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gwern comments on Open Thread: October 2009 - Less Wrong
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I have something of a technical question; on my personal wiki, I've written a few essays which might be of interest to LWers. They're in Markdown, so you would think I could just copy them straight into a post, but, AFAIK, you have to write posts in that WSYIWG editor thing. Is there any way around that? (EDIT: Turns out there's a HTML input box, so I can write locally, compile with Pandoc, and insert the results.)
The articles, in no particular order:
(If you have Gitit handy, you can run a mirror of my wiki with a command like
darcs get <http://www.gwern.net/> && cd www.gwern.net && gitit -f static/gwern.conf.)(Edit to say that this is in response to the culture and aesthetics article)
I take there to be a number of different things we want out of an piece of cultural production.
Expression of universal aspects of human nature, emotions.
Sensory stimuli (why old horror movies aren't scary, older movies have longer shots, and Michael Bay has a career).
Shared cultural experience- (we like to consume works that are already cultural embedded, we want to share in something nearly everyone experiences- this is why it is worth reading Homer, seeing Star Wars and listening to the Beatles).
Capturing the spirit of the times (we like it when works express what is unique in us, works that capture our sense of place and time, how we're different from our parents, etc. this is why punk music wouldn't have worked in the 18th century, why we have shows like the Wire, and why Rambo's motivations are really confusing for people born after 1980 who never took a modern history course.).
Your argument seems to turn on saying that whatever piece of culture you're consuming now you could be equally satisfied with something older. This seems to be the case with regard to the first criterion but once one admits the second and the fourth new production is essential.
But what extra sensory stimulation does Dan Brown's novels have over Don Quixote? If anything, the medieval printings (to say nothing of the illuminated manuscripts) could be much more elaborate and visually complex, and for every adjective Dan Brown employes, Cervantes uses 10 and throws in an allegorical speech. (I kid, but you know what I mean.)
Further, if we imagined that we had only a few books in existence of high quality (ie. not a lifetime's worth), and nothing else but this hot new medium of video games, then the technical development must come to an end at some point and then regular production will push us ever closer to the point where the argument resurrects itself. Notice that Nintendo has for 2 consoles generations now chosen to not compete on sound or graphics. I don't doubt that there are further innovations in store, but at some point video games will become like novels are now, and movies are fast becoming: a medium whose full limitations are known and anything desired produced.
With enough superior works of #1, we don't need that. But I think you're a little pessimistic. Why couldn'tve punk have worked in the 19th century?
Religious folks read the Bible and Islam in every time period for every conceivable purpose and regularly produce new interpretations for their time. Consider the hippie Jesus compared to the medieval Catholic Jesus; or look at higher biblical criticism. One might think that after 1800 and more years of intensive analysis & exegesis, nothing new could really be said about the text, much less a powerful new interpretation of just about everything that will send shockwaves through Christian & Jewish communities around the world and fundamentally altered many sects - in a way that was more appropriate for a post-Enlightenment/Industrial Age world.
And of course, Shakespeare keeps being tweaked and and reinterpreted to speak to society's current interests.
I admit to never having read Don Quixote. I've read Dan Brown and mostly hate him. But it seems pretty obvious to me that Brown's pace is a lot faster and thats basically what we mean by sensory stimulation for books. Its the equivalent of shorter shots in film. New problems are always popping up, the setting is always changing, etc. And the mind's eye can only adjust to so much additional description. I don't think a longer, more detailed description of a single scene creates more stimulating than more basic descriptions of three different scenes.
While this is true of some technologies I'm not sure this is necessarily true of all mediums. Either way, the technological advancements are permanent. Old black and white and color films don't suddenly become equally simulative once the technology plateaus. This means that the argument doesn't resurrect itself until well after the technology plateaus as you have to give the industry time to match older accomplishments in the other criteria. In other words, you don't oversaturate society with films until you've matched what is good about Citizen Kane, Casablanca and Seven Samurai but added high tech sensory stimulation.
/#1 and #4 aren't interchangeable. You can't quell the desire to consume works that speak to our uniqueness and "The Moment" by supplying people with universal works. Try forcing a teenager to listen to their parent's music (there is a surprising revival of classic rock with this generation but historically music taste revealed large generational differences).
The scholarly work on the rise of punk music almost always talks about punk as a response to a particular socio-polico-economic condition. Obviously cultural studies isn't a hard science and lacks ideal standards of evidence, but I've found this particular claim convincing. See Subculture: The Meaning of Style by Dick Hebdige. More obviously, the reaction to new music by older generations seems to suggest that what constitutes good music can be temporally relative. I think any invocation of "youth culture" pretty much suggests this.
I'm not sure what the force of your paragraph on reinterpreting the Bible is supposed to be?
Then shouldn't short story anthologies rule the roost? Those beat out any regular novel for scene changes (each story has several scenes, stories usually aren't long), yet they are almost as commercially suicidal as poems (even quicker than short stories, for that matter). And we don't see much travel fiction like Marco Polo or Ariosto these days.
Sure, but this point is only important to prevent people from having an escape hatch: 'Aha! We have plenty of books, sure, but how about movies? video games, etc.' This point says that the clock is ticking even for them. In order for a new medium or genre to defeat this argument, it would have to be capable of improving itself for forever, and at a competitive price-point. I don't think this can be done short of the Holodeck or simulated worlds or something, and even then there may be issues. (Consider Pascal's mugging and bounded utility functions - if we create enough art to reach the bound, then we neither need nor want more.)
The point is that I think your modalities 1-4 are like saying that there are different incommensurable kinds of utilons, and no number of 1-utilons can make up for a deficit in 3-utilons. The Bible example is specifically intended to show that people can derive all of those utilons from even the narrowest or most worthless resource, and that they can do so apparently ad infinitum (no sign of weariness of the Bible yet...), which all suggests to me that there's really just one utilon.
The criteria isn't scenes per page, its new mental picture per minute of reading time.
Conceded. But its a minor concession. Yes, when we have perfect-as-possible world-simulators new technology will at some time after that no longer be a driving force of cultural production. When we have perfect computer graphics/camera and film techniques technology will no longer drive the production of films once top-level films match earlier productions in the other criteria.
