This is the fifth post of the Drawing Less Wrong mini sequence, in which I discuss how to draw, how learning to draw *effectively* relates to rationality, and what the initial results were when I started running a drawing workshop, teaching people with essentially no experience.

Technique

The ability to observe is probably at least 2/3rds of what separates non-artists from amateur artists. But those 2/3rds are near-useless without the ability to move your pencil the way your eyes want to it to go. And once you've transitioned into an amateur artist, around 9,000 hours of honing your technical skill is what separates you from a professional.

"Technical Skill" is a broad term - kind of a catch all for all term for various motor skills you'll need to develop, background knowledge about how particular types of lines and shapes are perceived by most humans, and how to combine those skills and knowledge to produce particular effects with your drawing.

I can't even begin to cover all of it, and most of it isn't really appropriate for Less Wrong. But I will talk about some key motor skills that tie in with the next article, and a significant bias that plays a role in them.

This article was challenging to write - distilling a kinesthetic process into written words is difficult. This article will not be a substitute for having a teacher and a model, nor will it tell you exactly what exercises to do. But it will try to lay down some concepts that I'll further expound on later.

This is the fourth post of the Drawing Less Wrong mini sequence, in which I discuss how to draw, how learning to draw *effectively* relates to rationality, and what the initial results were when I started running a drawing workshop, teaching people with essentially no experience.

To draw a city, you must walk around that city and look at it. 

You can't sit in a room with the blinds closed and create a map and expect it to be accurate. You cannot draw what you cannot see. To draw things, you need to look a things. This is surprisingly hard for a few reasons.

One is that you may want to be drawing imaginary things. I'll talk about this at length in the a later post. For now, let me just say that you can't *learn* to draw realistically (even realistic fantasy) by drawing things that aren't real. 

Another reason is that when people begin, they do not have very good hand-eye coordination. Your can't trust your hand to move on its own - you feel like you must be watching it the entire time, staring intently at the pen and paper and making sure they're doing what you want them to. Coupled with this is a gross overconfidence in how good your memory is.

The third, and most significant reason, is that you don't know how to see in the first place.

• Observation
• Technical Skill
• "Instilling Energy and Weight"

The Nature of Talent:

"Am I talented enough to draw?"

This is a question people think about a lot. It's a wrong question.

Here are a few related, relevant "right" questions:

• Do you have pre-existing skills that can be repurposed for drawing?
• How quickly are you able to acquire skills relevant to drawing?
• Do you naturally enjoy drawing? 
• If not, can you easily BECOME the sort of person who naturally enjoys drawing? 
• WHY and WHAT do you want to be able to draw?
• How well do you want to be able to draw? How much do you value being able to draw that well? 
• How many hours of dedicated practice are you willing to put in to achieve this?

This post begins a mini-sequence that discusses how to draw, reports on an experiment about teaching people how to draw, and examines how rationality and good drawing practices are related. (As it turns out, a fair amount)

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.

**Note: I'm not a poet. I hardly ever write poetry, and when I do, it's usually because I've stayed up all night. However, this seemed like a very appropriate poem for Less Wrong. Not sure if it's appropriate as a top-level post. Someone please tell me if not.**

Imagine

The first man

Who held a stick in rough hands

And drew lines on a cold stone wall

Imagine when the others looked

When they said, I see the antelope

I see it. 

Later on their children's children

Would build temples, and sing songs

To their many-faced gods.

Stone idols, empty staring eyes

Offerings laid on a cold stone altar

And left to rot. 

Yet later still there would be steamships

And trains, and numbers to measure the stars

Small suns ignited in the desert

One man's first step on an airless plain

Now we look backwards

At the ones who came before us

Who lived, and swiftly died. 

The first man's flesh is in all of us now

And for his and his children's sake

We imagine a world with no more death

And we see ourselves reflected

In the silicon eyes

Of our final creation

In the comments on Soulless Morality, a few people mentioned contributing to humanity's knowledge as an ultimate value.  I used to place a high value on this myself.

Now, though, I doubt whether making scientific advances would give me satisfaction on my deathbed.  All you can do in science is discover something before someone else discovers it.  (It's a lot like the race to the north pole, which struck me as stupid when I was a child; yet I never transferred that judgement to scientific races.)  The short-term effects of your discovering something sooner might be good, and might not.  The long-term effects are likely to be to bring about apocalypse a little sooner.

Art is different.  There's not much downside to art.  There are some exceptions - romance novels perpetuate destructive views of love; 20th-century developments in orchestral music killed orchestral music; and Ender's Game has warped the psyches of many intelligent people.  But artists seldom worry that their art might destroy the world.  And if you write a great song, you've really contributed, because no one else would have written that song.

EDIT: What is above is instrumental talk.  I find that, as I get older, science fails to satisfy me as much.  I don't assign it the high intrinsic value I used to.  But it's hard for me to tell whether this is really an intrinsic valuation, or the result of diminishing faith in its instrumental value.

I think that people who value rationality tend to place an unusually high value on knowledge.  Rationality requires knowledge; but that gives knowledge only instrumental value.  It doesn't (can't, by definition) justify giving knowledge intrinsic value.

What do the rest of you think?  Is there a strong correlation between rationalism, giving knowledge high intrinsic value, and giving art low intrinsic value?  If so, why?  And which would you rather be - a great scientist, or a great artist of some type?  (Pretend that great scientists and great artists are equally well-paid and sexually attractive.)

(I originally wrote this as over-valuing knowledge and under-valuing art, but Roko pointed out that that's incoherent.)

Under a theory that intrinsic and instrumental values are separate things, there's no reason why giving science a high instrumental value should correlate with giving it a high intrinsic value, or vice-versa.  Yet the people here seem to be doing one of those things.

My theory is that we can't keep intrinsic and instrumental values separate from each other.  We attach positive valences to both, and then operate on the positive valences.  Or, we can't distinguish our intrinsic values from our instrumental values by introspection.  (You may have noticed that I started using examples that refer to both intrinsic and instrumental values.  I don't think I can separate them, except retrospectively; and with about as much accuracy as a courtroom witness asked to testify about an event that took place 20 years ago.)

It's tempting to mention friends and family in here too, as another competing fundamental value.  But that would demand solving the relationship between personal values that you yourself take, and the valuations you would want a society or a singleton AI to make.  That's too much to take on here.  I want to talk just about intrinsic value given to science vs. art.

Oh, and saying science is an art is a dodge.  You then have to say whether you value the knowledge, or the artistic endeavor.  Also, ignore the possibility that your scientific work can make a safe Singularity.  That would be science as instrumental value.  I'm asking about science vs. art as intrinsic values.

EDIT:  An obvious explanation:  I was assuming that people here want to be rational as an instrumental value, and that we should find the distribution of intrinsic values to be the same as in the general populace.  But of course some people are drawn here because rationality is an intrinsic value to them, and this heavily biases the distribution of intrinsic values found here.