work. Now, are there enough people in society who know that this is impossible so that they won't end up funding what will be a useless attempt?

What people in general think will be useful might not actually be so.

Like I said, correctly estimating the usefulness of things depends on brainpower and information. People aren't equally intelligent/informed. This means that people aren't equally effective at estimating the usefulness of things. In a market, each and every person has the opportunity to give their money to the most effective estimators of usefulness. The logical consequence is that more effective estimators have more influence than less effective estimators.

Is the distribution of influence optimal? No. Not even close. Many markets are missing. For example, the market is not going to make the decision whether to put the presidential center into the park. The reason that the market is not going to make this decision is because most people underestimate the usefulness of markets. The reason that most people underestimate the usefulness of markets is not because they are inadequately intelligent... it's because they are inadequately informed. The reason that most people are inadequately informed is because schools and universities are not markets. Each and every person does not have the opportunity to give their money to the teachers who most effectively estimate the usefulness of knowledge. It's a vicious cycle of ignorance that results in the suboptimal distribution of influence.

Hopefully we should all agree that nobody would benefit if the least intelligent/informed individuals had the most influence. So we should all agree that we would all greatly benefit by correctly determining which system is the most effective at giving the most influence to the most intelligent/informed individuals.

[Arlenton]

Yeah seems fine.

[Xerographica]

I received this reply to my comment on the article...

If it's trees that will sway your vote, plant the same or more trees being displaced.

Originally I would have preferred an architectonic landscape by burying the building which could be as big as the evolved program and green roof levels to model the landscape. Looking at this section of Olmsted's 'park' in a flat urban area, it is no "Capability Brown" - Platonics

Here's my reply...

The premise of Liuzhou Forest City is that trees and buildings do not have to be mutually exclusive. I really love this premise. From my perspective, the line between between the natural and the artificial should be completely blurred. Trees facilitate nature... and so should buildings. Biologists currently use all sorts of techniques to explore and study the biodiversity of jungle canopies. Ideally, buildings should just have just as much biodiversity as jungle canopies. Then biologists will be just as motivated to spiderman buildings.

I really enjoy seeing pictures of Ficus roots cascading over ancient ruins. It's wonderful how relatively quickly the jungle will reclaim a space. Architects, engineers and biologists should all put their heads together in order to figure out the best way for nature to reclaim all cities. The problem with our current society is that cross-pollination isn't maximized.