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Things you are supposed to like
I'm trying to like Beethoven's Great Fugue.
"This piece alone completely changed my life and how I perceive and appreciate music."
"Those that claim to love Beethoven but not this are fakers, frauds, wannabees, but most of all are people who are incapable of stopping everything for 10 minutes and reveling in absolute beauty, absolute perfection. Beethoven at his finest."
"This is the absolute peak of Beethoven."
"It's now my favorite piece by Beethoven."
These are some of the comments on the page. Articulate music lovers with excellent taste praise this piece to heaven. Plus, it was written by Beethoven.
It bores me.
The first two times I listened to it, it stirred no feelings in me except irritation and impatience for its end. I found it devoid of small-scale or large-scale structure or transitions, aimless, unharmonious, and deficient in melody, rhythm, and melodic or rhythmic coordination between the four parts, none of which I would care to hear by themselves (which is a key measure of the quality of a fugue).
Yet I feel strong pressure to like it. Liking Beethoven's Great Fugue marks you out as a music connoisseur.
I feel pressure to like other things as well. Bitter cabernets, Jackson Pollack paintings, James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the music of Arnold Schoenberg, and Burning Man. This is a pattern common to all arts. You recognize this pattern in a work when:
- The work in question was created by deliberately taking away everything that most people like best about that art form. In the case of wine, sweetness and fruitiness. In the case of Jackson Pollack, form, variety, relevance, and colors not found in vomit. In the music of Alban Berg, basic music theory. In every poem in any volume of "Greatest American Poetry" since 2000, rhyme, rhythm, insight, and/or importance of subject matter. In the case of Burning Man, every possible physical comfort. The work cannot be composed of things that most people appreciate plus things connoisseurs appreciate. It must be difficult to like.
- The level of praise is absurd. The Great Fugue, Beethoven's finest? I'm sorry; my imagination does not stretch that far. "Burning Man changed my life completely" - I liked Burning Man; but if it changed your life completely, you probably had a vapid life.
- People say they hated it at first, but over time, grew to love it. One must be trained to like it.
- People give contradictory reasons for liking it. One person says the Great Fugue has a brilliant structure; another says it is great because of its lack of structure.
- Learning to like it is a rite of passage within a particular community.
Here are some theories as to how a work becomes the darling of its medium or genre:
- It is really and truly excellent. This would explain features 2 and 5.
- It is a runaway peacock's-tail phenomenon: Someone made something that stood out in some way, and it got attention; and people learned to like things like that, and so others made things that stood out more in the same way, until we ended up with Alban Berg. This would explain features 2 and 3.
- Enshrining good art as exemplars helps advance people devoted to art up their field's dominance hierarchy; enshrining bad art as exemplars advances people who are more devoted to seeking power. Guess which type of person you find more of at the top of power hierarchies? This would explain all five features.
- As people learn more about an art form, they can more-easily predict it, and need more and more novelty to keep them interested; like porn viewers who seek out movies with continually-stranger sex acts. If ivy-league universities had departments of pornography, they would scoff at the simplicity of films lacking bondage, machines, or animals. This would explain features 1, 3, and 5.
- Practitioners of an art appreciate technique more than content. This is why authors love Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Delaney's Dhalgren; they are full of beautiful phrases and metaphors, ways of making transitions, and other little tricks that authors can admire and learn to use, even though these books aren't as interesting to readers. This could explain feature 5.
(Don't assume that the same theory is true for each of my examples. I think that the wine hierarchy and Alban Berg are nonsense, Jackson Pollack is an interesting one-trick pony, Citizen Kane was revolutionary and is important for cinematographers to study but is boring compared to contemporary movies, and Burning Man is great but would be even better with showers.)
I could keep listening to the Great Fugue, and see if I, too, come to love it in time. But what would that prove? Of course I would come to love it in time, if I listen to it over and over, earnestly trying to like it, convinced that by liking the Great Fugue I, too, would attain the heights of musical sophistication.
The fact that people come to like it over time is not even suggested by theory 1 - even supposing the music is simply so great as to be beyond the appreciation of the typical listener, why would listening to it repeatedly grant the listener this skill?
I have listened to it a few times, and am growing confused as to whether I like it or not. Why is this? Since when does one have to wonder whether one likes something or not?
I am afraid to keep listening to the Great Fugue. I would come to like it, whether it is great art or pretentious garbage. That wouldn't rule out any of my theories.
How can I figure out which it is before listening to it repeatedly?
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Comments (367)
You can find just about any color in vomit, if you eat creatively beforehand.
For example, by eating pieces of clay colored in particular ways.
Posts like this are why I keep coming back to LW.
EDIT: More specifically, because more progress gets made on a particular topic in one evening than in four years of typical college classes on the same topic.
The real question is, why do you care about peer pressure?
EDIT: I just listened to it for the first time, and really liked it. Still, tastes differ.
Comments like this are why I keep coming back to LW.
Because not everyone we'd want to associate with are people who can mentally just up and decide to not be status signalling creatures. And thus we want to model how and why the status signalling happens, both to understand how to react normally as well as how we can act without falling into the same traps. Not to mention this is something just glossed over in everyday status signalling interactions; maybe we can optimize the situations.
English, please?
EDIT: Is it a fancy way of saying that we give in to peer pressure to not look stuck up? Just a guess...
EDIT2: OK, Jack said it even shorter, but it looks like I sort of got it.
Disclaimer: Hopefully I can close the gap, but if not, I'll have to hope someone else gets what I'm talking about, because I'm not always the best at explaining signalling.
Humans are social animals. Part of our social behavior is making ourselves look like we're ideal individuals, whether we're conscious of it or not. Peer pressure helps force others to align with both our view of ideal (by making them act more how we want them to act) and reinforce our ideal-ness (because we're making them agree, if submissively and possibly unconsciously, with our view). Many people don't understand this is what we're doing, but are otherwise intelligent individuals with ideas or characteristics that we like. Thus, we want to understand the social behavior going on here so we can interact with this set of people better than if we just decided to not learn the behavior, as ignoring them would also be below par.
Edit: Jack got it better. I was writing from a pressurer's standpoint for my explanation of why it happens, and then a pressuree's for my answer to why we care, but that may have made it more confusing.
We want people to like us.
How did you think of it compared to a Bach fugue, or Beethoven symphonies 3-9?
I do care about peer pressure, and it is irrational and self-destructive not to care about peer pressure. But in this case it is not peer pressure as much as my desire to have confidence in my own judgement.
You can draw a lot of motivation from peer pressure; the trick is to expose yourself to specific kinds of peer pressure that propel you towards some desirable goal.
In regards to art, once I made a considerable effort to like extreme metal, because a respected art-geek friend recommended me to do so. He's a professional poker player with little to no social engagement in art circles, and thus his tastes have remarkably social-pressure-free origins. I figured that'd make his social pressure on me more valuable. Currently, on reflection, I believe that some extreme metal is extremely good, and I also enjoy such music immensely, and the fact that I could manage to reach this state only via peer pressure doesn't matter that much.
"Try to minimize information cascades regarding art recommendations" seems to be a good heuristic in general. Another would be: "value the recommendations of people who have complex boundaries of liked-disliked art". Someone who likes some classical music, but not most, and also likes some extreme metal, but not most, maybe considers the actual music more carefully than someone who likes most music from one genre but completely dismisses certain other genres.
Because all my friends do.
I've been listening to it as I read your post, and I like it well enough so far, despite not being a huge classical music person. (I will probably get bored of it before the end though since I don't really have the patience for long classical works.) I also liked Pollock's paintings the first time I saw them in person, and generally prefer abstractish art to representational, despite not being an art connoisseur. My point being, some people really do like these things without having to try :).
I do think you have a point overall, in that stuff that's harder to appreciate can become higher in status for precisely that reason. However, just because it takes a while to "get" something doesn't mean that it's secretly bad. In particular, listening to music multiple times could have a "key" effect similar to the effect where an incomprehensible distorted sentence can be understood clearly after hearing a non-distorted version (I can't find a video of this right now). Similarly, just because you don't understand some piece of mathematics the first time (or two) you read it doesn't mean that people who claim to find it beautiful are lying or have tricked themselves into liking it. Some things really do require more effort to appreciate.
Sounds plausible.
I think you're referring to Sine wave speech (listen to SWS, then original, then SWS again), so I'm just gonna put the link here for you...
I understood the SWS almost every time the first try (didn't get #4).
He might also be referring to audio pareidolia (example with the NAACP).
Feeling as if you "should" enjoy something seems like a natural reaction to a -wanting/-liking/+approving behavior, in this case enjoying the Great Fugue. For the most part +approving behaviors have high status, so feeling confused that you don't like it isn't surprising--different parts of your desire are conflicting.
There is a fifth hypothesis, which is a more general form of #4, that could explain the popularity of the piece: when appreciation for an art form becomes sufficiently developed, the criteria for judging it changes as a result of the psychologies of the people who make up the institutions devoted to that art form. For example: literary criticism. What the layman looks for in a novel is drastically different from what an English professor looks for, and that's because of the institution of literary criticism and the kinds of people it attracts. This trend probably has a self-reinforcing effect for two reasons: a) there are strong status reasons to signal enjoying +approving works, e.g. literary critics gain status by saying they enjoy Shakespeare, and b) institutions devoted to art forms can become more homogenous over time. Thus, a popular piece of art need not be more novel to be "fine art," it just needs to be better optimized for the new criteria. This hypothesis is consistent with pattern features 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6.
