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David_Gerard comments on Helpless Individuals - Less Wrong
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People appreciate air travel without study of aerospace engineering.
People appreciate being able to conduct secure transactions without study of cryptography.
People appreciate cell phones without study of EM physics and information theory.
And in case you think I'm limiting it to science/engineering:
People appreciate acrobats without study of acrobatics.
And the Beatles without study of musical history.
In all of these cases, the field, in a sense, forces you to care about it. You may not be able to understand its details, but you can't deny that there is a genuine achievement behind it that can't be faked.
In contrast, there are fields where the best thing you can say is that, well, the people who already invested a huge portion of their lives in it think it sure is swell... . What should I make of those?
We're talking about aesthetics here, in which the end product is a subjective feeling in the listener's brain.
As such, a useful analogy would be you refusing to believe that a novel in a language you don't speak (say, The Brothers Karamazov in the original Russian) could possibly be better than Red vs Blue fanfic, because if it was you'd be able to read it, c.f. your list of analogies above.
That is: the key point your analogies above miss is the concept of inferential distance. Even if the inferential distance is huge (e.g. learning Russian), that doesn't make claims of the art's quality fraudulent.
What's annoying you, I suspect, is komponisto's apparent assertion that his chosen favourite music is not only good, but objectively the best music there is, and that the qualia one experiences from this music are the best available from music. This is ridiculous to me too. However, that there is inferential distance between you and the music does not make the music a fraud. This apparent assertion of yours is also ridiculous. The purpose of all forms of art appreciation course - degrees in music, a newspaper article, a record review - is to lessen the inferential distance to a given piece of art.
I'd like to know which specific statements of mine give this impression, because that isn't what I see myself asserting.
From my perspective -- of having to endure a constant stream of casual remarks to the effect that contemporary music sucks, often coming from people who aren't particularly familiar with contemporary music, but think themselves sufficiently informed because they enjoy listening to Mozart to show off their own status -- I'm basically just defending the existence of the music I like. In the process, of course, I expressed enthusiasm for this music, and what I'm seeing here appears to be pushback from violating the social taboo against expressing high levels of enthusiasm (for pretty much anything).
I was looking through your posts, but this one appears to say precisely that.
No, it does not make you smarter than everyone else. Some people have more capacity than others, but you haven't magically hit the sweet spot for all of human music. That is the bit I'm seeing and going "that's ridiculous".
Art works by pressing buttons in someone's head and generating a subjective experience. The artist first, then others because humans in a particular time, place and (sub)culture will have similar enough buttons to be able to talk about them. Inferential distance kicks in when you take the art out of its time, place and (sub)culture, and at that point it may in fact take a degree's worth of bridging to get there (and to a huge number of other places as well).
Art is great for effect in general, not just for your carefully defined personal category of "interestingness" (and I can't find the post right now, but I recall you saying you were using your own personal definition of "IQ" as well). That presses your personal buttons very effectively, but it's not a universal button and - and this is the key point - it's not the greatest of all buttons.
Can simple art be effective? Can there be simple art that is more effective than complicated art? Here I include "simplicity on the far side of complexity" as "simple", though arguably one may not.
But hey - tell me I'm wrong.
That was written after the grandparent, first of all. Secondly, see my reply to you there: it doesn't say that at all, unless you invoke additional premises (such as "utilizing more intellectual resources" implying "objectively better") that I haven't stated.
Do you deny that appreciation of contemporary art music (or even Schoenberg) is Bayesian evidence of high IQ?
For purposes of this specific sub-discussion (regarding empirical predictions), you may assume that I am talking about "the thing measured by IQ tests".
I haven't come close to claiming that my buttons are universal. As for "greatest", well, obviously I think the music I like is the greatest music. But this isn't an information-free statement: there are reasons I like the music I like, and those reasons are not unrelated to musical ability and experience. Obviously, there's a personal component, too -- I like some composers and works better than others of equal sophistication -- but that personal component plays a much smaller role in explaining my "disagreement" with nonspecialists than it does in explaining my disagreements with specialists (which will tend to be much narrower).