There are diminishing returns with all the modalities. So you won't maximize total utility by just maximizing one of the modalities. So lets say modality #2 ceases to be relevant because of technological plateau. In that case people will best maximize their utility by consuming top-of-the-line productions that satisfy large amounts desires for #3, #4 and #1. Modality #3 is mostly contingent on the consumption decisions of everyone else so put that aside. Then the ideal cultural production will speak to the times and touch on universal themes. These might be rare but will only be possible if cultural production continues indefinitely. Aside from these works one would want to consume an equal of "speaking to the times" works and "universal" works (holding constant for preferring one over the other generally). Unless we value universal themes a heck of a lot more than timeliness this means there is additional need for new cultural production even when that production doesn't speak to universal themes.
I'm still not sure if I get the Bible thing. It is true that there are a lot of people who derive a lot of utility from reading the the Bible repeatedly. But the people who do this aren't reading the Bible as literature (are there non-theists who just love the Pentateuch? Is the Koran any atheist's "favorite book" on Facebook?). They're getting utility because they think they're reading the work a superbeing wrote to speak to their narrow parochial concerns. These are the only people who come up with modern interpretation and they do so precisely because the Bible taken at face value says so little about modern concerns. They're trying to make up for the shortcomings of the Bible with regard to #4.
You would rather have us clumsily interpreting Pride and Prejudice so that is seems more relevant to promiscuous, polyamorous culture than just write new books?
Don't see how that affects my examples. Here's another: how could a book of haiku have a less favorable ratio of 'new mental picture per minute of reading time' than a Dan Brown novel?
This is your best point so far. Now, diminishing returns doesn't mean no returns, nor does it necessarily implie converging on any constant (if I remember my limits correctly); but given a finite lifespan, hitting any diminishing returns means a suboptimal set of choices. So we could have thousands of Shakespeares waiting for readers, but if they are all eternal-veritied out, it's still a suboptimal situation.
This definitely blunts my argument. I think I can save it by permitting a small level of current-events production (if you produce too much, then it can't be consumed while current, after all), and there would still a lot of cost-savings - I saw my little sister with a copy of the very popular Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which is certainly a current-events literary production if ever there was one, yet I'm sure it cost very little to write (Grahame-Smith claims he wrote only 15% of the final text, and the constraints surely made it much easier to write that), and no doubt much less than subsidizing universities to educate in creative writing hundreds of students.
I'm an atheist, but I'll freely admit I derive tons of pleasure from the Book of Job, to just name one book. And as for the Koran: I was reasonably impressed on my read-through of the translation by its literary qualities, and I have been given to understand that the original Arabic was so highly regarded even by non-believers that Arabic literature can be divided into pre- and post- periods, and has since dominated Arabic prosody. Here's a random quick description:
(As for Facebook - if you're here, you can construct the social signaling argument why an atheist would specifically avoid publicizing his appreciation of religious literature, if he can even get past his own hangups in the first place.)
We do that already, very inefficiently, via universities. And see my previous comment on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies... Writing new books is risky, as Jane Austens are rare; critics & interpreters, on the other hand, are plentiful & cheap.
I mean, maybe they don't. But this haiku also don't have twisting plots with anti-matter bombs and ancient religious conspiracies. In general though, I don't think most short stories or most poems have more favorable ratios than thriller novels. But in any case there are other reasons to prefer thriller novels. The relevant comparison is thriller novels of today and thriller novels of the past.
Right, though of course the entire culture won't want to consume the same set of these works. You'll want to have timely products specific to age-group and subculture. Now I don't know where the ideal level of timely cultural production is but I'm not sure why the market wouldn't have already sorted this out. Publishers, studios and record companies are all profit driven organizations and if they could make more money just re-releasing old works instead of signing new authors and artists I think they would since it would save them money. Why shouldn't we think the culture market is efficient? In fact, given how little time most people actually spend consuming Shakespeare (compared to Will Ferrell comedies) it seems to me that timeliness is valued far more than eternal truths.
I'm a fan of the book of Job too. I also like Genesis. And I have heard the same things about the Koran. But I couldn't possibly read the Bible everyday without it seriously diminishing in utility for me. And the are large swaths that are painful to read. I also don't have any particular need for it to have timely or prescient lessons. The people are getting large portions of the desire for cultural production fulfilled by reading the Bible again and again, day after day are almost exclusively believers.
As for subsidized universities teaching creative writing I don't have any reason to think that more creative writing (and I guess, Video Game Creation and Film) students actually translates into more resources wasted producing unnecessary cultural works. Those students are only ever going to get paid for their work if there is a market demand for it and to the extent they spend time producing works when there isn't a demand for it we should just classify that time as leisure time which benefits overall utility.
I almost forebear from pointing this out but... we have very good reason to think that the culture market is not efficient. That is, the whole intellectual property regime constitutes massive government intervention & subsidy (as I specifically wrote). If Will Ferrell comedies weren't copyrighted, how much worse do you think they would do against Shakespeare?
(I'll note in passing that publishers like Folgers go to great lengths to make their Shakespeare editions copyrighted, by claiming editorial mending (eg. stitching together plays from the various folio and quartos), by adding in useless essays and retrospectives that the target demographic - students - will never ever read, and so on.)
The people who can do so were raised that way. The Bible shows that to a great degree, the quality and 'endurance' (depth?) of a work is subjective & culturally set. If you were raised in a culture that discouraged/didn't-encourage new works, do you think you would still be literarily restless and footloose all your life? A different point: perhaps the Bible is not your ideal book, but do you think there does not now exist one for you?
This seems to assume an efficient market again. But wages and employment are portions of the economy notoriously irrational/inefficient (eg. 'wage stickiness'); if a student has spent 4 years learning creative writing (and even more for the masters), likely going into debt for it, are they really going to admit their mistake and work in some more remunerative field?
No, of course not, either out of sheer stubbornness (to do so would be to admit a massive mistake), or because they love the field. Ergo, an inefficiency where there is an oversupply of English majors. (I believe Robin Hanson has a similar theory: that there are too many musicians, resulting in near-minimum-wage average pay, because it's glamorous/socially-impressive.)
We actually can test this question. On the internet copyright laws are so poorly enforced that they might as well not exist. Do you think Will Ferrell movies are downloaded at a lower or higher rate than Shakespeare? Now maybe we think the reason for this is that Will Ferrell comedies are only available for free on the internet whereas Shakespeare is copyright free everywhere. But we can compare Will Ferrell movies to older movies that are still under copyright and they'll still do better-- maybe not always over the long term, but certainly in the period in which they are timely and relevant.
