Overview for komponisto - Less Wrong

komponisto on Rationality Quotes May 2013

2013-05-13T10:47:15.399888+10:00

There are probably no more than 100 people alive that can make their way through Bach's 2nd Partita for violin.

I'm pretty sure you're underestimating that by...a lot. Fermi estimate time:

Bach's sonatas and partitas for solo violin are a cornerstone of the violin repertory. We may therefore assume that every professor of violin at a major university or conservatory has performed at least one of them at least once, just like we may assume that every professor of mathematics has studied the Lebesgue dominated convergence theorem. How many professors of violin are there? Let's just consider one country, the United States. Each state in the U.S. has at least two major public universities (typically "University of X" and "X State University", where X is the state); some have many more, and this doesn't even count private universities. Personal experience suggests that the average big state university has about one professor of violin. There are 50 states in the U.S., so that's 100 people already right there. And we have yet to count:

every other country in the world (including European countries like Germany where the enthusiasm for art music in general and J.S. Bach in particular is likely to be much higher);
private universities and conservatories in the U.S.;
members of the violin sections of professional symphony orchestras throughout the world (again, on average one in each U.S. state);
professional concert soloists (there may be more of these than you realize)
the students of the aforementioned professors (between 5 and 20 in a given semester, at least one of whom will typically be playing one of the sonatas or partitas that semester).

Thus, it wouldn't surprise me at all if there were at least 10,000 people alive who have performed one of the sonatas and partitas (to say nothing of those who would be capable of performing them). There are six of these works in total, so we can divide this already-conservative estimate by six to (under)estimate the number who have performed the Second Partita in particular. (This is likely an underestimate because many of them will have performed more than one -- indeed, all six, in a fair number of cases.)

A glance at the recordings available on Amazon, sorted by release date may help put things into perspective.

The estimate "no more than 100 alive who can make it through" would be much more appropriate for a difficult contemporary work (like, say, Melismata by Milton Babbitt) than a 300-year-old standard.

komponisto on Post ridiculous munchkin ideas!

2013-05-12T17:04:39.390509+10:00

Indeed, this style of insanity might beat sanity.

komponisto on Post ridiculous munchkin ideas!

2013-05-12T05:00:44.452865+10:00

A disadvantage of that particular name is that it's the name of no fewer than two famous people.

(Or is that an advantage?)

komponisto on The Best Textbooks on Every Subject

2013-04-25T12:21:16.820046+10:00

And after more than a decade, I still have trouble reading Kolmogorov and Fomin.

Huh. I've always liked Kolmogorov and Fomin. (And shouldn't it be under "Real Analysis and Measure Theory"?)

Have you looked at Jost's Postmodern Analysis, by chance? (I found the title irresistibly curiosity-provoking, and the book itself rather good, at least if memory serves.)

komponisto on Open Thread, April 15-30, 2013

2013-04-25T11:54:37.959811+10:00

The phenomenon of altruistic punishment itself is apparently not just a matter of speculation. Another quote from Preston's piece:

Experiments show that when some people punish others, the reward part of their brain lights up like a Christmas tree. It turns out we humans avidly engage in something anthropologists call “altruistic punishment.”

He links to this PNAS paper which uses a computer simulation to model the evolution of altruistic punishment. (I haven't looked at it in detail.)

Whatever the explanation for their behavior (and it really cries out for one), the anti-Knox people are truly disturbing, and their existence has taught me some very unpleasant but important lessons about Homo sapiens.

(EDIT: One of them, incidentally, is a mathematician who has written a book about the misuse of mathematics in trials -- one of whose chapters argues, in a highly misleading and even disingenuous manner, that the acquittal of Knox and Sollecito represents such an instance.)

komponisto on Being Half-Rational About Pascal's Wager is Even Worse

2013-04-18T16:33:52.896911+10:00

If you view the 90% number as an upper bound, with a few bits' worth of error bars, it doesn't look like such a strong claim. If Szilard and Fermi both agreed that the probability of the bad scenario was 10% or more, then it may well have been dumb luck that Szilard's estimate was higher. Most of the epistemic work would have been in promoting the hypothesis to the 10% "attention level" in the first place.

(Of course, maybe Fermi didn't actually do that work himself, in which case it might be argued that this doesn't really apply; but even if he was anchoring on the fact that others brought it to his attention, that was still the right move.)

komponisto on Being Half-Rational About Pascal's Wager is Even Worse

2013-04-18T16:19:47.623399+10:00

Since I just posted to announce a meetup featuring Michael Vassar, I suppose I was primed to recall his take on the Fermi episode:

...1 in 10 is not such a bad estimate. The problem was not that Fermi was stupid or that he was bad at making estimates; he was probably much better at making estimates than almost everyone. The problem is that he was adhering to a set of rules for what you should be thinking about or talking about that is flat-out insane, frankly. A set of rules that says you shouldn't think about anything until you're ready to do experiments with more-or-less established experimental techniques.

From this perspective -- which assumes that Fermi arrived at his estimate through an honest, non-motivated calculation -- what Fermi should have done was believe his own estimate, instead of applying the heuristic of "if it's not established. experimentally-tested science, it doesn't exist". Because a 10% probability of the scenario in question is indeed approximately 100%: that is, enough to take seriously.

Meetup : Washington DC Kennedy Center Meetup with Michael Vassar

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 15:07:13 +1000

Submitted by komponisto • 1 votes • 1 comment

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Kennedy Center Meetup with Michael Vassar

WHEN: 18 April 2013 12:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE: John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, 2700 F Street, NW, Washington, DC 20566.

(This is very short notice -- 11 hours from posting -- so apologies!)

This meetup will have two "sessions"; people are welcome to attend either or both:

12:00 pm - 2:00 pm

and

3:30 pm - 7:30 pm

(Michael is attending an event with press at 2, hence the break.)

We'll plan to meet in the area with tables and chairs outside the KC cafĂŠ, which is on the upper ("Terrace") level of the Kennedy Center. I'll try to bring a Less Wrong sign.

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Kennedy Center Meetup with Michael Vassar

1 comment

komponisto on 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey

2012-11-05T19:43:49.358258+11:00

Taken.

komponisto on Firewalling the Optimal from the Rational

2012-10-08T10:13:12.872438+11:00

The phrase "contemporary art music" has its own problems, of course. For example, it suggests that music from the rock and jazz worlds isn't "art" or "artistic music,"

I might be sympathetic to that objection except for the fact that it is virtually never raised against the term "art song" -- which is nothing but a special case of the same usage.

I've also heard the term "university music," since nearly all composers of the type you and I are discussing were trained in music at a university

The idea of "advanced music" (another candidate term, with its own problems) as mainly a university pursuit has historically been mostly an American phenomenon, but has started to spread elsewhere. In Europe the cultural milieu is different, so there hasn't been as much need for such music to "retreat" into academia (as it is sometimes pejoratively phrased). Of course, some composers (notably Babbitt) have explicitly embraced the university as an ideal setting for this sort of music, and don't mind terms like "academic" (considered derogatory by some).