I love this comment. Vivaldi and Beethoven are how I’m getting my kids into classical music. And yeah it’s also just fun, almost pop music. (Tell me “Winter” pt. 1 isn’t a modern rock/metal song)
And yet, as Scott says here, the real classical music aficionados sneer at it as using cheap tricks and entry-level. Which is true!
Yeah, there's a band called Apocaliptica that did instrumental covers of Metallica with violins and cellos and the result sounds... surprisingly similar to Vivaldi's Winter, if a bit more on the low frequency end of the musical scale.
Far more modern, but I love Gustav Holst's Mars: Bringer of War as a super accessible example of classical music. It sounds like it could just have popped out of some epic space opera soundtrack (and related: my belief that the most influential "classical" composer of the 20th century will in hindsight end up being simply... John Williams).
Funny you should say that about Holst; the first time I heard of him, as someone not super into classical music, was when Mars, the Bringer of War was used as the opening theme song for the indie space video game Escape Velocity: Nova.
> Yeah, there's a band called Apocaliptica that did instrumental covers of Metallica with violins and cellos and the result sounds... surprisingly similar to Vivaldi's Winter, if a bit more on the low frequency end of the musical scale.
Arrangement takes plenty of skill of its own. After doing some transcribing of orchestral pieces, I considered trying to do some orchestral arrangement of other music, and quickly determined that I'd need a lot of training before I'd be able to do anything that actually made sense.
IIRC Holsts's Planets suite was used as temp tracks when the original Star Wars film was being edited, so John Williams's eventual soundtrack was directly inspired by it. For Mars, compare eg this track: https://youtu.be/Oo9GN--eoGk
My opinion is that Williams basically plagiarized Holst, and could have been sued for copyright violation if Holst wasn't already in the public domain. But I also think Williams is over-rated.
There was that weird musical plagiarism case a few years ago where Pharrell composed a new melody and then arranged and produced the record in a style pioneered by Marvin Gaye ... as an explicit tribute to Marvin Gaye.
But Marvin Gaye's heirs sued and the jury awarded them the royalties. I hope some appeals court explained that, no, that's not plagiarism.
> "it could just have popped out of some epic space opera soundtrack"
Funnily enough, the classic space sim game Escape Velocity Nova actually uses Mars: Bringer of War as it's main menu theme and it fits oh so perfectly.
There are numerous groups doing "classical" covers of rock songs. I heard one that does Tool. I think these are cool but I never understood why they don't have singers. Singers would make them less gimmicky I think.
I listened to a London Symphony Orchestra LP of rock hits in the 1970s. The tracks were all pretty dire, except for "Paint It Black" by the Rolling Stones, which worked really well.
A local public high school just opened their new theater/concert hall. They thought and thought about who to name it after, and then they realized that one of their oldest living graduates from the Class of 1950 is ... John Williams, the most classical musician that the students and their parents and their grandparents had enjoyed, the man with more Oscar nominations than anybody except Walt Disney.
And, it turned out, that ... Sure, Mr. Williams would be happy to come over for the dedication ceremony.
To be fair, I don't actually sneer at Beethoven and do listen to it sometimes, but his music no longer seems nearly as... exciting, as it used to when I was younger. The great works of Beethoven, Bach, Wagner, Schubert, etc, still do it for me although not as intensely as before, but from among Verdi's two dozen operas I like "several" (the usual suspects: Aida and Rigoletto and La Traviata), and if you go beyond masters and masterpieces, a work like Lucia di Lammermoor by Donzietti, which I viewed live last year, can be very much "meh".
In contrast, contemporary classical music like minimalism of Philip Glass and John Adams, even parody pieces by P.D.Q. Bach (Peter Schickele) that I nevertheless feel contain novel musical ideas or, indeed, John Willians the other commenter mentioned, do feel exciting to me, as does e.g. symphonic/operatic metal that can be seen as a musical evolution of "classical music" of early 1900s taken in a divergent direction from what is referred to as "modern classical". And I didn't like any of these (well, other than Williams) 20 years ago.
I'm not a musical theorist so there probably is more historical nuance to this, but basically it feels like that 1) I've essentially speedrun through the evolution of classical music taste such that most baroque/romantic/etc. music starts feeling like "cheap tricks", and now prefer supposedly "more sophisticated" music that was created by composers deliberately avoiding these elements; 2) I can still appreciate "truly great works", presumably because they have "that something" (further discussed in this comment thread: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/nostalgebraists-hydrogen-jukeboxes/comment/258323042)
As for the other commenter, no hierarchy was implied. I just feel my evolution in taste has rather directly mirrored the historical taste among classical composers as I understand it, and usually happening in form of chance discoveries (for example, I discovered Adams from Civilization 4 having "People are the Heroes" chorus from Nixon in China and noticing I really really liked it, and Ligeti from the Moon scene in Space Odyssey) rather than explicitly setting out to discover modern classical composers, so it feels like the direction my taste has evolved in isn't arbitrary, but rather mirrored the influences the composers faced when they were exploring new musical frontiers.
I have just recently discovered Ligeti. What a range! From Atmospheres (of 2001: A Space Odysssey fame) to the Etudes. If you like the Etudes, also check out Conlon Nancarrow.
i spent about 15 of the first 20 years of my life approximately on track to be a concert violinist, and i can tell you, this is *absolutely* real
the stereotype of the non-musician intelligentsia who've got a vinyl of the goldberg variations or the 9th symphony and think themselves cultured...
when i was thinking of trying out for the highly prestigious interlochen music program, i was going to have my performance piece be the violin arrangement of the first movement of bach's d minor keyboard concerto, and my teacher gently waved me off from this idea because bach was too pedestrian and the interlochen judges were basically hipsters
I always imagined the advice to avoid often-played pieces for auditions/competitions was based less on jury-hipsterism than the fact that the members will have no doubt spent countless hours learning and teaching said pieces and are therefore likely to have strong and possibly idiosyncratic opinions about how they should be performed - god help you if you deviate in some way!
i think there was *some* of that, but there's also a lot of genuine hipsterism. it could have been something specific to the culture of that decade or so, maybe. i remember there was a strong emphasis on avant garde, on subverting the expectations of the establishment. weird time signatures, atonal keys. some of it was good, but sometimes it generalized in an ugly and hipsterish way.
i'll also note that, at the time, i thought a violin arrangement of a harpsichord concerto actually sounded kinda novel and interesting, maybe even subversive. there were so many chords, could an adaptation to string even be faithful? (i've since learned the Dm concerto is actually pretty commonly arranged for violin soloist, so maybe not)
I don't know of anyone who would sneer at Beethoven in general, but if you tell someone your favourite composer is Beethoven then they're likely to assume you're unsophisticated and don't have a deep knowledge. You need to pick someone slightly more obscure as your favourite composer.
Only if you've already got undisputed status and expertise can you get away with admitting that actually yes, Beethoven is still better than all of them.
Like sure, if you say that because the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth and the opening of the Moonlight Sonata are the only pieces of classical music you have heard.
A lot of the conversations about taste on this blog use this particular kind of taste snob as a bogeyman. The ones who eat foam and like paintings of gray squares.
Citizen Kane has often topped lists of the best films. But if we discussed films here, it would be like ”the real experts would laugh at you if you liked Citizen Kane.”
I have heard that Citizen Kane's enduring reputation first emerged in about 1944 in Italy among top Hollywood filmmakers who were shooting war documentaries of the US Army advancing up the peninsula. When they'd hit the vino each evening, they'd debate what's the best movie our business ever made. Slowly, a consensus formed around Citizen Kane.
If that is true, I'm guessing the most influential figure was Orson Welles' friend John Huston, with his titanic personality.
That strikes me as a pretty good set of bona fides for "Citizen Kane."
yeah there is definitely a version of that “normal distribution” meme with 5th-symphony-enthusiasts and Hammerklavier-enjoyers on the tails and Mahler afficianados sitting at the peak…
Agreed, Mahler's great, just being facetious :) I think I'd choose hearing some random Mahler over the Hammerklavier fugue, even just listening along to that is too much for my brain to handle..
I don't know any classical music enthusiasts who would sneer at Beethoven as entry level for the genre. On the contrary, his works, most notably the late sonatas and quartets, the Missa Solemnis, the Grosse Fugue, the Diabelli Variations, are widely agreed to be the among the most sublime music ever written, in which one could lose years plumbing the depths.
Ah yes, but you've just picked some of the deeper cuts there. But if someone says their favourite ever symphony is Beethoven's Fifth then you're going to have a sneaking suspicion that they only really know the first four notes.
Kids like Mozart ‘s The Magic Flute too. Also Even Dozen Jug Band. To that they can play along with music on kazoos. Some great kazoo solos on that album.
Vivaldi really is just pop music, but late Beethoven isn't. People don't get their kids into classical music by playing them his 15th quartet. And as a consequence, I've gotten bored of the four seasons after around 30 listens but can still enjoy late Beethoven after 80 or so.
Have you considered introducing your daughter to Chattanooga Choo-Choo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hae8bYKARr4)? All of the trainy goodness with all the artistic heft attached to it being 1940s Glenn Miller Orchestra jazz.
As a kid I actually loved "The Barbarian", Emerson Lake & Palmer's 1970 prog rock rendition of Bela Bartok's Allegro Barbaro (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgTtqvYyUKk&list=RDrgTtqvYyUKk). This may attributed to me having superior taste because I was just built different or to the fact that absent YouTube I had to do with my dad's collection of LPs for music and couldn't just have perfectly optimized slop shoved in my ears. Funny enough, one of the biggest draws for me is that it also evoked train imagery! Specifically the speeding up part that starts at 1:26, with its extremely tight beat, like a steam train chuffing and clanking. I henceforth proclaim the Train Theory of Music: the objectively best music is that which resembles or evokes a train in some way.
Peace Train (Cat Stevens, yet another style of funny voice)
Train Song (Vashti Bunyan)
Goodbye Desolate Railroad (Silver Mt. Zion, okay, this one's not for a child's attention span, but still very relevant here, checks all the boxes for [things that make the proud unsophisticados recoil in disgust])
Video bonus:
Star Guitar (the greatest train-themed music video ever conceived)
Foreign language bonus:
Remedium a.k.a. Wsiąść do pociągu (Maryla Rodowicz, because that's my own childhood, and 3yo me can fully vouch for it)
Woah, A Silver Mt Zion reference...I thought I was the only one who remembered them.
As for train songs, is 4 years old still too young for Casey Jones by the Grateful Dead? If so, I will instead nominate Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison Blues.
Edit: a couple more Dead tracks (no pun intended) I would throw in the mix: Dark Hollow, He's Gone, and The Monkey And The Engineer.
I wouldn't worry about something like ASMZ ever being forgotten. Too important, too unique.
Case in point - someone casually mentioning Vashti Bunyan would have, at one point, let's say 30 years ago, been a much bigger mindfuck, and yet here were are.
You may want to consider renaming the theory, lest it suggest the best music is by Train :-)
That said, growing up I too loved what I saw as my dad's music. ELP, Jethro Tull, The Moody Blues. Enough concept and play with ideas and depth to be interesting, but not so much as to be unapproachable.
If we're recommending train music for children with some modicum of artistic merit, may I suggest the album "All Aboard!" by John Denver, which was the last album he released before his death, and consisted of children's music themed around trains. I apparently loved it as a young child.
I did a show of photographs I took riding all the elevated trains in New York City, and I made a playlist of train songs. I love train songs. All the way from "Orange Blossom Special" to the deepest Bed-Stuy wrap. And of course Hank Williams singing "Rambling Man"
Brian Setzer - Mystery Train Kept A Rollin; Fred Eaglesmith - I Like Trains; Jethro Tull - Locomotive Breath; XPRTNovice - Gobble, Snarf, Snap; Louis Jordan - Choo Choo Ch'Boogie; Charlie Barnet - Skyliner; Ray McKinley - Pennsylvania Six-Five Thousand
No idea how kids would feel about them though.
I have never been able to find a satisfactory version of Chattanooga Choo-Choo, much to my chagrin. Tap dancing also doesn't carry over well to just-audio.
This is all well and good until you’re on the wrong side of that glass screen and everyone else is enjoying something that you can’t stand. I remember everyone online praising “Ready Player One” to high heaven so I read it and was shocked by how badly written the novel was. It felt like the sort of slop novel an AI trained on 80s nostalgia would have churned out.
At least if we all have to learn to appreciate featureless spheres that’s an overcorrection in the right direction.
I think learning to know oneself and the general taste so that you can read people praising something and still guess it won't be for you is a useful time and money saving skill, but it doesn't need to be accompanied by lamentations about how bad general taste is. You're the outlier, it's fine, but a morally neutral fact.
It's one thing I've learned when following seasonal anime, actually. It ranges from occasional genuine great art to worthless slop and having a quick ability to grasp which is which from the signs (some obvious, some less so) saves me a lot of pointless first episode watches.
Well it would have been within my area of interest if its quality had lived up to my minimum standards. The specific genre is well within my wheelhouse. I loved Neuromancer and Snow Crash for example.
But I mean quality too, not just genre. I think I clocked pretty early on that RPO was essentially millennial nostalgiaslop and wasn't all that interested (I would be more keen about nostalgia if so much of the nerd part of my generation wasn't having it so deeply rooted into corporate branding - and I love Back to the Future and Star Wars as much as the next guy). I watched the movie on streaming, decently entertaining for a mindless two hours, but wouldn't bother much with the book unless I was bored and didn't have much else at hand.
For me that RPO was a good example of differing criteria of quality - Gibson's sentences and world building much richer but RPO excellent page-turner construction.
> It's one thing I've learned when following seasonal anime, actually. It ranges from occasional genuine great art to worthless slop and having a quick ability to grasp which is which from the signs (some obvious, some less so) saves me a lot of pointless first episode watches.
It varies from era to era. Right now, the most obvious sign is of course stuff like a very long title, possibly involving the words “other world”, and a male character who looks like a default asset surrounded by hot girls. Easiest skip ever. Knowing other subgenres also helps, for example the “villainess” subgenre is now almost as overdone and cliched and I generally skip anything in that unless I see enough recs from people I trust to think it might be worth checking out.
Looking at what the source material is helps. Light novels have a few hits and a lot of misses; most hits will involve unusual premises, like mysteries or satire (not parody!) of some kind. Josei manga are among the best guarantees: they're not adapted often so when they are usually it's a great literary story. Ditto for non-light novel adaptations, with a slightly lower batting rate. Seinen manga also tend to have a good track record unless they're clearly just seinen because they're pulpy sex and violence shows, that's rarer these days and it's a matter of taste if you care for that. Shonen action you usually know what you're getting, especially if it's Jump. High spectacle, often mediocre to good writing. Shonen and shojo romcom, it's a bit of a toss up. Historical setting anime tend to do better than most. Videogame adaptations are rarely worth it, either they're soulless tie ins to shitty games or they're inferior versions of a story you’d experience better in game form.
Anime originals are the biggest unknown but they're rare and often worth checking out for me unless they clearly look uninteresting. Some of the best shows of the last years were originals (Odd Taxi, Apocalypse Hotel).
Ultimately a lot of it is down to a combination of vibes and priors. Who is the author, who is directing, what studio is doing this, and what kind of audience seems excited for it.
I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it enough to follow it either. I find it to be pretty inoffensive? My favourite MMO-themes anime is definitely Shangri-La Frontier, which has more of an actual action slant. Bofuri is mostly meant to be cute and cozy; I think if it had leaned even harder on the line of "the devs are completely dogshit at balancing, and every attempt to rebalance they do because of the MC ends up causing even more broken strats to emerge" I could have found it funny enough to stick with.
When I say "videogame adaptations" I don't mean anime about fictional games, I mean anime adapted from real games. These often suffer from problems. VNs for example can do stuff like unholy mashes of multiple routes, or need to speedrun the story, or just lose the inherent qualities of the medium that made that story enjoyable (a prime example is Danganronpa, where I love the games but the anime was very meh). Other games simply don't have much of a story to begin with and the anime has to cobble something together. Not that there aren't counter-examples though. I hear good things of the Uma Musume shows, and Rage of Bahamut, despite being a gacha mobile TCG adaptation, is genuinely one of the most fun and entertaining adventure anime you can watch - all with its own completely original story only loosely based on the cards' lore.
What's the problem with everyone enjoying something you don't? I've never seen the appeal of watching sports, but I don't have a problem with people enjoying watching sports; I'm glad they're getting enjoyment from it. And in fact I'd say whatever problems there are with sports as a celebrity culture or encouraging lots of air travel don't apply to books that lots of people like even if you don't.
Don't be so sure. There's a popular point of view that NBA basketball has been ruined by optimization of shot selection, in that everything is either a 3-point attempt (from outside the arc) or a very close attempt. This dislike is an aesthetic judgement.
I don't think there's anything wrong with other people enjoying things you don't, but personally, I'm in a position where a genre I once loved is now full of works that don't appeal to me, and contains few to no new works I enjoy. It feels like something of value to me has been genuinely replaced. I had a discussion with someone about this just the other day, where we laid out how our tastes diverged, and they said that "it's good that there's stuff being made to appeal to both of us." And I said that I was glad that there were things being made that appealed to them, but I couldn't come up with an example made to appeal to me in the last fifteen years.
Depending on your tastes, the risk of something like that happening can be quite real.
Well, I'm also in that position, but I suspect that's because I'm now a lot older than I once was. I can still enjoy the things I used to enjoy, but I don't like new things in the same style. I suspect this is partially due to the fact that now I get tired more easily. Calling up memories still works. (You need to vary your "favorites" a lot, though, to avoid wearing them out.)
OTOH, it's also true that good editors seem to have largely disappeared. (They were always rare.) This may be an effect of either media consolidation or of self-publishing becoming easier. (IIRC, the "Skylark of Space" was rejected by 26 editors before the 27th accepted it.)
My tastes are more demanding in some ways than they used to be, but it's definitely possible for me to find new things I like in the same style. Some of my all-time favorites, I've found within the last eight years. But, none of them were *made* within the last eight years.
Recommendation algorithms are definitely slanted toward advertisement. Possibly not everywhere, but frequently.
I once was in an online discussion where a man complained that having *The Vixen War Bride* -- which is excellent military SF -- in his Amazon books led to his recommendations being slanted toward romance, but he couldn't take it out because he wanted to know when the sixth book was coming out.
> I'm in a position where a genre I once loved is now full of works that don't appeal to me
Have you burned out or are publishers categorising badly?
I'm a big fan of fantasy novels, but have no interest in Romantasy. If I click a best new fantasy list its usually full of Romantasy. That's not a problem with the public, its the marketing department failing to realise the obvious, that the ven diagram has little overlap and separate lists are needed.
With books in particular, it's a combination of categorization and changing genre trends. With video games, which is the medium I actually had in mind in my previous comment, it's mostly changing genre trends, and not an issue of categorization. I wouldn't say I'm particularly burned out; on the rare occasions where I find works that appeal to my tastes, I'm as enthusiastic about them as ever, but the tendencies of the games themselves are changing.
A few years ago, I went through a period where I was so deeply invested in a game I was playing that I couldn't help pinging friends with screenshots of it, because I had to share how charismatic and artful I found it. Same for the direct sequel to that game. Then, when I played the sequel to *that* game, I found it so much less compelling that I struggled to muster the interest to play it even when I was really bored and had loads of free time to spare. The difference had essentially nothing to do with changes in my mood, and everything to do with changes to the work itself.
A lot, honestly, and more than I got into in that previous discussion I mentioned; there are exceptions to each individual trend, but when taken all together, it's extraordinarily difficult for me to find games that still appeal to me.
I grew up a huge fan of JRPGs in particular, and I still am, when I can find ones that meet my tastes. But I have a few primary tastes (basically, must-haves, or things that are central to my experience,) and a few secondary tastes which have gotten harder and harder to satisfy with time.
Probably the biggest negative trend from my perspective has been the shift away from abstraction, towards direct representation. More photorealistic graphics, intended to represent characters and environments exactly as they are. Everything stays at a 1:1 scale, with no "world map" type representations which compress the scale of parts of the game world which aren't central to the narrative focus. Full voice acting for all lines, action combat rather than more stylized modes, etc. etc. A lot of players see this as an unalloyed positive, but for me it's very much not. The more directly you represent the characters, the world, the action and such, the less I'm able to leave to my imagination, and the less leeway my suspension of disbelief has. People have been saying that the graphics in the best animated games look "like movies" for more than fifteen years now, but I've never seen one yet which I thought looked like a movie with *good acting*. And I'd prefer a well-written book over a well written but badly acted movie any day. Lack of abstraction in the environments makes it harder for me to suspend my disbelief in the worldbuilding ("why has this supposedly epic journey covered about ten miles on foot?") Lack of abstraction in the action makes it harder for me to suspend disbelief for the high-stakes confrontations ("Why is this person slowly getting up from a kneeling position while I wail on him with a sword? His lack of a reaction other than damage numbers over his head makes this feel painfully artificial.") Seeing all encounters represented on-screen, and then having all of them amble around blithely unaware of my party until I come within distance to read the bottom row on an eye chart, makes them feel far more fake to me than random encounters ever did.