How exactly are copyright laws supposed to skew the market toward recent works anyway? Sure, it means the production companies need to produce new works and advertise them, but it basically counts as a tax on consuming any work produced in the copyright period. The fact that there is a thriving culture industry despite the existence of copyright termination should count as a reason to think there is a real desire for new production. We might think that the desire is just constructed by the industry through advertising-- but the culture industry wouldn't be different in this regard from any other industry.
Maybe. But my argument is that they just think they're reading the words of God. I think that reason is a lot more compelling but I'm not sure how to settle it. Are there non-religious works that draw the same kind of adoration? If I thought there was a book written by God I would read it as much as possible, too.
Well that definitely isn't going to make me want to read one book again and again. If the quality of new works decreased I probably would read old works more but only because of the quality disparity not because I would no longer have a desire to read good, new works. I do wonder though, if there is a neurodiversity issue here. I have pretty serious ADHD which might contribute to my having a steeper drop in returns from repeat consumption.
Re: The English major
You're right. Though I think an English degree is mostly an inefficient because it doesn't get used, not because it does. Still it is plausible that a resulting surplus of works drives the production price down...
Edit: I'm not sure I have a response. Or if I need one. It sort of depends on what would happen to the quality of work in a world without English departments which I find very difficult to answer.
And just to show that the Bible-as-literature isn't me, here's Richard Dawkins:
On the subject of banning new books, this objection to the proposal crystallized in my head yesterday evening: Fiction, like society, is capable of social progress. This isn't a completed project. Stopping the production of fiction in its tracks now would leave us with a corpus of stories that under- and misrepresents many groups, and this would become even more of a problem than it already is as those groups gain broader acceptance, rights, and numbers (assuming the population keeps trending up and policy keeps trending socially liberal worldwide).
Progress is quite a loaded word, and if you assume fiction will progress, then you are almost assuming your conclusion.
Let's make 'progress' concrete. Perhaps progress means that 'the fiction produced every year will feature characters that will statistically ever more closely match current demographics in the United States'.
Why is fiction mirroring demographics important?
Think of science-fiction; should Accelerando feature a carefully balanced cast with a few African-American men & women, 3 or 4 Hispanics of various ethnicities & nationalities, and a number of South-East Asians and old sansei? How would it be improved by such mimicking?
Or think of regular fiction - When William Shakespeare was writing Othello, the number of blacks in England must've been a rounding error; would he have done better to reflect the 100% white composition of England and make Othello an Arab or just a regular white northern European? When David Foster Wallace wrote Infinite Jest, would it be somehow more just or better, and not just more "progressive", if he had randomly noted that Michael Pemulis was of Chinese descent?
Fiction has never mirrored society even crudely, not in racial composition of characters, socio-economic status, career, religious or philosophical beliefs, or any distinction that you would like to honor with the title 'group'. That's the whole point: it's fiction. Not real. To make it ever more accurate this way would be to turn it into journalism, or render it as pointless as Borges's 1:1 map from "Of Exactitude in Science".
It may have been small, but I severely doubt "rounding error" is accurate. Do we have a historian in the house?
Edit: In light of Alicorn's remarks, it would be good to have both Italy and England.
Everything I've read has said that England had, at least until the 1800s, a minuscule black population, and particularly before and during Shakespeare.
Here are some random links on the topic since I don't remember where I read that blacks were exotic & unpopular rareties in England and next to none of the slaves passing through British hands came to the home isles:
This book Black Breeding Machines mentions that blacks were such a small minority in England that when their presence began to bother the Londoners, Queen Elizabeth could simply order them out of the country. And it's worth noting that one of the few mentioned blacks in England is a 'blackamoor' in the Queen's service - reinforcing my rare, exotic characterization.
(And the general lack of material itself argues that there just weren't that many. It's hard to research what didn't exist.)
EDIT: As for Italy, I can only point to a similar sporadic appearance of black servants in Roman and medieval Italian sources, and links like http://www.blackpast.org/?q=perspectives/africa-and-africans-imagination-renaissance-italians-1450-1630 which make me think that if the medieval Italians could have such strange beliefs about Africa and its inhabitants, there couldn't've been very many actual Africans/blacks among them; and if that's true about Italy, which is right there above Africa, what about England, a continent away (so to speak)?
I am not qualified to teach this subject, not even on the 101 "the stuff you are saying appears on bingo cards that anti-bigotry activists use to summarize common ignorance for crying out loud" level it seems to be on. Trying would be unpleasant, probably would have no positive effects on anyone, and would doubtless solidify the reputation I seem to have accumulated as a usually sane person who mysteriously loses her mind when bringing up "politics".
I will, however, note that Othello took place in Italy, not England, and it would be bizarre if it reflected England's demographics.
I think the two of you may be talking past each other here, namely that gwern overlooked the phrase "corpus of stories". What gwern seems to be attacking is the thesis that every individual story should have a racial/cultural balance of characters that mirrors the general population. Your argument that the corpus as a whole should contain a reasonable balance is not one which I think gwern would refute.
Obviously every story need not be balanced. But it's not obvious to me why the corpus should be balanced, and I can think of reasons why it either doesn't matter or is a good thing (half the attraction of anime for people is, I think, that it borrows enough Western material to be relatively easy to understand, but the overall corpus is still very 'unbalanced' from a US perspective).
Arguments for either position would be good, but Alicorn's original post just says being unbalanced is a problem and anything perpetuating the problem is bad, thus bans/taxes/withdrawal-of-subsidies is bad; I have no positive arguments in favor of new works from her, so I have to content myself with offering criticism and negative arguments in the hopes that she'll offer back.
(Or I could just drop this whole thread, but then I'd leave unsatisfied because I wouldn't know all the flaws with my approach, like the argument about works being enjoyable in different ways like being contemporary.)
If you're interested in continuing this conversation with me in particular, I'd prefer to move to a private venue. I really don't like the "mysteriously loses her mind over politics" thing, or the karma nosedive that comes with it, but I'm willing to assume that you as an individual won't interpret me that way.