Yes, as long as interest comes from somewhere. Superficial "complication" is not the only way to create interest.
Are there universal buttons? That there is any controversy at all over value of music so many thousands of years after its inception, and that music taste is tagged 'personal' (and indeed, uses words like 'taste' and 'preference') suggest there are not.
In the absence of universal buttons, how do we rank 'greatness' of buttons? Again, 'music taste is personal' is an impediment. There are several options:
The first three suffer from all the problems common to majoritarianism solutions - a self-approving effect (where the individuals who prefer 'what the majority prefers' make up the majority). The fourth is a pure evo-psych idea. The fifth is a twist on the fourth, but suffers to some extent from issues relating to cultural relativism ('greatness' of buttons is heavily dependent on current cultural settings).
Some of these systems at first glance seem to rank appeals-to-intelligence quite highly. Possibly appeals-to-desire-for-status could take top spot.
I could see a milder claim of universality that isn't on your list-- a claim that a large majority of people over an extended period of time like (or perhaps love) the music which is claimed to be universal.
It's amusing to see claims that some types of music (usually classical) are wonderful because they're universal, but also that people these days need to learn to like them.
I don't see how this comparison holds, since I can read a translation of TBK, and nothing I've said implies that not knowing the language it's written in suffices for any kind of dismissal. Certainly, you can enjoy it more if you learn Russian and read it in the original, but it probably wouldn't be worth the effort to do so just to enjoy this book (plus some other set) -- yet that's basically what's claimed of the top academic music/theology, and I hope you can see how that position is in error.
I don't know if komponisto asserts this, but by selecting one clique's favored music (which cannot show its superiority in unfakeable tests), academia is saying something like this, and it is that position that I reject.
OK then, you don't get that analogy. Do you believe it is possible to learn about a piece of art and understand much better what it's about where you didn't before, thus increasing the quality of your subjective experience of it?
This phrase reads like a mindboggling category error on the level of this Robin Hanson post. Could you detail what sort of tests you are thinking of, and preferably any past examples? I cannot imagine what you could possibly be thinking of which would actually usefully answer any question about art as far as someone interested in having a superior artistic experience is concerned.
No, I got the analogy just fine -- it just didn't prove what you thought, and my position didn't imply what you claimed.
Yes. But when you get to the point where you're claiming I must first be (in effect) indoctrinated into an insular clique, you're going way beyond that. Once you start getting to pre-suppose feeding the listener a long cirriculum, it's no longer sufficient to say, "hey, after that indoctrination, they liked it, so we were right all along!" As I keep saying, you can make anything likeable by this metric! My point is that any such priming of the subject means you have a higher standard to meet: that work needs must then be compared to other entertainment venues that can apply a similar amount of priming -- you have to account for opportunity costs, in other words.
You can make me like your dance style after 10 years of indoctrinating me? So what? I can make you like Star Trek after 10 years of indoctrination -- but Star Trek doesn't get entire academic departments devoted to it.
I already gave one -- the Joshua Bell experiment. For others, it would be things like, "can people identify which ones academia has designated as 'good' without having been told in advance?"
That's called "inferential distance" as it applies to music; the distance between you before you learnt more about the art and after you learnt more about the art is the inferential distance.
You appeared confused by and dismissive of the concept in music previously. Please go back and see if anything I or komponisto (who thinks quite different things to me, by the way) have said makes any more sense to you now.
Er, I at no stage questioned this, and previously agreed with you in saying so.
You appear to be claiming I said things that are a bit like things komponisto said (and which I disagreed with).
You didn't answer before so evidently I have to ask again: are you seriously asserting that, rather than being a human interest "fish out of water" story, the Washington Post seriously intended it as a scientific test of Joshua Bell's artistic merits? What?