Ah, I was worried about that, thanks for the feedback.
I don't know that much about any kind of music, but to the extent that I do know anything I'm much more knowledgeable about jazz than "classical". This is a common failure mode, I think: underestimating the complexity of things you're unfamiliar with compared to those you know better. (It also doesn't help that I learned about jazz into the context of playing it, while I learned about "classical" in the context of learning rule-oriented music theory).
This might completely invalidat...
Yeah, whether the lack of popularity of jazz and classical music is caused by their slowdown or their slowdown is caused by their lack of popularity is one of those tricky questions. There's definitely causation going both ways, but it's really hard to tell which part has more impact, or which one changed first to start off the decline (and if they're both driving each other now, does it even matter which one started things off?). If I had to guess, I'd say that the rise of rock, pop, and (slightly later) hip-hop music gave people new musical options, and ...
In the specific cases of jazz and classical music, it seems like a slowdown in creation of original properties could be pretty plausibly explained by those types of music not being very popular anymore (why that is so is a more complicated question), and so not attracting as many of the talented musical minds of the most recent generations. The people who were going into jazz and classical music 50 years ago could be going into rap and electronica now, and it would look pretty much like our world, I think.
I'm not sure if this is actually true, as I know v...
It can be worthwile to figure out specifically how something that goes wrong, actually does go wrong. In the interest of helping with that, I'll try to add something to all the other criticisms that people have already made here.
The author actually makes a lot of mostly plausible arguments; they're not all accurate or useful (in particular, a lot seem to be in the form of "here's a reason why AI might not be a risk, with no thought going into how likely it is," which is only marginally helpful), but they're understandable, at least. What's espec...
Some more standard advice would be to make some kind of public commitment to it, so there's somebody else to hold you accountable. This could be kind of difficult when it's something as unimportant as a video game, as that might make you look pretty weird (depending on your friends and your relationships with them), but you could do it very casually; even just mentioning the task in passing in a conversation would probably help. I also find that making a "public" commitment helps even when it's not actually public; just consciously focusing on t...
I'm not sure about the level of rigor you're looking for; whether this is supposed to be a fun, short assignment, or something less accessible. This doesn't really go into any mathematics, but shows the interesting and even entertaining side of game theory pretty well:
There're also Douglas Hofstadter's writings on game theory, which, like pretty much everything of his, are a joy to read (for me, at least). I ...
Right, that's a good point you're making about most points in song-space being worthless, and it maybe even shows that the multidimensional-space way of looking at things isn't really appropriate in this situation. Since I can't think of anything better, though, we might as well just keep talking about a "sparsely populated" space.
I think that distinction comes to core of the problem here: we're talking about a hugely vast space, where a hugely vast proportion of points in it are inconsequential. There's a battle going on between those intuitions... (read more)