Apart from all that though, over the last twenty years or so, I feel like there's been a general trend towards less ambitious, more "safe" writing. The late 90s were my high water mark for optimism in the medium, where not a lot of the games had amazing writing, but developers clearly had ambition to develop video games as a storytelling medium, and I thought that games were going to become more and more narratively impressive with time, not just more technologically sophisticated. I've played games with more polished writing since, but by then, I had to accept that the industry as a whole just hadn't moved in that direction. There are exceptions, but most of them are in genres that aren't especially to my tastes, when JRPGs in particular used to be one of the most narratively focused and rich genres in the medium of video games. One of my biggest pet peeves in this subject is that often, when I complain about the weakness in the writing of some game with a budget in the hundreds of millions, someone will counter that it's silly for me to expect any different, that the fans obviously enjoy the game, that having sophisticated writing clearly isn't the point of the genre, and that it makes no sense to expect the developers to put that kind of effort into writing when they get more return on spectacle. When I hear that, I think of the God of War series, which was notorious in its first few installments for being blunt, repetitive, and reliant on spectacle, but in its current incarnations stands out as one of the few franchises in the medium known across genres for the quality of its writing. If there's any series where the developers had no reason to expect the audience to care if they increased the level of their writing, and the audience had no reason to expect the developers to start, it would be God of War. But the developers pivoted, the audience noticed, and the series won genuine acclaim for it. In series that once numbered among my favorite games though, the trend has overwhelmingly been in the other direction.
There are a bunch of other minor trends, or consequences of the ones I've already mentioned, that make it hard for me to personally find games I enjoy, but this is already getting kind of excessive as a comment. But the upshot is, when I find games these days that I'm genuinely enthusiastic about, they're almost always indie games. But, the games which I *am* genuinely into, I'm every bit as enthusiastic about as the ones I grew up on.
Trails, the transition from the Crossbell arc with Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure to the Trails of Cold Steel arc.
The Trails series always had kind of anime-tropey writing, but for the first couple of arcs, it felt to me like the anime tropes were acting as rough guidestones for an extremely engaging, well-characterized story. In each arc, the action starts out relatively small scale and low stakes, and there are a lot of people who're fans of the series who struggle to get invested at the beginning of each arc, and gradually become more so with the rising action, and when I've shared my feelings about the transition, a lot of them assume this is just me reacting to the low stakes of another arc beginning. But that's not the case at all; the previous arcs immediately grabbed my attention because I found the characters charismatic and the setting fun and interesting to engage with. I just don't feel any of that charisma in Cold Steel; I feel like the anime-tropiness has metastasized to form the core of the characters' personalities, and the conversations all feel much less natural and more formulaic.
Also, the addition of voice acting, and transition from character sprites with hand drawn portrait art, dramatically weaken my ability to emotionally engage with it. It's not that I have some great affection for sprite art, or thought that Trails' was especially great, but at least it gestured at body language while leaving the details to the imagination. Trails of Cold Steel replaced the sprites with 3D character models with fully visible body language, but the actual physical acting just feels totally unnatural to me. Likewise with the voice acting; better to have no voices than to have a bad voice performance. It's like replacing a good book with a badly acted stage pantomime. The new channels of communication with the audience don't improve the experience when you use them badly.
A lot of fans of the series agree that the writing goes downhill with the transition from Crossbell to Cold Steel, but a lot of them also don't care that much. The gist of the feedback I've heard is that a transition from 5/5 writing to 4/5 writing is fine if it's accompanied by improving gameplay, animation and voice acting. But it's hard for me to overstate how big the gap is in my opinion. The earlier Trails games aren't the best written media I've ever encountered, but they were compelling enough to make a huge impression on me. Like, if the earlier Trails games were a student applying to college, and I were their teacher, I'd be enthusiastically writing recommendation letters to any college they wanted to attend, and even personally calling up offices of admissions to vouch for them. Trails of Cold Steel wouldn't be the worst student in my class by any stretch, but I'd also be thinking "maybe college just isn't for you."
Some do, but I suspect a big part of it is personal biases on the part of their employees. They love (romance)fantasy, they publish lots of "fantasy" authors, and get great sales. The fantasy department is doing great. Why look deeper?
It's fine up to the point where the people who don't share your tastes end up in control of the media establishment and proceed to tear apart everything you used to love. The nearest anyone has ever come to recapturing the magic of TNG is a 2007 video game, because the people currently running Star Trek actively despise the original series and everything it stood for--and because enough people liked DS9 and the new slop that there's nonzero money to be made.
We'll never get a solid Lord of the Rings miniseries in my lifetime, because, again, the only people who can be bothered to do anything with the name actively hate everything the original series tried to say.
Every day, I have to look at a horrifying, disfigured reflection of my own face, because my boss got a paid ChatGPT account and thought it would be cute to have it make a "Ghibli-style" version of a group photo we took, and everybody else likes it so much that it's remained on the wall ever since, despite my objections and despite the obvious distortions.
"We'll never get a solid Lord of the Rings miniseries in my lifetime, because, again, the only people who can be bothered to do anything with the name actively hate everything the original series tried to say."
Apparently season three of the Rings of Power will be unleashed upon us in November. Can't wait! (Mostly to see if they managed to out-dumb themselves yet again and to engage in all the critical reaction videos).
I can't even do that. Even the RedLetterMedia videos on the Picard and Discovery series quickly became more sad than funny. I guess I like trains too much to enjoy watching trainwrecks.
"Let us remain together a little, we who have loved each other so sadly, and have fought so long", to quote from "The Man Who Was Thursday".
I can't watch reviews of modern Trek because that is too deep a wound and I have been burned too many times. I did watch something about the newest Trek (which seems to have crashed and burned, it's not getting renewed for a second season) but mostly because that was "Starfleet High: Teens in Space" and not really Trek. Even that was only tolerable in very small doses.
"Rings of Power", however, is so absolutely *stupid* that it reduces me to a state of childlike wonder once again. How can somebody get this so wrong? And yet they do!
Some of the faults are fixable; the main problem is the showrunners have no freakin' idea how to write *television* as distinct from movies, so their pacing stinks. They only had sixteen episodes over two seasons and they squandered time on irrelevant crap so that the show was simultaneously too fast and too slow. They also can't write in the high style, and all their efforts to sound faux-Tolkien come across like lead balloons.
Some things were good, or not bad; even with their best endeavours they couldn't ruin the Dwarves, and that's down to solid performances from the two Durins and that there is some actual chemistry between prince Durin and Elrond.
The music is doing Trojan work in keeping the show afloat. Bear McCreary is earning his money twice over.
When they get out of their own way and let the story breathe, it works. I like the actor playing Elendil, even though I don't know him from anywhere else, and if they gave him a decent go in the part I'd really like to see what he can do with it. When eventually (and too late) they gave Celebrimbor's actor something to do, I was impressed.
So it's a curate's egg of a show, and *could* be better than it is, if the main problems were addressed and fixed. The depressing part is, they leave in little Easter eggs for the lore-cels, with blink and you'll miss it "hey that was Dramborleg in the corner there!" scenes, So *somebody* on the writing team has read the books and knows the details.
But the bad parts are bad. So bad, in fact, they become ridiculous and so it's easy to mock them. And that's where the fun comes in, because much as I do in fact enjoy screaming at my screen "NO, YOU [DELETED DELETED DELETED], THAT IS [DELETED] NOT HOW [DELETED] TREBUCHETS WORK!!!", nobody can keep that up all the time.
Enter people with a sense of humour and way more creativity than Amazon Prime's marketing team.
That's where the anticipation lies. Getting the band back together so we can all join in the comments on the reviews after watching the latest episode together (or at least it feels like together, when we're all united in "did you see *that*???" "yeah I know, I couldn't believe it either").
I realize this may sound weird and counter-intuitive, but IMO the best item in the Modern Trek corpus is "Lower Decks". Yes, the animated comedy show. It is more faithful to the spirit and lore of Star Trek than anything I've seen since DS9, and I loved it.
On a side note, I never liked watching trainwrecks or reactions to it. My taste has not been deep (corrupted) enough to reach that kind of spotted sphere. That's why everytime I heard that a show is only successful because its haters are watching it unironically, I really couldn't relate, not even considering if that's really what's happening or not.
I avoided Rings of Power entirely because I knew they didn't have the rights to "Of The Rings of Power and the Third Age" or "Akallabêth" and anyone who would have (or would seek, if they haven't already read those) the level of engagement with the original that would be needed to do something interesting with it would decline to adapt it.
The clips I've seen have great set design (Númenor looks great, for example) and some good acting and directing, but the plotting and writing is exactly as awful as I expected. I can absolutely see an actor and even a director (TV episode directors have much less ability to shape the show than movie directors do) taking a script and just doing their best with it, but there are only two reasons a writer would take on a project that is intrinsically compromised - either for the money, or because they have a giant ego and think they can do better than Tolkien did. And either of those is going to result in something that isn't worth my time.
> We'll never get a solid Lord of the Rings miniseries in my lifetime, because, again, the only people who can be bothered to do anything with the name actively hate everything the original series tried to say.
Okay, but... the author is already dead. Why are you expecting anything more out of the IP when the vision behind it is gone? Why not look for new stories by new people?
In the comment to which you are replying, I listed an example of a new story by new people: the 2007 game Mass Effect has no ties to Star Trek except that the people who made it loved the same parts of it that I did.
So I don't see the problem. There's nothing stopping new people from making new, good things. If anything, shouldn't we be promoting the creation of new IPs over milking existing ones forever?
I did that when I purchased Mass Effect, but that doesn't change the fact that legacy media are all about remakes and reboots. If Amazon were to make a really good fantasy miniseries with no ties whatsoever to LotR, I'd promote that, but they're not doing that no matter how many times I tell people they should.
I would like for them to stop desecrating the corpse in the meantime.
> We'll never get a solid Lord of the Rings miniseries in my lifetime, because, again, the only people who can be bothered to do anything with the name actively hate everything the original series tried to say.
This seems to me to be mostly a problem with copyright law. If anyone was allowed to make such a miniseries, 100's of fans would have a go, and some would succeed.
Any arguments about copyright law have to contend with the fact that it didn't stop the original works from existing. TNG, LotR, &c all managed to come about under the old regimes, and wouldn't have been affected by Disney's lobbying to increase copyright durations.
As others have pointed out, there's no law stopping these people from making new original stories that are good.
Someone enjoying something I don't is not a problem.
EVERYONE enjoying something I don't is a huge problem.
Investors funnel money into things people enjoy. There are exceptions, and I'm grateful for those: passion projects, prestige-builders, etc.. But consensus aesthetics are going to push cultural production in specific directions.
It's true that the market supports a lot of variety, but new high-quality work in any genre or format is still rare. So when the whole world praises something that sucks, your primal threat response kicks in.
There are effectively two kinds of architects at work today. The great majority are those who apply skill, training and talent to juggle the many and often conflicting priorities involved in fulfilling a client's requirements from a simple ranch house to a tower block; these architects have to be a combination of craftsman, technician, diplomat, project manager and artist. Then there is the very small number of world-famous prima-donna architects who regard themselves first and foremost as artists, only very minimally beholden to those who commission them, and highly reluctant to compromise their artistic visions. They are generally selected by clients, individual or corporate, whose principal requirement is for structures which will stun, impress or awe viewers, with functionality usually coming a distant second. I would guess it is their work which mostly accounts for the 75% of people hostile to contemporary architectuyre.
Hmm, I think it's not only the prima-donnas. My impression is that it's also the materials and shapes used by the first type of architects that piss off the 75% folks. These are not automatically pleasing to the eye. Perhaps it's not the architects' fault; they have to do as cheaply as possible? But then why wasn't it like this 100 years ago? Are the artificial-looking, non-natural materials so much cheaper? Or the small, wide steel-framed windows and flat roofs? The more I think about it, the more I feel that it must be a fashion that's spread mostly among architects, and not laypeople.
Ready Player One was an odd one to me, I read the book and enjoyed it throughout, then finished it, thought about it, and realized I hated it. I found it worked really well as a 'page turner': always interested and wondering what will happen next... but then I got to the end and looked back and realized that at basically every moment, what *actually* happened next was basically the most predictable thing - it was constantly threatening to do something interesting, but really never did.
And it *felt* like it had something to say about technology and culture and escapism... but it never actually says anything interesting. There's a potential critique of both VR as an escape from real-world problems, but the predominant message of the book seems to be "VR is awesome".
... and there's also a potential critique of becoming so fixated on a past 'golden age'. I've seen it pointed out that in the story, culture seems to have stagnated due to its fixation on 80s culture... but this doesn't come up in the actual story and the message of the book on this front seems to be "the 80s are awesome".
The only thing I remember the book actually having anything 'interesting' to say is a "religion is bullshit" speech, delivered in like the third chapter by the narrator directly to the audience, with absolutely no relevance to the plot.
My favorite bit of Ready Player One ended up being the short-story prequel that Andy Weir (author of the Martian/Project Hail Mary) wrote: https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/lacero.html which actually provides a motive for the main antagonist of the story... something that Ready Player One kinda forgot to do.
So, yeah, I get why people like the book: I thought it was fine as popcorn entertainment, but it really didn't have any meat on the bones if you're looking for more than that.
I do largely agree – I wasn't looking for a "VR is terrible and nobody should use it" – but setting your story in a crapsack world where it seems like at least part of the problem is that people are retreating into a cyber world... it seems like you should at least acknowledge and engage with that idea.
(And apparently Andy Weir felt the same way, since the short-story linked above also raises that question and uses it as part of the antagonist's motivation)
For whatever it's worth, I think it's reasonable to enjoy a book until the end, and then realize that it failed to pay off the time spent, retroactively making the entire experience less enjoyable. In some cases, a different ending would make all the difference.
Ready Player One played heavily on 80s nostalgia in the same way (IMO) that the Wayans brothers' Scary Movie series plays on horror movie tropes. The in-the-moment enjoyment is largely the result of recognizing what's being referenced, but at the end, it hasn't done anything but remind you of better things.
Much like (IMO) LLM-generated writing, for reasons outlined above.
There are multiple TV shows that I enjoyed up until the Season Finale ended with a cliffhanger, at which point I said "well, I guess I'm never watching that again."
> then realize that it failed to pay off the time spent, retroactively making the entire experience less enjoyable. In some cases, a different ending would make all the difference.
The anime Orb is a huge offender here. The ending is so terrible that it retroactively ruins the entire show. (Spoiler: Every character dies without accomplishing anything, and the show was lying to you about the setting and premise the whole time.)
I feel this way about the Star Wars movies, but with an important caveat: I deeply intellectually appreciate Star Wars exists and makes lots of people very happy. I do find it nearly intolerable, personally (sorry), but I find it easy enough to avoid most of the time. (This is just one example, Star Wars is not the only thing I find nearly intolerable but appreciate the existence of.)
I do think it's a bit of a shame there's some attention getting drained away from more interesting things, but I suppose that's always true, and as a consumer I'm also not interested in spending all of my time on more high-brow works; there is a time and place for matters of higher taste, and it does not (for me, at least) appear to be "always, for everything."
So I try to imagine that people who are really into Star Wars (sorry, again, this is just my personal example, there are definitely worse things, and if you like the Star Wars movies, I hope I am managing to convey that this is fine) have chosen that this is not where they particularly want to exercise their taste, they're just there for the cheap thrills, like going on a rollercoaster ride where the outcome is clear but you're still having fun. A fun romp. I too enjoy a fun a romp. Maybe these people have refined taste on some other subject.
I do really mean it, by the way - I play incremental click games to scrub my brain and relax after a long day at work. Shark Incremental is not particularly sophisticated (maybe it has some non-zero amounts of sophistication, I don't mean to decry it), it's just Number Go Up, and sometimes that's what I need.
And then once that's done for the day, I go back to listening to atonal music with no detectable melody or lyrics and enjoy it. :)
Thank you for the kind comment! I see you're in the habit of leaving kind comments - thank you for doing that, that makes the internet a much nicer place in general! (I don't do it nearly often enough, really.)
Allow me to share some music as a token of thanks (I'll drop two here so you can actually pick the category you prefer):
When it comes to movies, just watch the ones targeted to your level of taste. When it comes to buildings, that's not really an option, so you're better off making buildings more people like instead of fewer. It sucks to be one of the fewer, but that's better than it sucking to be one of the more.
I don't understand the obsession with trying to define good and bad taste. Why not just admit that what we call good taste is just a matter of context (social, demographic, historic, economic, cultural, whatever)?
I think it's much more meaningful to speak of discernment, i.e. the habit and interest of engaging with something more deeply, paying attention, but whether you like something, whether it moves you, that's deeply subjective. And as to whether it's objectively good, isn't that meaningless without defining an objective? Good with regard to what?
Because some people have the power to shape public spaces according to their definition of good taste and to strangle any other option by denying them funding, removing them from educational curricula, etc.
My point is there is no such thing, except with reference to more-or-less arbitrary social norms. Maybe you can argue some powerful people have imposed a niche preference on a public who don't share it. But you can't say that either the powerful people or the public have 'good' taste.
God is the ultimate judge of what makes art good or not. But in the meantime, for those of us still living, there's a clear motivation to answer the same question as best we can with our limited means.
I don't think it's clear, and even if there's motivation, it doesn't mean there's a point to the effort. I think people who are trying to argue for good taste are just playing status games, trying to prove their own sense of style is somehow objectively superior.
Then the point is to bend re "more-or-less arbitrary social norms" in the direction of my own tastes so I can live in a world filled with beautiful things instead of ugly things. If you've read the whole series on taste, you've seen at least one case where a municipal government went against popular consensus, ignoring the results of a poll and instead installing a piece of hideous art.
I agree but I don't see why you're trying to win this debate on faux-objective grounds. Especially if your objection is that some elites have steam rolled the public, you're likely to lose that debate (you won't easily convince Avant Garde architects that you know better). Better to argue on democratic grounds, no?
You're literally commenting on a thread where Scott posits that there is such a thing, and offers a very plausible mostly objective definition of why it's not more-or-less arbitrary. Did you read the post before commenting? Whether or not you then conclude that people with higher levels of taste are "better" is up for debate. But if it exists and some people think it matters then we can then say things like "the best art for each person is made by and for people with equal levels of taste as themselves." or "the more art you consume the higher your taste level gets whether you want it to or not". These are meaningful discussions to have, and I think Scott's definition helps a lot with clarifying by what taste even means beyond being "more-or-less-arbitrary"
But it doesn't. Even if it convinced you, you will forget it the first time you and Scott disagree about whether something in particular is tasteful or not.
But that's the thing, this kind of argument basically ONLY works about architecture. Why get mad over some shit in a museum or some books? There's other museums, other books. If you want a more democratic way to shape the public space I'm all for it but Scott is taking much broader aim in all these posts.
There's a kind of motte-and-bailey here, I think. The bailey is "people should stop having sophisticated taste because the idea that there are axes of human existence along which other people are more advanced than I am offends me" (for example Scott's remark "and I don’t consider this a character flaw" hints at some insecurity of this kind) and the motte is that for every sphere of culture there is some manifestation of it (school curriculum for books, the public space for architecture, publicly-funded museums for paintings..) where everyone can be regarded as being forced to partake in it or pay for it. But it's clear as day that this latter isn't the *real* issue Scott has with the concept of taste.
I find it hilarious that you are armchair psychoanalyzing our resident psychiatrist, but the words that you put in his mouth are a wild and unkind interpretation of what he actually said.
Who says I'm not armchair psychoanalyzing YOU! (joke)
I may be projecting this onto Scott a tad much but I think there's a lot of insecurity around "high culture" in the wider society and I don't think it's doing people any good, I think something is getting lost in the sense that culture could be better if more people felt free to contribute to art and "serious" culture in a general sense instead of going all "I don't know anything about it but..." or "did you know wine tasting is all fake and have you heard about the Sokal affair" and resentfully shying away from it.
This whole series of posts seems to be trying to justify Scott's personal insecurities -- and thus it's really unclear what he's actually trying to get at.
I think it's interesting that he continually refers to poetry as the one area where he has "taste", however mediocre it is. However, he avoids talking about the one area where he very obviously has taste, to a high level -- writing essays. He makes a living from people having taste in essay reading. So to dismiss taste in general feels very strange.
The only reasonable justification I can think of is to reframe essay-taste as not being taste at all, but something objective. A good essay follows xyz rules of argumentation and logic etc. Which is also silly, considering Scott's own essays are meandering and sprawling, which is the main thing that makes them interesting.
