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[–]ShardPhoenix 16 points17 points  (0 children)

This is a rare Gwern piece that I don't agree with. For one thing, there are obvious benefits to having stories that reflect modern technology, society, philosophical and scientific ideas, etc.

[–]DegenerateRegime 12 points13 points  (0 children)

I honestly can't tell if this is a parody or not. It seems like a lot of effort to go to just to make a point about arguments from economic efficiency.

[–]Fuguenocht 20 points21 points  (12 children)

Serious case of overthinking it imo, in particular, an extreme case of high modernism.

Very simplified. Ignores that great works tend to build on other lesser works, even on an established tradition or style, rather than appearing out of nowhere. And that even when they're worse, works of the current moment are bound to speak to us in ways that past art can't.

Also, this is so quintessentially Puritan, up to the point of burning the paintings and smashing the idols, that you should put it in the culture war thread.

[–][deleted] 12 points13 points  (6 children)

Why do people on this sub take everything so literal?

[–][deleted]  (3 children)

[deleted]

    [–]PM_ME_UR_OBSIDIANhad a qualia once[M] 18 points19 points  (2 children)

    User was banned for this post. Ban expires in seven days.

    [–][deleted]  (1 child)

    [deleted]

      [–]anarchism4thewin -1 points0 points  (0 children)

      Rekt

      [–]calvedash 2 points3 points  (0 children)

      Thanks for that link on high modernism, thoroughly enjoyed it. Is it no surprise that Gwern himself is in the comments of that article?

      [–]AfforessLiving in the Motte, Dying in the Bailey 1 point2 points  (1 child)

      I agree future works build on the story archetypes and tropes of previous tales, but that is not a knock-down argument. There could be a limited number of possible story elements or narrative styles, which thereafter all others are re-hashes or clever mixups.

      Dismissing the essay by branding it with a derogatory label seems churlish. That the term "overthinking" could be added as an insult on this forum is really amusing.

      [–]Fuguenocht 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      I mean, it's also underthinking it in the sense that he jumps to a grand societal conclusion after considering very few perspectives on a complex subject...

      It's overthinking it in the sense that it's so stressed about minor inefficiencies which it doesn't even argue convincingly are real, that it advocates vaguely totalitarian political policies to avoid them.

      [–]jackarg 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      Agreed, and I have no idea how Gwern came to the conclusion that "The uses of fiction are much less than one might think, and many of those uses are propagandistic, dangerous, or both." It's very extreme imo. Fiction extends to much more than that.

      [–]PM_ME_UR_OBSIDIANhad a qualia once 10 points11 points  (0 children)

      My (shitty, pedantic, uncultured) perspective: art is society having a dialogue with itself. The value of art is in getting people to agree on narratives. Narratives are shaped by an environment in constant evolution, so necessarily there's going to be a lot of art with a limited shelf life.

      I'm happy to condemn individual examples of contemporary art, but I still think that contemporary art in general is important.

      [–]lvwolb 5 points6 points  (0 children)

      Just like ShardPhoenix said, this is a rare Gwern post that I disagree with. I fully agree with "culture is not about aesthetics". But, this does not mean that subsidies for creation of culture are misplaced.

      Let me make an argument for the creation and consumption of inferior cultural artifacts.

      Should we aim to only consume and create "maximally good" culture? "Maximal" in the mathematical sense, i.e. a piece is maximally good if and only if there is no other piece that is strictly better, in all relevant categories.

      And I say no! Creation of culture is part of the culture. It would be a sad world in which no one would read my works, for there are always better works to consume. It would prevent all conversation, and all personal growth of culture creators.

      The world in which billions consume the best of all culture, while almost-as-good creators, or budding still-mediocre-at-best creators fail to find their niche is a dystopia. It begins with economies of scale, where a power-law of success excludes all but a tiny fraction from the creation of culture, and it ends with an AI creating super-humanly good culture, so that no human will ever need to, or be allowed to, produce any culture ever again (of course the creation of cultural goods will not be forbidden; but without recipicients, what's the point?).

      Now, let me make this criticism more explicit in a field I know well: Mathematics. Should we, as a mathematical community, encourage our members to only consume the best, most useful or aesthetically pleasing, or enlightening, theorems, theories, articles? Or should we divide our attention, so that all fields of mathematics have their adherents, and also mediocre mathematicians their readers?