I'd really prefer not to. I've made a point of conducting all of my Wikipedia business on the wiki itself, and similarly for mailing lists. There seems to be only one person downvoting you in this thread, and that's easy enough for me to cancel out.
The karma is only a secondary concern. It bothers me more than I would like it to that I am seen as suddenly and inexplicably turning irrational whenever stuff about -isms comes up. This is germane here in particular since to continue this conversation, I'd have to talk about (gasp) feeeeeeeeelings.
The comment that claimed you turn irrational has zero karma. My response that it was an ungenerous interpretation is +2. So I'm not sure you should conclude that a significant number of people see you as turning uniquely irrational, but obviously there is no need for you to say anything you don't want to.
What's inexplicable about it? We all turn at least somewhat irrational whenever stuff about -isms comes up. It's human nature. Politics is the mind killer and all. That's why discussion of contemporary politics is discouraged here, or at least was last I heard.
Translation: we shouldn't discourage new fiction, because we need more fiction that supports my worldview (which by the way happens to be good and true).
Alicorn, no offense intended, but your rationality just seems to switch off when you start talking about your politics. This isn't the first time I notice that.
Thats a highly ungenerous interpretation of alicorn's argument. Her argument holds up no matter what the underrepresented group is. It could be men's right activists or Ron Paul activists– all the argument requires is that previously small, unpopular and underrepresented groups become larger, more popular and better represented. If the world gets more racist we're going to need more white power books, as much as I would hate such a world. An evaluation of the groups that become popular isn't suggested by the argument.
Group underrepresenatation isn't even necessary, either. A more general form of the argument carries as long as you agree that "[fiction] isn't a completed project[;] [s]topping the production of fiction in its tracks now would leave us with a corpus of stories that" is suboptimal in some way.
Cf. DH7
Nope, doesn't work. Why do you think new fiction would make the corpus more optimal in any way?
Because the criteria of optimality change over time. If civilization ever becomes so static (or so cyclic) that I agree with people 50 years ago about what makes for a good story, then you can stop writing new fiction. As is, there certainly are some old works that were so good for their own time that they're still worth reading now, despite the differences in values. But I can't fail to notice those differences, and they do detract from my enjoyment unless I'm specifically in the mood for something alien.
If the criteria are always changing & devaluing old works, why do we read things like Gilgamesh or the Iliad or Odyssey? Did they have nigh-infinite value, that they could survive 3k+ years?
As far as I can tell this is just the "spirit of the times" point restated by people who can't be bothered to read our long-winded exchange.
It makes the corpus more complete, if nothing else. Of course we don't want to write all possible books; that's just the useless Library of Babel. But that's physically impossible anyway; within the range that we can apprehend, I'm inclined to say that more books about more topics is better.
The concept of "underrepresentation" itself is politically motivated, not just the choice of particular groups.
I guess. And maybe there is a political critique to be made of Alicorn's argument. But then it needs to be more developed then a snarky translation. There are no obvious ideological blinders in alicorn's comment and it certainly doesn't reduce to you translation.
Edit: removed screaming. Disregard this comment.
I already mentioned Values Dissonance as a reason to prefer new fiction to old.
I personally ran into this effect with a work written in 1981 - the song "Same Old Lang Syne" has a casual reference to people driving away after splitting a six-pack of beer...
The first essay was the best IMO. What do you think about banning net-unproductive websites?
It would be tremendously difficult, as we can generally agree whether a book is fiction or nonfiction, but 'net-unproductive websites' is unclear, and what subsidies are websites in general receiving that we could scrap? (An actual ban or tax obviously would be even more difficult to implement in a usefully Pigovian way.)
Books have copyrights, universities, direct government grants, etc.; but the Internet is famously disdainful of the former, and the mechanisms like the latter 2 are very rare indeed. (Quick: name an American poet or novelist who took a foundation or university-sponsored sabbatical to work on their website!)
As for your claim that old is as good as new - it's not.
Yes, about half of them. Not all were actually good, IMDB has some systemic biases. Good movies are much less common than you claim.
Also you cannot just decide to skip making mediocre movies (or anything else) and only do the good ones. At best by halving number of movies made, you'll halve number of great movies made. Due to expected positive externalities (directors and so on learning from previous movies how to make better ones), it might lower number of great movies even more.
If you make the list of best movies tend to be more recent. Looking at IMDB, which I consider very strongly biased towards old movies, top 250 are from:
Which is quite strongly indicative that movie making industry is improving (and this effect is underestimated by IMDB quite considerably). On list of movies I rated 10/10 on imdb, only 1 out of 28 is not from 1990s or 2000s.
It's also true for books - progress is not that fast, but I can think of very few really great books earlier than mid 20th century. Or highly enjoyable music earlier than the last quarter of 20th century. No solid data here, it might be due to progress of technology in case of music, and better cultural match with me in case of books.
Random thoughts:
Values Dissonance is a real problem, even when applied over the scale of 50 years. Also, ScienceMarchesOn and even History Marches On. The more things we learn, the more things we can tell stories about.
I've found that, by reading an awful lot of books, I feel like I understand literature and storytelling. On the other hand, I really don't understand music very well. I can't tell what qualities make one piece of music good and another not as good. I can play the piano pretty well, but I can't really improvise or compose. My taste in music (or complete lack thereof) seems to have a great deal to do with the mere exposure effect; I like the kinds of music that I hear a lot and don't like the kinds of music that I hear less of.
Also, one other big difference between much contemporary popular music and much classical music is that a lot of contemporary popular music has lyrics that listeners can understand, and a lot of classical music is entirely instrumental or in foreign languages.
Really? Really? I would put Mozart, Bach or Verdi against absolutely anyone from 1975 to the present.
I'm trained as a classical pianist, and I still don't enjoy Mozart, Verdi, Scarlatti, or pretty much any other of the classical period composers. I love Bach, but I'm not familiar with other baroque composers.
But mainly, I really enjoy romantic and modern classical composers. I'd absolutely agree with the thesis that music has been getting better and better, even limiting oneself to classical music. (Bach is an amazing exception.)
Comparing classical to popular music is very interesting. Perhaps the difference is that classical music requires a very developed ear in order to enjoy, and so it only appeals to a much smaller subset of people--those with training or high musical talent--while still being comparable or superior in quality to popular music. I would compare it to wine, except there's strong evidence that wine appreciation is almost entirely about status. I'm not sure if there's anything else to compare it to. Programming as an art form?