Is that different from a "peacock's tail"?
Come to think of it, it does resemble a "peakcock's tail" much more than it resembles #4. But I don't think it's identical because the peacock's tail hypothesis doesn't account for the judgement criteria changing based on how appreciation for an art form transforms itself into an institution. (And, more crucially, how the institution's subsequent evolution affects the judgement criteria.)
Hm. If you put Jackson Pollock in the same category as The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, maybe I should re-evaluate my opinion of Jackson Pollock.
In which direction?
Positively.
What do you like about that poem?
I'll chime in. I quite like the lines, "For I have known them all already, known them all;/ Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,/ I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;..."
Also, the tone of the poem itself is quite dismal and deals with basic existential dread and a sort of mean loneliness, which (when I first read it as a teenager) seemed incredibly poignant and touching. Perhaps it seems a bit less fraught with meaning when those concerns don't press as heavily on the mind, but it left an emotional impact on me. I also like the things less easy to justify objectively; I like the imagery and rhythm of the poem, though others may not.
I can see how it may seem a bit wankish with the Dante's Inferno quote at the beginning and some of the more oblique turns it takes before getting to a point, but I like it nonetheless. Poetry is strange; I can read a poem and like it or not like it after a few minutes of reflection, but I have to really think about it to justify my feelings if I am to try and explain it to someone else.
It didn't seem worthwhile to mention this earlier, but now that people are throwing anecdotes around I might as well add mine: Prufrock is one of my very favorite poems. It's wonderfully evocative, generates emotional torque deftly without getting maudlin, and it's packed with beautiful phrases: there's hardly a line in there that doesn't have something that'd scan well as the title of another work. Granted, the theme of middle-aged middle-class frustration isn't universally palatable, but if you can stomach that it's got a lot to recommend it.
It's also pretty straightforward as Eliot goes, really; if you're looking for examples, The Waste Land is just as beloved of English departments and a lot more opaque and less conventional.
"Do I dare /Disturb the universe? /In a minute there is time /For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse"
The "coffee spoons" line gets a lot of love, deservedly, but that passage is what sticks with me, that and the callback later in the poem "Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?"
My metric for good poetry is that it should still echo in my mind after I've stopped reading it, I've stopped thinking about it, and I've moved on to other things. By that metric "Prufrock" is a good poem, certainly the best of Eliot's poetry that I've read.
Also, those passages may be of interest to LW-- there might be some clues about akrasia.
I love the poem, but I wonder whether that's because it was the first work I read that made my standard teenage social anxieties into something profound- the fear of becoming an adult who blends into the scenery, an acquaintance to all but an intimate to none. (Note that Eliot himself was extremely young when he wrote it.) If some other work did the same thing for you, then you couldn't have the same experience again with Prufrock. It's much better done than the sort of thing that most teens project themselves into, of course, but it's still as fundamentally a teenage work as most rock songs are.
I think it's for the same reason that most people who never saw Star Wars when they were a kid don't see what the fuss is about when they watch it as an adult.
The other thing about Stars Wars is that it was a huge jump in the quality of special effects.
Even though I was past the age to really imprint on it, seeing that battle cruiser go past and past and past overhead is a treasured memory.
Now, big special effects sf movies are routine.
Good point. For me, the huge SFX jump in my childhood was Jurassic Park- I can't imagine that someone who grew up after the early 90s would attach as much emotional valence to such a corny story as I did, now that its disbelief-shattering CGI is commonplace.
Maybe Phil should read (or write) The Love Song of J. Ackson Pollock.
(FWIW I like Prufrock a lot and largely agree with Phil's assessment of Pollock.)
I've found that a lot of music takes 5+ listens before I really start to enjoy it. This is particularly the case of complex, subtle music. This could be just me adjusting to social demands but I find it can happen even with music I want to dislike. Katie Perry grows on you.
Most of what I listen to is popular music and I find that a lot of the music I used to love just goes down too easily now. It's a very similar experience to eating sugary candy you loved as a child but is too saccharine now. When I listen to new music that is at similar levels of accessibility and ease of listening this manifests itself in a lower limit to the number of times I can hear the song without getting sick of it.
I may simply have less musical sophistication than most (I've got more than a decade of choir experience under my belt, but have developed neither a familiarity with the mechanics of music nor a significant body of opinions,) but I more often experience the opposite. As a piece of music becomes familiar, it gradually loses its power to move me.
That happens to me too. Enjoyment peaks between 5 and 25 listens.
For me, the first is generally the best.
Although if I don't like a song quite a bit the first time I don't deliberately subject myself to it repeatedly.
Does the ability to enjoy a piece of music come back if you haven't heard it for a while?
More than if I've heard it a lot recently, but not to the point that it's like listening to it for the first time.
We're now basing judgments of highbrow status-seeking behavior by sampling YouTube commenters?
Oy.
It might not be as off-base as you think. There's a huge selection effect for who would listen to the Great Fugue, and if there's one thing that YouTube commenters do in spades it's play signalling games.
Go look at the page. It may be the only YouTube channel on the internet without grammatical errors.
Surely there are unnecessary words in this phrase.
I was impressed, though I don't think that's the only time I've seen that.
On further reflection, I don't think disliking any particular highbrow cultural symbol necessarily conveys low status. People in the know are only supposed to like the works of either Tolstoy or Dostoevskiy, but not both. Having an opinion either way is fine. Not being able to offer an opinion -- now that's low status.
I haven't heard that before. Can you give some evidence of that?
I don't have an opinion poll to point you toward; however, if you ask someone who teaches Russian literature whether there is a split between "Tolstoy people" and "Dostoeyevskiy people," I expect them to confirm that this is a widespread belief.
My suspicion is this:
You can learn to appreciate anything that requires creativity if you understand what they're trying to do and stuff like that. It starts out that they're creatively trying to accomplish something, like making a soothing sound in this case. Once people start appreciating it for the art, rather than just sounding nice, people will then create it for the art, rather than to sound nice. After a while, you end up with an art form that's very different than what it started as. It's still good. It's just something completely different, and each will look bad if you don't realize it's what you're looking at. Never read a literary masterpiece if you want a nice story. Never read a popular story if you want a literary masterpiece.
I think it's the job of storytellers to wind up exactly in the middle. They should tell useful, nuanced truths in a way that doesn't exclude anyone who might benefit from them.
I like variance on both those axes existing. That way there will be stuff in that middle for me. Not everybody will agree on where that middle is.
What's a nuanced useful truth to some may be obvious to others. What's an oversimplification to someone can be hopelessly complex to someone else.
If you try to please everyone you end up pleasing nobody, yadda yadda.
(Though some people probably can write really awesome and universally accessible stuff. I just don't want to hold everyone up to that standard because then I'd have waaaay less stuff to read.)
In this case, if you try to please everybody, you'll probably please people with similar tastes as you.
They still have the trade-off. They're just awesome enough that they can do better at both than you can do at either. They could have made it even more artistic, at the cost of being less accessible, or more accessible, at the cost of being less artistic.
I think you may have merged your response with the quotes (you need to have a blank line between the last line of a quote and the first line of non-quote text).
Fixed. I do that a lot, but I normally catch it.
I'm not sure what "appreciate it for the art" means.
Do you mean "appreciate its intended purpose" (i.e. what an artist is trying to accomplish) rather than "appreciate its expected purpose" (i.e. what you think the artist is trying to accomplish or what you think the artist should try to accomplish or what you know previous artists have tried to accomplish)?
I think more appreciate the strategies they used to creatively accomplish a goal.
That isn't required. Just a good drug that you hadn't had before. Having the right drug in the right environment is perhaps the simplest way to make a significant long(ish) term change. Excluding "change by damaging something" which is easy! Also excluding "met my significant other".
I suspect Methods of Rationality may be the end product of a similar phenomenon with respect to a number of trends in speculative fiction, e.g., of putting in more and more elaborate Xanatos Gambits and more and more subtle pop culture references.
Or as Eliezer put it:
Try looking at the above quote while tabooing the word "awesome", or better yet replace it with a word that has a similar meaning to an art movement you aren't involved in e.g., "groovy" for psychedelic, "transgresive" for modern art, etc.
Clever, but are you implying that a good story is essentially wireheading?
I wouldn't go quite that far. Maybe affective death spirals are attractors in designspace, though.
"minimalist"
I read that in a kind of stern, commanding voice, which makes it sounds really silly with the word "groovy" in it. Much sillier than with "awesome", for some reason.
This makes me realize that the voice is nothing like Eliezer's.
It's hard to beat the Algorithm of Groovy.
Oh, behave.
Who knows, maybe is a couple decades describing something as "awesome" will sound as silly and passe as describing something as "groovy" or "funky" does today.
I'm trying out a new way of processing subjective aesthetic experiences. I'm spending less time worrying about how most people don't know they're signaling, and more time thinking: "This is a feeling I'm having, and it's new, and it won't be new for long, but luckily there are more feelings out there to be had."
The first thing I've noticed is that not everyone desires the same degree of novelty or the same intensity of arousal. I'm at the higher end of both spectrums. The second thing I've noticed is that I'm already suffering from diminishing returns. I'm in the offshore drilling and tar sands period of my cultural oil age.
Make me wonder how realistic it might be to willingly ration aesthetic experiences. Probably not very.
I've certainly heard of people who did that.
Such as?