      Asked like this, the answer is obvious: A mathematician must create mathematics in order to grow, and cannot do so without a community that two-way communicates with him. My own marginal value of reading the greatest works might be higher, but by engaging with less-popular fields I also create value for these subfields.

      Now, you could argue that a mathematician, or a theorem, that does not significantly move the field forwards is worthless. Luckily, the case for mediocrity is much easier to make for mathematics than for arts. The mathematical community produces two things: Theorems, and mathematicians, many of whom get spit out by academia, and go on to do economically useful things in the real world. If you want the latter, then you need to subsidize the former.

      TL;DR: It is not virtue but supreme selfishness to refuse to engage with your peers, and instead only consume your superiors creations, whether they be Gromov or Mozart or Goethe.

      [–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (6 children)

      Movies, tv series and computer games become technologically obsolete. It's not hard to see why I would rather play Overwatch rather than Duke Nukem.

      Books become obsolete as well as they deal with a society and events we barely recognize. I recently saw a Shakespeare play and I'm convinced that he is still performed out of snobbery as his world views are alien to us, so he has to be reinterpreted.

      This goes for science-fiction as well. As science and technology progress the fiction that relies on them must change.

      Where things don't become obsolete, like hard rock and metal music, the scene can become backward looking and uninterested in new stuff. This makes sense as someone new to the scene has more than 40 years of music to catch up with.

      [–]Fuguenocht 15 points16 points  (3 children)

      I would agree with this type of argument way more often if they didn't invariably choose as their example one of the few guys who's genuinely great

      his comedies are definitely outdated, but the dramas...

      they flow like motherfuckin thunder and are about as philosophical as Walt Disney.

      Also I don't think the progress of art is as linear as science. The video game example is exceptional because the tech of that form is still so quickly evolving.

      But I agree that the OP article is wrong.

      [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

      Music and visual arts rely on science and technology more then it's usually acknowledged.

      For example renaissance sculpture and anatomical studies, classic music and instrument makers like luthiers, impressionist painting and the understanding of light, rock and amplifiers etc.

      Even more so for architecture.

      [–]bigstrat2003 12 points13 points  (1 child)

      I recently saw a Shakespeare play and I'm convinced that he is still performed out of snobbery as his world views are alien to us, so he has to be reinterpreted.

      I would put that on whatever production you saw, not Shakespeare. The reason his plays are still performed and loved today is precisely because the world view isn't alien to us. For one famous example, look at the "to be or not to be" soliloquy in Hamlet. In that speech, Hamlet is contemplating suicide to escape his troubles but is afraid of the possibility that what awaits after death might be worse. That is literally something people struggle with today! How can one possibly say that the work is alien and has no applicability to a modern audience, when the characters are struggling with the same basic things that humans today struggle with?

      Yeah, there are things in Shakespeare's plays that are a product of the time and will go over one's head without the cultural context. But so much of his work is timeless stuff about the human condition that is still very much applicable today, and that stuff is why his work is still so appreciated.

      [–]anarchism4thewin 2 points3 points  (3 children)

      Why is this site so horribly organized?

      [–]doubleunplussed 7 points8 points  (0 children)

      I kinda like it. An escape from the over engineered web 2.0. I mean, it's totally overkill in the other direction, but my pent-up rage at the complexity of most websites really goes for the overcompensation.

      [–]gwern 2 points3 points  (0 children)

      The CSS was broken for some reason. I didn't notice it for a while because I've been dealing with an epic meltdown of my laptops and backups.

      [–]calvedash 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      I might be seeing things differently (I've been having trouble with plugin-ins and stuff) but I believe his site has just reverted to this archaic look within the past few weeks; I visit his site often. It is usually a sleek white with a proper sidebar. Again it could just be on my end.

      [–]Jiro_T 2 points3 points  (0 children)

      I responded once on Lesswrong and once on SSC to this. So here we go again:

      I think gwern sells short the argument that older fiction books are produced in different societies and reflect ideas and prejudices from those societies that we might not share. He addresses it in a reply to one of the comments, but the reply is mostly “there are prejudices in older works that don’t matter because the conflicts no longer exist” (for instance, the Pharisees in the New Testament).