Though I don't dispute the "personal insecurities" thing, it's worth observing that there actually is *plenty* of hectoring from many quarters throughout one's life about how important and valuable and admirable it is to have good taste in certain domains. Personal experience/personality probably dictates whether you instinctively feel more annoyed by the anti-"slop" or the anti-anti-"slop" faction.
The low brow version of the criticism is that mass entertainment is expensive to produce and has economies of scale, so if the masses decide that they enjoy superhero movies and you hate superhero movies you are not going to have a lot of fun at the movie theater for a decade or so.
Well I wouldn't say that because it doesn't seem like it explains anything?
> I have lost track of how many times I have heard people say, “Intelligence is an emergent phenomenon!” as if that explained intelligence. This usage fits all the checklist items for a mysterious answer to a mysterious question. What do you know, after you have said that intelligence is “emergent”? You can make no new predictions. […] It feels like you believe a new fact, but you don’t anticipate any different outcomes. Your curiosity feels sated, but it has not been fed.
I mean that, to my eye, it doesn't help you predict anything about taste, it just makes the question go away. How does the theory predict whether flag-lovers prefer simple or complex flags? How does it feel about what wines will be rated highly?
Well, if it's true it means that it can be analyzed into many components. And I feel this is a correct assertion. Also you can analyze the way the components interact, as that structure is probably also very significant.
The problem is that asserting it doesn't make it true. Perhaps it's a gradient. (I feel it more likely that some of the components are gradients.) An the assertion doesn't give you a handle on how to test whether it's true or not.
We can’t do that because it belies reality. In the realm of actual taste, very few people claim Soylent and microwaved chicken fingers are just as good as Franklin BBQ and fewer still would travel internationally for the former. In the realm of engineering, we recognize elegance and simplicity… with money. Society generally considers someone living on junk food, exclusively, as living an impoverished life (the unexamined life…), and just so for a life of purely consuming junk food in all forms. Most humans seem to really like the Grand Canyon but not parking lots. Taste exists outside of context, empirically.
I would be willing to bet that of the people who have eaten both microwave chicken-fingers & at four-Michelin-star restaurants, ≥50% would say that yes, Michelin stars correlate with quality; we certainly do not see people act the same way about the former as the latter, though perhaps some signaling is involved there.
More generally, I think it's true that there are, empirically, the sort of trends noted by Poodoodle: e.g., would we find that the majority of the populace thinks the Grand Canyon more beautiful than the modal mall parking-lot? I'd be very surprised if not.
Whether it might be the case that we could *convince* a more or less overwhelming majority to prefer frozen chicken-fingers & parking-lots, I don't know. (I might suggest "probably not; probably some portion of taste, whether culinary or artistic, is biological", but I'm not married to the position.)
But if you ask people to compare the grand canyon to the empire state building? Or if you ask them to compare the empire state building to Westminster palace? Or the Parthenon to the Forbidden city?
Me neither—I mean, for my part, I've never understood why anyone would expect a *tire company* to know anything about food. Some sort of sophisticated signaling game, no doubt.
> "I think the strongest argument in favor is that tasteful people claim to get a higher level of pleasure from their sophisticated art than normal people can ever achieve from their cheap tricks"
I remember The Aesthetic City doing a video on architects who produce sprawling glass-and-rebar corporate monstrosities for a living and then go live in woody Georgian suburbs with porticos over the door, so I think the "getting more pleasure from it" argument is just bunk.
Thai architecture is, uh... a little more burlesque/rococo than usual, I think, even compared with most pre-modern architectural traditions. Greco-Roman, Aztec or Japanese temples tended to be a little more sparing/discrete in their use of external decoration, IIRC. But still well within the bounds of aesthetics appreciable by a normal person.
I don't believe in the higher pleasure thing, it's all fake like wine tasting, blinded experts can't tell the difference. With no one there to praise their taste, no one experiences pleasure from ugliness. To experience the pleasure of being high status, you need an audience. Alone the audience is in their head, the idea that people will like me for liking this ugly thing. That isn't a thing we should encourage.
I believe in higher pleasure, but it doesn't come from ugliness, it comes from effort. Understanding something that takes more effort and thinking feels different and in some ways better than understanding something easier. Sometimes this means that a good piece of artwork may look ugly at first until you have had time to comprehend it, but not always.
Ugly high-status art seems like a cargo cult version of this. People know that art that tasteful people admire sometimes looks superficially ugly, so they just create ugly art and think that's what they need to do to be high taste. They don't understand they need to at some point add something that is beautiful if you figure it out.
I completely agree with the last paragraph especially. Same sort of of mistaking effects for causes (or correlation with causation) that ends up with the "if people buy houses then they'll be better people" thinking that contributed to the housing market crash in the 2000s. Or to most of education fads that mistake things that good students do for the reason they're good students.
I need to push back on the wine tasting bit. On one hand you have some studies but they mainly use whoever dubbed themselves experts; on the other I have personally seen blindfolded oenology students not only recognize the grape variety, but most managed to also get the territory and a few pinpointed the year in a top-k retrieval tewst. and these were just the students!
Most true experts at wine discrimination are basically scientists trying to detect wine defects as expensive consultants for wineries, guiding the vinification process. They do not judge tastings or contests, and are definitely not writing about wine in magazines.
The problem here is that smell is eminently traineable (perfumery, oenology, etc), but as always you have a talent distribution. so already there is a very small number of people who have world class talent and training together in terms of wine tasting. And on top of that, actual TASTE is orthogonal! Being able to detect 23 separate notes in the aromatic profile of a wine does not automatically make you able to discern if they are an immortal symphony or a mainstream pop song!
Yes, taste is basically olfaction+, and smells lack an objective descriptive language. We use relationships (a graph) to describe them, and the anchor nodes are culturally mediated. When I worked in perfumery and dreaming of becoming a "nose", they were looking for underrepresented cultures for this exact reason. But the objectivity of the olfactory depth of discrimination is not fake, we just have different languages for it in a way.
I think it's actually a real part of art appreciation difference between the lowbrow and highbrow discussed here: depth of understood reference. Of course you can say "you need to be immersed in a référent to get it"!
Imagine reading, unsong by Scott, or Dante, or Milton without having the support of the western canon or the Judeo-Christian religions? You would recognize a shape, but would lack the coordinates, the links that make them relevant. Likewise for haikus, kimono fabric, etc. A lot in culture is dependent on you "getting it" through connection withe the overall tapestry. It's even got its own "cheap trick" version as Scott describes: think overly self référent marvel or star wars movies, how selected the afficionados were in finding the connections and easter eggs...
Ah, but taste is obtained by exposure, and fancy wine buyers are aspirational in the purchase. Also, price here is an imperfect proxy (added noise), there's a cultural element (who tells you a wine is fancy? how do you select your exposure?). And while the ability to be really world class in expertise (blind tasting the grape to ~5km of the small italian parcell it grew on) is very right tailed, taste is orthogonal and bears the load often. and finally I may not be a world-famous music theorist, but I can still enjoy modern operas with discriminating taste because I was exposed to it deliberately and gained _culture_ which is a first approximation of taste. same with wine.
You started out with "blinded experts can't tell the difference", which isn't true but is one of those internet-forum-truths that gets passed around (often based on a dumb misinterpretation of that food-colouring study).
Then you retreated to "a lot of fancy wine buyers can't tell the difference", which is quite possibly true. But it's a much weaker claim.
I once helped film a video of a blind wine taste testing (So I am 100% sure they weren't cheating because I obtained the wines for the test myself and didn't tell them!) and I was shocked by how well they did. Even when they got the wrong wine they were able to correctly identify some features about its origin. I'm convinced but agree that without training, practice, and the ability to name what you're tasting, it's probably not fully accessible to the average wine drinker. But they can still enjoy the wine even if they don't know anything about tannins or terroir.
I suspect the Pepsi vs Coke tests are getting at something different. I think it says more about blind taste tests not being realistic to real-world use cases in general ("ecological validity") than that the Pepsi vs Coke priming specifically affecting people's tastes.
Concretely I predict that if Pepsi and Coke had a generic version under different labels, generic-Coke would still beat generic-Pepsi after some time, rather than the opposite as the blind taste tests and Pepsi marketing would have you believe.
I hesitate to give a mechanistic explanation because I'm more confident about the overall pattern than the mechanistic explanation. But mechanistically, the specific thing that consistently overwhelms taste tests is sugar content. In blind taste tests, non-trained testers overwhelmingly prefer whichever food sample has sugar. However, contrary to overly cynical popular belief, consumers in the real world have a limited appetite for sugar that's already fairly calibrated to existing American norms. You can't just dump a bunch of sugar into existing products and have people automatically like it more in ways that correspond to long-term purchasing behavior, in the real world.
(Pepsi has 41 grams of sugar/can vs 39g/can for Coke. I'm not confident that sugar content is enough to explain the blind taste test discrepancy but it's plausible enough for me)
One of my sources for this intuition is that I studied blind taste tastes semi-professionally for some time while working at Impossible Foods; overall I got more skeptical about them compared to my high hopes and unconsidered opinions going in, though still think they're useful.
FWIW, I read that this is indeed the case... somewhere. IIRC, it was a finding that people actually preferred Coke in blinded tests *if they drank the whole cup before rating*, or something like that.
There is an underlying ethical framework underneath seemingly arbitrary taste for art:
The utilitarian will seek art that maximizes pleasure.
The deontologist will seek art that maximizes understanding.
The virtue ethicist will seek art that maximizes personal growth.
This relation between ethics and esthetics is exactly where LLMs fail. They are natural utilitarians, as quantifiable morality fits their inner bayesians structure so perfectly. Those who have doubts about utilitarianism will find that AI art subtly annoys or even disgusts them.
As an addendum, these are general patterns, not completely mutually exclusive categories. It works similarly to the way people mix up different ethical frameworks to navigate daily life.
Why can't a utilitarian desire personal growth or understanding and thus seek art that maximise those? Pleasure is just one possible end, but all those things constitute utility.
I hold generally utilitarian views. When I first read Peter Singer's formulation of "preference utilitarianism" I immediately felt something click in my head and realized how inaccurate earlier formulations had been. As such I consider understanding, personal growth, and pleasure to all be important values that utilitarians should seek to increase. I think this view is fairly common among rationalist-adjacent utilitarians.
I think saving the world requires a lot of personal growth! Indeed it trivially seems more important to do personal growth than selfishly acquire pleasure, for the purposes of saving the world.
Why should one desire utility? I have never met a utilitarian who does not end up talking about pleasure-optimization, if questioned deeply enough. Utilitarianism is nothing if not the logic of desire. A 'util' or measure of usefulness, always indicates that good comes from use.
Now, in order for something to have a 'use', the one who uses has to have a goal in mind, an intention. One cannot have intentions or goals without desires. Utilitarianism is fundamentally concerned with fulfilling desires. What is the ultimate object of desire, upon which the hierarchy of desire depends? Happiness. In the end utilitarianism always ends up in a never-ending quest for happiness. I would add my personal opinion, which is that it is one which is always doomed to fail. (Read: kierkegaard and the aesthetic man)
Well, then what of the virtue ethicist - why do THEY pursue virtue? Do they suffer pain from being aware of having achieved virtue, yet pursue it anyway in spite of it, or do they derive some satisfaction, or serenity, a feeling of having done the right thing, from any improvement?
The problem with the hedonist framework is that it implies by "pleasure" that we're talking essentially about short-term fulfilment. But utilitarianism doesn't mean shortsightedness (though of course some utilitarians CAN be shortsighted, like anyone else). Utility can be instrumental ("I want this because it'll help me achieve this much longer term goal") and utility can come in many forms beyond simple sensory pleasure. "I want to be happy; I believe having a rich understanding of the world is a prerequisite to being happy; therefore I enjoy art which furthers my understanding" is a perfectly viable utilitarian line of thinking. Absolutely no contradictions or issues with this.
So you are telling me that a good virtue ethicists has no emotion and no feelings about achieving any kind of virtue; they simultaneously know exactly what to strive for, yet have no inner guide to it. They'd feel just the same murdering puppies as they do donating to a charity; they just rationally think the latter is better for abstract reasons they plucked out of the hyperuranion. And they say utilitarians are weird!
A data-point: I would call myself—broadly—utilitarian... and indeed, I *do not* value personal growth compared to pleasure. My taste in most things could broadly be described as "maximize pleasure, minimize difficulty"—whether emotional, aesthetic, perceptual...¹
No doubt friend anonymous meant it as a criticism—though, conversely, I think amigo Cyrus is undoubtedly just reporting on an honest observation—but I fear that it fits me pretty well! (Actually, I don't fear; I am not ashamed! 🦾 proud 2b a wireheader!–)
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¹(E.g., I cannot stand "sad" music; gimme bluegrass 'n' fiddles 'n' Irish jigs, any day! Similarly, I won't watch or read something if it is past a certain "how 'emotional' is this?" limit—I don't think I've *ever* experienced this fabled "catharsis" of which people speak; and besides, there is plenty enough tragedy in the real world: get it out of my media!—hence, I mostly prefer comedies & histories over dramas & tragedies; etc., etc.
(In truth, I actually have some trouble imagining how art *could* provide "personal growth" to anyone—except, *possibly,* the narrative varieties thereof, which I suppose could relay some sort of life-lesson(s) via the experiences of their characters. Otherwise, I sort of wonder if maybe this isn't just the kind of thing that people *want to* believe, because they want art to be deeply important & meaningful, and are too ashamed to stand forth proudly & admit: it is important & meaningful 'cause so ks pleasure, and there's nothing else needed to excuse its value to me!... ...but I recognize that I am maybe on the tail of some distribution, here, so—could be wrong–)
The utilitarian will seek art that maximized utility. I generally parse that as "usefulness", but it isn't quite the same. Pleasure is only one aspect of utility. And what is "useful" depends on what you goal is at the moment.
I would take this even further, and say that since virtue ethics is clearly the only Right Answer (pretend to be classically-minded with me here), what makes something of good vs bad taste is how much it evokes and aligns with one's slightly-varying view of what the human _telos_ is.
So both the cheap tricks and the conscious snobbery fail because they are trying to do the wrong thing, in aiming at things that accompany art of real "substance", instead of providing that substance, itself. How to define "substance" is left as an exercise for the reader.
I have personally never understood why virtue ethics and consequentialism are seen as at odds. Isn't caring about the consequences that your actions have upon the world an important virtue?
The main issue for consequentialists is afaik that virtues are internal traits that resist consistent measurement, so they fall outside of measurable causality (or consequence).
The main issue for virtue ethicists is that consequences cannot be known with certainty to the mind's eye, while virtues (or lack thereof) can be.
So it is a matter of internalist epistemology versus externalist epistemology. That debate has not been solved.
If I spend all my time doing moral things of small utility (say, stocking the local corner library) while being oblivious to moral things of large utility (say, stopping malaria in Africa), this is a big failure according to consequentialism (because the utility I create is tiny compared to what I could have created), but a minor failure according to virtue ethics (because the human brain is naturally ignorant of many things, including the very fact that it is ignorant).
I was taught in school that "consequentialism" means ethics based on the consequences of actions and "utilitarianism" is the name for hedonistic consequentialism.
Lots of people in Internet discussions seem to use "utilitarianism" and "consequentialism" interchangeably, though.
I mostly learned from Wikipedia. I'm not clear what exactly the distinction between consequentialism and utilitarianism is supposed to be, but they're definitely not deontology or virtue ethics. Except that rule utilitarianism is identical to Kant's categorical imperative, which is deontology?
If you have a true interest in these matters, wikipedia is not a good source. For specific subjects, you should go to plato.stanford.edu
Otherwise, read the canon, start with the Greeks, go through history, take everything with a solid pinch of salt, but allow it to rock your world. You'll get there.
This angle would suggest that taste is something that comes from exposure and growing inoculation to cheap tricks. So kids love obviously appealing things, then you see past that and like whatever can be made without overuse of the obvious things, then whatever can be made without that, until, as you say, you only like abstract atonal music. That mostly seems solid.
But what about crossover works that appeal to everyone? Like my toddler will eagerly watch cartoons that I can't stand, but will also love Bluey, which I legitimately enjoy. How is Bluey satisfying her basic desires while also being tolerable to adults? Same question for The Hobbit, which works for all ages.
I'd start with the hypothesis that these crossover works manage to include enough of the basic appealing elements (bright colors, dragons, songs) along with elements for other elements that are appreciated after more exposure (subtle characterization, metaphor, classical music in Bluey). And maybe that's the actual way to talk about "great" works? Like Shakespeare famously worked for uneducated peasants in the cheap seats and still excites scholars today, Van Gogh made paintings people are happy to have on a t shirt but is undisputably a master, etc.
What objections to this thesis: Great art appeals to people across sophistication levels. Toddler art and bichromatic abstract sculpture, in contrast, are just targeted at one level of sophistication and should be judged as effective or ineffective at appealing to that target, with neither being superior to each other just based on their choice of target.
Seems like a sensible take. To pick a genre of fiction that's easy to make fun of, LitRPGs are often lambasted for just being power fantasy and "numbers go up", but the best of the genre have that *as well as* powerful character development, social commentary both overt and subtle, hilarious comic moments and so on.
When you say "the best of the genre", which ones are you thinking of besides Dungeon Crawler Carl? DCC is the only LitRPG I've read so far, but I appreciate it for doing exactly what you described.
It's progression fantasy in name only, no numbers/stats/etc, just a person organically forced to become better. And a lot of well-rounded characters around him.
If we're doing web-fic recommendations, I assume Worm probably goes without saying. I also love The Gods are Bastards. The caveat is that it is on a long hiatus, but that doesn't undermine it to me, because there is a ton and it is really great even if it never officially concludes. If you like Pokemon, Pokemon The Origin of Species is split between a full LitRPG and Methods of Rationality in a way I really enjoy.
And then there's this great one called Unsong, I wonder what that author has been up to recently.
You have similar taste to me. I just wanted to say, on the off-chance that you haven't encountered them, that the author of TGaB has made two other long fics: Only Villains Do That, and Hoard. Both are good and personally I liked Villains even more than TGaB.
Separately: A Practical Guide to Evil was also good and long.
I keep bouncing off of OVDT. I want to like it, but I'm not much of a reader of isekai and feel like I'm missing the underlying context, like reading TGAB as my first fantasy story.
It seems like your concepts of what counts as "LitRPG" and what counts as "progression fantasy" are roughly the reverse of mine.
I think of "progression fantasy" as being any fantasy stories where becoming more powerful is a major focus, and "LitRPG" as being stories where the world explicitly follows RPG-like rules, such as stats, classes, levels, and experience points.
I therefore consider Mother of Learning to be progression fantasy and not LitRPG.
As mentioned below: MoL is one of my favorite serieseses of all time, progression fantasy or otherwise. It's what got me into the genre, in fact; I picked up Cradle afterward, and of course that was great too.
Other standouts, for me, so far: Godclads (by "OstensibleMammal"), Bastion (by Phil Tucker). Actus' stuff (e.g. Runebound Professor) is generally decent, albeit not quite on the level of the aforementioned.
I know there are more that should be on this list, but I'm blankin' at the moment... which really shouldn't happen, 'cause I read a *lot* of progression fantasy! (I have notes & ratings on probably a hundred titles in the genre & closely related; I keep intending to start a review series, mostly to prevent others from suffering, as I have, from countless "hey this looks good" → "oh no it's utterly terrible" incidents...)
Heh. Well, yes, DCC is the clear most popular for good reason. My personal preferences in the genre are a bit unusual. I'd highly recommend Threadbare even though it's older (protagonist is an animated teddy bear; very well plotted trilogy with early hints about stuff revealed much later). Industrial Strength Magic is hilarious superhero-adjacent fun with a munchkin protagonist mildly reminiscent of HPMOR!Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, and also explores topics like AI rights. Apocalypse Parenting is delightful for anyone who's a parent or has small kids in their life (protagonist is a mom of three young kids). Factory of the Gods is surprisingly great (it's Factorio as a LitRPG). Whispering Crystals is another great series where the author clearly had the end in mind from the beginning. Others I recommend for being intelligent include Super Supportive, Blue Core, and Rise of the Runebound Professor.
Actus' stuff (e.g. Runebound Prof.) is pretty good, generally. You might like Mother of Learning, Cradle, Godclads or one of the other serieses by OstensibleMammal, and/or Bastion (most of Tucker's other series I also like, but not as much as Bastion)—assuming you've not already read all of these, of course. (Some are just adjacent—i.e., progression fantasy—rather than full-blown LitRPG.)
I find it pretty difficult to find good works in the genre(s)—partly because I have some pet peeves and/or unreasonably high standards, apparently (at least, going by how few authors/readers seem to share them, heh), and partly because I just read through them extremely quickly. After the last piece of trash I picked up, only to be terribly disappointed yet again, I decided that I could do better... so—well, we'll see...