I'm rationing my consumption of Bach. And I revisit the Brandenburg Concertos sparingly.
I just realized that I spent most of tonight mildly depressed because I didn't ration Beyonce's 2011 Glastonbury Festival set. It's enough to make you give up being an artist.
I'm currently watching The Wire for the first time, and I try to only watch one or at most two episodes a day. I know that I'll enjoy the series more, and remember it better, if I watch it over an extended period of time than if I watched a season a day.
The Wire deserves its own comment thread. I believe it is an objectively valuable and deeply moral example of what art can do. I envy you, I wish I could wipe my memory and see it anew.
Interesting. I have found myself strongly preferring the experience of consuming fiction in one go to consuming as it comes out, to the point that I have stopped reading some webcomics (like Vattu) until they finish their current story so I can consume them at one go.
I find it a lot easier to see the connections between the parts when doing so- imagine watching a movie one scene a day!- and I find myself not particularly enjoying the suspense of waiting for the next installment. It's not clear to me, though, how my emotional attachment to the work changes based on the time I'm processing it.
I've also noticed a counter-trend, which is that when I'm reading or watching a work that evokes strong emotions or imaginative responses, I will frequently pause to process the emotion or imaginative scenario, then resume the work. So possibly one should pause a movie between scenes.
I noticed that I tended to get bored with music I had a copy of, because I played it too much. So now I mostly only listen to a track if I really want to, or it is unfamiliar, or it is on the radio. If I can't choose a track I strongly want to listen to and the radio doesn't appeal at all, I turn it off. The radio gets a lower threshold since they space out repetitions of music, and have enough new music to do so.
I haven't checked if there are any music listening systems analogous to spaced repetition learning systems, but optimised for playing tracks you like without you getting bored with them. That could be good.
Try Pandora? Their licenses prevent them from playing songs too frequently, but they replay songs you upvote more than songs you don't (and never play songs you downvote), as well as learning from your preferences to give you new music you might enjoy.
I have found that their selection can be somewhat limited in some subgenres, to the point where you can have upvoted or downvoted enough that it no longer has new music it thinks you'll be interested in. (So far, I've only done this with Celtic Punk, and that was made easier by my dislike of The Pogues.)
You are not likely to believe me when I say that I still remember vividly, almost 50 years later, how strictly I disciplined myself with that book, forcing myself to read no more than a single chapter each evening. The catch, my out, the stratagem by which I escaped the bonds of my own law, was that I could read that chapter as many times as I wished; and that I could also return to the chapter I had read the night before, if I chose. There were evenings on which I reread the entire book up the point -- The Council of Elrond, let us say -- at which I had forced myself to stop. - Gene Wolfe
Your link is broken.
Thanks. Fixed. In accordance with Hartman's Law, you used "you're" instead of "your". :)
A handful of points, without any particular axe to grind, from a professional music scholar:
(1) The Great Fugue is difficult to like, difficult to know what to make of -- even most of its passionate advocates would agree to that -- and there's no particular reason to think that opinions from wildly positive to wildly negative are not all within the realm of the reasonable responses to this piece. A huge amount of scholarly ink has been spilled on why it, and the late string quartets, and the Missa Solemnis, are so peculiar.
(2) Relatedly, people who love it and think that it's obviously, uncomplicatedly lovable may well be putting on airs or signaling. And as with any piece of music that has gigantic prestige built up around it (partly due to its reputation for being super-profound and inscrutable), all opinions are probably to be somewhat taken with some suspicion of signaling behavior.
(3) Think of someone who has repeatedly shown herself to be a brilliant, extremely sound thinker. You come to trust her opinions on a wide range of topics. When she says something you find absolutely bizarre or inscrutable, you're going to at a very minimum think carefully about what she says to see if the fault is with you. If you're a fan of most of the music Beethoven writes, I encourage you to give him a similar benefit of the doubt.
(4) I myself find the Great Fugue remarkable but not at all pleasant -- in fact, while Beethoven holds me enraptured right up through the Last Five Sonatas and the Ninth Symphony, he loses me a bit with the Missa Solemnis and the late string quartets, with the exception of a few isolated movements. You're certainly not wrong to suggest that admitting these views in academic music circles is low-prestige (although not as much so as it used to be), but a major factor in this is my point (3) above: Beethoven has generally earned the benefit of the doubt. Also, it's equally low-prestige in those circles to run around gushing about how amazing the Great Fugue is without having some interesting things to say about why you think so.
(5) I am totally baffled why you are so convinced that quality must be something that inheres to a piece of music. Quality is subjective, or at most inter-subjective, and aesthetic judgments do not contain truth value.
(6) Whatever you think you mean by suggesting that the music of Alban Berg (not sure why you picked him) lacks "basic music theory," I can completely guarantee you that you are wrong. Music theory is not a property of musical compositions any more than linguistics is a property of language. If what you mean is that Alban Berg was not a composer of tonal music in the 18th- and 19th-century sense, then that is true, but (a) his music contains structure, just not tonal structure; (b) the relativism of aesthetic judgments means that that is neither a bad thing nor a good thing except insofar as the pleasure some people take in his music is good; and (c) if you are hinting at the claim that people who say they like Alban Berg's music don't actually like it but are just signaling social prestige, then that may be true for some individuals but is false in the general sense.
(7) Liking has a great deal more to do with familiarity than you think it does, and substantial music cognition research backs this up.
(8) It is probably impossible to separate individual aesthetic pleasure from socially-pressured aesthetic pleasure as thoroughly as you want to. (I'm reminded of the famous Judgment of Paris wine-tasting episode (link is to Wikipedia, tinyurl is the only way I could get it not to be broken).) We are social beings, so we should release ourselves from the imagined obligation to make all our aesthetic judgments in a social vacuum. Even the pleasure you take from the things you think you like in the most genuine and uncomplicated way is to some degree socially determined. Liking things is something that we're in many ways primed to do by what we hear from others -- if my best friend recommends me a novel, I'll read it with somewhat more patience knowing that someone whose opinion I value has vouched for it. If in the end I like it, even if I wouldn't have liked it otherwise, there's no reason to think of that liking as being less genuine or less valuable.
(7+8) If you listen to the Great Fugue a hundred more times, unless you find something viscerally unpleasant about it (which, make no mistake, some people really do, since it's pretty loud and screechy), you will probably like it, because familiarity and social conditioning tend to do that to us. If you like it, stop driving yourself crazy and just like it. If you can't stand to like something thinking that there's some element of social conditioning driving you to do so, then by all means stop listening to the Great Fugue.
(9) That said, many people do find that it's interesting or pleasant to expend a little effort to see if they can learn to like something that they don't immediately like but have some reason to think they may like eventually. That's what an acquired taste is. If you give it a shot and it doesn't take, then let yourself off the hook. And you can always take some pleasure in being the aggressive countersignaller who goes around telling anyone who'll listen that the Great Fugue is totally overrated (some people will take a lot more pleasure in that than they ever could in the piece itself (the politest, but by no means only, word for those people is "contrarians")).
I think it's more a case of us not being good enough at them yet. An aesthetic experience isn't going to affect everyone in the same way, but neither is aspirin. We can still count on reliable clusterings of similar reactions and go from there.
I agree with your last sentence but not your first. Aesthetics is pretty reliable among humans, but what about in minds-in-general?
After all, dung beetles probably consider dung to be pleasing at some level. The beauty of dung, art, a piece of music, etc., is not "true" or "false".
How about just getting more accurate about what actually happens (in terms of interaction between sound waves, light waves, and brain) when we perceive art? Surely we are doing this.
See Schmidhuber (of AIXI etc):
I'm watching his '09 Singularity Summit talk now. Is there a reason I shouldn't consider it massively important?
It's been a while since I read his writing on this topic, but I remember thinking that it is a cute idea, yet I really wanted experimental backing (which ought to be easy to do) and the generated stuff didn't seem very pretty.
"Aesthetics is pretty reliable among humans, but what about in minds-in-general"
I don't think that's relevant. A fugue's job description doesn't include entertaining killer robots from outer space, it's supposed to entertain humans.
In general, I think any artwork should be judged (not enjoyed, but judged) based on whether the author succeeded or failed at what [s]he, personally set out to do, and whether it was a hard thing to do - whether it is creating music that is different from all other music in every way imaginable while remaining musical, or writing a novel that avoids all unrealism, or just figuring out what makes museums accept works for which "garbage" is a description, not an insult. Basically, the same way you'd judge an engineer.
Now I wish there were a classical music piece entitled "Fugue in G for Killer Robots from Outer Space".
Sort of like this?
I, uh. Wow. I did not expect to like that nearly as much as I did.
I heard an interview with a conductor doing Beethoven's 5th symphony, complaining about people who come up to him and say they enjoyed the piece. (cue German accent) "I want to ask them, 'Really? What is wrong with you?'"
I find that attitude baffling, don't you? But you do encounter it sometimes. Glenn Gould quite famously claimed to hate all music written between 1750 and 1900 or something -- but he still extensively performed and recorded it, so he must either have been lying or really wanted the money.
Something one comes across a little more often is a prickly attitude when you tell a performer or composer that you thought their piece was "pretty" or something, which can be taken as pejorative if something more along the lines of the Kantian sublime was intended! Maybe that's what the conductor in this case meant.
It was Christoph Eschenbach, I'm pretty sure. I think he meant the 5th isn't supposed to be "enjoyed" because it's so dark.