I think enjoying poetry or literature is a good comparison. Both take effort and some hard work to be able to appreciate and are considered dull and boring by people with no training/study in the relevant discipline. They all also unfortunately appeal to some people's shallow sense of "high culture" and thereby encourage inauthentic signaling by lots of people that don't really enjoy them. It's easy to understand that if you had no experience yourself, and your experience with a small number of people who profess enjoyment is that they are engaged in false signaling, that you would think there is nothing more to it than that, that everybody who professes passion is just engaged in false signaling.
I'm convinced that most people who took a music appreciation class and studied music theory and ear training for a year, combined with some music lessons, would at the end of that process have a completely different reaction to classical music (assuming they did it all by choice and weren't forced into it by parents).
Mightn't that just be because those courses are specifically to teach appreciation of those kinds of music? I expect it's probably possible to teach people who don't like rap, or country, to appreciate those genres; but because rap and country don't fit the shallow sense of high culture, no one is motivated to learn to appreciate them if they don't already. There is very little net benefit to learning to appreciate a new kind of music - there is abundant music in most genres, and one can easily fill one's ears with whatever one can most readily enjoy, so you probably don't get more total enjoyment from music by adding to your enjoyed genres. In the case of classical music, the benefit of learning to like it isn't really in the form of enjoyment of classical music; it's in the form of getting to sincerely claim to like classical music, and no longer being left out when highly cultured people discuss classical music.
That argument only works if we aren't allowed to enjoy novelty.
We can still enjoy novelty! For instance, I have a near-perfect track record of liking show tunes. There's lots. I can get a steady supply of novelty, supplementing older musicals with the new ones that come out every year and the other sorts of music I like. I don't need to learn to appreciate entire new genres to do it. Unless you mean that appreciating a new genre is a qualitatively different form of novelty? But then learning to appreciate the new genre is self-defeating. By the time you've learned to like it, you've already been exposed to lots of it and it's no longer new.
Do you actually feel this aversion? Because it's so... foreign to me. Learning to enjoy a new genre of music is always a fascinating discovery. I hear a curious snippet somewhere and go hmmm, gotta investigate deeper, then 24 hours later I'm swimming in the stuff, following connections, reading and listening... sort of like this (warning, that site is like crack for the right kind of person.)
It's not an aversion. If I had nothing better to do, or had a terrible time finding anything new to listen to, I'd be okay with learning about and learning to appreciate classical music. But as it happens, new, immediately fun music enters my life at a pretty satisfactory rate. I added a new artist to my library just yesterday because my roommate played his CD in the car on the way to the grocery store and it sounded neat. There's no reason for me to spend extra time on music that doesn't promptly catch my ear, when I can just hit up friends for personalized recommendations, cruise Pandora, and keep up with the artists I already enjoy - unless I feel like succumbing to the status signals that make classical different from other music!
How would you know this given your admittedly limited experience with classical music?
Speaking for myself, there is lots of music that I love listening too, in many different genres, but nothing else has such power to move me as classical music as its best does -- for example -- the Confutatis from Mozart's Requiem, or the Bach d-minor Chaccone, or in a lighter vein that I think anybody can appreciate and feel moved by, Paganiniani or the vitali chaconne.
I love lots of popular music, and probably listen to popular music about as much as I do classical, but there is a certain kind of ecstatic -- almost mystical -- experience that some classical music triggers that I've never gotten with popular music.
Okay - so you get special, unique value from classical. Meanwhile, I get special, unique value from Phantom of the Opera. Why should I think that learning to like classical music is more worth my time - given that I'm now left bored by most classical, or think of it as pleasant background noise - than pirating more Andrew Lloyd Weber?
I'm not so much arguing for learning to like classical music as for learning to understand classical music. I think most people would enjoy it more if they had greater understanding. Classical music is especially rewarding with greater appreciation/understanding, and especially difficult to enjoy with less appreciation/understanding. Perhaps an analogy will convey my point better.
You write fiction, yes? Have you ever studied creative writing, taken a class, read a book on creative writing? Have you ever had an English class with a skilled and passionate teacher that involved analysis of texts that you gained more and more appreciation for after really careful reading and study? Do you feel that the process of becoming a better writer and/or learning to analyze fiction has increased your appreciation and enjoyment of fiction? Most people find that going through those sorts of processes results in much greater enjoyment and appreciation, and they are also able to enjoy fiction that they formerly would have found boring. I think the process is the same for classical music (and jazz as well, for that matter [it's true of any art/music/etc., but to different degrees]).
Expecting to either just "like it" or "find it boring" and thinking of it as being just another genre like rock or pop is like approaching Dostoevsky with the same background/expectations/skills/patience as you would a Tom Clancy novel. The fact that Dostoevsky is more difficult than Clancy, that most people find Dostoevsky boring and Clancy (or an equivalent easy read) engaging, doesn't mean that it's just a matter of taste which you happen to enjoy more. Some things require considerable experience and skill before it is possible to have an informed judgment about them: the literature classics, for example, and classical music.
As for whether it's worth anybody's while to do so, that's an individual choice.
Yes. No. No. No.
Hell no. I have a completely unbroken track record of hating every single book that I have ever read for the first time as a class assignment, and have never found that a book I already liked was improved by this kind of dissection.
Not one bit! I have mostly become a better writer by learning related skills (I was allowed to make up my own second major in undergrad, and therefore literally have a degree in worldbuilding), practicing, and emulating the good parts of what I read. I now have to turn off my critical faculties entirely to enjoy any works of fiction at all, even those that are overall very good, because detecting small flaws in their settings, characterization, handling of social issues, dialogue, use of artistic license, etc. will throw off my ability to not fling the book at a wall. Works that aren't overall good turn on said critical faculty in spite of my best efforts. I can barely have a conversation about a work of fiction anymore without starting to hate it unless I'm just having a completely content-free squee session with an equally enthusiastic friend!
I guess I'm a mutant?
Although I have never read an entire Dostoevsky novel (my reading list is enormous and I haven't gotten around to it), I have really liked the excerpts I've read - immediately, without having to work for it. This is why I plan to read more of his stuff when I get around to it. I've never tried any Tom Clancy. Is he worth reading?
