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Swimmer963 comments on Being Wrong about Your Own Subjective Experience - Less Wrong
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First, a remark addressed to the two people who downvoted the grandparent: your behavior makes no sense at all. My best guess is that you disapprove of discussion of music on LW. But not only is that an unreasonable position to take, it wouldn't explain why you didn't downvote neighboring comments.
(I have in fact noticed that comments of mine that discuss music score consistently lower than my other comments. I can understand if some of the "mathy" types of people that populate this site have a perception that topics relating to art and music are "fluffy" and unprestigious, but what I've never been able to understand is why this perception doesn't seem to get updated once they run into people who are similarly "mathy" but also interested in art and music.)
Now to Silas's comment:
(1) On "insular cliques": not all cliques are equal. There exist "insular" (which I suppose means low-population) cliques such that impressing them has value.
Well, then where does the rest of Mozart's value come from?
You're hiding the work of your argument behind the phrases "someone today" and (especially) "something like". Who counts as an eligible appreciator? What music counts as "something like EKM"? After all, on my view, the work of MACs is like EKM (and inherits prestige thence). A distinction that places Mozart and Lady Gaga on one side and Schoenberg and Salieri on the other doesn't carve musical reality at its joints. (To do that, you'd have to put Mozart and Schoenberg and Salieri on one side, and Gaga on the other.)
In the present context, this is a distinction without a difference. The point is that I could simply say to you "the market has spoken" with regard to Bell, just as you are wont to do with EKM. What criterion of "justification" are you appealing to here?
Did you notice that your comments (and those agreeing with you) nonetheless score higher than your critics in such discussions? (And whoever's modding you down in this thread, it's not me -- I don't use downmods against opponents when my investment in the discussion might be compromising my judgment.)
(1) It matters when determining whether a clique is learning the structure of reality or just replaying inside jokes. If the clique judges designs based on useful models that carve reality at its joints, and that use objective, unfakeable (e.g. through consensus) metrics, we should care what they think and we should be impressed those who can hit narrow targets in the design space they define. If the clique has to keep checking on whether the rest of the clique already likes something, because there really isn't a successful model ... then none of that applies. Which category do MACs fall in?
From the other stuff that people still like, voluntarily listen to, etc. after hundreds of years and no indoctrination.
As bad as Lady Gaga might be, where's the Music Theory PhD can that can demonstrate a superior understanding of the mind-music relationship, rather than just whine about how reality won't bend to fit his theories?
The ability to make a judgment without having to first be told what your judgment should be. Layfolk who get recordings of EKM aren't doing it because it's the hot thing right now among their friends and the elite cultural arbiters told them to.
In contrast, the royalty really wouldn't tell the difference if Bell flubbed and "only" performed at the 95% percentile. While the market has spoken, it is not announcing a victory of the characteristics you claim are important: it is showing that people will buy based on hype, and we know it's hype because their market value changes when the hype is removed (as the Bell experiment showed -- no wealthy person said, "Holy s***! Let me hire you to be my personal performer! You're way undervalued here!")
It should really raise a red flag for your when you're basing your opinion on "but rich people like this stuff when they're duped!"
I am fairly "indoctrinated" in classical music (my parents have been taking me to the symphony since I was small, and I sing the stuff) and I like Lady Gaga. Whatever sense in which she is awful doesn't have much effect on her popularity. Yeah, her music isn't as complex and challenging as Mozart's, but maybe that just shows that complexity isn't the only thing that makes music pleasant to listen to...in fact, if anything I think simple music is funner to listen to, since untrained people can sing along and enjoy the tune for themselves. (I enjoy classical pieces 20 times more when I know them well enough and am in a venue where I can sing along.)