My post says in two separate places that familiarity leads to liking; and this is why the question of whether I should continue to listen to the Great Fugue is a problem.
If liking is just about familiarity, then it doesn't matter what we listen to, and music criticism, and music theory, and all of art, is bogus.
I'm very familiar with the song "My Sharona" by The Knack, because I had a housemate in college who played it frequently. I hate it. I'm also very familiar with the Green Acres theme song. I think that I hate it, yet I find it so compelling that it can get stuck in my head for an entire day - which requires some kind of greatness.
My post doesn't say that. Theory 4 explicitly rejects that view. But if you strongly believe that aesthetic judgement has no truth value, even relative to your human biology and your culture, then musical training is a waste of time, and I am confused as to why you would call yourself a musicologist, since you then have no more understanding of music, and no better taste, than anyone else.
My knowledge of Alban Berg is limited. I have listened to his music for only about one hour total in my entire life, because I found it painful to listen to.
Aesthetic judgment has no truth value in the sense that if I like something, it is not meaningful for someone else to say "You are wrong to like it." It may be meaningful for someone else to say "You think you like it, but you're wrong, you actually don't" -- which I think captures the dynamic you're concerned about in this post in some respects, and I think it's quite appropriate to be concerned about that and to want to avoid getting railroaded into thinking you like something that you really don't. But when I genuinely like something, there's just not any sense in which there is a truth or falsity condition to my liking. It's like our emotions -- there are always factual beliefs that condition our emotions, but various emotional states may all be reasonable responses to the same set of facts, because of the personal, individual element.
This is all somewhat distinct from the sense in which some things are widely and predictably liked by a lot of people. We say that someone has good taste when their judgment is a good predictor of others' judgment. These kinds of preference-clusters around some objects are about the closest we can get to saying that personal aesthetic judgments can be right or wrong. Nevertheless, the ultimate seat of aesthetic judgment is in the individual -- i.e., the brain that experiences an aesthetic object and determines whether I like it or not is my own, with whatever states and inputs it possesses that make up the judgment -- so I do say that actual aesthetic preference is neither true nor false.
I don't think I have "better" musical taste than anyone. I like a lot of music that lots of other people like, and I also like some music that very few people like and hate a pretty great deal of music that a lot of people like. None of this qualifies me to tell other people that they are right or wrong to like anything. Neither does my training in music performance and scholarship. When I perform music, I try to do it in ways that other people will like, and sometimes I get it right and sometimes I get it wrong, often hilariously wrong.
Musicology as a scholarly discipline has little or nothing to do with making aesthetic judgments, although most musicologists are guided to some degree by their aesthetic judgments in choosing what they'll work on. What distinguishes the profession is knowledge about music (its history, technique, and so on). I wrote a quick sketch of the kind of things academic musicologists do here, just a couple of days ago.
Initially I couldn't understand why you had such a low opinion of the "trainwreck" you linked to. But I think I've figured it out. Is it not so much that you can't use musicological data to create music that hits it intended mark, but that it's crude to lump all that mark-hitting into the category "good?"
To reply to this and your other comment at once, yes, this is one reason why I think it is so bad. A related idea is that I think that this obsession with a hypothetical ratability (however computationally intractable) of music fails to recognize that music is enormously wrapped up in culture. I'll try to explain why I think that's a fatal error. You and I agree that there are preference clusters around some pieces of music, but we interpret the existence of those clusters differently. To you, they suggest a kind of groping toward some as-yet-unseen aesthetic truth -- what we would like if we were like we are now, only better (coherent extrapolated aesthetic preferences?). To me, they are limited in their (even hypothetical) extent by both individual difference and by cultural difference -- preference clusters only crop up reliably among people who are relatively similar to one another and share a lot of cultural common ground. In my view, even if we were much, much better, smarter versions of ourselves, aesthetic judgment would continue to vary as widely as the combined variance of human cultures and the traits of individuals.
Another way of saying this is that music is a phenomenon created by so many aspects of culture and individual psychology, in such eclectic ways, that I don't think a mathematical model of our responses to music can be very much less complex than a complete mathematical model of the human mind, biology, and culture. When I see people pursuing approaches to music who see it as much simpler than that (like the aforementioned trainwreck), it's a dead giveaway that they don't know what they're talking about.
Even if we were much, much smarter versions of ourselves, intellectual judgment would continue to vary widely.
But there wouldn't be creationists.
Yes there would. Much, much smarter != freed from cognitive biases.
Granted there would be religious people, I do not think there would be creationists. Granted for the sake of argument a few people sufficiently smart are now creationists, were everyone that smart, the community of creationists might shrink until having such opinions about biology would be as isolating as analogous literalist Biblical opinions about the "four corners of the Earth". Absent a supporting community, only seriously deluded smart people, such as might also think themselves Napoleon, would be creationists.
If I understand what you are saying, you think that one could not be qualified to tell people that they are simply wrong to like what they like, but one could be qualified to tell them that they like what they like because they are stupid, or for similar reasons, including sometimes when those reasons are (or are due to) things either or both of you would rightfully label wrong according to each of your values.
Yes. In other words, your aesthetic preference is what you like, not what you wish you liked. I believe that what Phil Goetz is struggling with in the original post -- an extremely valid struggle that I think we can all relate to -- is something like a three-layered conflict between (a) what he likes, (b) what he would like to like, and (c) what he would like to like to like. (a) and (c) are negative -- he does not like the Great Fugue and would not like to like to like it, but certain pressures make him feel in some respects as though (b) he would like to like it.
Your comment gives me an opportunity to clarify one other thing. Aesthetic judgments are often based in part, though I believe almost never wholly, on factual beliefs of some kind. Insofar as those might be mistaken, I think it does present a limited sense in which I might be wrong to like something, but only wrong relative to my own meta-preferences. To construct a silly example, imagine I like Wagner's music in part because I am under the impression that he was a morally upright person. (This might sound like a bad reason for liking someone's music, but I would argue that things like that factor into our aesthetic judgments really often.) Now, it's unlikely that even my belief about Wagner's moral character would cause me to like his music if I truly found it viscerally unpleasant, so I do think that a core of more purely aesthetic judgment remains in most cases -- but let's say that my positive aesthetic judgment is made wildly positive by my belief about Wagner's moral character, or that a slightly negative (just worse than indifferent) aesthetic judgment is made slightly positive by my belief. Since Wagner was not a morally upright person, though, I think it's fair to say that the portion of my aesthetic judgment about his music that is informed by that belief is simply wrong. However, I don't think there are -- by definition -- any aesthetic judgments that rely entirely on facts.
Your first paragraph is well-stated, and I agree with it.
I can at least expect that musical taste is like multi-level regression, where human biology is one level of regression with a lot of data, a culture is a second level, people who like a particular kind of music is a different second level, and an individual is a third level. Each additional level makes our model more precise, but provides less data.
So, even if I can't say someone's opinion of a musical piece is wrong, I could say it is very improbable, and give my estimate of their taste some kind of entropy penalty. With enough knowledge of their opinions, I could reject the hypothesis that they belong to a particular musical affiliation group.
More importantly, there is a human level of the regression, and it provides some information. Having tastes that differ significantly from standard human tastes - it could be a result of training, so it might be "good"; but it's also as close to "wrong" as we may be able to get.
But, none of what I just said is useful for the problem posed in my post. I think the answer is brain scans.
There is something objectively good about particular musical intervals, e.g., the octave, the 1-3-5 chord, that has to do with the ratios of their frequencies. Therefore there is some objective truth about musical taste. You could use that to construct some metric of each interval, and make something like a Markov model of how that metric changes over time in different musical pieces, and see if you come up with patterns. But that still wouldn't answer the question whether a deviation from that pattern indicates something new and good, or new and bad.
I think that you're saying that my question has no answer.
I'm not sure I agree here. I understand the point you are making about ratios of frequencies, but by that logic, equal tempered music would presumably be automatically inferior to music in just intonation, because the consonant intervals are more consonant in just intonation than E-12 tuning.
Music that is more consistently consonant is not better; all pieces composed entirely of octaves and fifths aren't inherently better than all pieces that also have thirds (or any other less-harmonic interval you care to name). This also assumes that Western music theory is the only valid type; musical languages consisting of a non-diatonic system are not automatically inferior.
EDIT: I'd like to add that I'm inclined to think there is a degree of objective musical quality.
That has very, very little directly to do with the aesthetics of musical composition, however. Its implications are rather in the area of how humans interpret musical sounds: all else being equal, we tend to think of acoustically simple intervals ("consonances") as being "more fundamental" than acoustically (more) complex intervals ("dissonances"), so that we interpret the latter in terms of the former, rather than vice-versa.
It's a curious phenomenon that, throughout history, people have thought (i.e. written treatises as if) the key to musical composition is identifying which "atomic" musical materials "sound good" (and then stringing them together, one presumes). But that isn't how it works at all. Musical composition operates on a higher level of abstraction; the treatment of intervals and so forth is just mechanics, like spelling words for a novelist.
(Whatever the reason is that you don't like the Great Fugue, it isn't because it doesn't contain enough consonant intervals.)
The challenge of composition is, in my opinion, first establishing what the musical language or the vocabulary of the given work is, then developing an interesting narrative using that language. In common-practice tonality, the musical language is more or less a constant; modern composers, in the absence of the assumption that they are writing in common-practice tonality, have to make it clear what the language is - that is, what tonal relationships form the structure of the piece - as well as providing a coherent direction to the piece.