Maybe this is just my idiosyncrasy, but I think making the reader work hard when this isn't absolutely necessary - in fiction, nonfiction, or anything else - is a failure of clarity, not a masterstroke of subtlety. This isn't to say that you can't still have a good work that makes the reader do some digging to find all the content, but that's true of any flaw - you can also have a good work with a kinda stupid premise, or with a cardboard secondary character, or that completely omits female characters for no good reason, or has any of a myriad of bad but not absolutely damning awfulnesses.
Music theory, no, but the others, yes. (I wouldn't think music theory would increase classical appreciation more than other genres, though.)
Disagree. Whatever the genre, more variety means listening is less tiring (because less monotonous) and, on the whole, more edifying. Each genre is enjoyed differently, and stimulates different parts of the mind. And in the specific case of classical music, on the theory that it is deeper and richer than other music (in the same way that set theory is deeper and richer than propositional logic, or Netflix is deeper and richer than Blockbuster) the limit of enjoyment is actually higher.
This sounds like a really terrible analogy; if anything, it ought to prove the opposite, that rap could beat classical since rap has access to all the instruments and styles classical does (including, let's not forget, the human voice which modern classical usually shuns) and much more (electronica?). So rap is more general than classical like set theory is more general than propositional logic. Or something.
What on Earth are you talking about? Seriously, what data is generating this impression in your mind?
Same question. Where did you get the impression that electronic media aren't ...central to the recent history of art music?
The fundamental difference between art music and popular music (including rap) is nothing so superficial as instrumentation. It's complexity of musical structure. Art music is structurally more complex than popular music; just as "art"/"research" X is structurally more complex than "popular" X, for all X.
(By the way, that's different from what makes something art music vs. popular music. That has to do with memetic lineage. An individual work of art music could happen to be less complex than an individual work of popular music. But the differing lineages differ statistically as described here.)
Sunday Baroque on NPR.
Is... is this not a good source of modern preferences in classical music?
Also, I feel that we are arguing in difference ways about complexity. I'm thinking in terms of total possibilities (eg. there are only so many 5 minute pieces expressible with 88 keys or whatever), but you seem to have some sort of entropy measure in mind.
I think music theory -- including ear training -- would disproportionately increase classical appreciation (but would also improve appreciation for other forms too). The reason is simple: classical music is more complex musically, so it rewards a more discriminating ear and a richer sense of harmony, counterpoint, etc.
There's a lot of popular music that I love and think is very interesting musically, harmonically, etc., but classical music is usually so much deeper and requires much more skill and musical knowledge to create (and also to appreciation). If you want to succeed in the classical world, as a performer or composer, you have to start by the age of 6, you have to be supremely talented, you have to work obsessively until you are accepted into a good conservatory, and then work even harder still. Your entire life is basically nothing but music from a very early age. That was true of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, etc., and it is still true today. The situation with popular music is completely different. You can pick it up as an adult, and if you're talented, you might still have a successful career. You can pick it up as a teenager, and within a few years have developed enough musically to be on par with almost any other popular band. It seems pretty clear that something that takes decades of study and practice (and involves study of hundreds of years of music history) is going to involve more skill (and make more use of skills acquired) than something that can be achieved in years of study and practice, and when the composer is relying on decades of study and their intimate knowledge of hundreds of years of changes in music theory, counterpoint etc., it is definitely going to take some work on the part of a listener to do more than skim the surface in terms of enjoyment and appreciation.
I took most of a year of AP music theory in high school (dropped out of it because I was being picked on) and never got the impression that we were learning about anything but archaic, old rules of music followed by dead composers. That, and how to take musical dictation, but none of the examples were contemporary. Was my music theory teacher just incompetent? Did I miss the generally applicable parts by leaving the class early?
And while having a variety of music is definitely good, there's plenty of variety within a genre! It doesn't seem obvious to me that you can get more valuable variety per ounce of effort by taking classes to learn to appreciate more genres than you can by spending time on Pandora.
I don't know how I missed this comment at the time, but it demands a reply.
Although it's difficult for me to mentally organize such a reply, because I simultaneously believe all of the following:
You probably were learning "old rules of music followed by dead composers."
That doesn't constitute music theory.
Your teacher's incompetence was likely not personal, but inherited from the discipline of "music theory" as a whole, which in my opinion has a far from satisfactory understanding of its own subject matter.
However, your objections to the class you took are not necessarily related to this criticism of mine; in particular, the fact that that doesn't constitute music theory has nothing to do with whether certain composers happen to be dead or alive.
There was probably considerable value in the curriculum they were trying to teach you, both for what it really was (music history; familiarization with art music as a pursuit, distinct from popular music) and as an indirect, nonexplicit (and frankly inefficient) way of teaching music theory (its traditional purpose).
Hence your attitude is probably misguided, even though I wish you had been taught differently; in effect, you're "right for the wrong reasons".
Musical dictation, though it may have seemed to you like merely one particular topic on the syllabus, really is the shibboleth for demonstrating understanding of music theory.
You would not want examples from contemporary art music in your first introduction to musical dictation. The reason the examples were old is the same reason the examples in your math classes were old, rather than being drawn from contemporary journals.
What you were really complaining about, probably, was that none of the examples were popular. (I really, really hate when people equate "contemporary" with "popular"!)
However, as I mentioned above, it is among the purposes of such a course to familiarize the student with the pursuit of art music, as opposed to popular music (with which they are likely to be familiar already).
In any case, conventional wisdom to the contrary, there aren't "separate magisteria" of music theory; the skill of musical dictation is what it is, and it doesn't matter exactly where the examples were drawn from, so long as they are of the appropriate level of complexity for the student's level. (Otherwise the theory being used is wrong.)
I'm sorry that the course didn't communicate this to you, but there exists considerably more intellectual depth to the pursuit of music -- in particular art music -- than you are likely to have encountered just by living in the general culture, "spending time on Pandora", and the like.
Please bear these points in mind -- in particular, the existence of people like me, who regard the creation of art music as an academic pursuit comparable in sophistication to science or philosophy -- when assessing the implications of your own experience in the domain of music.
What readings and activities would you recommend to someone interested in becoming able to compose music, as opposed to learning how to play any particular instrument?