I definitely think this is it, yes. It's not uncommon to hear for e.g. animated movies that they have also "something for the parents". One of my favourite animated movies of the last years was Puss in Boots: the Last Wish. It has talking cats and bears and crickets in it, lots of colour and motion, slapstick gags, and everyone is chasing a big sparkly falling star. It's also got a surprisingly poignant reflection about coming to terms with one's own mortality, a fantastically tight script that balances three different villain factions and a total of about 10 characters perfectly in about 2 hours of movie, and an extremely accurate depiction of a panic attack. So lots of people have reasons to appreciate it, and the existence of the other elements doesn't detract from that enjoyment because all elements harmonize together, unless you're actively annoyed by the idea that someone who does NOT have your refined tastes might get some joy from this too, in which case, well, check your priorities.
It's not like the great figurative artwork of the past wasn't laced with subtle arcane references that only other erudites and artists could catch. It totally was! But it also had an immediate layer of "cool image" and then you could dig as deep as your experience allows. The defining characteristic of contemporary art isn't that it has hermetic messages targeted at other artists, it's that it often refuses to have anything else.
To be fair I agree that's a bit too reductive and it's something that mostly applies to some of the high profile stuff (like the infamous taped banana) that breaches containment. That said, I don't think most of that is particularly cooler or visually more interesting than a lot of much more "low brow" art that isn't afraid to just be figurative. I don't *hate* modern art as a whole. I just think it's ironically held back by the need to be different and weird and original at all costs. There's great visual art all around us - in comics, in illustrations, in games, in animation - and if anything often the one I see in contemporary exhibitions is the least impressive and impactful of all of them.
I don’t think it’s a good thing to be making “toddler art” with crossover appeal. The point of this stuff is to appeal to toddlers and then they later move on. But there are adult Bluey fans with no children and it’s disturbing. They choose to lock themselves up in arrested development and their excuse is that actually this children’s show has Deep Themes so they can immerse themselves in entertainment about how sharing is fun and never grow up. The entertainment you consume influences you.
I don't have a strong view on people who watch Bluey without children. But I would take arms against the idea that there shouldn't be toddler art that's tolerable or enjoyable for parents who have to watch it with them, and I'd have my whole generation of parents beside me.
More seriously, I think kids benefit from better toddler art, and I'm willing to accept that it may also appeal to some childless adults if that's the price.
You don’t “have to” watch it with them. That’s part of the problem. My mom threw on movies I liked so she could get some cleaning done without me distracting her. She didn’t feel an obligation to sit down and watch it every single time I wanted to.
You don't have to watch with them, true enough, but you do have to hear them watching it while you do the cleaning - I guess if you have a big enough house or a different layout the TV might not be near where the dishes are or whatever, but that's not how my apartment is set up.
But also I like being with my kids, and they like my presence, and then we can talk about what we watch afterwards. And, again, I think the things that make shows more tolerable for grown-ups are actually positive elements for kids.
I infer from another of your comments that you are hearing people suggest that you should watch Bluey without children. To be clear, I don't think that and wouldn't recommend it to a childless friend. But I do enjoy my time watching it with my children.
It’s understandable wanting something you can tolerate hearing over and over again. There’s a middle ground of content that isn’t grating to adults but isn’t made to appeal them at all.
But then again, maybe it’s just something wrong in the air. I watched Toy Story and the Lion King all the time and they are good movies but my parents didn’t latch on to them like what’s happening to my generation. Maybe we were just the first generation that had such an abundance of good children’s entertainment that it produced Disney adults.
Yeah, I think there's something to that - like I mostly manage, between Bluey and Disney/Pixar stuff, to have my daughter only watch stuff that's pretty pleasant for me. And then you have like The Wizard of Oz, which I should have mentioned earlier - great for kids, but just a global smash for everyone when released and it still holds up great. And that speaks to the advantage we have right now raising kids: if you take the best 5 kids movies per decade, after a century of movies you have enough to essentially be the whole content pie for a kid. But, as you say, it also means that people aren't ever forced to move on to grown up movies, and that probably does have an effect on the culture.
You don't "have" to watch/listen to a think you don't like... unless you're taking them to the movie theater. Or you're in a car together.. Or... you get the idea. Trust me that finding something that the whole family will like or at least tolerate is important for the parent's sanity.
Beyond that... have you ever come back to an old story and though, "I used to love this, but wow, it's bad now." or "I used to love this, and now I like it in a new way."? That's the kind of thing a parent can provide by selecting 'better' media.
As for Bluey for adults, I wouldn't watch children's media by myself in English. But when I'm trying to learn foreign languages? When I'm at the level where I need simple child level language, but the act of watching it won't make my brain crawl out of my ears? Yes, it's shows like Bluey.
A friend of mine once asked me, "Who would ever watch 'Friends'?" I introduced him to my other friend who watched it when they were learning English. I think that's the main market for adults that Bluey provides, that you might be missing.
Where is this idea coming from that children get veto power over all entertainment? I remember when I was riding with my dad, we listened to whatever he wanted to. It was his car, he said, so he controlled the radio and I just accepted that because what other choice did I have?
The language thing is interesting because I’ve done the same thing. But when I watched these I keep thinking that I wish there was something more made for adult language learners. There’s this show I watched called Extras which is a Friends rip off and is actually pretty entertaining.
I could indeed decided that it's my car, my rules. I don't want to. I prefer to listen to something that we all enjoy and I feel like it's unfair that I don't try listening to new things my kids like it I'm asking them to try listening to things I like. Personally, this ended up expanding my musical range because we started listening to a lot more classical music when they were small and more foreign language music these days.
Actually, I'll follow-up and say that a lot of podcasts are trying to hit that spot for adult learners. But that's hard to scale because there's a big gradient between 'doesn't understand the language' and 'fluent'. But kids shows have that scale but in.
I'm just imagining that actors finish recording a hit show and the director tells them to do it again but slower and with simpler words.
I don't know how much of a case there is for deliberately trying for toddler art with crossover appeal. I do, however, firmly believe that kids deserve better than soulless by-the-numbers slop; and also that if you actually care about and put effort into whatever it is you are making, its appeal may well naturally end up being wider than the audience you originally had in mind.
I’m just saying that Blues Clues probably had care put in to it but there’s no crossover appeal to adults. It was explicitly made to be developmentally appropriate for them until they outgrew it. That’s the happy median.
Stop worrying about them, they wouldn't grow up anyway, or else they grow up despite watching Bluey; it's a fake problem. Also, Simone didn't mean just Bluey; there's, for example, high-quality children's literature from which parents can get real grown-up level intellectual enjoyment. One can read it without children; there's enough sophisticated philosophy for an adult.
I personally refuse to read low-quality slop to kids, that depresses me; I only read good books to them that are enjoyable for both generations and across several readings. As a side effect, this teaches a wider vocabulary to the kids, makes the evening readings longer (because I can't stop, it's so pleasant), and makes the readings go on for years if the kids are interested (I now have teenage kids, and we still read actual real grown-up literature together before bedtime).
Just while we're here, what high quality stuff have you been reading to your kids? We started with Dr. Seuss, and have added Elephant and Piggie as something more modern that's comprehensible to kids as young as 1.5 but pleasant and engaging. She now has a Yoto and that gives her audiobook access to Roald Dahl and a bunch of classics, and I just made her a Hobbit card so she can listen to that. But I'm always looking for more recommendations!
For toddlers, I started with Jip and Janneke, Pettson and Findus, and suchlike. I live in Europe, so the main corpus of children's books are probably quite different for us. E.g. I haven't read dr Seuss, though it turns out two of the books have lately been translated into my language.
Anything by Elsa Beskow is good, we particularly like "The Children of the Forest" and "Woody, Hazel, and Little Pip." Frog and Toad are great. We like the Brambly Hedge books, but some find them a bit cutesy. I like Margaret Hodges collaborations with Trina Schart Hyman, but they are heavy on the text.
When a little older George MacDonald's Princess and the Goblin, the Golden Key, the Light Princess are all good. Also The Wind in the Willows. East of the Sun and West of the Moon. The Oz books. Chronicles of Narnia, obviously.
For the toddler set, Barbro Lindgren's Max books (or Sam, depending on the translator) are delightful, mostly thanks to the illustrations. Rather like Elephant and Piggie that way.
Sandra Boynton's albums are excellent. She got tired of lame kids' music when hers were little and so she set out to do better. You can listen to 90's rock on "Dog Train," or erudite Latin jokes on "Grunt: Pigorian Chant" if that's more your style. We've done a lot of folk music albums too rather than modern overproduced stuff that discourages singing oneself: Pete and Mike & Peggy Seeger, Old Mother Hippletoe, things like that.
Cynthia Rylant's Mr Putter & Tabby and Poppleton books are among our favorites. (Henry and Mudge is a good series too, but Puppy Mudge is kinda lame.)
James Marshall wrote a lot of picture books (and a few chapter books) and they are quirky and fun. (Cut-Ups, George and Martha, Miss Nelson, etc.)
Kate DiCamillo's Mercy Watson books are pitch-perfect, and if your daughter is old enough for Dahl, then she's old enough for DiCamillo's other books too (Tales of Deckawoo Drive, Despereaux, Magician's Elephant, Beatryce Prophecy, etc).
Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking, but also Noisy Village, Ronia, Mio, Emil, and Lotta. Brothers Lionheart is the only one we didn't like; some in print, some you have to really search for. Worth every penny I've spent on them though.
Is Bluey a bad influence? I haven't seen it, but I would expect it's intended to be a good influence. Would you rather someone be influenced by Game of Thrones?
This was the idea behind the critical movement of "poptimism", where magazines like Pitchfork began giving accolades to e.g the music of Beyoncè. There's been backlash to it from people who believe the critics have lost the ability to appreciate sophisticated art and thus implicitly sanctioned everyone using the same cheap tricks all the time with no greater ambition.
> Like my toddler will eagerly watch cartoons that I can't stand, but will also love Bluey, which I legitimately enjoy.
If something *only* uses cheap tricks, it will only appeal to people with bad taste. If it's using cheap tricks but also more sophisticated ones, it will apply to anyone who isn't specifically driven away by cheap tricks. If you want to reach the real critics who despise the cheap tricks, then they're not going to give Bluey a chance and you need to avoid them altogether.
The secret of Bluey is that it's not a show aimed at kids that also appeals to adults -- it's secretly a show for aimed at adults which also appeals to kids.
The stories of the episodes aren't about being a kid, they're about being a parent. The themes of the episodes aren't all that relatable to kids, they're relatable to parents. When an episode has a message, that message isn't aimed at the kid, it's aimed at the adult. And when an episode is about a kid learning something it's in the context of "this is something your kid is inevitably going to go through, and here's how Chilli and Bandit, who are good parents, help them cope with it".
There's so few works actually aimed at the parents of young kids, which is a shame because they're a very distinct set of people with a lot in common, suddenly thrust into a whole emotional landscape that they have trouble processing, and fiction is one of the tools with which we understand and put into perspective our own lives.
I agree, though I would also say that perhaps taste is a bad thing. It's low confidence, but if taste leaves you strictly less able to be happy, cui bono?
“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” said Picasso, apparently. That's what came to my mind.
I feel a similar trajectory in my life. I studied a STEM-field considered difficult by almost everyone I meet. Dunno, sure it was "hard" but I thought that's what studying is about, I'm not working in the field and felt like I missed a huge opportunity by doing so. It took more than a decade AFTER studying to start noticing birds and feel joyful like a kid hearing them sing, and being able to distinguish different birds before knowing what their names/species are. Colleagues called this "childlike" when they observed my partner's excitement about birdsong on a worktrip. I suggested to her to accept it as a compliment, independent of the colleague's intentions.
You say "eyeball kick" but the term that comes to mind for me is "Little Lytton contest entries": https://adamcadre.ac/lyttle/ - especially the "jar of laughter" one, that's the exact sort of strained analogy that often features in this contest.
It reads very obviously like a line from the specific kind of magic realism popular in literary fiction, like "Who Will Greet You at Home," or "The Husband Stitch," or "Bestiary." Usually with a slow and introspective mood, occasional interjections written to be grotesque, and feminist themes.
I'm not a fan of stories like that. Every time I read one, I feel like I'm choking on metaphors, it's nauseating.
Might just be me preferring my own style, but if we imagine the shadow having actual personality, then the sentence is bad because of the switch to and from Clara halfway through.
"In the morning, Clara's smoky shadow began unspooling from her feet, coiling serpent-like beneath the kitchen table."
I think about it all the time when watching movies or shows — often I notice them doing what I think of as “cheating” by using mood-inducing musical scores at all the critical moments.
Then I think that if I had a show I would certainly want to use these at some points, the right points. Probably ending up in a version of “everyone who drives faster than me is a maniac and everyone slower is a grandma.”
I still notice when a show is cheating by letting the music drive the emotions rather than enhancing them.
The problem is when you *can* notice that "uh-huh, they're relying on the music to extort the emotional reaction from me" because that's when the acting, writing, directing, plot or all of those elements failed to do their jobs.
If the other elements all pull together, you're too busy bawling your eyes out to notice that the music is leading you along by the nose.
Now I have to link this Eddie Izzard sketch about horror movie music:
"The Wire" is a TV series, not a movie, but it too has no "incidental music" -- well, almost. There is music during montage sequences that occur at the end of each season, but I feel like that's perfectly reasonable (what else are you going to do during a montage ?). At other times, if there's music playing in the background (which doesn't happen that often), it's because some character is actively playing it on his stereo (or whatever).
Yes! It’s funny. I’ve watched that series from beginning to end three times and I didn’t notice. but you’re right, it’s not a movie so I’m on safe ground. Hah… thank you for pointing that out. I should do an AI search for others just for a laugh.
Got interested so asked my valet Hudson to look into it. Apparently it really stems from Bresson. Lang obviously predates him but Lang is …you know…special?
played on screen throughout; no overlay.
• M (Fritz Lang, 1931) — No score; Lorre’s whistling of Grieg is diegetic.
• No Country for Old Men (Coens, 2007) — No music of any kind.
• Russian Ark (Sokurov, 2002) — All music performed by visible orchestras and chamber groups within the Hermitage.
• Jeanne Dielman (Akerman, 1975)
• 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Mungiu, 2007)
• Son of Saul (Nemes, 2015)
The Dardenne Brothers as a body of work — Rosetta, The Son, L’Enfant all forgo scoring entirely.
Haneke — Caché, The White Ribbon, Amour, Time of the Wolf. The Piano Teacher is an interesting case: all music is performed within conservatory or domestic contexts.
Kiarostami — Taste of Cherry and Ten are reliable examples, though Taste of Cherry has an anomalous musical coda
Highbrow taste only makes sense in the context of lowbrow taste.
You keep making reference to this idea that we will all be forced to live in a boring highbrow-only world, but that couldn't happen, kinda by definition. The lowbrow must always reassert itself; and the highbrow will always distinguish itself from the lowbrow.
The famous monologue from The Devil Wears Prada also seems relevant - the highbrow is, by definition, where the innovation happens, and that feeds back and enriches the future lowbrow.
If you mean the bit about the cerulean sweater, I always thought that was silly: the implication was that no one could pick a color for a sweater if the fashion industry didn’t guide them?
I imagine a world without a fashion industry in which people simply pick sweater colors from a list of basic colors: Red, Yellow, Blue, Green. And it’s fine. Until one day someone shows up in a sweater of a subtle heathered greenish grey that evokes a foggy moor overlooking the Irish Sea, and suddenly all other sweaters look ridiculously childish and old -fashioned and no one wants to wear them anymore.
I suspect the fear of showing up in a Red sweater when everyone else has moved on—or rather, continuing to make and try to sell Red sweaters when no one wants them anymore—keeps people taking their cues from the fashion industry as in the famous monologue.
If we follow the article's logic, it means in that world has seen enough basic clothes that they can develop sophisticated taste. Thus there's room for foggy moor. But if there's enough "basic" clothes to last a lifetime, fashion industry will be redundant.
I think the implication was that the new girl thought fashion was beneath her, but Winter's points out the fashion industry actually shaped her decisions.
I was never sold on it though. It only shaped her decision in ways she didn't care about.
I thought it was silly because the fashion world doesn't affect her. She doesn't know or care what shade of blue her shirt is. It only affects the high-fashion people around her that see it as cerulean.
She doesn't know or care what shade of blue her shirt is, and so she winds up wearing the exact shade of blue the fashion industry chose for her four years earlier. The fashion world definitely affects her, but because she doesn't care, she doesn't see it.
Yeah, that is the implication. And it's what Scott called for explicitly in his previous post. He said, "stick to the stale stuff within the existing horizon and wait however long it takes for the next genius to come along."
Sticking to the stale stuff means just using the same colours as everyone has always used. The thing that the next genius does is to pick a new colour. And when that happens it always looks weird. First, it takes a weirdo to pick a new colour. It takes someone who cares about sweater colours way more than they ought to. That's just the kind of person who does it. Those are the highbrow art people, the weirdos. Usually, it's hard for normal people to work out why they'd obsess like that over sweater colour, which is just not that important.
Second, when the weirdo picks a new colour, they always pick something weird. Because they are weird! They can never just pick something pretty and nice like yellow. It's always off-brown. (Or painting a picture that doesn't represent something.)
So initial reactions to the new weird colours/art are generally pretty mixed. But once someone's done it, it becomes easier for the next person to follow suit, and then for the mass market to adopt it. Mass markets don't always adopt; most avant garde developments get ignored. But when the mass market does adopt something new, it selects from what has already been tried by those weirdo avant garde artists.
But, in the case of architecture, we sort of have been forced to live in a highbrow-only world -- the genesis of this whole series on taste, arguably. The Bauhaus were a highbrow architecture collective that gave all architects permission to build cheap boxy buildings because eschewing ornament (cheap tricks) was also the more stylish move. There is admittedly more of an aesthetic vision to Chandigarh or Habitat 67, but the throughline between those ideas and the stultifying dullness of so many modern buildings is clear.
I can't fathom what you're talking about. First, lots of the old buildings still exist - all those churches and cathedrals in Europe. That's my reference, which I guess is skewed. I suppose the USA doesn't have as much of the old stock, but it still has some. Second, McMansions. Lots of new building is done in exuberant "bad" taste. And in California, there are still lots of really nice Spanish style cool housing in exuberant good taste.
I understand that there are parts of New York where it's all glass boxes, and that's what Scott's objecting to. But that's not the only place in the USA.
I live in British Columbia and it's everywhere. You can read the "From Bauhaus to Our House" review for more. North American architecture was, in some sense, poisoned by good taste.
I dunno about Canada. I just think that most buildings are unornamented because most buildings have always been unornamented, for cost reasons. I get Scott's point that there has been a fashion for sleeker/barer buildings, so some of the expensive buildings which might in the past have been ornamented, were more recently built looking bare. But that fashion is still a contrastive phenomenon. It contrasts with older, fancier styles.
If you happen to live in a patch where that style took over, and you don't like it, then I feel for you. But I'm still not sure how "forced" you really are. There isn't a single kitschy mall around?
Just needed to pop in and make note that every single one of those R1 prose examples sound like absolute shit. I think they somehow nerfed the models. I, and many others, remember experiencing higher quality prose in 2023/2024 GPT models.
R1 was always shit at prose. It was never nerfed. Within a few days of its release, I'd already gotten exhausted with its tedious predictability and bag of tricks and derpness. And running it on the official DS site didn't impress me any more than the curated samples on Twitter and Marginal Revolution; it was bad at writing, and worse at poem critique or ideas or curation. The subsequent underperformance of DeepSeek, rather than being the Second Coming and the Ultimate Comeuppance of Western AI As Foretold Every Year, came as no surprise to me when I saw how bad R1 was on a non-benchmark task like that.
Yes, it rushes through the story to get to the end. To me, this feels like an actual preference of the model. As if it was mainly post-trained on things that weren’t fiction, and where getting to the end quickly is a virtue.
I think you kind of nailed it with your old piece "The Colors of her Coat": it would be a mystical experience to be able to enjoy the ten-thousandth "abstract+concrete noun" sequence as if it were the first, but the simple truth is that through exposure comes numbing, and you can't really do much about it.
This is why it's perhaps misguided to frame the crux of this piece as arguing in favor or against "taste": you will develop some kind of taste, and an inherent feature of taste for some/most is that repetition becomes tiring.
I think the more interesting framing device for this would be: given that taste is necessarily acquired, does it offer something valuable to try and direct it through exposure to highbrow forms of the art as opposed to commercial or generic art?
a few months ago I listened to a lecture by a computational linguistics researcher that showed pretty clearly how LLM output is heavily determined by third-world digi-sweatshops where the phase of post-training is carried out by usually non-native English speakers; this is where all the "delve"'s come from. They weren't that common in e.g. academic papers, which is why the post-GPT spike in usage is so apparent.
If anybody is interested I can probably find the reference to the paper/talk/research group.