In a sense, in some modern idioms, the harmonicity of an interval or a chord is pretty irrelevant, once the intervallic or or chordal relationships the composer is using to create the piece are consistent and understandable. That said, harmonicity is an important part of how we hear music, so what intervals are used will of course affect the quality of the finish quality.
This is more or less the standard "party line", and even makes a certain amount of sense on its own terms, but I think it's actually wrong.
More specifically, I don't think "common-practice tonality" is actually a thing, music-theoretically. The illusion that it is results in my view from two circumstances: (1) the high cultural prestige of European art music from approximately 1700-1900 (corresponding basically to an era when it happened to be dominated by Germans); and (2) the fact that more recent art music is less accessible to casual listeners due specifically to its complexity (i.e. not any difference in "musical language", if we take that to mean the fundamental principles of musical comprehension).
I think there is a fundamental change in how Western Art Music is composed around the start of 20th century; the removal of the tonic-dominant relationship as the fundamental relationship within musical works is responisble for that. Of course, the Second Viennese School considered themselves successors to that traidition, not revolutionaries or iconoclasts, and I would be inclined to agree, but I do think that there is significant to music written before theirs and music written afterwards. I'll readily admit this may just be down to how I've been taught, and I'm not a musicologist (though I do have some familiarity with different types of analysis).
What do you mean by "party line"? Which part specifically is the party line? Whose party line is it? The party line of musicologists, or the party line of contemporary composers? I find it hard to imagine there's a party line for composers, given the composers I know and the biographies of some of the bigger composers of the last century. I'm interested because these are mainly conclusions I've come to on my own.
I agree there is a certain amount of German-centrism in the term "common-practice tonality", but that itself doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I agree contemporary music is more complex (excluding minimalism and other obvious exceptions) and that is a factor in its accessibility, but also people's familiarity with the common-practice tonal language gives (as popular music is based on this language too) them expectations as to what music should be like; music that does not follow these conventions is difficult for them to understand.
Yes, this is a proposition I reject. Don't worry, I don't expect my claim to be obvious; explaining it would be a rather involved technical discussion. A necessary first step would be the wholesale rejection of the traditional Rameau-Riemann theory of "chord progressions" in the explanation of earlier music, in favor of the kind of approach taken by Schenker and, later, Westergaard.
All of the above; particularly those of high status.
It definitely exists -- but only as a historical cluster of musical works, and not as a theoretical category. From a theoretical point of view (again, my theoretical point of view, which is separated by considerable inferential distance from the memes of traditional music theory), there is little use for a category which includes Bach and early Schoenberg and excludes middle and late Schoenberg.
Is quality totally subjective, though ? If so, then there's nothing special about Beethoven's music, or Bach's music, or Elvis's music, etc. Sure, their work has stood the test of time, but if there's nothing inherent in music that makes it good or bad, then whether it stood the test of time or not isn't terribly important. Furthermore, if one piece of music is as good as any other, then why have professional musicians at all ? Why should we even have "music" as a discipline ?
Why have money? Sure, it's been around for ages and it's used the world over, but if there's nothing inherent in money that makes it valuable, then how long and how widely it's been used isn't terribly important. Furthermore, if one coin or bill is made of the same stuff as any other, than why mint currency at all? Should we even have "money" as a thing?
EDIT: Just in case it needs saying: An awful lot of things that are terribly important to humans and can change their lives for better or worse do not correspond to ontological primitives or the first-order phenomena on which reality is ultimately based.
Money has value by consensus agreement -- even the most dedicated Gold Standard advocates will usually cop to the fact that it's gold's properties that make it useful for trade, and anyway most money now and through much of human existence has no basis in gold. You cannot melt down a gold coin, shred a banknote of paper or plastic, and extract the raw value from it. It's totally made up. And oddly enough, this may very well not prevent you from starving to death if you run out of it...
This is already a weaker claim than the one you seemed to be presenting before -- though I may have misunderstood you at the time. Rather than saying that one piece of music is as good as any other (f.ex., a random tune that I'm humming is as good as anything produced by The Beatles or Brittney Spears or whomever), you are now saying that there exists a "consensus agreement" regarding which music is better. Thus, it is possible to rank music according to quality, even if we define "quality" as "alignment with the consensus". I'm going to chip away at your claim a little more, though.
While it is true that the value of money is governed by consensus, this value is not entirely arbitrary. For example, if Mexico's government got its act together, somehow developed fusion power, and began exporting energy to its neighbours, I would expect the value of the Peso to rise relative to the Dollar. I can't predict exactly what this value will be exactly, but I am fairly sure it will be much higher than it is today.
This is because the consensus that governs the value of money is rooted in at least two real-world quantities:
Is this also true of music ? Or is musical quality still completely arbitrary ?
This is my first post in the conversation. Are you thinking of a different person maybe?
Nooooot exactly. What I'm saying is that questions of whether music is pleasurable to listen to or holds up to sophisticated aesthetic analysis do not dissolve even if we assume the criteria are arbitrary (and indeed, different musical traditions around the world have different tone scales, different ideas about what constitute good lyrics, rhythm, et cetera -- so while two humans from entirely different social contexts may disagree with each other's tastes in music, it is still rather likely they both have a taste in music).
I like listening to Tuvan throat singing (no, really). I know plenty of people who can't stand it (one of my spouses being a prominent example, but she adores heavy metal). There's no a priori reason why I'd dig phase-shifting and simultaneous harmonies in a raspy voice while she prefers electric guitar and heavy thumping drum beats.
So you're right that it's arbitrary, but the statement "these preferences are arbitrary" is kind of meaningless -- I still have the brainbits that respond well to Kongar ool-Ondar, and my spouse still has the brainbits that respond well to Apocalyptika and Sammael, and this will lead to important, meaningful social behaviors on our part.
Don't get too confused by my money analogy -- it's true that money stands in for trade balances in a sense and so relative valuations between currencies can be expected to vary in response to economic conditions, but that doesn't make any instance of the symbols or tokens of trade-balance valuable unto themselves.
What I'm saying is you can't make meaningful statements about music quality outside of context; you should taboo the word "arbitrary" here.
Such folks may want to try the piano 4-hands or string orchestra version.
Perhaps it would have been better to write "not just" instead of "just not" -- because Berg's music in fact contains plenty of tonal structure; there's a reason he's considered the most "conservative", "backward-looking", "romantic" member of the Second Viennese School (whether or not such a characterization stands up to "proper" scrutiny). The final orchestral interlude of Wozzeck even has a frickin' key signature.
Yeah, the most complete way I could have put it would probably have been something like "Berg's music contains structure, but not very much of the kind of structure that would make it sound like the classical tonal music of the 18th and 19th centuries." That's the intuition I wanted to validate while pointing out that there's no sense in which there's "more music theory" in some kinds of music than in others.
I've been listening to the Fugue now while reading Less Wrong and enjoying it! Thanks!
I hate bitter cabernets though.
I have an experience that seems relevant.
I was assigned several chapters of the high-status The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War for a class, and fell in love with it, reading it over and over. I don't say status had nothing to do with it, for every effect has multiple causes (and every cause affects multiple things).
When the translator finished the similar-status and somewhat similar content The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories, I bought it and began reading it with the expectation I would find it stimulating on multiple levels. I found it very boring and randomly meandering, in the same way so many people say they find all of history, which I was finally able to relate to.
Perhaps I was sabotaged by high expectations that I only noticed not being met, but on the other hand I was primed to consider the book favorably and confirm that opinion.
Regarding your point 5., these are two of the earliest works of the art form, which is also a mark of something one is "supposed to like".
A meta-status theory would be that I validated my appreciation for Thucydides by disparaging Herodotus.
As for the Fugue, it was quite pleasant, though I thought the thirty seconds after 11:48 were silly.
I think having the idea that one should like a work of art is going to distract from the chance of actually liking it.
If you're confused about whether or not you like it, there might be something interesting going on. Trying to find out what it is might or might not distract you from the music.
It probably isn't pretentious garbage, though it might not be the greatest thing ever.
For what it's worth, I liked the beginning, but find it hard to believe people think this is better than the more popular Beethoven symphonies. It seemed like bits of Beethoven, and Beethoven is pretty good. Then I got bored, and started reading while using the Great Fugue for background. Long about 11:00, the music got sweet and intense and grabbed my attention, and I stayed with it, really enjoying it till the end.
I unintentionally hurt someone on Hacker News when I mentioned that:
I know I am "supposed" to like Of Mice and Men, Animal Farm, The Catcher in the Rye, The Crucible, Moby Dick, A Doll’s House, The Scarlet Letter, etc... more than a "mere video game", but the fact is, I don't.
Those have different meta-levels of "supposed to".
I think one is supposed to like Animal Farm, "supposed to" like The Catcher in the Rye, and only "'supposed to'" like Moby Dick.
I have literally no idea what this comment means. I assume that you think Animal Farm is easier to like than Moby Dick, but have no idea what the different levels of "supposed to" are supposed to mean.
I imagine one of them might mean "people make the natural supposition that you like X, with no judgement" and one of them might mean "it is expected that you like X, with social opprobrium if you do not" but I don't know what the other might be.
My guess, is as follows: One is expected to have actually enjoyed, or at least be able to have a decent discussion about, Animal Farm (supposed to like it). One is assumed to at least say they enjoyed and have a small discussion about Catcher in the Rye, but nothing serious as no one will press it ("supposed to" like it). And one is implied to only have to say you read Moby Dick, as no one but literary critics will actually discuss the book (only "supposed to" like).