      I don’t think that reply is on point. While there are some prejudices that are obsolete, there are others which are not–sexism is endemic in older works, for instance. gwern’s reply to that is that the world was sexist back then and it would be worse propaganda to depict the old world with modern values. But that is only relevant insofar as the fiction is about the old world–fiction which is set in modern times can simultaneously depict less sexism than older fiction and be true to the world in which it is set. It also fails to consider that there’s a difference between accurately depicting the world as sexist and writing fiction which approves of this state of affairs.

      And some ideas in some media are really new. Quick, how many American TV shows with female action heroes can you name that came out prior to Xena? Heck, forget sexism and any other form of -ism; how many American TV shows that are heavily story arc driven can you name that came out prior to about 20 years ago?

      He also didn’t address differences that are not propaganda-based, such as there not being Shakespeare plays about the Internet. Science fiction is especially prone to this due to advances in scientific knowledge.

      11/2016 edit: Also, people have pointed out that if there are more works of all types, there are also more top-X%-works (or more works that line up with a given person's preferences by X%).

      [–]AfforessLiving in the Motte, Dying in the Bailey 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      I remember reading this piece several years ago, after the gwern essay "Terrorism is not about Terror". I found the logic of Culture is Not About Esthetics entirely correct, each explanation individually satisfactory, and yet the final conclusion unsatisfying. I can't deny the bare facts presented and every chain of logic presented seems correct. The conclusion is nightmarish, and so I hold out hope that whatever seems missing will present itself.

      [–]phenylanin 1 point2 points  (2 children)

      Let’s look back on the argument:

      1. Society ought to discourage economically inefficient activities. At least, it ought not to encourage inefficiency. It may not do this perfectly, but this is still a desiderata; special pleading for some activity, saying that some other activity or market is far more economically inefficient, is not a good reason.
      2. If some good a can be created to fill a need, and there is an existing & available good b that fills that need equally well, then it is economically inefficient to use a and not b.
      3. Consumers of new art would be equally satisfied by existing art.
      4. By 2 & 3: it is economically inefficient to produce new art.

      ∴ By 1 & 4: Society ought to discourage new art

      I think my objection is against #2 or possibly #4--this analysis ignores gains to the producer from the act of creating. It seems very gwernian to miss this.

      [–]Fuguenocht 2 points3 points  (1 child)

      Honestly art seems more like a byproduct of normal human activities than something they do intentionally. It's everywhere. They put it everywhere. I don't think they can help themselves.

      [–][deleted] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

      ..."they" ?

      [–]keeper52 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      I have seen sober estimates that if one were to start at the first Wikipedia article and read alphabetically, the percentage of Wikipedia one has read will go down over time, the articles were created so fast.

      This comparison doesn't make much sense. It cannot be true when you start reading - the first article that you read will take you from 0 to 1/n. The second article that you read will take you from 1 out of n, to 2 out of some number that is surely less than 2n (the content of Wikipedia is not doubling every 5 minutes).

      If articles are being added at a constant rate (and your reading speed is also constant), then the claim also can't be true no matter how fast the rate or how long you read. If 1000 articles are added for every 1 that you read, then the fraction that you have read is k/(n + 1000k), which is monotonically increasing as k increases, asymptotically approaching 1/1000.

      In order for the claim to be true, it would have to be the case that articles are being added at a faster rate now than they used to be, and you've read enough articles to be above the current ratio. But it looks like Wikipedia's growth has been linear (in terms of gb) or slowing (in terms of number of articles) rather than getting faster. So the fraction that you've read can't have been shrinking unless you got a big head start before 2007.

      [–]velocityjr -1 points0 points  (0 children)

      Art and science and math are the same thing. Languages that describe our experience. Artists, mathamaticians and science create about equal amounts of genius and crap. They create it together. They use the same spaced out daydreams. Genius and crap. Newton reading Greek poetry as alchemy. Steve Jobs studying calligraphy(the most famous artist probably). Einstein and his violin. Pythagoras and his harmony. Cave dwellers and blue buffalo. Never got no copyright happiness, none of them. Bring it on. The everlasting tide of the future machine made by artmathscience.