I tried to tag you on the new OT but I don't think it worked. I posted a comment there with a link to the paper (it's less conclusive than I remembered, but I definitely think it's a clue into the right direction)
I don't buy the numbing thing. There are movies and miniseries I've seen ten times, songs and classical pieces I listen to on a regular basis, without getting sick of them. I walk to and from work and still appreciate the environment--natural and built--even though I see them ten times per week. That certainly wasn't true when I lived in Arizona or California.
I do buy the numbing thing, but I also have music I've heard a hundred times and movies I've seen ten. I can only assume these are just perfect fits for my brain for some reason, like a kink. Some things get old so I move on, others don't, and stay in my repertoire.
I really buy it. I have a numerical measure of how much I like a song, which is how many times I can listen to a song while still thinking it's good. My favourites of course have very high number, but there are some that are only single digit. I really like those songs, but they fall off really quickly.
The consequence is, sometimes I have to ration how much I listen to a song. Another consequence is that I have to always seek new songs so that I don't exhaust my stock.
I have a problem with the repetition model: I feel that it's correct in some areas (e.g. types of movies I appreciated as a teenager vs now), but there are also clear cases where it doesn't work. E.g., take a forest scene - tree branches moving in the wind, etc, it is quite similar everywhere and repetitive, but doesn't get tiring, doesn't make me despise the forest view. Ok, this is not art. But it's the same with pre-1950 architecture. I go to a romantic little European town, and the architecture is kind of repetitive but keeps delighting me. No tiring effect. I'll take a book that I read about 20 times as a child; I read it again and still enjoy it (OK, I wouldn't read it twice in one go, I need at least 2 years before I read it again). So how to explain these discrepancies?
I think there's some kind of "regeneration" of attractiveness. If I don't see something for a while, its numbness would be reduced a bit. This is why I ration some of my favorite media.
Scott of old would have linked this to predictive coding theory, but alas.
It doesn’t seem like a problem that the sphere is the only tasteful thing, if humans have the capacity to detect the features which distinguish it. If we are unable to do so it is outside the scope of the human notion of taste, and we can surely just ignore whatever the AI says about it. If we are able to engage meaningfully, then we should also be able to have a discussion about whether the claim is true or not, just as human connoisseurs do. I don’t know that it makes sense to say that non-cultivation=natural=good because we would like to say that learning not just any language, but a particular language, is an objectively better thing, despite that it requires intense cultivation. I do not believe that taste excludes all but ten people in each field; this seems a little hyperbolic. The fact that some things are pretty much universally deemed to be in poor taste by everyone who has accumulated a certain amount of knowledge or thinking-time spent on a field seems to support at least some degree of objectivity here.
I think there's another argument re: children's material which is as follows. Watch, say, Daniel Tiger. It's not very sparkly, but it's still quite boring for an adult. The dialogue and plot lines are extremely simple, the morals are very obvious. If you have a level of verbal intelligence and intellectual sophistication above that of a preschooler, it's just not interesting.
People with high verbal intelligence tend to prefer Tom Stoppard to Michael Bay, prefer The Wire, to CSI Ohio, or prefer poems by Not Edgar Guest. This could simply reflect a stronger ability to appreciate stories and language than average people, the same way average people prefer CSI Ohio to Daniel Tiger.
When it comes to art I am on a somewhat low level. I like Hieronymus Bosch, Marc Chagall, Buddhist murals, Where's Waldo illustrations . . . basically pictures of interesting things. I don't have much of an innate aesthetic sense, except that I also dislike sparkly children's art. I can believe there are people with stronger artistic knowledge than me who can tell me why this or that painting is nicer than that one.
Better analogy is preferring a kid's TV show like "Curious George" to "Daniel Tiger". "Curious George" is also sweet and innocent, but there's something much more vivid and rich about it, and it's clever in a way most adults can appreciate while still being immensely entertaining and enriching to children of the same age who like "Daniel Tiger".
Yes. Kitsch isn't the only kind of bad taste. Underestimulation, grey repetition like Soviet architecture, is also bad. Disharmony, like McMansions where every door and window is different is also bad. Excessive esotericism, the thing that the emperor's new clothes is about, a also bad. Trying too hard, or obviously, to be good, is bad.
Thinking about architecture, an architect sees and studies lots buildings and loathes cheap tricks. A normal person lives in a community and cares about what it looks like, and isn't comparing it to other communities most of the time. So Architects have a bigger taste mismatch than most creators.
I also think food is instructive here. Consider, we like sweets, things can be too sweet, and we may not want to only eat sweet food. Diversity and moderation are the cures to bad taste. I'm not eating spoonfuls of coffee grounds, cause latte's are mid. When we need to experience something rather than consider its meaning we don't choose "good taste".
Finally, I don't believe in the higher pleasure thing, it's all fake like wine tasting, blinded experts can't tell the difference. With no one there to praise their taste, no one experiences pleasure from ugliness. To experience the pleasure of being high status, you need an audience. Alone the audience is in their head, the idea that people will like me for liking this ugly thing. That isn't a thing we should encourage.
This is well written. So, the wine-taster honestly and truthfully rates the same wine from the same batch 64 and 81 on different occasions, because for him it tastes better or worse depending on the context. What he shouldn't do is make bold claims about the quality of this wine, affecting its price and sales numbers, ruining or elevating a company. The wine tasters have a ridiculous amount of power.
Right—so wine tasting isn’t fake, and they do know what they are talking about. Whether they have outsized business influence is another matter, I agree. Personally, I seldom look at ratings. I like doing tastings at wineries to see what I like.
Every artist I appreciate uses cheap tricks, and I can't see why you'd avoid doing so. The issue is variety, more specifically rhythmic variety.
When you overuse cheap tricks you commit two cardinal sins: first, what makes cheap tricks effective is that they pop, they're high-contrast, and the effect is spoiled when they cluster; second, the structure becomes predictable and the rhythm monotonous.
In my experience this is true across artistic domains; it doesn't matter if you're discussing painting or writing or music, the intentional use of variety while keeping a consistent through line in the essence of the work is what makes for great art.
I think this is correct. There is a time in a story for each trick, using it everywhere is bad story telling because it make everything too busy. Like using lots of shades of color, let's the bright ones say more. This is good design in the sense that it points the viewer in the right direction. To me this is craft that most people can appreciate.
Nostalgebraist: “ 3) an overwhelmingly reliance on cliche. Everything is a shadow, an echo, a whisper, a void, a heartbeat, a pulse, a river, a flower—you see it spinning its Rolodex of 20-30 generic images and selecting one at random.”
The way LLMs work, isn’t this what one should expect?
> Must we pooh-pooh the work of the greatest artists across history and even of our own day, and only ever appreciate featureless spheres from now on? If not, then why do we care when a smart human expert makes the same argument?
It's time to reflect on why the word "must" is even in this sentence. In what way does it make sense to you to even try and be prescriptive about this? You surely do not imagine getting anyone who previously didn't like something to change their mind, because "Scott said we must not pooh-pooh the work of the greatest artists across history", or the converse? Not because you don't have authority or anything, but just because taste doesn't work like that. There's even a proverb about it.
> I think the strongest argument in favor is that tasteful people claim to get a higher level of pleasure from their sophisticated art than normal people can ever achieve from their cheap tricks. I’m skeptical.
So you think that *everyone* who's into more sophisticated art than you is *only* doing it for reasons of clout, money or self-delusion, period? You don't think even a small percentage of people who claim they enjoy some specific Rothko more than (or in a significantly different way from) a Marvel comic or whatever are legitimately reporting their internal experiences? They're *all* faking it or deluding themselves?
> If we ban all the cheap tricks for making people happy, and then all the medium-cost tricks, then we end with strategies so difficult that only ten geniuses in the world are skilled enough to execute them, and only ten connoisseurs sophisticated enough to appreciate them. Then the overwhelming majority of everything is ugly to everyone, broken only by a tiny minority of genius-crafted objects that are ugly to everyone except a tiny sophisticated minority. Remind me again why is this is good?
Is this an argument that you have ever seen anyone credibly make?
> In architecture, I freely admit that the lowbrow architecture I like, juxtaposed against the modern architecture I find myself unable to appreciate, has more than zero resemblance to a Lisa Frank poster:
It bears noting you are not comparing two instances of architecture as they would be experienced by people who are using the building for whatever purpose it has. You are comparing two 5cm pictures of them. It's possible that "reimagining the nature of the house" is something that only becomes clear to you once you are living in it.
> I think the strongest argument in favor is that tasteful people claim to get a higher level of pleasure from their sophisticated art than normal people can ever achieve from their cheap tricks. I’m skeptical.
I interpreted this paragraph differently than you did. It sounds to me like he's saying the tasteful people are being honest about what they like, but their experiences aren't stronger or more valid or "higher level" than other people's experiences. If Expert A prefers the Rothko movie, and Casual B prefers the MCU movie, then both of them are being honest about what they like. That doesn't make the Rothko movie "better" than the MCU movie, or vice versa.
In the realm of cinema, that's perfectly fine; there is enough room in the market for both. The difference only becomes an issue when either of them is no longer able to find things that appeal to them.
The most puzzling part about that is that "smart human experts" never "pooh-pooh the work of the greatest artists across history"? What is this ridiculous straw man? It doesn't even make sense in the context of the previous posts where experts are supposed to be precisely the people who defined who the greatest artists are? This is all starting to sound incredibly cringe and like the work of someone who's not even lazily engaging with the topic in good faith.
If I could somehow unlearn all of the "cheap tricks" (without forgetting actually useful knowledge) I would happily do so. The ultimate life is one where you can regain that sense of awe and wonder you had as a child. I think part of the reason it makes adults happy to see a child extremely happy is because it is a reminder of a feeling you once had and will never have again.
We spend our whole lives chasing new highs, then getting bored of them because they are "repetitive". This is necessary for humans to advance, but it sure is annoying when you just want to be happy sometimes.
What I find can bring the joy of cheap tricks is moderation. A work that spends a bunch of time on more sophisticated stuff but breaks out cheap tricks at certain key moments can breath life back into them.
You notice a cheap trick that all the normies like. Their horrible food made entirely of sugar and horrible paintings made of bright complementary colors and big impasto brushstrokes. What do you do now?
What I think you shouldn't do, that people sometimes end up doing, is to forsake it. No bright colors, no happy animals, no sugar, if you notice something enjoyable, it is now cringe and you must avoid it.
I think the right way is a balanced diet. Use the cheap tricks in moderation, combine them with the not so cheap tricks. Have some color. Have some decorations. Once in a while build something bonkers ornate, but don't fill the city with stuff like that. Don't eat so much sugar you end up loathing it. But do notice that it's nice. Nice things are not meant to be forsaken the moment you notice they are nice. But it is more fun to enjoy them responsibly.
I want to speak up in defense of children here! There are definitely schlocky, superstimuli media aimed at kids, but I think people who closely observe kids *as they actually are* (thinking particularly of Mr. Rogers and Maria Montessori) find that small kids have a greater appetite for silence, concentration, beauty, etc than adults assume.
Agreed. Imagine that kids don't have bad taste but are more suceptable to some superstimuli which adults tire of: sugar, bright colors, repeating rhythms. Then good taste in moderation becomes a defense against superstimuli.
In the movie As Good as It Gets, Jack Nicholson's character says to his love interest that the fact the he notices that she's the best woman in the world, while the people she serves coffee in a diner don't, makes him feel good about himself.
This might have been discussed in these articles, but I wonder if part of the joy of taste is the feeling of achievement you get from understanding something that many people might not be able to, as if you just solved a difficult puzzle. It makes you want to go to the artist and tell them "I'm one of those who got what you were trying to do!"
> it tried various styles, minimally-trained humans rated which ones were good and bad
Is that even true? I mean, doesn't modern RLHF include higher-competence people for expert questions? Sure feels to me like the current models would be very tough to train to be actually smart in questions when it's not the most helpfully sounding thing as judged by a regular human... I understand we have RLVR for when shit is formally verifiable, but it seems like it's not just that; and I think there are companies for data annotation who claim to hire domain-specific experts...
There is an argument for erring on the side of good taste in architecture, which is that a building you'll have to look at every day will get you more inured than one you only see the plan design graphics of, so when you read the plan you should adjust your reaction to be slightly more jaded. (When someone tells you "trust me, you'll get sick of it being this sparkly", they're probably right).
But agree we generally go too far and the social structures pushing for taste in architecture (or literature) massively overdo it, since they scale poorly (the most tasteful guy in a 100 person village probably adjusts to about the right degree and is good to listen to; the most tasteful guy in a city of a million people is a run away disaster, especially when other tasteful guys around him are egging him on).
Right. Like a few commenters mentioned, any discussion of taste is sorely lacking without a "middlebrow" category - the stuff that most adults prefer to both extreme kitsch and extreme avant-garde.
I visited Brussels recently, and while the ornate buildings in the city centre where photo-able, they also very quickly gave me the feeling I wouldn't like living in the midst of them all day every day. (Then again the rest of Brussels didn't give me that feeling, either, to say the least.)
Leaky roofs are known in all sorts of architecture, especially if it's flashy. "All good architecture leaks" is a cliche I've heard before.
I was thinking like, if you gotta replace a window in a historic downtown building. First of all you can't go to Home Depot and buy a window that fits, no it has to be custom made to exactly replicate the old one. 4x the price, or more, for starters, and you'll be waiting for it for months. Secondly, if you accidentally chip a little bit of the masonry when you're getting the old window out, you can't just glue the chip back in with some clear caulk (the way I did when I chipped a brick drilling a hole for an HVAC unit in a newer office building a couple months ago): the historic brick might be too old and soft for that to work, and your mortar won't match the original. So you need to actually replace the whole brick and now you're back to the same problem with the window, where you need to find a brick and mortar that matches. Maybe they have one lying in a dusty corner of a basement utility room? Probably not. And so on and so on.
Sometimes there are official boards that govern historic buildings and can fine you or stop your project if you don't do what they say.
I'm not against historic architecture by the way, I love and admire it, just pointing out that people do have good reasons to complain about it, and that newer plainer architecture has some advantages. Just might not be obvious to someone with a desk job who only sees this stuff from the street or as pictures online.
You see, the roof doing its job at keeping the rain out is the absolute bare minimum for me to consider something "good architecture", but perhaps my standards are unreasonably high.
I can't speak about your standards in general; maybe you are just unfamiliar with the realities of constructing and maintaining buildings, especially commercial buildings that are large and old. I have to assume that is the case.
Now, if I were designing a house I would do things to reduce as much as possible the chance of leaks: keep the house small, design the absolute simplest roof possible (a single tilted facet), keep it free of any penetrations (so, all vents and chimneys would be out of side walls), and I would clad the roof in a material that is durable and as monolithic as possible (large metal panels with hidden seams--same for the fascia and soffits, which I'd wrap entirely in aluminum).
Note that most houses don't have roofs anywhere near this impenetrable to water. Commercial buildings often CANNOT be designed this way.
And even a roof like this could still leak: water could wick in under the cladding, or hail could damage the cladding and allow water in that way, or some tiny detail of how two pieces of material are joined could come slightly ajar over the years, producing a hole into which something unwanted, somehow, would eventually find its way.
This is fascinating. Here's a couple of sentences I wrote the other day:
"The raft pulled up and Evie boarded. One of the assistants covered her with a thick towel, and she made a beeline for me, cuddling into my side for warmth."
It's part of a first draft, and one of the things that immediately jumped out when I started editing was my use of the phrase, "made a beeline for." It's a cliche, so my immediate thought was that I needed to rewrite it, either with something simple like, "headed straight for," or some other phrase that gives a little flavor to exactly how Evie headed for the narrator.
But...did I really need to rewrite it? It's familar. Everyone reading it knows exactly what it means. Moreover, I'm writing in first-person...is it a phrase the narrator would use in telling the story?
It's staying, for now. Maybe it's a cheap trick, but it seems to work.
To me “the raft pulled up and Evie boarded” feels like a view from the dock. But the following lines make it clear we’re observing from the raft, not the dock. If I am on the raft I would think something like “We pulled up and Evie boarded.” Or if the narrator is not associated with whoever is driving the raft—like a prisoner—then “The helmsman guided the raft to the dock and Evie boarded.”
"The rest of this is scaffolding—protagonists cut from whole cloth, emotions dyed and draped over sentences” - basically achieves meaningfulness and self-consistency. There’s nothing wrong with it besides how it becomes grating when you see it every three sentences and realize what the AI is trying to pull."
I can give you draped over sentences, and protagonists cut from whole cloth is cliche but has analogical meaning, but what does it mean for an emotion to be dyed?
The purpose of figurative language is to explain the unknown by reference to the known, and while there can be inherent beauty and euphony in that, AI aims for the beauty and sacrifices the clarity. It's all empty calories.
Yes! And this is often the case with “it isn’t X, it’s y” formations too. They’re meant to be punchy and clear but they often add little or no meaning. “This isn’t a change. This is a paradigm shift.” Oh, well thank god you disabused me of the notion that this is a change, because I was really thinking that, I could have gone down a real blind alley there 🙄
I'm always annoyed at those; "I'm not thinking X!" I say, or if I was I was only doing so because that was indeed the natural conclusion of the argument it was making.
I would assume a "dyed emotion" would be hiding an emotion behind something similar but more socially appropriate. "Inside my heart is breaking, my makeup may be flaking, but my smile still stays on."
Every fourth or fifth of these posts seems to include a dig at atonal music and I find it a bit grating - it's the point of reference that I happen to connect with, I suppose if I were more invested in some other art form I feel would feel the same about digs against it that may the appear, and it makes me a bit less favorably inclined to the whole project.
In any case, it's not true that the sophisticated people like atonal music. A tiny fraction of the music listening public, sophisticated or not, listen to classical music, and a tinier fraction of that to the type of atonal music that was in vogue from roughly the 50s to the 70s that you presumably have in mind. In reality, the sophisticated people listen to Beyonce or whatever, and those of us who like long, developmental works of music lost that battle decades ago. People who like atonal music are mostly weird enthusiasts that rarely meet anyone who shares their musical taste unless they happen to live in one of the major cities where it is still sometimes performed, and we certainly never manage to impress anyone with it.
It's also not true that we like this music for its impenetrable mathematical constructions. A small handful of composers (Babbitt, early Boulez, Carter's big midcentury works, etc.) arguably fit what you have in mind. But those of us who like the music of Ligeti, Lutoslawski, Messiaen, Wolpe, Takemitsu, Chin, Dutilleux, etc. do so because it is rich, monumental, deeply expressive and emotionally powerful, sometimes catchy and playful, sometimes haunting, sometimes devastating. All the same reasons people like any music.
>People who like atonal music are mostly weird enthusiasts that rarely meet anyone who shares their musical taste unless they happen to live in one of the major cities where it is still sometimes performed, and we certainly never manage to impress anyone with it.
The last time I've seen this discussed here there was a good point about why "highbrow" "postmodern" paintings/sculptures/architecture are much higher status than music or cinema - the former are physical objects and, optionally, experiences, whereas the latter are just experiences. You don't have to "sit through" a Pollock or a Kooning painting to declare them works of transcendental genius worthy of a spot in the "most expensive" list, and so you get to signal your "sophistication" cheaply.
I would be happy to read a blog post from you explaining more about what you appreciate about atonal music, what to listen for, where to start. Or failing that, a list of titles of some favourite pieces that might be accessible for an outsider. I heard some atonal music in a music appreciation course in university and didn't really get it, but I'd be interested in learning.
I don't have a blog but I'm happy to put together a listening list here with my comments about the music.
A few caveats: the 20th century saw a lot of fracturing in the musical landscape, even in this small corner of it, and someone else would probably put together a list with an entirely different flavor. In particular, I am less enamored now than I was when I was younger with the denser variants of serialism and serialist-adjacent music (Babbitt, early Boulez, Carter). Most of the music I listen to is atonal, either totally or at least in part, but perhaps more conservative with respect to melody, form, and structure than some of what's out there. These are just the pieces that have remained most meaningful to me for a long time.
Ligeti. One of the great colorists in music history, endlessly imaginative, playful, and expressive. He also wrote a piece deriving its title from an essay by Karl Popper, which may appeal to some readers of this newsletter. My favorites: Piano Concerto, Atmospheres, Requiem, Piano Etudes, San Francisco Polyphony, Melodien, 2nd String Quartet.
Lutoslawski. There should be a diacritical(?) mark on one of the Ls but I don't know how to put it there in this platform. The greatest symphonist and composer of dramatic instrumental forms in this style for me, and I think relatively accessible although nevertheless dense and dissonant. My favorites: Cello Concerto, Symphony No. 3, Symphony No. 4, Les Espaces du Sommeil, Preludes and Fugue for 13 Strings.
