They don't have to know all the details about the structure and engine to know that, "wow, this plane sure holds a lot of people, moves them a long way, very quickly, and does so in a way that I can afford".

But could they look at a plane, without seeing it in action, and predict that it would very quickly move a lot of people a long distance in an affordable way? It doesn't seem like this metric could appreciate the differences between any of the main passenger planes in use.

But is that training in objective achievement, or in how well you know a clique's inside jokes?

I contend the former - the sense in which it's great (other than "approved by elites") is that it takes large amounts of effort and very refined skill.

So you think in that comment, komponisto has sufficiently broken the similarities I have cited to theology as an academic field? If so, please elaborate further about how you came to this conclusion.

What distinguishes music as an academic field is this purported enjoyment plus the cultural capture -- the belief, which you keep repeating, that not enjoying the elite-designated music is a failing of the listener, and academia is the one that gets to make this call.

I think we need to taboo the highlighted term.

There are, in fact, cognitive/intellectual prerequisites to being able to enjoy music. This shouldn't be surprising: chimpanzees presumably don't get human-level enjoyment out of the Beatles, much less Beethoven. (And even if they do, mice still don't, etc.) I doubt the infant Beethoven would have appreciated the works of his adult self. And so likewise, some humans (like my current self) are better equipped to appreciate Ferneyhough than others (like my 12-year-old-self).

It occurs to me that what this argument is really about is status. I read you as resisting the idea that the kind of abilities involved in being able to enjoy academic music are something that one should be awarded status for possessing. I think this may be because you misunderstand the nature of those abilities.

(It's very important, by the way, to understand that we're not talking about aesthetic evaluation, at this point. We're talking about the ability to hear the music as music, as opposed to incoherent nonsense. Only after you can actually perceive the musical structure of a piece can you begin to talk about the extent to which that structure suits your own personal tastes. But most people who say they "don't like" contemporary art music aren't at that stage; what they are expressing is the fact that contemporary music sounds like nonsense to them, and they are mistaking their non-enjoyment of nonsense for aesthetic disagreement, evidently not quite realizing that the music actually sounds different to people who "get" it.)

If there were a real accomplishment here, rather than a mere agreement to applaud other members of the clique, academic-produced music should outperform in blind tests

Outperform what, in what kind of test? What test does a piece of music have to pass for you to consider it a "real accomplishment"?

Meanwhile, I have some empirical predictions for you. If any of these were able to be decisively falsified, I would be confused and would have to reevaluate my model:

• The average IQ of the population of Beethoven enthusiasts should be higher than the average IQ of Beatles enthusiasts, and lower than the average IQ of Schoenberg enthusiasts.

• Among professional musicians, enthusiasm for the music of Schoenberg should be positively correlated with IQ to an even greater extent than among the general population. (High-IQ should be greater evidence of Schoenberg enthusiasm conditioning on the person being a professional musician.)

• People who enjoy Beethoven should perform better on aural skills tests (sight-singing and musical dictation) than people who don't. This should be true to a lesser extent if "Beethoven" is replaced by "the Beatles", and to a greater extent if "Beethoven" is replaced by "Schoenberg".

In my experience of this sort of thing, it's motivated by the pursuit of a personal obsession. I've watched this in the rabid variety of record collector, back in the '80s and '90s when this sort of thing could be difficult and expensive. I've been that record collector. It involves turning into an obsessive crank, at a penalty to status.

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.

I'd like to know which specific statements of mine give this impression, because that isn't what I see myself asserting.

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.

I don't see how this comparison holds, since I can read a translation of TBK

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?

(which cannot show its superiority in unfakeable tests)

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.

Is it your contention that modern musicians write Clasical minuets and Baroque fugues which are in some cases better than the best of the older works that are still listened to, but that no-one cares because much of the value of those works is in their role in a canon?

I myself would guess that none of the works produced over the past hundred years would be judged by the majority of an impartial audience to be significantly more compelling than (for example) Bach's Chaconne.

It should really be pretty easy to do a controlled experiment with a naive population to see how common it is for modern artists to be able to impress an audience as much as their 18th and 19th century precursors did.

I'm seriously interested in someone performing some experiments on this subject.

Same here.

I guess that my major reason for holding the contrary position was largely because modern musicians and composers, more than painters and authors, are the results of university education and I fairly strongly suspect university education of destorying artistic ability and distracting artists with intellectual games that simply lack the merits of the fields that the academic subjects are derived from. I suspect this in math as much as in music, and I think Von Neumann agreed with me, as this quote suggests.

I'm impressed that you're familiar with the Von Neumann quote (which is sadly little known in the mathematical community but which my friend Laurens is fond of); but on the face of things it doesn't seem to directly support your paragraph above. Explain further if you'd like?