Oh man I miss Pandora since they stopped streaming to the UK. :(
On topic: I had quite a few years of music lessons (though I wasn't really much good) and some musical theory, which I really enjoyed. And I do quite like listening to classical music in a vague sort of way, but I wouldn't say I have an "appreciation" for it: it's not as though I can pick out features or analyse it or anything. So am I appreciating it without a tuned ear, or am I just unaware of the work my bit of theoretical knowledge is doing behind the scenes?
I'd say appreciation is really just a synonym for enjoyment. You can be a world-class performer without knowing any theory at all.
My music theory course only had a slight emphasis on classical music. (Mainly because classical music is more analyzable with theory, I guess.) Probably your textbook was just old or inferior. But I got very little out of the course anyway.
I'm not suggesting that it's necessarily worth the effort to increase one's appreciation of classical music, given the opportunity cost. (I'm not exactly chomping at the bit to appreciate Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow, or Hegel or Kant or Foucault or Derrida. Or wine, for that matter.) But the easiest way would probably be to pick a CD with some good classical music on it and listen to it many times through until you start to understand it musically. Courses are likely overkill. When I first started learning Bach (around the age of 10) it made no musical sense to me at all. I forget how long until I started to understand it, so I don't know how long you'd have to listen to start to get it. Maybe too long to bother.
Hmmmmmmmmmmm no. Doubt there's a good way to resolve this disagreement.
As for learning if coming to it as an adult, I'd recommend resources like Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts (and any of his many writings on music, such as The Joy of Music), as well as Aaron Copland's What to Listen for in Music and works of that nature.
The key point in my opinion is that you have to learn to hear more in the music, to be able to hear and follow the different voices in a fugue, or recognize the development of a theme in a sonata allegro form, and this sort of ability only comes about through some offline study and intellectual training that is then applied when listening to music and the knowledge really comes alive.
Perhaps there are some genres with more or less variety than others? Or we're counting genres differently?
This is obviously a matter of taste. I really like Ode to Joy, but that's the only old music that has a ghost of a chance of competing for my affections on a par with my favorite show tunes or other more recent selections. If you like a lot of old music and not a lot of new music, it just means that you a) have common tastes with people who were rich music patrons in the Golden Age of your choice, or b) you're succumbing to some signaling effect having to do with the perceived absolute quality of old dead white musicians' work. If there is something like objective musical quality out there (which is a matter of open debate in aesthetics), it's probably very fuzzy. Maybe Ode to Joy is objectively better than Sk8er Boi, but the jury is out and they don't seem inclined to come back soon.
Obviously it's a matter of taste, yes. (And I do think about the signaling effects of my musical tastes from time to time; it is rather an interesting topic.) I was only putting forth my "no good music has been written since the death of Gershwin"* opinion to contrast with taw's "no good music was written before 1975" opinion, in order to produce a synthesis that would support gwern's original contention that enough art now exists that we needn't subsidize more of it.
*not actually my opinion, but close
For me, and as far as I can tell vast majority of other people, they're just not terribly enjoyable.
As Technologos points out, # of movies made per year seems to have increased considerably, so the fraction of good movies made could have dropped but your numbers be accurate. (eg. the 1930s saw 15, so 15 * 3 = 45, not too far from the 2000s's 56)
Average doesn't seem important at all. Also systemic bias - would you seriously argue that if a top rated movie from 1930s came out today (with just refurbished technology and such trivia) it would still be a hit? I find this nearly impossible.
A dropping average suggests (massively) diminishing returns.
And as far as remakes and sequels go? Well, you tell me...
I doubt computational power of an average chip is much higher than in 1970s. Ones on the top are ridiculously better, but at the same time we had explosion in number of really simple chips, so quite likely average isn't much better. Or at least median isn't much better. Does it imply lack of progress? (don't try to find numbers, I might be very well proven wrong, it's just a hypothetical scenario)
I think that analogy would be more insightful if you replaced the entries with 'supercomputers' and 'the TOP500'.
Obviously, if we were actually going to work through this data we would want to know the rate of best-movie-ranking rather than the absolute numbers. Just as importantly, we'd want to know the frequency of best-movie-ranking relative to the number of movies watched from each decade, such that best-movie-rankings aren't simply dependent on availability.
In my experience, of the older movies I have watched, a greater fraction were strongly memorable than of the newer movies I have watched. In part, I suspect this is because I watch older movies intentionally, knowing that they are reputed to be good, where I watch newer movies with a somewhat lower bar for putting in the effort (because they are available in theaters, are easier to talk about, etc.).
Assuming the best old movies don't get filtered out and stay available, this data is accurate for our purpose.
IMDB top list is based on Bayes-filtered ratings, it says what proportion of people watching the movie loved it, not how many people watched it. It will be automatically biased towards intentional watching (therefore old movies), and the bias is in my opinion fairly strong. Still, in spite of this new movies win.
To be clear, I agree that the list should be biased towards old movies in the manner you describe.
The total number of films created has been rising for a while, however (under the "Theatrical Statistics" report here, for instance). It's not entirely unreasonable to believe that over 3x as many films were made in the 2000s as in the 1930s, though; compare Wikipedia's lists of 1930s films and 2000s films. The latter is dramatically longer.
Like I said, we would want to know the fraction of films making the Top 250 list, not the absolute numbers.
It would also be interesting to apply the methods of Human Accomplishment, collating critical lists & histories other than IMDB, such as the rather grandiose "The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made " from the New York Times. I would very much expect a recency effect.
Re the culture piece: you make some important points, but the "Let's ban new books" thing seems rather self-undermining. If you're going to ban new books, why not ban new blog comments, too? The observation that we have more culture than anyone can know what to do with is hardly original, and your phrasing can't have been the best, so why did you spend all that time writing this piece, when you could have been making money?
My answer to this entire dilemma is just to say that culture isn't about economic consumption: I guess that was entirely your point , but I'm taking a different attitude about it. Writing has been made into a commodity, but writing as such is a means of communication between people. To say that I should not write is to say that I should not speak, and even the least educated and cultured among us says something now and again, so to say that I should not speak is to say that I should not live. Why should I live, when we already have billions of people already?---because I want to. I don't care if nothing I do has global, world-shaking effects; I don't care it's all been known and done before (if not here then somewhere across the many worlds); I want to know; I want to do---this particular conjunction of traits and ideas wants to know and do, even if lots of other superficially similar conjunctions have already known and done many superficially similar things.