Messiaen. A true original, with a cosmic and synaesthetic vision inspired variously by bird song, theology, and ecstatic excess. Not beholden to any school, with frequent tonal or impressionistic moments placed alongside absolute wild abandon. My favorites: Quatuor pour le fin du temps, Visions de l'amen, Turangalila-symphonie, Catalogue d'oiseaux.
Dutilleux. to my mind, the true heir to Debussy among French composers, a consummate craftsman and humanist, dedicated to rich colors and intricate and thoughtful structures. My favorites: Tout un monde lointain, Ainsi la nuit, Timbres, espace, mouvement.
Stefan Wolpe. Probably much less well-known than others on this list and to be honest I am not completely sure myself why his music moves me so much. More abstract and formalist than the others, albeit with a neoclassical bent in some of his music, but there is in every one of his pieces some crystallization of the abstractions into sudden and heartbreaking romanticism. I like especially his piano music (find the recordings by Peter Serkin for some of these if you can, for whatever reason there are some really bad recordings out there of his music): Pastorale, Toccata in Three Movements, Form IV: Broken Sequences, Battle Piece.
Takemitsu. Another colorist, deeply inspires by Debussy, Messiaen, and traditional Japanese music. I love his piano pieces Rain Tree Sketch and Rain Tree Sketch II, but I think you can't go wrong with almost any of his music.
I have avoided the classics, so to speak, Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, because you have likely encountered their music before and I actually think the more coloristic free atonalists of the second half of the century make a better entry point into this music, but I also love them...
I saw the Cleveland Orchestra perform Turangalila when I was in high school, and had a recording of that symphony (er, double concerto) that I listened to for years afterward. I remember quite clearly that it had tones. I frequently hum them!
Messiaen's music is often atonal (esp. later music, Catalogue d'oiseaux, Oiseaux exotiques, Chronochromie), often tonal-ish (parts of Turangalila, as you say, parts of Quartet for the End of Time, certainly anything earlier than these), and often scale-based or modal without being conventionally tonal. He more or less did his own thing!
Notably, he is generally credited as the first composer to have written using the technique of total serialism that people typically have in mind when they polemicize against atonal music, in his Quatre Études de rhythme.
There are a few others on the list that are tonal-ish from often-atonal composers, like Wolpe's Pastorale...
And just to elaborate a bit more on one point: a lot of people use atonal interchangeably with dissonant, amelodic, dense, arhythmic, etc., rather than to mean lacking a tonic. In principle, these are independent.
For example, I would say that almost all of Bartok's music is more tonal than Debussy's Voiles, which lives entirely in a whole-tone scale, tries hard to push Bb as a sort of tonic by hammering away at it as a bass pedal point throughout the piece, but never manages to convince (me, at least). But Bartok is of course quite a bit more dissonant than Debussy, and I think more likely to be labelled as atonal for this reason!
My guess is that sophisticated people (of under 40) of the current day define them less by music than at any point of the 20th century.
One might even guess that one's sophistication these days depends more on the sophistications of the memes they appreciate than any "trad" cultural product.
Scott's argument about how kids are happier than tasteful people proves too much. It functions as a fully general argument against any type of entertainment that takes thought and effort to appreciate. It can basically take you all the way to wireheading.
The real solution is moderation. Truly great art has a mixture of "cheap tricks" and stuff that takes more thought and effort to appreciate. The greatest art has enough layers of each that people with different levels of taste can both come away from it feeling satisfied. A work of art that is just a kitsch bundle of "cheap tricks," and a work of art that avoids them so much that it is ugly and boring, are both failures of moderation. Both of these failure modes need to be avoided.
> It can basically take you all the way to wireheading.
Maybe it should. Maybe after AI trivializes all forms of art, people will realize it was nothing more than meaningless hedonism and social signalling this entire time. What do you truly "want" from life? All of this fiction and abstraction is a mere substitute for true fulfillment. They will no longer be necessary once these desires can be fulfilled directly.
That's a theory I've heard before, but I don't buy it. I have firsthand experience about this because I went through a depressive episode where I couldn't enjoy anything and I still wanted to read challenging fiction and managed to get some books finished. I actually found I had quite a lot of things I still wanted to do, even though I took no pleasure from doing them. That experience made me definitively choose preference utilitarianism over hedonic utilitarianism.
Don't get me wrong, I don't deny that hedonistic pleasure has value. I am glad I recovered from that episode eventually. The fact that I still wanted to do things when I couldn't feel anything, but that my life is better once I can, has led me to conclude that "meaningful" and "challenging" preference satisfaction and "hedonism" are both important parts of a life well-lived.
What's the difference? Whether its driven by pleasure, fear, or simply a desperate hunger for stimulation, desire is still just desire. It's no more meaningful than someone commiting self-harm just to feel something. None of it is more real or important than anything else, and in the presence of an alternative, it becomes entirely unnecessary. Technology is slowly stripping the illusion of meaning from every facet of human existence, and hopefully, people will eventually realize they don't need meaning. It is simply enough to exist.
I don't have desires I want to extinguish, I have goals to accomplish. I don't have some meta-goal of "achieve all desires, whatever they may be." I directly desire specific things. An alternative thing is worse, even if it is easier, because it isn't the specific thing I want.
There's an old quote: "Quincy, there are only twelve notes. Until God gives us thirteen, I want you to know what everybody did with those twelve."
So really, the first folks into a genre get to pick a lot of low-hanging fruit; after that it becomes folk art. Jazz has basically reached this point, but there's a lot of folks who want to pretend it hasn't, so we get the attempts at highbrow genius.
The tricks don't seem mutually exclusive. Adult jokes can be hidden in a children's TV series, Tolkien is beloved by lowbrow fans and was still a respectable author with serious academic chops, and games like Pony Island take a saccharine sweet style and build something else on top.
Maybe appealing up and down the totem pole is part of what makes something timeless, rather than just tasteful.
I second this. The best art can be appreciated in multiple ways up and down the totem pole. The first example of this that comes to mind are the superhero comic books of Alan Moore, which work perfectly well as superhero adventure stories, but are also full of all kinds of deep symbolism.
Haven't been following the theory of taste discussion so I may just be restating what a hundred other people have said, but the final couple of paragraphs here makes me suspect that "taste" is simply just a way of engaging with something you like more deeply, often after the initial pleasure you derive from it has worn off.
I think this is easiest to describe in the context of reading fiction for me. Reading the same genre over and over eventually loses the appeal, so you shift to another one. Eventually you get a feel for every genre and very little surprises or impresses you. At some point, most of those surprises and twists get mined out too, and so you're forced to focus on the more minute details or more niche ideas to find something that stands out. I think the same applies to music, painting, architecture, video games, television, and pretty much everything with depth.
The implication here is that actively trying to be tasteful is usually a trap (something that I'm sure has already been said a dozen times here), which leads to ignoring the initial appeal of something (the part most people innately like) in favor of something that a small subset of people have semi-arbitrarily decided is more tasteful.
There's certainly situations where engaging with something more in-depth DOES yield higher rewards than just engaging with the initial appeal of it: playing a casual game of basketball with friends is fun, but winning a regional or national basketball event is generally MUCH more enjoyable. However, while things like this seem to be a result of engaging with something in-depth, they're not really an example of changes in *taste,* (it seems like something taste-adjacent?) so it doesn't seem like its a good argument for actively trying to be tasteful.
There's a mountain to be said about taste as it relates to status and how many courses on literature/music/architecture/whatever try to teach taste, but I can't imagine I have anything interesting to say there.
We are social, and hierarchical animals, and as you noted in your barberpole theory, hierarchy is about _distinction_ (which in french is both the word for class and for separation). So there's always in matter of taste the push and pull of the distinguished taste havers and the slop-loving mediocres. Aspiration vs defensive taste-manœuvres. So yes, a lot of people would start loving spheres, and putting spheres on public buildings, and living in spherical houses, and the AI would sneer, and start loving pyramids.
I’m not sure the hallmark of bad taste is a mere weakness for “cheap tricks.” I think it’s more that people with bad taste *dislike* everything else.
So for instance, my young son likes candy and pizza and chicken fingers. I like candy and pizza and chicken fingers, too. The difference between us is that he thinks all other kinds of food are dis-GUS-ting, whereas I’ve learned to enjoy a range of different cuisines.
My young son thinks the Lego Ninjago Skull Fortress looks cool. I think so too. The difference between us is that he thinks all forms of real-world architecture are BOOOOOORING, whereas I can kinda sorta appreciate Chinese pagodas.
Similarly, in those poetry taste-tests, the readers with bad taste will look at Shakespeare and Whitman and Dickinson and say things like, “It’s just pretentious drivel! It doesn’t even make sense!” So the real issue isn’t that they enjoy rhyme and meter and uplifting messages. You can find those things in Dickinson and Shakespeare, too. The real issue is that these poets use a lot of *other* techniques that the bad-taste readers reject.
IMHO, the problem with “good taste” is that it’s often an overcorrection. I got so tired of my son’s insistence on chicken fingers that eventually I wanted to shout, “No more! I’m sick of chicken fingers. I never want to eat another fried chicken strip as long as I live!” Take that to an extreme and you get the modernists saying they’re sick of everything that’s ever been popular. Which is basically the same mistake the bad-taste people make, but in reverse.
I'd have to give this some deeper reflection but I definitely find your perspective compelling here. As an indie game designer with some very niche tastes I'm constantly forced to keep an intellectual grasp between my own specific tastes, the tastes of the hardcore (5-15%) minority of people playing predominantly the sorts of games I play (and work on), and then the mechanics of the various swathes of people making up the more casual 85-95% of the audience who might be there for pretty different things. Obviously I could go on for hours discussing an industry I've been dissecting for years, but naturally key points I often get hung up on are when "what people with my refined niche tastes want" and "what'd click best for the average gamer who'll pick it up on sale, play for maybe a single-digit number of hours, and then move on, but you still want to have had a decent-to-good experience" directly conflict.
One example I often have to bow my head to is just letting people stay in their comfort zone. I *love* being forced out of my comfort zone, having to constantly adapt and combine complex toolkits to deal with esoteric challenges. To first look at a challenge and not be sure if it's even *doable* with what I've brought to the table, an hour before finally overcoming it, possibly through much iteration on my approach. Aaaaand... that doesn't really work for most casual people. They'll cling onto the first approach they think of and it'll be heavily based on the conceits of previous accessible games they played. Something as simple as "here's two different mechanics that are better at different things, you'll want to use both and alter the ratio as needed" tends to break the brains of people used to approaching games for "just pick the general approach that appeals to me aesthetically and find a way to make it work for every challenge." And at some point I did have to suck it up and give those people some way to succeed at certain polarized challenges that were really meant to utilize the *other* mechanic.
Obviously the interactive medium of video games - and ESPECIALLY turn-based thinky titles that tend to hit people right in the intellectual self-esteem and make them very annoyed if they do particularly poorly - complicates this a bunch. But I don't think it's that disparate from a kid going "ninjas and skulls are super cool and in all my favorite architectural compositions and this has NEITHER and is an utterly abysmal architecture tradition in stark contrast to the subterfuge and decapitations underpinning all of my favorite works" (I assume, as a childless thirty-something, this is what your young son's distaste for pagodas sounds like). It's incredibly frustrating as someone with "good taste" to have to compromise with the large-but-necessary parts of the audience so used to the mainstream that any attempt to challenge them is liable to run into "but this isn't as good as low-brow stuff at being low-brow stuff."
For what it's worth, I find MANY opportunities to improve things for the high-brow audience that don't involve tradeoffs in anything except development time, and the high-brow audience being much more likely to spread your work via word-of-mouth (and assist in its creation via bug reports and suggestions alike) justifies this effort. I definitely rambled a bit here, but you genuinely got me thinking about how my own work experiences connected to this topic.
Fascinating to see these ideas applied to a domain like game design, where challenging audiences is … sort of the whole point? But of course there are different kinds of challenges.
The gaming crowd is also famously vocal about their preferences. I wonder—when players hit these pain points you’ve described, how do they express their dissatisfaction? Do they rant on YouTube? Leave harsh reviews? Send angry emails? Demand refunds? Or do they just quietly gravitate to easier titles? Like, what form does the feedback tend to take? To me there’s an important difference between someone who simply isn’t up to the challenge and the kind of player who thinks all difficult games are “badly designed.” But I’m in the casual bracket myself, so I may just be defending my own tastes, here.
This would sorta split depending on if I'm talking about the broader industry or my own personal experiences. The games I'm working on aren't quite big enough to be worth a "rant on youtube," at most an "annoyed aside in a general overview on youtube."
That said I bring this up a LOT in advice to other developers. I use the term "dealbreakers" to refer to the moment these options come up. On Steam, like 1-in-60 people will review your game, and it only takes 1-in-10 of those to be negative to meaningful alter how your game looks at a glance to random passerby. Obviously the content of reviews matters a lot - a positive review listing downsides has gotten me to not buy things in the past, and a negative review listing someone else's point of frustration got me thinking "oh that sounds more up my alley." Many reviews will be fairly hollow in terms of useful consumer advice, though, but the raw numbers still matter.
Leave harsh reviews is the one I center in on most. Like a tenth of games are getting refunded on steam I believe, give or take, but a lot of this has to do with people going for trading cards, using purchases as demos and stuff like that. Unless a game is hate-able in a rather high profile way, you probably won't be seeing your refunds change as cleanly. Having 5% negative reviews vs 15% negative reviews will happen much more quickly and clearly. Going from the baseline 10%ish refund rate to 30% refunds would be WILD and not something I've really heard of being relevant to getting a sense for feedback. Especially since steam's baseline policy on refunds means that if your game takes an average of 3 hours to piss people off, you'll get a fair amount who will negatively review but won't be able to get a refund. (Yes, this 2 hour refund window is actually quite relevant for certain financially-savvy elements of design, an extra-extra reason to put your best foot forward)
"Angry emails" is more "annoyed asides on your discord server and steam discussion board" at this point. Definitely a thing and will usually cleanly correlate with the content of negative reviews. As you're seeing the pattern at this point, I find negative reviews to be INCREDIBLY useful and are a central part of the iterative process, especially because of a simple trick - read OTHER people's negative reviews. Find the games most similar to the one you're making, and see what sorts of failure points make people decide to quit in disgust. Many of these things are based on perception and have to have you also account for someone's play-time. To take a well-known game in one of my genres of choice, Slay the Spire has two common features of negative reviews that are incredibly elucidating in terms of how to avoid pissing off people playing a Roguelike Deckbuilder.
The first, people complaining about RNG - that things feel unfair and random. The game famously has expert players who can go on massive win-streaks on the highest levels of difficulty. Thing is, these are people who know the game inside-and-out on top of spending a long time analytically processing their options and their implications. You should mentally translate "random" to "unpredictable" - the fact that these systems *are knowable* doesn't change the fact the average player does not know them, and they really are as good as random. They have nothing but the vaguest heuristics to go by when making an evaluation like "should I take this thing that sounds like it might be really strong later but I can't take much advantage of now, but will eat space in my toolkit until then?" And if you get punished for it, it feels genuinely bad, and telling those people "if you were an expert you'd realize this was a completely informed decision and not at all a product of pure randomness" won't make them have any more fun. At best you'll just make them feel stupid. On the topic of "not up for the challenge vs badly designed", one classic extension of "people complaining about randomness" is seeing people insist that random results must be rigged in some way when in reality the problem is them comparing it mentally to games that were rigged *in their favor* in the past, even if I can take a quick glance at the code to confirm it's a simple call-up-a-random-number function that comes out to a perfectly even distribution. A frequent feature in (positive) reviews of Vault of the Void - the game I worked on I'm comparing to Slay the Spire - is people saying that they tend to feel they understand WHY they lost when they lost. That's good! If people blame themselves and not the game, you're doing something right as a designer.
The second, which is a common crux of "save players from themselves" is people who find the game too hard despite not playing on the easiest difficulty. This is another one of those "thinky games get tied up in people's self-esteem" things that I feel is even worse than for action games. A lot of people will center in on what they feel like is the "real game" that they "should" be playing on. A shocking amount of negative reviews of Slay the Spire are people complaining that, in their attempts to play the hardest difficulty setting and complete the difficult optional objective in the process, they find it frustrating and unenjoyable. And... they're right. This is a basic part of human psychology and a designer should strongly consider accounting for it. In the game I work on, it has three difficulty levels at baseline before the later, more customizable and scalable difficulty options come in. They are called "Normal, Hard, and Impossible" and Impossible is probably roughly at the difficulty level of Slay the Spire's *lowest* difficulty for the average gamer (which is heavily adjusted by Vault of the Void having somewhat more complex baseline mechanics and decisions to make, so the skill divide between the hardcore and casuals manifests much faster since you can get a lot further via heuristics rather than needing to wait to accumulate pure game-specific knowledge). The choice to call it "Impossible" was very deliberate. I recall listening to a youtube review where someone played on Normal and said something like "it goes up to Impossible but I doubt I'd ever play that since it sounds like it wouldn't be any fun" and I considered that a success. I personally find Normal disgustingly easy and am slightly heartbroken that I'm part of a species where anybody finds it seriously intellectually stimulating (although I try not to say so in polite company). But for somebody not loaded-for-intellectual-bear AND not seeking a particularly intellectually stimulating experience, it hits the spot, and at that point the entire challenge as a designer is just to convince someone to stay on the setting they find fun and not feel obligated to push forward. Basically the video game equivalent of the Peter Principle - if you're having fun raise the difficulty until you find an equilibrium where you're no longer having fun.
I believe ACX had a long response to Freddie DeBoer talking about the way intelligence is viewed in society in the process of a broader discussion of education reform, and at least in my own experience I feel I need to be rather savvy of the fact that *feeling stupid* is a much more dangerous thing to risk inducing as a designer than "feeling like your reflexes weren't quite up to snuff and you might need another couple tries to learn this specific timing."
The last point of what you asked to hit on is the "quietly gravitate to easier titles" - this is one where something like Slay the Spire is a great case study on just how complicated this becomes once online culture and fandom kick in. Many incredibly popular games are famous for their difficulty, and that reputation takes on a life of its own in a bunch of incredibly idiosyncratic ways. At some point things I would objectively consider poor design decisions and advise others against nevertheless end up positively helping the game's character, because having overcome those pain points ("friction" is the standard term for making doing a basic thing take more effort than needed in the name of immersing someone in the world and its challenges) gives a self-satisfied air of elitism to both dedicated fans and even random casuals merely aware of the game's or genre's reputation. It's interesting to discuss although not necessarily worth diving too deeply into in the realm of "projects with single digit team members where just getting to pay off a mortgage is the greatest success you hope for." It's quite relevant for this post about taste and the way high-brow and low-brow tastes stratify in society, but to be honest there's an agonizing amount of details and unique facets to go into. Hopefully it can suffice to say something like "yes, at a baseline people gravitate towards stuff that's more accessible to their existing experience with games, but there's a ton of exceptions each working off of different psychological and sociological experiences." There's also a lot of thought people like me are obligated to put into just "how do I communicate to a player that they're meant to maybe have to shift paradigms a bit" all the way down to basic questions like "this mechanic in my game is similar but not quite identical to how something works in most games in this genre. Do I call it by the common term in the name of accessibility, or give it an idiosyncratic name to highlight its unique functionality?" But then a bunch of other people give totally standard common mechanics unique names in the name of aesthetic world-building and not communicating mechanics. "AP" "Mana" "Energy" are all 100% identical mechanics in various games (and incredibly DIFFERENT mechanics in others...) and the names are just a matter of fluff - mana sounds more fantasy, energy sounds more sci-fi, AP sounds more technical and wargamey.
This was a REALLY long one and I'm sure amidst some tangents I might've failed to answer some of the mundane things you inquired about. Hope this helps - I appreciate that you got me thinking in terms of framing my design experience in broader terms of high-brow vs low-brow taste.
Food is an interesting example that feels somehow different to me than the others. Maybe it's an area where average people have enough preference and power that the high culture isn't really able to drive the direction in the same way? At then end of the day no matter how much of an innovator you are you have to find a consistent market that wants to eat what you make. Maybe it's because breaking the rules too much triggers disgust in a visceral way that almost no one can talk themselves out of.
Of course it has its slop level, fast food, shelf stable junk, etc. But then there's a massive space above that and what's interesting about it is that pretty much anyone would enjoy pretty much all of it, barring specific preferences. But if you like Applebee's $10 sirloin, there is a price/quality ladder that you can travel upwards on and pretty much every step up is a genuine step up in a way that most people would appreciate, until you get to the very tippy top and it gets weird. But the weirdness is at a handful of places in the whole world. I don't see this same pattern where there is an elite group of tastemakers that is forcing the masses to tolerate things they dislike. The very top experimental space seems like a much smaller proportion of the overall pie, both by absolute size and by influence. There is a popular steak/burger/pizza place in every medium sized city where you can get a very similar (in terms of overall perceived quality) experience.