Several points here:

1. My impression is that there are issues of bad social/cultural institutions destroying artistic ability outside of academia. I have some friends artistically genuine who have spent some time as painters and become disillusioned with the signaling games and hypocrisy present within the communities of painters that they've come across. Note that fledging painters and authors face greater financial pressures than academics and that this can lead to perverse incentives (to appeal to the lowest common denominator or to current fashions for greater marketability). See Minhyong Kim's comment here.

2. The absence of new empirical sources for mathematics seems to me more a consequence of the stagnation of theoretical physics than the social structure of the mathematical community.

3. In my own view insufficient emphasis on exposition has played a significant role in whatever stagnation has occurred within the mathematical community since, e.g. the 1800's. The barrier to entry has gotten progressively higher as mathematics has developed and in such a setting, in absence of strong efforts to to cast background material in an accessible and readily digestible form, the pressures toward specialization and fragmentation get progressively stronger. There aren't career-based incentives for expository work so mathematicians who are interested in exposition either conform to the research-based publish or perish norms or leave.

4. I'd be happy to compile an annotated list of relatively accessible survey papers if you'd be interested and find it useful for getting a sense for the state of some of contemporary mathematical research.

I'm seriously interested in someone performing some experiments on this subject.

Is the Joshua Bell experiment the kind of thing you had in mind? If so, it pretty conclusively confirms your suspicions.

Fame feeds on fame, status on status. Which is why it's all the more important to constantly check that a field hasn't lost its moorings.

Is it your contention that modern musicians write Clasical minuets and Baroque fugues which are in some cases better than the best of the older works that are still listened to, but that no-one cares because much of the value of those works is in their role in a canon?

Depending on who you're considering to be doing the caring and not-caring, this may very well be an apt description of the situation. But the main point I would make is that these are student exercises. Writing works in older styles is a skill that one learns in school; it's very much like how math students are asked to re-prove theorems of Euler or Cauchy. You may be seen as a genius if you rediscover the proof of the fundamental theorem of algebra, but nobody's going to give you the same kind of credit they give Gauss. Likewise writing a really great fugue in your counterpoint class isn't going to make you Bach. Part of the reason is that Bach already did this stuff (so you're not in the "canon"), but also when Bach was doing it it was at the frontier of musical thought, which it isn't today, as evidenced by the fact that it is taught to undergraduates. Whereas Bach's challenge was to be as inventive as possible, today's students have to be as inventive as possible while still sounding like eighteenth-century music, which is a challenge of a different kind, and will tend to produce different musical results.

I could easily believe that in those cases, but I simply don't believe it in the case of Opera. The Opera cannon is just not very large. Some people have heard the whole thing and only like a few dozen operas.

First of all, the total number of operas written since the form was invented (something like 40,000, if I recall correctly) is much larger than any single human could plausibly have heard. You must be talking about the active repertory of famous opera houses, which is indeed probably something like a few dozen. However, there are good reasons apart from artistic merit to expect that the number of operas in regular production would be small: namely, staging an opera is typically a very costly and laborious undertaking. (So is composing one, by the way, which is why doing so is not a typical student exercise the same way writing a fugue is.) This will push toward conservatism in repertory selection, with companies sticking to the pieces they already know "work". There are all kinds of obscure operas by great composers (such as Handel) that have only recently begun to see the light of day for this reason, and being by such composers, their artistic quality is quite high. If folks want more old operas, there's plenty of digging to be done (and it's being done).

It should really be pretty easy to do a controlled experiment with a naive population to see how common it is for modern artists to be able to impress an audience as much as their 18th and 19th century precursors did.

It would be very hard to find a truly naive audience with enough musical ability to make the results of interest. Best you could do would probably be musically gifted children who had been deliberately kept uneducated in music history. (Then you'd have to ask what the appropriate age is, etc.)

That said, if it could be done, I'd be all in favor of doing it. My prediction would be that there wouldn't be much of a difference between the perceived "impressiveness" of actual Baroque fugues and the best imitations of Baroque fugues from today.

I guess that my major reason for holding the contrary position was largely because modern musicians and composers, more than painters and authors, are the results of university education and I fairly strongly suspect university education of destorying artistic ability and distracting artists with intellectual games that simply lack the merits of the fields that the academic subjects are derived from

Let me be clear: this absolutely does go on, no question. But it probably goes on in all fields that have university departments -- including (as you note), math, and yes, the empirical sciences. And my suspicion is that while it may give mediocre practitioners of a field the illusion that they're doing better and more important work than they are, it doesn't actually stop the best folks from doing genuinely high quality work. (At least not all of them.)

However, if that's your theory, what then do you think of European "modernist" composers, who are similarly "inaccessible" but have less association with universities?

A slightly different point, but when I brought up the possibility of current composers writing in the old styles and thus creating attractive music, several people told me that it's simply too hard to write music in an old style.

There seemed to be a strong consensus there, but perhaps the problem is that they were applying too high a standard of authenticity. I'd be content with music which supplied many of the pleasures of baroque or classical-- it doesn't have to pass for period music to a well-informed listener.

I have a notion that you can tell which sf artists have been to art school. The composition, anatomy, and perspective are all excellent, but there's no sense of motion.