Yes. You are expected to actually like Animal Farm, plausibly lie about liking Catcher in the Rye, and transparently lie about liking Moby Dick.
Catcher in the Rye was actually the only book I was ever assigned to read in school which I wholeheartedly enjoyed, but I gather that it's significantly a love-it-or-hate-it work.
I read Catcher in the Rye is high-school, at the time I found it reasonably mediocre and certainly nothing memorable. Later, when I was in grad school, I found out that apparently it was a huge deal when it was released. I can only assume that this is some combination of Seinfeld is Unfunny and possibly that I don't remember it very well.
Off-topic, but I think a better name for the Seinfeld is Unfunny trope would be Actually, You Can Do That on Television
I think you'd get more points by knowledgeably hating Catcher in the Rye than by plausibly lying about liking it.
That was not my experience. I actually liked Animal Farm, but I was the only person in my 10th grade English class who did not like Catcher in the Rye1, and I've been reading Moby Dick on the kindle recently and finding some of it quite interesting, in a sort of pseudo-nonfiction way.
1 -- I regard Catcher in the Rye and some other books (A Farewell to Arms also springs to mind )as particularly awful in that I can barely remember anything about them except the negative emotional affect being forced to read them produced. This is distinct from, say, Wuthering Heights which I really didn't like because it's not my kind of book, but which I remember just fine and can understand why other people might think it was great.
This probably depends on where you hang out-- I've seen a claim that science fiction fans are apt to like Moby Dick, even if it's the only classic they like.
I love Moby Dick. Melville constructed an epic fantasy out of real-world material. It presents a detailed picture of a world very different from ours and full of crazy, fantastic, heroic stuff, like a fantasy - but that world was all real.
I dislike The Catcher in the Rye, feel as if I ought to like Animal Farm, and genuinely like Moby-Dick. I can see why other people would dislike Moby-Dick, but I still like the damn thing.
My hypothesis: Because I was not taught Moby-Dick in school, I did not associate reading it with work, but with relaxation. This is borne out by my love of David Copperfield (read alone) and only vague enjoyment of Great Expectations (assigned in school).
I think the concept of inferential distance applies to art. As a kid, I was mostly exposed to classic rock (Led Zeppelin, Queen, and so on), and I felt something close to disgust when listening to anything significantly removed from that genre. However, I eventually bridged the gap between genres by finding music that mostly resembled classic rock but with a bit of something else. Eventually, this led me to enjoying entirely different genres that I'm fairly sure I'd otherwise hate.
It's the same with film. I moved from only enjoying blockbuster-type films to very strange films that some might say are pretentious or boring.
Before I thought there was an inferential distance for art, I tried to expose friends and family to some of my favorite movies. So, for example, I'd show them a movie like Festen--which I thought was actually somewhat tame and easy to like--and they'd hate it from the outset. The subtitles were a problem, the plot was a problem, it was boring, and so on. These were intelligent people with complex tastes in other areas. And now that I think about it, I'm confident that I'd feel the same way if I didn't have the progression of experiences that allowed me to love that movie the first time I watched it.
So, I'd say if you want to enjoy the things "you're supposed to like," bridge the distance with things similar to what you already enjoy.
This may shed light on the phenomenon and start value judgement-fuelled arguments in equal measure: what works are we "supposed to like" in the Less Wrong community?
I may get the ball rolling by mentioning that although I like GEB and think it has plenty of merit, I think it's ridiculously non-commensurate with the amount of praise it receives.
Primarily HP:MoR and anime. And anything else, but only if we can find something interesting to say about it from a rationalist point of view. As grouchymusicologist says of the Grosse Fuge, gushing adulation on its own, even of HP:MoR, will not earn LessWrong points.
Agreed about GEB. It appears that the more someone already knows about mathematical logic, the less highly they rate GEB, to the point of weary eye-rolling from professionals in the field.
Do experts dislike GEB because it covers material they think is obvious and/or because they think it's wrong? Or because non-experts keep talking about it to them?
Because -- so I understand, and I am not an expert -- they think it is wrong. Not by any means an undifferentiated heap of nonsense from beginning to end, but wrong enough, in the bits that the naive go geewhizgollygoshwowgeehay over and think they learned something from.
I recall the late Torkel Franzén, undoubtedly an expert, having some strong criticisms of it on sci.logic back in the day, but I don't remember details.
I spoke with my supervisor in college, a composer, about this. He's made some attempts at reading Hofstader, and said he found that the sections about music were just uninteresting and obvious to a trained musician.
I've read Hofstader's article on the music of Chopin, and found it interesting, but not particularly new.
Gosh I've been reading LessWrong since before it existed and I didn't realize I was supposed to like anime.
Anime references seem to be part of the common currency here, although I haven't seen much and what I have has not awakened my enthusiasm. I even watched all of Fate/Stay Night on YouTube, and The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya on DVD, since Eliezer had mentioned them from time to time; but I found less in them than he did.
The "true" Fate/Stay Night is an interactive videogame, which has never been translated into English in an official release.
I know that what I've seen is only part of the F/SN canon (and the same goes for Haruhi Suzumiya), but Eliezer hasn't mentioned speaking Japanese, so what did he watch?
Goetz said 'official'; very popular VNs often get fan translations. It's a safe bet that anything by Typemoon has been fan translated.
The only anime I've really enjoyed is Fullmetal Alchemist . I suspect there are, in fact, plenty of people on LW with no interest in anime -- that just passes unnoticed because they simply remain silent when the subject comes up.
I personally found the original Haruhi Suzumiya novels and stories to be superior to the anime.
Right. My impression was that it was okay to like anime, but that we should feel embarrassed about it because while we are watching cartoons we could be solving the FAI problem or taking a second job in order to donate to Village Reach.
I'm not sure you're supposed to like anime, or at least people don't talk much (at all?) about liking it. However, a substantial background in anime (something I don't have) seems to be assumed.
That's why you're supposed to read it in high school.
This can raise a warning flag but I've experienced this myself with coffee and some other foods. It didn't take any training for me but a lot of people who like beer don't like the bitter, hoppy beers like IPAs without some training - and while pretentious beer snobs are annoying and amusing on several levels I can't quite doubt them when I have the same preferences.
I agree (have had the same experience), although I argue that mustard, sauerkraut or other bitter/sour foods are better examples than coffee or beer, simply because drugs change the way we process surrounding stimuli.
How confident are you that your Beethoven fugue informants are reliable?
I am not an expert, but I do own a dozen or so Beethoven CD's and I have never heard of "Beethoven's fugue" as a standalone title. I do know that there are some pieces he wrote which are widely disliked. In particular there is one called "Wellington's Victory" which the current wikipedia page says, among other things,
Now, one day around seven or eight years ago I was reading a piece in the Sunday New York Times which was titled something like "the worst music ever composed by the greatest composers". This Beethoven work was very close to the top of the list. Then, a day later on the classical music station they played the sucker, it did sound ridiculous, and it was obvious from the way the DJ spoke that one of his friends or co-workers had played a practical joke on him (or maybe he was a great practical joker of a DJ--which I doubt, because I listened to that station all the time and this was a third string substitute DJ) because he just went on and on about the fantastic, but not much appreciated Beethoven work. It was kind of surreal.
You are going to have to provide more evidence than some cut paste you tube comments to convince me of this:
According to the wikipedia page on op 130,
(Also I mostly agree with what the musicologist said in his comment.)
Yes, people disliked the Great Fugue more when it was performed than today. But this is also true of the 3rd symphony.
There's some relevant history to Wellington's Victory. In 1813, Beethoven was seen in Vienna as a has-been. He needed to get back into the public eye. He premiered WV together with his 7th symphony. WV was tremendously popular, and its success carried the 7th Symphony along with it, and brought Beethoven back into the public eye, so that he could write and sell more actually good music. This is a case where the contemporary taste was "wrong". But I don't know the most important fact, which is whether the musical snobs of the day identified WV as bad.
By contemporary accounts, Beethoven got a great kick out of conducting WV, what with firing cannons and making lots of noise, so I won't be cynical about it.
You can also see this pattern at work in the Beatles, who became popular by writing dance pop music like "Twist and Shout" (which is good, as pop, but is pop), and this enabled them to go on to record Sergeant Pepper's and the white album.
They did indeed. In fact, the snobbiest musician of that time was Beethoven himself, who responded to critics of the piece as follows:
OK I went and gave it a listen. The copy I have is in this 8 disk box.
(Also Rodgers and Hammerstein were going for a German folk music sound, so perhaps Beethoven and they were both independently derivative of the same sources. Or this connection could purely be a figment of my imagination.)
Do you want to know enough to administer a musical taste test for this?
If you give people links to two fugues (unlabeled and untitled at the link source), and do not tell them which is which, and they aren't familiar with either, enough responses of which is better might give you at least a rough idea of to what extent it's actually great or whether it's just riding on reputation. Although, if they've heard either, we would need to discard their results because of likely bias.
This post has generated enough interesting comments that I would ordinarily move it to LessWrong at this point. But I posted it to Discussion because it is a discussion; I don't have answers. What do you think - should I move it?
Yes. Make it into a new sequence!
Interesting enough to be moved, but it is essentially discussion. Hard to tell.