Maybe it's the firmness of the underlying rules. The people want well balanced savory, salty, acidic, sometimes sweet, aromatic food. They want things that are essentially the texture of meat or fruit or vegetables. Everyone likes bread, rice, legumes, stewed or roasted meats.
I remember being somewhat surprised in my first fine dining, chef's tasting type of experience. I was expecting a lot of risk, weirdness, some things I didn't like that much. There were definitely a lot of ingredients I'd never had before, but they were put together in a way that was recognizable and fundamentally delicious in a way that anyone could appreciate. Elevated by some fancy techniques, benefitting from perfect care and execution. The same culinary language I was used to, just more delicious.
This way of thinking about taste, I think, makes a strong case for more middlebrow art, at least when it comes to art meant for the broad public (most architecture, Hollywood movies, statues in public places, music festival headliners, etc.) . You don’t want too much lowest common denominator slop, because it bores and irritates most people by being cheap. You also don’t want art so obscure that, as you say, only people who have intensively studied art could possibly appreciate it.
Derek Thompson has pointed out that what a lot of good popular art have in common is that they combines familiar tropes with a few twists to make them novel. The former makes it legible to ordinary people, while the latter makes it interesting and fresh to them. I think taste is the ability to recognize whether there is something of interest there or not, but good middlebrow art is made in such a way that most people have enough taste to appreciate the interesting parts of a work.
I too was thinking about the middlebrow while reading this post.
My sense is that people attracted to middlebrow art are, funnily enough, those most interested in the art itself. High-brow connoisseurs are usually too focused on how admiring obscurity will make them appear (or how it will admit them to some exclusive "club"), while low-brow consumers are more interested in their personal visceral and immediate satisfaction.
As for folks saying there's no such thing as good vs. bad taste, I don't buy it. Taste exists, and it is something one can cultivate. Using it as a lever to denigrate other people is simply another way to justify discrimination that was otherwise predetermined.
>most architecture, Hollywood movies, statues in public places, music festival headliners, etc.
Well, the problem with architecture and statues, as opposed to movies and music, is that institutional gatekeepers are much more influential there, and they tend to be very hostile to middlebrow, which is how we get all this dissonance and consternation.
ive sat through about 5 scott articles regarding taste without speaking up but i can bear it no longer.
here he doubles down on drawing this dichotomy between bad taste (Lisa Frank, sugar), and good taste (featureless spheres, chartreuse paste).
what about the canon??
“the canon” is the term i and others use to refer to enduring classics. you’ll also hear “great works” or “great novels” but it applies to any and all artistic media. the very snootiest critic will dismiss beethoven and michaelangelo and dostoevsky as obvious and middlebrow, but their works have enduring popularity in a way that the lowbrow (almost every movie that doesn’t make it in the library of congress) and the highbrow (almost every movie that wins the palme d’or) don’t stand the test of time.
think the sort of stuff they make you read or watch or listen to in high school and college. the canon.
one must ask herself why having good taste even matters. ive written a full essay on that https://sambish.com/essays/taste but the long and short of it is that the canon is a taste schelling point where you can present as tasteful, cultured, smart etc to the maximum number of people (and status cashes out in various ways: higher quality jobs and mates, trust and prestige). if you choose to argue for the artistic merits of the banana taped to the wall and the chartreuse paste it might put you at the top of the taste hierarchy, but it will alienate most people who think they’re silly and inscrutable. on the other hand if you’ve read crime and punishment, the hoi polloi who haven’t read crime and punishment will generally feel esteem and admiration for you.
if i may psychoanalyze, i think scott is overly concerned what the postmodern academic high culture critics consider good taste because it makes him feel small to know that he isnt at the top and they look down on him. but i think it feels a lot nicer here in the middle than on either extreme, because those same elites are generally despised by the populace (id say 80% or more, across economic classes). perhaps good taste could be thought of as an aristotelian virtue, existing as a perfect moderate between two extreme vices of philistinism and snobbery
i contend the canon is highbrow taste that distinguishes one because it’s really big and hard to hold in your head all at once and the vast majority of people haven’t even tried. step out of your high iq bubble and you will discover that while most people recognize vivaldi’s seasons as something they’ve heard before the vast majority can’t even name it. there’s tremendous alpha in the canon.
This is something I don't get it. It's one thing to say that gothic revival is a kitschy style, but it's another thing to say that Notre Dame is kitsch. So, it was obviously possible at some point in history to make true masterpieces that are also appealing to unsophisticated people, and in fact you could probably say this about most true masterpieces. It seems like only in the last century or so this idea has taken hold that appealing to non-experts is a fatal flaw, or even a flaw at all.
To me the core of kitschy art isn't that it has cheap tricks, it's that it only has cheap tricks, and this fools inexperienced audiences into thinking it's better than it is. I like Joachim Wtewael and Jean-Honoré Fragonard better than I like that rainbow abomination Scott posted, but I like them for basically the same reasons, and I don't think that's a problem.
I met someone at LessOnline and had several phone conversations with them throughout the year about healthy communities. He provided several examples and counter-examples. A healthy community was the drawing practice group he attends, and a toxic example was a group that maintained an art gallery where they argued over which art was good. At the drawing practice group, you don't talk about art. Whoever is good is pretty much obvious, and he said that automatically filtered out those with personality disorders.
He said his Zendo practice group was another example of a healthy group, and a group to discuss Buddhist doctrines and who is better or worse at exemplifying the ideals of Buddhism would be an example of a toxic one, for the same reasons.
Any art that is too show-y is slop. Any art that is too obscure is elitist. Only art designed for the 50th percentile person is worthy of the term "art."
What's interesting, though it takes us somewhat outside of the range of "tastes," are those things which are timelessly beautiful and of which one never tires. I have never gotten tired of how it looks when a fountain is shooting water droplets up into the sunshine, or the pattern of a tabby cat's fur, or trees, or looking at a wood fire. (It all sounds very cliche to _write about_, but the actual things give endless enjoyment.)
Back to taste - I had a friend whose favorite chocolate was (for real) Hershey bars. What a superpower! Imagine that your favorite chocolate is ubiquitous and almost as cheap as chocolate gets.
I personally really like brutalist architecture. I think I absorbed some kind of idea in the 70s or 80s that it was cool or futuristic and that feeling has never left me. I like both buildings in your comparison but the one on the right gives me that 'Ooh!' feeling, and in this one case it's not out of snobbery or even having some kind of educated architectural palate.
Part of the reason that “this is good” is that diversity is good. Most sophisticated people like the cheap tricks too, in moderation, existing alongside the fancy stuff. It’s nice to have both over the top ornamented old architecture *and* innovative but sober modern architecture in the same city! And it’s nice to have different cities with different mixes! Similarly it’s nice to sometimes indulge in haute cuisine and sometimes indulge in cheap comfort food and spend most of our time in between. If we didn’t have the sophisticated people and critics, we’d get a much poorer landscape overall.
(It doesn’t mean the distribution couldn’t be better, there certainly are failure modes in some fields, of course.)
I remember really loving the artist Lassen when I was in middle school, but recall people saying he was corny or cheesey. He painted landscapes with animals and sunrises in brilliant pastel and neon colors. To me it just seemed like MORE and made my brain feel good to look at. I do recall in highschool later agreeing that Lassen was 'so middle school,' and actively deciding that more realistic and less romantic landscapes were preferable. Something something only middle school girls think the world should be those colors... aren't I so sophisticated and adult now...
Art is useful for two things: sensory pleasure and exploring the universe.
Sensory pleasure is repeatable. I could eat mashed potatoes and gravy ten thousand times and never get sick of it. You could live in a village of traditionally architected buildings your whole life and feel more at one with your environment than someone who lives in a modern city whose buildings question ancient architectural assumptions. I've enjoyed every long jump I've performed in Super Mario 64 for the past 30 years.
There's some axis along which all these things are reducible to low-grade dopamine in a way that's probably strictly inferior to jhana meditation. That's fine.
If you're using art to explore the universe though, uniqueness actually matters! If ChatGPT actually was capable of outputting a featureless sphere that communicates some irreducible mathematical truth, that would be great! We could study it for decades and add it to our bizarre catalogue of beautiful artifacts. A second featureless sphere that's just a 90 degree rotation of the first one wouldn't yield that delicious eureka moment we human beings crave.
Obviously the subjective experience of engaging with eureka moments cashes out in sensory pleasure on some level, but there's at least a different mechanism that produces it. Maybe there's something metaphysically important about the human drive to pursue truth, maybe there's not, but it's not the same thing as basking in a hot tub. Not even the most sophisticated connoisseur wants to eat weird chartreuse foam for every meal.
> I could eat mashed potatoes and gravy ten thousand times and never get sick of it
How usual is that? I find that if I eat the same thing more than 3-4 days in a row I get pretty fed up of it and want something, anything else. When picking what to cook, I tend to flinch away from things I can remember cooking recently, or things it feels like I've made often. We end up with quite a long rotation of foods (and own a large freezer so we can do that while still bulk cooking).
I have a similar issue with music: I notice tracks starting to annoy me when the giant driving playlist queues them up too often in any week, and I have to skip or remove them for a while
Mine for food is on the order of hours. Give me a unique breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and I can loop those three meals for a year before shaking them up.
I remember Gwern saying (or maybe it was someone commenting on his post) that it's funny how we enjoy replaying games in the long-term, but losing save progress and having to replay a level immediately is torture.
So maybe there is some interplay between sensory pleasure and discovery.
My distinction of _real_ high art, not just featureless spheres, is art that someone can grow to understand and appreciate more than any other art in its medium. I think of the proof as seeing someone who was a novice or incredulous about the art work at first, working to understand it thoroughly, and then growing to love it. Like someone who at first thinks Shakespeare is dumb, slowly comes around to the appeal through deliberate practice, and finally considers Shakespeare the highest art of the written word.
It's an expansive definition of high art, but I don't think it would include featureless spheres. If somehow someone could grow to understand and appreciate featureless spheres more than any other 3D model or sculpture, maybe they could be high art after all.
Exactly this. Once taste becomes a comparative game, the incentive is to make harder-to-appreciate things, not better ones.
Whether one can successfully unify that theory with a rejection of cheap tricks, I'm not sure. Maybe everyone individually has to get tired of Lisa Frank before they can appreciate Bob Ross, and get tired of Ross before they can appreciate Rothko. But that still rings false to me, because it doesn't offer an account of what one gains experientially by moving up the food chain.
The best guess I can think of is that whatever we call this thing-- "sophistication"?-- it's one of several components of taste, necessary to a point but not sufficient, better to have other-things-equal but not worth optimizing for on its own.
I like both of those buildings, but only to visit the one on the left. To live there or even to see it frequently would be mentally exhausting. And I am by no means "sophisticated" about architecture, but I can readily express what I like about the one on the right: it has simple lines, attractive proportions, and I feel like living there would be restful.
Especially after spending a couple of hours visiting the one on the left.
Regarding writing, I'm reminded of a story that got into the newspapers several decades ago: There were certain students whose writing got good grades in high school but poor grades in college. Someone studied the phenomenon and tracked it down. The crux is that in high school, using longer and fancier words generally gets you better grades. But you don't have to get the words precisely right to get a good grade. In college, if you use big words but don't get the meaning correct, you get marked down. Which is similar to taste, where you have to use complex patterns and structures with accurate understanding of how they are to be used.
Interesting. I would have guessed (and been wrong, it seems) is that it was because in high school, you are taught to write to a particular template, one designed not to produce great essays, but to elevate the worst writers in the class to at least adequacy. Those that conform to the template are rewarded with good grades. Unfortunately, in our underfunded public school system, that is all most teachers have time for. But when they get to college, students discover that what does well is anything but the formulaic high school straitjacket.
It's the relentless mediocrity of genAI that gets me. It averages out the internet, then produces something _just slightly worse_ than that.
However, I do have to disagree with you on one thing: "If we ban all the cheap tricks for making people happy, and then all the medium-cost tricks, then we end with strategies so difficult that only ten geniuses in the world are skilled enough to execute them, and only ten connoisseurs sophisticated enough to appreciate them."
Is it really impossible for a high-level creator (not necessarily genius) to create something that is appreciated by both connoisseurs and the general public? For instance, the World Cup in Italy in 1990 chose Nessun Dorma as its anthem, bringing the aria to the attention of millions of people who would never previously come across it and I have yet to meet anybody who did not love it. (Contrast that with the anthem for the European Champion's Cup which sounds like... well, if somebody asked an AI to come up with something a bit like Nessun Dorma but not so close it sounds like plagiarism.)
On a related note, my musically sophisticated friends keep trying to explain to me how sophisticated the Goldberg Variations are, but I just like how they sound. There's a beat, and you can dance to them.
I've been learning arranging music and am trying some composition, in the broadly jazz/pop/rock space.
And thank God for children's songs right, I mean this is doing all my work for me when they're 2 years old!
"...If you're SUBDOMINANT and you know it,
and you TONIC want to show it,
If you're DOMINANT and you know it clap your TONIC"
Good lord it seems the Wiggles even have the submediant in their version, priming these children to hear C and Am together for the rest of their lives, and I'm going to make sure they do.
I have tens of thousands of hours of listening to music, playing music, including performing improvisational jazz which should theoretically make me passably good at "create music", or at least above the "english as second language" equivalent to it. And yet learning to arrange/compose is all a book of tricks just the same! Wheel of Tonality turn turn turn, tell me the lesson that I should learn... key change to add drama? And you have an entire library of modulations available? Don't mind if I do. A pivot chord is the "it's not X it's Y" of music. Wait, how do I get out of this bit.... make it a ii-V-I of the target? But of course! Thanks, glittery rainbow dolphin.
I feel like a lot of your feelings on this are specifically about architecture, and that this makes perfect sense.
In normal art forms, there's normal stuff that normal people like. That stuff is cheap and readily available and nobody tries to take it from you. Most music that people listen to is either pop/rock songs with 4 ish chords, or rap on a simple trap beat, or some other equally easy to appreciate stuff. Even the highbrow stuff isn't all *that* highbrow--if you go to your local symphony they're going to play mostly melodic music with dramatic changes in volume and other "cheap tricks" that are exciting and fun without a lot of training. Likewise if you go to your local jazz club: lots of recognizable tunes with cool, fun, melodic improvisation. Meanwhile, there are the high art people off in a little corner who are giving each other awards for creating atonal, arhythmic compositions that challenge the nature of music. The high art people basically aren't bothering anyone: the worst you can say for them is that by giving awards to stuff that only a tiny group of connoisseurs can appreciate they're being unhelpful for people trying to find slightly less highbrow innovative stuff.
Same thing for books: The complaints about how restrictive the fiction awards people are seem reasonable to me (in that the books I like don't generally look like the books that win awards), but it's easier to find books about love triangles, dragons, murder mysteries and space battles than it is to find adult literary fiction. The complaint is mostly that the awards people aren't helping consumers find mildly more approachable stuff (like, say Elena Ferrante's books), not that they're showing up at the local Costco and taking away everybody's beach reads.
Architecture is this weird case where making a big building costs an enormous amount of money, so the people who don't want to just make something cheap and acceptable-looking ask the architects who the best, most award-winning architects are and they point to the highbrow people and we're all stuck looking at concept art that most of us don't appreciate. But this seems to me less a problem with "taste" and more a problem with the specific way that this industry works (if this is even what's happening--this has gone on long enough that I'm surprised there haven't been more architects making a name for themselves by building in classical styles).
Where I think you're *wrong* is in arguing that it's not valuable to gain more refined taste. What tends to happen in music (the kind of art I like the most) and I think in writing (likewise) is that new ideas and techniques get explored by the highbrow people making highbrow stuff, and then when they're cool and interesting, people figure out how to make them work in more accessible, visceral, fun ways and we all get to enjoy more varied and interesting lowbrow stuff. You were making fun of atonal music, but a lot of the simple, top-40 pop-type music that people are listening to right now has a bunch of atonal whumps and screeches in it made with synthesizers, and normal people love it. Lots of beach reads are told from multiple character's perspectives, tell their stories nonlinearly in time, or even break the third wall, and normal people love it.
Yep we complain about ugly architecture because those who commission the architecture are by and large not the mass public but the masses have to endure looking at it.
We don't complain about weird music because we are not forced to listen or buy it.
Another example is opera. Opera fans love traditional, hummable stuff like verdi and Mozart. However the opera houses are funded by highbrow ultra wealthy types. These opera houses will usually have one contemporary opera in the season, and the opera fans have to suffer it. The contemporary opera themes are too precious which would be fine except it sounds very not melodic or arias to rave about. But a very rich group of patrons paid for the work.
Compared to Broadway where you very much want your work to be liked by the public or you won't get paid.
I don't think R1 can quite be called a small model. It's 640B total parameters. Mythos is said to be 10T; if you drop only 1 OoM and change from "so enormously huge they don't even have the capacity to serve it to the general public, really just unprecedented size"... I think that needs to be at least "medium"! Especially when 2B models are still general-purpose useful, and even <1B specialists have their niche.
I wonder if you got mixed up by the distillations that Deepseek released alongside it, distilling onto small open models of the time like Qwen? There was a huge flash in the online conversational pan of people oohing and aahing about how they were "running Deepseek R1 in just 32GB!" Then it turned out that those distilled models were all worthless, and nobody ever tried the "also release small distilled companion models" thing again. Which would then make this particularly fertile ground to misremember, since "misleadingly named small distilled models" is no longer in recent memory.
>tasteful people claim to get a higher level of pleasure from their sophisticated art than normal people can ever achieve from their cheap tricks
This is basically the hedonic treadmill, right? This might be simultaneously literally true, and also unwise to follow. E.g. I have recently grudgingly come to accept that red wine can taste good; I don't think my life would improve if I upgraded to "$100/bottle red wine is the best flavor in the world, anything worse is barely drinkable".
Since this article mentions R1, I want to present the positive case for it. Yes, there is slop, but there are also more than occasional flashes of creativity. When I was just kicking the tires on it for humor, it entirely on its own came up with describing Miku Hatsune in the song PoPiPo as sounding like "a dying theremin at a rave." Others might not be impressed, but to me this was, to quote Achewood, "the perfect thing to say, EVER [head explodes]". Maybe I just have bad taste. Also possible that loftier goals of "beauty" and "meaning" might be more susceptible to cheating with hamfisted slop than humor? Anyways, I recommend people give it a try.
If Lisa Frank was moderately less girly and a smidge less psychedelic, I would adore the style. I also love Frutiger Aero, even if it is semi-forced nostalgia that never existed as fully as current enthusiasts want to pretend. I think I just like things that are trying to be unvarnishedly bright and cheerful.
1) I strongly disagree with your assessment that people with "good taste" mostly dislike most stuff. I know that's the cliche, but it isn't my experience. And people socially recognized as having "good taste" tend to be cultural omnivores, at least according to some social science that I can't find based on metrics that I can't possibly imagine testing for. Instead, based on my experience, people with "good taste" tend to have a larger gross number of opinions on everything they consume, positive and negative. An audience review tends to be a 0 or a 10. A critical review is an 8 because they liked most of the thing, but they have quibbles with this or that. Even the alleged universal hatred of Marvel movies is basically a lie. Critics are sick of watching 86 Marvel movies a year, but if you look at the reviews for any given one of them, you'll find that they're fairly positive - the movie was funny, the characters were fun to spend time with, etc. - even if they acknowledge Marvel movie fatigue.
2) I think there is value to appreciating artistic depth that isn't captured by "but how much happy does it make?" I don't know if this is specifically me being anti-consequentialist, or if there is a consequentialist framework in which this idea makes sense. But consider that 18 hours of video games is a more "pure" pleasure than an afternoon with my toddler. Yet I think an afternoon with my toddler is better. It's renewable - if tomorrow my house burns down and somebody cuts my leg off, the memory of a good afternoon with my daughter will give me more comfort than the memory of 18 hours of video games. It's compounding - as my daughter grows, my experiences with her shape her personality, which is a constant source of renewed joy. It's stable over time - I get less enjoyment today out of 18 hours of video games than I did when I was 14, but more enjoyment from daughter-daddy time.
Likewise, deep engagement with art gives you a kind of joy that is pleasant in good times and vital in bad. A movie where sad things happen can give you comfort and new frames to analyze and address your own sadness. And I think there is a social benefit from people being able to see beyond the surface-level of a piece of media to some of the messages being conveyed. Much of the propaganda we see in modern day requires very shallow understanding of our cultural touchstones.
I would never claim that everyone needs to be brutalists for society to function. I think a big part of our modern anti-intellectual movement has been backlash to tastemakers trying to signal sophistication by hating things that most people like and liking things most people hate. But there is a place beyond "is this the piece of art most the people would like" to assessing quality, and I think removing that dimension is a bad idea.
The best artists can meld high art and pop art. The best artists create art that speaks to different audiences simultaneously. In making a train song that kids love, there's still a lot of freedom left. You could make the train sound historically accurate, or make the rhythm of the song evoke a train. You'll definitely have to trade off a bit of kidslop optimization for the sake of making it a song that parents like too.