When I say it's a notion, I mean that I haven't checked it in any way, it just seems like a plausible way of explaining paintings with those characteristics.

So far as mathematics is concerned, aren't there two streams-- empirical and for the pleasure of the mathematicians? Neither of these are the same as working on whatever math is publishable, though.

I went to a few lectures on mathematical music theory once. I've forgotten most of it, but I recall learning that most of the music I can enjoy (pre-1900 Western classical, 20th century pop and rock) is, structurally, confined to a very special case among all the possible scales that a music system could be built on. Someone like Schoenberg is to all the other music I listen to, as Mars is to all the different continents of the earth.

(Aside: remember the scene in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" where the aliens communicate in music? I saw it again recently, and it cracked me up, because it was obviously trying to sound "alien" but it really wasn't. It sounded like the tricky part of a Leonard Bernstein piece. There's much more "alien" music right here on this planet!)

So I think Beethoven really might have been more accessible to the listeners of his day than contemporary classical music is to us. Beethoven, at least, wrote his symphonies in the same key as an ordinary folk ditty. (Sometimes he even kept the ditty!)

I'm not sure how possible it is to adapt one's ear so that a totally new scale sounds pleasant. I can't listen to much classical music past Stravinsky and get any pleasure out of it. But then again, I first listened to Indian classical music in adolescence, and that has a completely different structure than Western music, and it sounded good to me instantly, no inferential distance at all.

But I've also got to point out that in aesthetic fields, when you get to the point where inferential distance makes laymen unable to appreciate what you're doing, you've gone from creation to masturbation.

That's a little much-- there's plenty of art which appeals to specialist audiences (hard science fiction, for example-- most people aren't going to have much fun with Diaspora), but which is still a meaningful effort by the artist.

But I've also got to point out that in aesthetic fields, when you get to the point where inferential distance makes laymen unable to appreciate what you're doing, you've gone from creation to masturbation.

What you've done is go from creating art for a lay audience to creating art for a specialized audience.

I agree that the extreme form of this is creating art for the enjoyment of nobody but you (aka masturbation), but there are interim stages along the way that are meaningfully distinct.

But I've also got to point out that in aesthetic fields, when you get to the point where inferential distance makes laymen unable to appreciate what you're doing, you've gone from creation to masturbation.

That's an unnecessarily loaded, rhetorical way to state your point of view. So if you don't meet a certain "laymen appreciation" quota, then you're literally not creating anymore? That's silly, of course.

And of course I hardly need mention the negative connotations of "masturbation".

But the point is substantively wrong, also -- or, at any rate, you're assuming the conclusion you need to prove: that the value of art depends only on the ability of laymen (large numbers of them, presumably, since I doubt it would suffice for me to exhibit particular examples) to directly appreciate it.

My fifth-grade classmates used to make a similar argument with respect to Beethoven: since I was the only one in the class who liked his work, he was clearly a failure as a composer.

Likewise, I suspect you (and others who say things like this) are probably just insufficiently aware of the community of people who appreciate contemporary art music. It's unfortunate that there's currently so little intersection between that community and this one; but that community exists nonetheless.

On the other hand, I saw Artist's shit at the Tate Modern and literally spent five minutes laughing. IT IS PERFECT AND BRILLIANT. If you want the simplicity on the far side of complexity, that's it. (... in a can.)

Is IQ really the factor that you want to highlight here? I would guess that 90+% of people with 140+ IQ are incapable of writing music that I find compelling.

As you know, P(A|B) != P(B|A). It's not that most high-IQ folks are capable of writing interesting music, but rather that almost no non-high-IQ folks are. (It may be useful to recall what I mean by IQ, which isn't necessarily what people immediately think of when they hear the term, but is what I believe they should think of.)

This should make sense when you consider that music is ultimately generated from the composer's stream-of-consciousness; and the higher one's IQ, the more interesting one's stream-of-consciousness tends to be. (This is almost tautological given my conception of IQ.)

My statement was nonvacuous; as far as I can tell there are people who judge works of art based on criteria other than subjective aesthetic response.

To a large degree, this impression probably exists due to communication difficulties, in particular a vocabulary far too impoverished to adequately reflect the complexity of aesthetic value.

Many (not all, but a nontrivial subset) of the people you're talking about, I would venture, will have conceded more than necessary when they agree that they're using criteria other than "subjective aesthetic response" to judge the value of a work.

(EDIT: I am led to suspect this because you contrasted "subjective aesthetic response" not with, say, the number of people who say they like it, but rather with "technical intricacy".)

[Have you found contemporary composers to whom you've had as strong a positive aesthetic response as Bach or Brahms?] Yes, of course!

Here too, my question was not vacuous; there are people who I know who would answer in the negative.

The "of course" here was meant to suggest not that your question was vacuous, but rather that you were perhaps a bit overly timid in inferring my answer previously. :-)

Will respond when I have some more time.

Looking forward to it.