I am reminded of this classic paper on wine-tasting:
Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better? Evidence from a Large Sample of Blind Tastings
Experts do prefer the more expensive wines, but this only means that for the non-experts, the negative correlation between price and popularity is even stronger.
It is called 4chan.
...really? I've never gone on /b/ - does it really meet that description?
"Scoff" might have misleading connotations.
Am I correctly reading your remark as a praising-with-faint-damns endorsement of Konkvistador's thesis? Also, what would you use in place of "scoff"?
Without at all answering your question, and on an entirely unrelated note, why hasn't "fag" become more parts of speech in English? "Fuck" is so versatile, from verb to noun to adjective to adverb to interjection to pronoun...
Probably because of the moralfags.
Because it based on petty bigotry rather than wholesome sexual abandon.
Phil, I'll remind you of your own comment:
It seems entirely plausible that a person's appreciation of a piece of music depends strongly on all the music to which she's previously been exposed. Two different observers with different music-histories may have very different internal representations of the same piece of new music. A given piece of music may be well-formed or high quality in one representation, but not another.
This also goes some distance to explaining (in an alternate fashion) why repeated exposure to the artwork increases appreciation for it. Assuming the piece really relies on their exposure to related music, extended exposure forces people to have increasingly similar backgrounds.
I read somewhere that people who have seen few movies tend to appreciate different kinds of movies than people who have seen lots of movies. Part of the reason is obvious: something that is clichéd and trite to one person may seem like amazingly original and creative to someone who hasn't seen it done over and over. At the same time, a newbie might not appreciate the way some movie turns the cliche upside down.
Something similar probably also applies to other forms of fiction, and possibly to music as well.
I think this helped me enjoy Godel, Escher, Bach more, on my second reading, after reading lesswrong. I am happy about this.
I watched the video, and I must say I like the colors and shapes and the way the light is moving through them.
Watch some of the other videos by smalin - esp. the Bach fugues and Beethoven symphonies. They are IMHO a lot more fascinating.
The Willat Effect-- people's taste in food becomes more sophisticated as a result of side-by-side comparisons
More about the Willat Effect
All joking aside, I really mean this. Try listening to it as a solemn piece. I don't think it's that great of a fugue, but it has some nice stuff in there. The lack of rhythmic and tonal movement becomes more appropriate all of a sudden if you put on a sour-puss face. If you imagine that its torturous, repetitive nature, is an intentional part of the emotional experience Ludwig wanted to give you, it becomes less annoying and more powerful, to my ear anyway.
and also:
Why not just make an earnest attempt to like all art in that case. You'll be better off. Is there some artistic merit out there which you would not be rewarding accurately if you liked all art? If you end up liking the great fugue after you listen to it a bunch, even though you didn't like it at first, sweet deal.
I got into jazz, essentially because i thought that it was cool to be into jazz. I did not like it when I bought my first jazz album, and I probably didn't like the next ten I bought either. But I'm really glad I thought it so cool that i was willing to torture myself for those hours at a time until i liked it. If I hadn't I wouldn't have the crazy good relative pitch I have today, nor the ability to mind-cream myself when someone rips Coltrane changes.
So, is my appreciation of jazz, then somehow shallower by virtue of my forcing myself to like it? Or perhaps in some way inauthentic? Well I'm not being inauthentic about loving jazz now. And I def have an above average ear for changes and improv. Ultimately, I don't think I should care at all what i did to like it now; who cares? I seriously doubt that someone who liked jazz from their first time hearing it, gets more happiness chemicals from jazz than I do by virtue of their being naturally into jazz, and my forcing myself.
The question is "if there's something new, and I don't like it, how much suffering should I be willing to put up with to learn to like it?" The answer clearly depends on juxtaposing the quantity of pleasure I should expect after I like it, and the availability of this thing , with the amount of suffering and time I'll have to put in to learn to like it.
Don't worry about why you like a terminal value. Just get it.
So, I should acquire additional terminal values so I can have higher absolute utility?
That's either wisdom or absurdity. It goes against my current model of rationality. But it seems to lead to winning, at least from the starting condition of having no values at all and thus not even being able to win or lose.
I guess it shouldn't be surprising that asking a question whose answer mystifies me leads to other questions that also mystify me. Maybe identifying a set of equivalent mysterious problems would be an advance.
A real life anecdote on altering taste, which is a related to art really:
The first time I tried a strong cheese, I didn't like it much (I came from a place that consumed relatively little dairy). However, I could see that others liked it, and expressed REALLY STRONGLY how much they liked it. So I kept trying different types until I did - then a great new gastronomic experience was opened to me, and my overall appreciation of food increased as a result. I call this winning.
Nowadays, whenever I speak to someone who "dislikes" a certain type of food, I always try to persuade them to try enough of it to like it, even if they don't want to like it now - because if they did like it, then they would regret not liking it, and it would make them appreciate more things as a result.
I can see this functioning similarly music: by not liking something that other people like, and not making an effort to like it (or worse, making an effort not to like it), you could be missing something really great.
The problem with altering preferences is, of course, that before you alter them, you apply your current preferences in your thinking, so the act of altering a preference always seems different in hindsight. "I was so naive to like this before!"; "I was missing so much before!"
My personal preference is to have as rich a world of enjoyable experiences as possible. Therefore, I strive to never have the thought "I don't want to like this", since it puts a limit on my appreciation of a category of things. In general, I'm the kind of person who "likes things". I don't know what that says about me...
One of the great ways to become a snob is do side-by-side comparisons (NancyLebovitz has links in another comment.) If you drink cheap bourbon immediately before expensive bourbon, the difference is highlighted compared to drinking them a week apart.
Many people who have done that have regretted it, though, because it ruins the cheap variety for them. Whenever they drink the cheap stuff, they think "this is so much worse than the good stuff," and so either their hobby becomes significantly more expensive or gets curtailed (because now they can only afford it a fourth of the time), and it's not clear that their overall experience is significantly better.
I, for example, have very picky tastes in food. The diet I choose for myself costs about $2-3 a day, and consists mostly of simple bread I make myself and water with a touch of lemon. I'm satisficed; would I be all that much better off if I made the investment to switch to steaks and cola?
Ah, but we know the difference there is that I'm sure you can appreciate the flavour of good steak and good cola if the situation calls for it, for example if you're treated to it in a restaurant. Choosing not to have something is a different matter to be simply unable to enjoy something that other people get great pleasure out of.
I guess I have the kind of personality which benefits most from the "I like everything" mindset, because I don't mind so much that something is worse than something else, as long as it's still good by my internal judgement. If I'm having supermarket shrimp, I know I could be having lobster, and even the shrimp would be tastier if it was freshly caught, but I don't really mind since I'm mostly thinking "mmmmmm... shrimp".
That sounds like a tremendous time investment.
Anybody else drink IPAs just cause they are cool? I know there's someone in here. I admit it: I hated it when I first tried it. And I would have never drank that bitter^10 garbage long enough to like it, if I didn't know it was hip first.
Maybe if it wasn't for people doing things cause they're hip, hard things to like at first with high future payoffs, would not even get as popular as they are today. AND THAT INCLUDES LW! Did you really love LW the first time you came across it? I did honestly fall in love with LW upon first contact, but I was already an aspiring rationalist with quite a radical take on the virtue of rationality.
So, should we care? I don't think so. Actually i think it might even be possible that we should make LW hipper. We perhaps should make EY the Fonz of rationality; and start wearing catchy uniforms; and start speaking a secret code, etc. if we really want LW style rationality to start to catch on in meat-space. The karma system already does well to motivate you and make you feel like a part of a community; but why not just go full on cult tactics? If it'll make people jealous, lets do it. Of course, we should always educate LWers about things you are supposed to like. But i see no good reason to turn down those that join LW because it's hip, or any reason why we shouldn't make it hipper, as long as we don't change the karma system it'll be good.
This feels wrong to me. But I don't know why. Wanna help me out.
When promoting the truth, if you value the truth, it is wise to use especially those methods that rely on the truth being true. That way, if you have accidentally misidentified the truth, there is an automatic safety valve.
What you say is true; but associating the community for the search of the best way of looking for the truth (promoting truth? where would we take a fully-reliable truth?) with some irrelevant purely emotional symbolics doesn't affect this safety valve.
It is not a Bayesian Conspiracy, it is Less Wrong - so if our old methods are wrong, it is the hippest thing to cast them away and become Less Wrong!
The SkyTopia site that grouchymusicologist dislikes posted its raw survey results here. It would be interesting to break the survey results down according to whether or not respondents believed in God or the soul.
W. H. Auden had an excellent heuristic for dealing with this problem:
"Between the ages of 20 and 40, the surest sign that a man has a taste of his own is that he is unsure of it."
I can like or dislike anything I want, as long as I'm willing to update. The space of possible art is huge, and I would cheat my future self if I excluded entire genres from consideration on the belief that they exist solely as pedant-bait.
I was slightly unhappy to see "Prufrock" mentioned in the same rhetorical breath as modern poetry that relaxes the demands of scansion, rhyme, and readability. I also dislike free verse, generally speaking, But "Prufrock" isn't even close to that! It uses some of the same metrical tricks as John Milton's "Lycidas":
--- John Milton, "Lycidas" (1637)
--- T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1920)
It's not as modern as it looks!
There are many places where prefixing the word "poetry" with the word "modern" signals that it can be dismissed off-hand, but I think that this is a bad way to categorize poetry. For one thing, it hides the way that new poems draw inspiration from older ones.