I think that society ought not discourage the production of new novels, not because we need more novels around (you're right; we don't), but because I want to live in a world where everyone writes a good novel. No one's life is exactly bitwise identical to someone else's (or they'd really be the same person anyway), so everyone must have something to say that hasn't already been said in exactly the same way. So let's explore the space; the project is by no means complete. Yes, this means that a lot of crap will get written, but I still think it's more fun this way than tiling the galaxy with James Joyce. But de gustibus non est.
Yeah, it is undermining. But it's funny! You're reading along and then you see "Let's ban new books", which although a fairly logical extrapolation, is still something that no one would expect to be seriously suggested.
More seriously, as I think I've already argued here, blog comments (and most websites in general) don't affect the weakened argument about removing subsidies. Less Wrong receives no government support (if anyone mirrored us, would we actually sue them or even bother with DMCA takedowns? I note that we don't work under any CC licenses, but that seems more like an omission than anything).
Alas, there is nothing new under the sun. (Oops.) But it seems to've been novel enough to most of the people who read it, and it's not like non-philosophers read Schopenhauer any more.
As a student, my time is worthless! Essays like this may be useful as advertising, or spinning off into assignments; and they're much better than playing Geometry Wars. (Also, is my phrasing that bad? I thought I wrote it pretty well. :()
I was also trying to show that it's 'not about Esthetics' too: if it were, we would expect there to be a lifetime-length canon optimizing your esthetics-per-work count, with occasional tweaks (deletions & additions) by specialists when some work is realized to not be very good or just exceeded by some unincluded work. But that is manifestly not the case.
So this would fall under the 'externalities' category - people writing novels become better people for it?
Well, I'm glad you wrote it, but I'm not the one complaining that we produce too much text.
I think you're underestimating long tail effects. There is a sense in which we can say that some authors are much better than some others, but people have extremely specific tastes, too: no one canon will suffice, not even canons for particular genres and subgenres. Consider that I like the particular philosophical style of Greg Egan; giving me a list of top "hard science fiction" won't help me. Or consider that one of my favorite short stories ever is Scott Aaronson's "On Self-Delusion and Bounded Rationality." Now, Scott Aaronson isn't a professional fiction writer; I don't even think that story was even conventionally published in an official fiction venue; it's not going in any accepted canon. But why should I care? It's going in my canon. Or consider that there's a lot of work on very specific topics that I have reason to believe doesn't exist. So I'll have to create it. Even if most of you wouldn't understand or wouldn't care; well, I'm not living for your sake. Some clever person updated Warhol, you know: "In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people."
Um, sure, although I'd phrase it differently. It's not so much "doing this stuff will make you a better person" as much as, "the entire point of this being-a-person business is doing stuff, and it might as well be this as not."
This sounds like an acquired taste; if you only came to like Egan's style because it exists, and you would've come to like some style even if Egan had never been...
Well, OK. If writing books are leisure activities, then why does it need any protection or subsidies? You don't hear many panicked cries that there is a papier-mâché deficiency which needs state intervention.
I recently thought of something else related to why one would prefer a "new" book to an old one. There's a certain suspense involved in reading a work in progress. Waiting for the next installment, making guesses at what's going to happen next, discussing your theories with your friends who are all at the same place in the story as you are, and so on, are all things that rarely, if ever, happen with old stories as intensely as they do with new stories. A message board I used to frequent had an extremely long-running discussion of Stephen King's "The Dark Tower" series that died shortly after the final book was published.
In other words, with new stories, you can give someone something to anticipate. Old stories tend to be well-known to the point where everybody already knows what happens, and the anticipation only lasts as long as it takes you to get from the beginning to the end.
Well, being a (former) Dark Tower fan myself, I think that's not necessarily related to the bald fact that the series ended so much as how it ended...
How much of this, do you think, is due simply to the fact that everyone is coordinated & equally ignorant due to sheer temporal necessity, and how much to the actual 'new' nature of releases?
I remember as a child I loved The Wizard of Oz, but I hadn't the slightest idea that there were sequels. One day, browsing through the very disorganized school library, I found one. I was shocked, and from then on, every few weeks or months as I rummaged, I would find another one. I recall being as thrilled to find one (though out of order) as I think I would have if they were freshly released & bought by the librarian, though they were, gosh, at least 80 years old by this point?
I haven't seen people talking about the new Battlestar Galactica series after it ended, either. Often, once "the answer" exists, people stop wondering what it is.
Yeah, I think that's what I'm getting at - you almost never get that kind of coordination when it comes to "old" works.
I don't think most people care so much about the suspense and discussing the next episode. People do discuss one-shot movies. But it's important that they all watch them at the same time, so that they can time the discussion. Before about 1970 movies were re-released in the theaters and I think this was adequate coordination. I'm not sure why it stopped. VCRs are an obvious answer, but I think they stopped rather earlier. And movies get remade today, which I think it greatly inferior to re-release.
This point is surely correct, but you again pick an unfortunate example - I've heard the ending of BSG was even worse then DT's...
Which is interesting, since there's nothing stopping a group from just not reading each & every book after a set period, thereby reaping the same gains but without issues like, I dunno, the author dying after 20 years & leaving it incomplete. (cough Wheel of Time cough)
The fact that people never do this, even in private, but rather prefer to tear through the entire series at once, suggests to me that this communality isn't worth much. (Aren't book clubs famous for falling apart after a little while?)
Perhaps the fans are just distracting themselves from the agony of waiting for something they love so much & killing time; I knew, before & during the prequels, more than one Star Wars fan who just tried to ignore anything they saw related to SW so they couldn't be bothered by the multi-year waits (out of sight, out of mind...) - they felt the itch you get when pausing a movie or show, or stopping in the middle of a book, but this itch would last for more than just a few minutes.
Yeah... Maybe Harry Potter is a better one?
Brandon Sanderson is finishing up the series based on Jordan's notes and other unpublished information he left behind.
Thanks, it's been a while since I wasted a whole morning on TvTropes. Please link responsibly, people!
You're welcome.
You should be able to just copy and paste the HTML version into the WYSIWYG editor and it will magic something for you.
There is a button in the editor that allows to enter raw HTML (and it should be easy to construct a regex script to get whatever).
Hm. I'll try that and pasting next time I feel like a top-post, then.