In a sense, I think that all creative pursuits are served well by the type of "brute force" you're talking about. You write/play/draw something, decide if you like it, and then work from there. However, narrowing down the search space, as you described, can be easier if you leave it to the unconscious. If you've been listening to the style of music you're composing in, or reading the style you're writing in, etc., it should have at least a few heuristics already loaded up. In the case of your melodies, what happens if you just "hum somet...
Those kinds of flags are the only way I can remember what I like. My memory is poor enough that I lose most details about books and movies within a few months, but if I really liked something, that 5-Yay rating sticks around for years.
Hmm, I guess that's why part of my brain still thinks Moulin Rouge, which I saw on a very enjoyable date, and never really had the urge to actually watch again, is one of my favorite movies.
Compression seems a fine analogy to me, as long as we're talking about mp3's and flv's, rather than zip's and tar's.
My career as a rationalist began when I started doing tech support, and realized the divide between successful troubleshooting and what most customers tried to do. I think the key to "winning" is to challenge your assumptions about how to win, and what winning is. I think that makes me an instrumental rationalist, but I'm not quite sure I understand the term. I'm here because OB and ...
I don't think Schoenberg ever had public favor. He may have had the favor of the "elite" music audience, but, as I understand it, the public at large was listening to early jazz. Maybe this is my American bias; I'm not sure.
I see your point about Bach; I always had the impression that composers knew about him, but the masses didn't. I could be wrong. What were people in their homes actually playing in the 18th and 19th centuries? Whose music were they going to see? The question of whether or not "popular music" has replaced the music of the canonical composers from a cultural standpoint hinges on these answers that I don't have.
Ciphergoth, I'm proposing that 5 is another option, not that it should replace the ones he's already proposed. I don't know much about BDSM, but I assume it covers a much wider spectrum than the enjoyment of pain. My main point, which I didn't express clearly enough, is that the term "masochism" is being seriously overloaded in the post. Personally, I can see a connection between spicy food and intellectual challenges (both put me into an excited and forward-moving state, although for propbably different reasons), but horror movies and rollercoasters go into a completely different category (just being scary).
I would love to read and comment on such a post. I would take issue with the widespread use of terms like "good," "high-quality," "real," and "art" to differentiate the Western canon of choral/orchestral music from everything else that's out there. I'm sure there are many jazz composers and theorists who wouldn't give Berg or Webern the time of day. And buskers play all kinds of music - it doesn't have to be Bach or Beethoven to be meaningful.
In terms of the Second Viennese School, what I should have said in my pr...
What about 5. Linkage to another belief that causes us to associate so-called masochistic behavior with something good?
Some people like BDSM because they like the feeling of someone being else in control. Some people like being hit because they associate it with the love of their parents. Some people wallow in bad feelings because that's how they learned to get attention.
I think question 2 is an important one. These behaviors can be logically grouped together as "masochistic', but the kinds of "bad" that they move towards are completel...
Sometimes history moves slowly. During his life, Bach was best known as an organist; sure, later composers studied and loved his work, but it wasn't until the mid 19th century that he started to get the reputation that he has now.
I think komponisto is implying that there was plenty of popular music back then as well, but most of those composers/performers didn't enter the canon.
However, I think there's another factor at play here - "art music" experienced the same academization and post-modernization that we saw in the visual arts. Serialism, m...
I'm with you, Saturn. Doing it well isn't easy at first, but I've found I've gotten quite good at it by mostly asking questions and keeping my mouth shut. I tend to act as an option-provider and a debugger. I let them do most of the actual determination of actions, and use my own power to help them realize the primary goals they're optimizing for, realize unconsidered courses of action that may lead to those goals, and challenge existing assumptions. I disagree about the status motivation though - when I've actually helped someone optimize, I feel like a real badass.
"There's no problem with you" can have a lot of persuasive weight as a response to a comment about what may or may not be a problem with CronoDAS. All things being equal, choosing the option that makes you look better is a fairly common bias.
Also, your status as a member of the lesswrong community and your tone, implying you've understood his particular situation, both lend you a slight boost in authority above random-person-on-the-Internet. I don't know whether this boost is trivial or not, but I think Eliezer is proposing a general rule whi...
The cheap example works, but, as you said, it's cheap. The logical fallacies tell me very little in terms of actually modeling the mind, because they generalize too far. A useful model of the human mind that actually addresses akrasia would have to fall in between those two extremes.
I've followed pjeby's work for almost 3 years now, and I've been a client of his for 2. From what I've seen, it's a collection of techniques, some new and some modified from pre-existing work, founded on a system of theories about how beliefs are stored and cached in the bra...
Are you saying that teachers who don't externally practice the thing they're teaching won't make good teachers? Or that they're not worthy of respect at all? If the former, I agree with Yvain and others that we have better metrics for determining teacher quality. If the latter, I'm not sure why this would be the case. The comparison to literary critics doesn't answer that question; it just accesses our assumed cached thoughts about literary critics. What's the problem with people wanting to be literary critics?
The post proposes a required formula for respect, but it never explains what quantity that formula intends to maximize. What's the goal here?
In case this hasn't already happened, or might happen again, I'd also be interested.