That's common to every art, apart from perhaps cinema or literature. Modern art? Just a load of paint thrown at canvases and unmade beds. Modern music? Just a load of random notes strung together. Modern poetry? Doesn't even rhyme.
I'm not sure which is worse - liking all modern art because one is supposed to like it, or hating all modern art because one is supposed to hate it. Either way, the category lines are not being drawn usefully. As the original post notes, there ought to be more to this than just going along with social signals.
Why ought there be more to this than going along with social signals? Isn't all of art just one great gameboard on which to play boundlessly complex social status games? When you think of people who are obnoxiously devoted to social status games, the "hipsters", you think of two things, fashion and art. Both are essentially meaningless except to define the rules of the games we play with each other.
If somebody enjoys something that they read or experience alone, then they must get some utility from art that isn't connected with the associated social signals. I suspect that there are many people who are capable of appreciating art without talking about it.
(This does not apply if they read something alone, brag about it, and try to signal super-high status and nonconformity by only liking obscure things. THAT is the status game that I associate with hipsters.)
I consider that sort of social signaling basically orthogonal to liking art for being pretty, funny, thought-provoking, or sublime. Art that is liked solely for social reasons is unlikely to survive a change in social environment.
(EDITED for pronoun trouble)
I think both are equally bad, to be honest, but that the latter is less common than the former. I think that people, given enough exposure to a diverse selection of some medium or some category, will eventually come to like at least a section of it. The widespread hatred of "modern X" is probably more often down to ignorance than signalling. Most of the signalling that goes on here is from people trying to demonstrate how hip they are; familiarity with current art is good for the image they are trying to promote. I think anti-modern signalling is largely from people who are trying to prove how conservative or old-fashioned they are, as a way of reinforcing other parts of their image.
That said, I move in circles that are more artistic than academic, so this is an obvious way in which my results could be skewed.
I don't think this actually happens. In my experience most people who hate modern art hate it because it's more-or-less uniformly absolutely awful. In my experience even the "good" pieces of modern art are only good compared to the absolute drek that is most modern art.
Edit: By modern art I mean "art belonging the the genre commonly called 'modern art' ", not "any art produced since the mid 20th century".
Another crucial issue is that art nowadays is financed to a large degree by the government (either overtly or via its formally "non-governmental" organs such as large tax-exempt foundations, academic institutions, etc.). This creates the same perverse incentives as government-financed science: the work is optimized for the bureaucratic process that determines who gets funding and official recognition, not for any direct measure of quality.
Even the money that enters the system from private buyers doesn't change these incentives much, since these buyers want to buy high-status art, not low-status kitsch -- and people in charge of sorting these out are nowadays, for all practical purposes, government bureaucrats just as much as those in charge of renewing your driver's licence. (Which makes their attempts at a "rebellious" image only more farcical.)
Moldbug once wrote a hilarious (and yet highly insightful) article about how this system works in poetry.
I think the bureaucratic aspect is more important than the government aspect. After all most classical and renaissance art was also funded by governments.
I think the hatred of all modern art is such a common meme that there are a good many people who repeat it without knowing anything about modern art.
Because I accidentally derailed my last post into pedantry, let me try again with a clearer heuristic:
A TEST FOR ART YOU REALLY LIKE:
Try to make fun of it.
If you can make fun of it, and you still like it, then you don't like it just because it's sacred.
This doesn't have to be a deep parody - I don't really think I could write a deep parody of Bach's Magnificat in D. But I can definitely imagine the parts that move me the most, the sublime moments that touch me to my core, played by a synthesizer orchestra that only does fart noises.
If the original work is itself a satire, do you try to make a humorless version of it?
Hmm...
"In the seminal Zucker, Zucker, and Abrams opus Airplane!, one character, played by Leslie Nielsen, asks another to pilot an passenger airliner in an emergency. The would-be pilot responds with incredulity, but is coolly rebuffed by the Leslie Nielsen character. This evinces laughter from the audience, as the exchange involves a confusion between two near-homophones."
Heh, heh... still funny.
For less goofy, more drily satirical stuff, I think that making a satire of the satire is still a viable option.
I had forgotten about this until just now, but there are examples where the connoisseurs actually are on to something that the average viewer/listener is missing. In a class I once took on Russian art, we watched a wordless documentary that was meant help one see the world the way avant-garde artists like Malevich or Kandinskiy did when they were painting. It changed my appreciation of this kind of art considerably -- I would now tend to dispute claims that these sorts of paintings are not representational. (I still have to regard this as a joke, though.)
Also, I genuinely, non-ironically like Russian Primitivism even though it often sort of looks like "my seven-year-old could do that".
Link to Paul Graham's take on the subject of what is good art.
I will submit two things first: (1) Jackson Pollock paintings are excellent, that you don't like them just demonstrates you're not in their audience; (2) the normal way for Burning Man to change someone's life completely is through drug use.
Over the course of my art history degree, not once did anyone insist I had to like any work. I had to recognize its importance--either as inspiration others drew on or as an exemplar of some type--but never actually be attached to any of the work. I think this tendency to demand others like a work is unserious. But this is where I wonder about the work "like" is doing.
I'm not a fan of Bouguereau, for example, but I actually "like" his work in the sense that I often trot it out when I need an example of late academic painting. In fact, he might actually be my most-referenced artist and I admit that, while I wouldn't hang any of it on my wall, I have a certain affinity for his work borne entirely of my distaste for it. I think you should consider this possibility: experts "like" a work in this sense--it is useful to them in explanation--but not in the "hang it on my wall" sense but others posture using the term but not really understanding what is meant by the expert.
Naturally, I think the posturers are fairly useless and have since my seminar days.
To understand musical consonance/dissonance, you must understand that consonance of simple harmonic ratios is an artifact of a much simpler underlying rule. The human hearing system does not analyze frequency ratios of individual notes, it examines the frequency domain clustering of partials of the sound as a whole.
If you listen to two sine waves of near identical frequency they sound consonant. Widen the frequency difference and they become dissonant. Further widen the frequency difference and they become consonant again. This was measured back in 1967 by R. Plomp and W. J. M. Levelt. The consonance of a musical harmony depends on the separation of the individual partials. We need a "critical bandwidth" of separation between frequencies to clearly distinguish them. You could think of dissonance as the unpleasant feeling of hearing different frequencies but failing to resolve them.
The majority of musical instruments used in Western classical music create sound by vibration constrained at two points, either the ends of a string or the ends of a column of air. Therefore the partials are all integer multiples [2] of the fundamental. It turns out that if these sounds are played together at small integer frequency ratios, the frequency of the partials align such that the quantity of dissonant, smaller than the "critical bandwidth", frequency differences is at a local minimum.
However, percussion instruments are not constrained in this way, so cultures with a percussion focused musical tradition (eg. Indonesian gamelan music) developed alternative tuning systems better suited to the timbres of their instruments. Early electronic musicians, eg. Wendy Carlos, also noticed how the consonance of different tuning systems depended on the timbre of the notes.
As far as I am aware, the first person to mathematically formalize this relationship, and develop a method to generate arbitrary tuning systems for arbitrary timbres and vice-versa, was William Sethares [3]. He has a great webpage at http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/ , with many audio examples. His book "Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale" should be considered the most important book on music theory ever written because it generalizes all previous musical theories, and solves the problem of the exhaustion of harmonic novelty in music without having to resort to unlistenable crap like serialism.
And now we get to the link to the main article, and the reason why Sethare's work was such a revelation to me. I shared a house with a music student for several years, and I became heavily involved in the classical music subculture. Back then I only knew of the Pythagorean ratio-based concept of harmony. I listened to a great variety of Western classical music, and attended several concerts. As my knowledge increased, I became disillusioned with pre-modern classical music, because each new composition began to sound like a reworking of something I had heard before. Traditional music theory simply didn't have enough scope for novelty. I studied the works of Harry Partch, who pushed ratio-based music theory about as far as it can go, and I wasted a lot of time attempting to extend his theory, but I never felt I had reached a satisfactory conclusion.
Of course I was exposed to atonal composition via my musician friends, and my initial reaction was the same as almost everybody's: I hated it. But both the obvious high status of this kind of music and my lack of knowledge of any alternative source of novelty slowly changed my preferences. I started listening to Second Viennese School composers and free jazz. The more I listened the more I liked it, and I gradually turned into an atonal music snob like my musician friends.
And then I left university and lost all contact with them. I forgot all about classical music for several years. When I listened to atonal music again I found I had reverted to my original preference. I'm now very certain the only reason I liked it was social signaling. I declared music to be dead and lost all interest in it.
When I later discovered Sethares's work it shook my beliefs about music to the core. My whole atonal adventure was built on a mistake. We're no longer limited by physical instruments and it's really possible to compose music simultaneously strange and beautiful. I now promote Sethares's work in the hope that more musicians will adopt it and create sometime great.
[1] R. Plomp and W. J. M. Levelt, "Tonal Consonance and Critical Bandwidth," Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.38, 548-560 (1965). [2] Approximately. Note that octaves on a piano are tuned slightly sharp, because piano strings are not simple mathematical abstractions, but have thickness and other properties such that they don't produce perfectly harmonic sound. [3] Sethares, W.A. (1993), Local consonance and the relationship between timbre and scale. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 94(1): 1218.
Interesting! Examples 2 to 5 from here were particularly mindblowing. Thanks for the link!