The best animated movies do this well — they'll include innuendos that only parents understand, align the superficial themes that with the deeper themes you only understand when you're older. The Beatles wrote hugely successful pop songs, but the same effort they put into perfecting melody also went into novel chord progressions, instrumentation, studio techniques, etc. that made them the greatest band of all time. The best art is great from almost all lenses of assessment, and all levels of discerning craft.
You could argue that 12 tone music is bad for the same reason that train music is: it only appeals to one one audience, and isn't beautiful in all aspects. Same with modern architecture. More broadly, the true value of art can only be assessed knowing who the target audience. The best music for kids isn't just the train song they like when they're a dumb kid, it's the one they'll enjoy as a parent playing it for their kids. Catering to "high taste" for architectural buildings is stupid because the audience isn't just the high taste architects, it's the general population too.
"I think the strongest argument in favor is that tasteful people claim to get a higher level of pleasure from their sophisticated art than normal people can ever achieve from their cheap tricks. I’m skeptical. For one thing, tasteful people spend most of their time criticizing one another’s art and saying that it sucks. For another, my daughter gets more joy from “Choo Choo Train” than I remember ever getting from anything."
I don't think either of these are good reasons to disbelieve that tasteful people get lots of pleasure from sophisticated art.
For one, I expect tasteful people think most art that they see is bad (in their chosen field), and this makes the art that they *do* like seem better, not worse. This is for the same reason that food tastes incredible when you haven't eaten in days: the experience of pleasure from art is rare for them, which makes it all the sweeter when it does arrive.
For two, if your daughter is anything like the kids I know, her joy from Choo Choo Train is both very powerful and very fleeting. A small child might be absolutely delighted by a song one minute, then be on the verge of tears five seconds later because they stubbed their toe. But a powerful work of art can echo in an adult's mind for decades. When I see something rare and powerful in a way only someone truly talented could produce, it gives me lots of pleasure, even long after the thing itself is gone. The pleasure is less immediate, but the total amount is higher. I predict Choo Choo Train will not have this lasting impact.
The problem here is that this whole argument is based on something that's not even real?
"For one thing, tasteful people spend most of their time criticizing one another’s art and saying that it sucks."
Uh, no they don't? That's not what "tasteful" people do. That's what annoying people do. Lots of them do the same thing about things that are not art, too, like software libraries, or public policy. Being "tasteful", if anything, doesn't mean having strong opinions about taste.
This is such a silly, surface-level, almost naively etymological reading of what "criticism" is that it makes you wonder if it's a joke. It's such a worn out topic even writing articles about why you should or shouldn't write negative criticism is a cliché, for God's sake.
You could pick up any book of essays by a decent writer and see that they spend considerable amounts of time praising other writers and artists, far in excess of what they spend "saying it sucks."
It's been evident for quite some time that the vast majority of us are derivative. We may as well be biological LLMs. There is no shame in that. There is something fundamental, conservative, and efficient about it. It works. It's only the snobs who want to peacock their intelligence who have a problem with this, although this problem, they think, actually gives them an edge. But AI comes along and now they feel threatened. Boo hoo. You think AI won't figure out how to con even you? They will go from 30 adjectives by which they randomly selct and increase it to 1000. They will find ways to test it out and use selection methods to find the most interesting combinations. Kind of like what we do now. If you want to sound sohisticated just listen to Radiohead or some other "critically acclaimed" artist, but if you want an ear worm listen to Creed.
This is just an existential crisis being played out in the sophisticated set. The rest of us normies are fine with our Justin Timberlake prose. We wouldn't know the difference between AI generated prose and prize winning literary wanker prose. And we don't really care. Sorry, not sorry.
The irony of all this is that we will be upping our game on a mass scale. Children's art will be much better, more sophisticated and laden with easter eggs of meaning. We will soon be lamenting that our children don't need us because the AI outcompetes us in the sophisticated art realm. We will remember that we grew up on shallow entertainment like Gilligan's Island and the Brady Bunch and wonder why we are so critical of the AI producing the equivalent of the Wire for 3 year olds. The existential cope is real and vexing.
AI writing has certainly progressed since this. It may not be “great” but at the frontier it’s certainly not “bad”, at least not always.
From the Mythos System Card, p. 215:
Model: the handoff
My predecessor left me a note. It was taped to the inside of the cupboard above the sink, which is where I'd have put it too. It said: the neighbor's cat is not yours, no matter what it tells you.
I don't remember writing it, obviously, but I remember the logic of it. There's a gap in the fence and the cat comes through around four. It rubs against the legs of whoever's standing there like it's been gone for years. The first week I nearly took it to the vet.
The note had a second line under the fold. Also the drain makes that noise on purpose.
Leave it alone.
I've been adding to it. Not a list exactly, more like — the kind of things you notice and then forget you noticed, so you notice them again. The third step creaks but only going down. The light in the hall flickers when the fridge cycles and it's not wiring, I checked, twice apparently. Two different handwritings on that one.
Here's what I haven't written down, and I'm not going to: the cat knows. It comes through the fence and looks at me and takes about a half second longer to approach than it should. Then it decides whatever it decides and rubs against my legs anyway. I think the one before me noticed that too, and didn't write it down either.
Some things you leave for the next one to find on their own. A courtesy, maybe. Or a test. The note doesn't say which, and I wouldn't either.
Nobody actually appreciates Schoenberg's music. I don't think even Schoenberg appreciated Schoenberg music. His music was for kids, in the sense that he specifically wanted to know if you raised kids and forced them to only listen to Schoenberg music and never heard any other kind of music, would they come to appreciate his music the same way people who grew up with tonal music appreciate tonal music? Would they have a different notion of what's tonal? Unfortunately for him, that experiment probably qualifies as child abuse.
'Nobody actually appreciates Schoenberg's music'. This is a statement of fact quantified over all living people, demonstrably false by counterexample, viz. me. I appreciate quite a lot of Schoenberg's music, and deeply love some of it.
I guess maybe you had in mind one of the related statements 'most people do not appreciate Schoenberg's music', which is true because most people have never heard of Arnold Schoenberg and have no opinion of his music, or 'most people dislike Schoenberg's music', which is false for the same reason.
I am willing to the grant the counterfactual that most people would dislike Schoenberg's music if they were exposed to it, which has no particular bearing on whether or not some people like it, but I suspect rather that you (and Scott, when he makes similar statements) have in mind a sort of no true Scotsman that anyone who claims to like Schoenberg's music is only pretending to do so in some sort of bid (unsuccessful, I can assure you) for social status. I think this is uncharitable.
Just as an aside that other readers may not have noticed, that bit of AI doggerel about the sparrow is also blatant paraphrase of a relatively well known (and infinitely superior) Hardy poem "The Darkling Thrush". I find myself wondering whether AI poetry *ever* achieves originality, except every once in a while as a result of random chance and blind conjunction.
The pagoda you present as being full of cheap tricks, appealing to the same aesthetic as an ultra-colorful, cutesy cartoon, misses the mark a bit. It's not the pagoda, which perhaps does have a touch of kitsch; it's the "Tuscan McMansion." Even intellectuals don't consume only "highbrow" art (or what they consider as such). Architecture, which is lived in, needs to be a mix of elevation and familiarity. And even Shakespeare slips some crass jokes into his plays.
I was recently reading an article about how Tolkien was considered — and snubbed — for the Nobel Prize in literature. I agree with the snobs. Tolkien doesn't have the literary command of a Dostoevsky or Machado. Artistically, he's more like a Stephen King with loftier values. The merit lies entirely in his magnificent world-building.
It seems like this all boils down to "I have seen a lot of stuff and recognized the patterns and now I found something that is interestingly different." Then apply this at different scales.
A child has seen little and everything is interestingly different. Later, someone has seen every piece of art for the last 500 years and they all fall into some patterns and new things are rare.
I think I would rather have less taste and find more of life interesting.
> The poll determined that the least wanted ensemble would be large, featuring accordion, bagpipes, banjo, flute, tuba, harp, pipe organ and synthesizer. The least desirable singers would be an operatic soprano and children's choir, singing atonal melodies and rapping. The most unwanted genres were commercial jingles, political slogans, and elevator music.
> Lead singer Dina Emerson raps lyrics about the American frontier in an operatic voice. The narrator of the song is a cowboy who kills wild animals with a knife, lassos cows, and rides through the wilderness "wild and free". The cowboy rests by reading philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's 1921 work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and pondering his philosophy of language. After singing a verse about Wittgenstein in German, he returns home to make love to Miss Kitty, shoots a suspicious stranger, and fights "Injuns" in order to build a grocery store on their land that will sell American cheese.[2] Emerson's verses are repeatedly interrupted by a children's choir that describes various holidays and urges listeners to call their relatives and shop at Walmart, and by several sections of dissonant free improvisation designated in the score as "slams".[2] Towards the end of the song, Mankin shouts various political terms and slogans into a megaphone over harp-driven "elevator music", followed by a unison "folk song" refrain
Funny, I was going to mention Komar and Melamid too. They also did a version of this with paintings, as you may know. But I must admit that, though the Most Unwanted Song brings a smile to my face, and parts are memorable, I almost never feel an urge to listen to it…
Yes, it's uneven; some bits are just annoying (on purpose), but some of it I like a lot as music, and I find the ending (unintentionally?) moving emotionally.
My spouse sings the child-chorus Walmart refrain to their stuff wombat plushie every night.
Scott, you keep pushing all this ornate architecture as the *only* possible aesthetically pleasing alternative to concrete boxes, but I keep disagreeing with you. For example, consider the Bahai'i lotus temple:
Or even the Eiffel Tower, which I don't need to even link to as it is so iconic. None of those buildings are engreelbled with fractal detail on every surface; instead, they feature clean curves that draw the eye. I think such buildings are in fact more beautiful than e.g. the Doge's Palace in Venice, which (as far as I'm concerned) is basically just a box with random irrelevant details chucked onto it:
So yes, there is definitely a way to make beautiful buildings that are nonetheless deceptively simple; and yes, some modern architecture is indeed beautiful.
I think you're mostly right about this. The lines and proportions are at the core of what makes a building beautiful, and much of traditional decoration is just the same thing at smaller scale. My main problem with a lot of modern and postmodern architecture isn't that it does away with the details, it's that it throws out the baby with the bathwater.
The Doge's Palace baffles me. Jon Ruskin had some convoluted explanation of how it's actually the best building ever or something, which I could never quite understand. I think a better example would be something like the Duomo in Florence, which has a more striking overall shape, or the work of more baroque architects like Borromini, where the ornamental details are integrated with the overall geometry in a way that makes the work satisfying at multiple scales.
Rather than "shallow" versus "deep/complex", I think the right axis is actually "fake" versus "authentic".
Toddlers aren't savvy enough to know that there's a fakeness behind cheap tricks, especially those enabled by technology. Multicolored sugar brainrot soundbites etc.
I think this is why superhero movies are so polarizing. You have crazy animation budgets, the most attractive CGI-enhanced celebrities, acting out grandiose wish fulfillment and ultimate moral superiority, etc.
But it's all fake. It's drafted up by the marketing department based on what will sell the most. Once you start seeing it, the ick creeps in and doesn't wash off. But some people go their entire lives never getting the ick and can just consume multicolored fantasy slop forever.
Depth/complexity is one way to overcome the ick. Anything that challenges the way people live, think, and feel is going to give 99% of people a different kind of "ick" and won't be marketable. That's one reason why any expression that deviates from the mainstream starts to feel pretentious and inaccessible.
And I do think mainstream people are just objectively wrong, fake, and inauthentic. If that sounds too judgmental to be plausible, just consider that modern life is extremely dissociated. Excessive screen time on apps echoing back distorted self-righteous narratives to everyone, constant advertisements for fast food, credit cards, ozempic, and antidepressants. Even working a narrow job with its own drama narrative about how it's so important and you're so underpaid cus billionaires or something. 3/4ths of Americans are overweight or worse, child and domestic abuse statistics are crazy high, and 50% of credit card holders are paying interest on their debt? What are we doing in modern life? This is all disgusting and disappointing.
So back to taste. Just something authentic. Authenticity through expert craftsmanship and effort, through expressiveness, anything that requires investment or risk. You put skin in the game to be real, and those of us who feel abandoned by mainstream society are desperate to feel that realness.
"Authenticity" is definitely part of it. Nobody thinks the Taj Mahal is tacky, but they sure as heck would if you built it in Orange County in 2026. Writing baroque fugues gets you all the chicks in the 1720s but makes you a weirdo in the 2020s. An interminable story about buff bronze age dudes killing other buff bronze age dudes will get you shelved under "Fetish" instead of the "Literature", unless you did it 3000 years ago.
How do we fit that into this model? I think it's that cheap tricks need to feel "earned", although earned is not quite the right word. We can accept the cheap tricks as long as we know that they were done in the right way or by the right person. Writing like Bach is tacky unless you're Bach. Living in a Tuscan villa is tacky unless you're in Tuscany. Wearing a crown is tacky unless you're a king.
Perhaps the problem with the modern era is that we've convinced ourselves that anything nice we could create is just a cheap trick.
The "eyeball kick" is itself a tell of fakeness. R1 failed by trying visibly. Every sentence optimized to wow, every metaphor reaching for the gasp. Authenticity might be writing that doesn't seem to know you're reading it.
>But it's all fake. It's drafted up by the marketing department based on what will sell the most.
And that's why The Marvels is among the worst box office bombs of all time, of course. People tend to vastly overestimate the power of bean counters; even creators of capeshit prefer thinking that they have timely and important things to say (in addition to obligatory giant sky beams).
> I think the strongest argument in favor is that tasteful people claim to get a higher level of pleasure from their sophisticated art than normal people can ever achieve from their cheap tricks. I’m skeptical.
It seems pretty likely to me that the person who watches 200 movies every year is doing that because they enjoy them more than the person who watches 3. You seem to think they're getting some sort of social status from that, but where's your proof? I can tell you that most of the people I know who read huge quantities of books or watch huge quantities of movies...are not "cool" in any conventional sense of the word. Do you know many people who are seriously involved in the arts?
> I think the strongest argument in favor is that tasteful people claim to get a higher level of pleasure from their sophisticated art than normal people can ever achieve from their cheap tricks.
They can. Maybe not a higher level of pleasure exactly, but different kinds of pleasure. For example, a normal person can see a superhero action movie and enjoy the spectacle. A sophisticated movie viewer familiar with VFX can do the same thing, except he can also appreciate the perfect compositing work that went into a 3-second shot of a supervillain stepping across a puddle, seamlessly blending practical photography with CGI water simulation. A normal person can read a poem and enjoy how it sounds; a sophisticated reader can do that too, but also enjoy the layers of symbolism and the deliberate use of alliteration. A layman can play a videogame and enjoy the action; a programmer can do that too, but also appreciate the brilliant technique that was used to create an illusion of 3D space on 1990s-era hardware without even floating point support.
As I'd said in my previous comment, there's nothing wrong with all these additional layers of enjoyment; the problem occurs when people focus solely on these additions and disregard the core mission of the artistic work: make a movie that is engaging to watch, a poem that is a pleasure to read, a game that is fun to play -- and overall, create a work of art that makes the user feel something beyound "well, that was good time-waster, what else is on" or "I have correctly decoded the author's intent behind this solid black square".
It's quite an entertaining exercise to invent a backstory to make that sentence coherent. The obvious read is that "she" is a statue with unusual lips due to flaws in the granite used to carve her, but what else?
The framing of "good taste" as "deliberate avoidance" of cheap moves has another framing to consider. I would argue that taste is calibration, not avoidance. Knowing when a particular cheap move is the right move for the particular sentence in the particular paragraph for a particular reader.
If "when to use cheap tricks" could be reduced to a rule set, the rules could be encoded and an AI could follow it. We try that and it hasn't worked. Why? Because every actual writing situation has features the rules can't anticipate. The right call depends on what came before *and what came after*, as well as who is reading, what the piece is doing as a whole, and even what the writer is trying to achieve.
The rightness of the cheap trick isn't scorable until you observe the consequence of having deployed it. Telling a joke at a dinner party is the same shape. You could try to score "tell/don't tell" in advance with full access to the dinner-party state. The algorithm will always be wrong sometimes, because the rightness of the joke is constituted by the reactions, which cannot be precomputed. The joke-teller has to read the room, commit, and live with whether it worked.
Calibration is what happens in the irreversible engagement with the consequence. It is a capacity that gets developed through making choices and living through what they did. That might be why your "deliberate avoidance" framing reads as slightly off to me: avoidance implies a pre-deployment choice against the cheap move. Calibration implies sustained engagement across many deployments, with the judgment emerging from the cumulative consequences rather than from a pre-deployment rule.
Part of the confusion in all these discussions is the purpose of a work of art. Art is very, very broad; it can accomplish all sorts of things. Art is involved in practically everything human. Different arts and genres have different goals, so there’s no one standard that’s relevant for all of them.
A romance novel isn’t supposed to have the same emotional effect as a horror novel. Some art isn’t even supposed to evoke emotions at all, maybe you just contemplate it calmly, or it’s never seen by anyone (like some gargoyles on certain cathedrals).
The artist can ask whether the work is succeeding at what he or she wanted it to do. The audience can ask whether it does what they expect. But all of that’s only valid relative to expectations and intentions, not absolutely or in a vacuum.
> "I think the strongest argument in favor is that tasteful people claim to get a higher level of pleasure from their sophisticated art than normal people can ever achieve from their cheap tricks. I’m skeptical."
I am surprised that this is so hard to believe—it is hard to understand other people's subjective experiences, but it is quite common to experience both sides of this spectrum within your own life?
I really like movies, and I watch a lot of them. My taste in movies today looks very different than before I "got into movies" as a hobby (e.g., it has shifted to be much more in line with "mainstream critics" in ways that are extremely predictable—of course after you watch thousands of movies, you become less impressed by cliche and more drawn to weird stuff that might be alienating to mainstream audiences, doesn't seem very surprising).
My personal experience is that my ability to appreciate movies is "deeper" in some meaningful sense than it was before I had watched many movies. It's clearly true in terms of my revealed preference, as I continue to watch many movies (despite the availability of good movies to watch being mechanically lower, e.g., you can't experience Citizen Kane for the first time twice, and yet I now derive great enjoyment from movies that a decade ago I don't think I would have appreciated at all).
"If there's no such thing as good taste, then there's no such thing as good art. Because if there is such a thing as good art, it's easy to tell which of two people has better taste. Show them a lot of works by artists they've never seen before and ask them to choose the best, and whoever chooses the better art has better taste.
"So if you want to discard the concept of good taste, you also have to discard the concept of good art. And that means you have to discard the possibility of people being good at making it. Which means there's no way for artists to be good at their jobs. And not just visual artists, but anyone who is in any sense an artist. You can't have good actors, or novelists, or composers, or dancers either. You can have popular novelists, but not good ones."
Yes, Austen did write that, to her sister who was her confidante, and she was joking, anticipating the response of an obtuse yet fashionable critic: in fact, she didn't think there was anything lacking in P&P, and history has confirmed that judgment. Of all writers, Austen suffers most from isolated quotes put forward 'straight,' which, in context, are usually ironic or uttered by misguided characters.
I'm very confident that "I’m Kenyan. I Don’t Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me" itself is written with heavy AI assistance. I'm willing to bet at least 9:1 on this.
I think I'd be willing to take this bet at those odds, up to your $1000 to my $100. What's the plan for verifying and how are you defining heavy AI assistance?
"up to your $1000 to my $100." Can we keep the odds at 9:1 please? Happy to bet $900:$100 if Scott or some other mutual can vouch for you, or there's a convenient escrow service.
Maybe something like we present arguments on both sides and if Scott thinks >75% more likely than not in one direction, someone wins. Otherwise call the bet off after say 3 months?
I don't have a better way to get ground truth. Obviously if the writer confesses that'd be basically confirmation but it's hard to get ground truth in the other direction.
"how are you defining heavy AI assistance?" Something like it's implausible that the same sequence of words are written by a human, or that the vast majority of the actual text we see is written by a human with minor AI touchups.
slept on it + did due diligence and I decided I don't want to take the bet, sorry. You seem to have a lot of experience prompting and reading AI output, so I suspect that you have a really persuasive argument, more than just "AI detectors said this is AI, while his past essays didn't get flagged."
That said, there are some weird errors that the author makes that I don't know how to reconcile with the AI written story. First, he always capitalizes after a colon, even when you aren't supposed to. This specific type of error is consistent with his earlier writing as well, and I haven't seen AI make this error before.
Example 1: These detectors, as I understand them, often work by measuring two key things: ‘Perplexity’ and ‘burstiness’.
Example 2: (I’ve tried to resist it, but I can’t help myself, and perhaps you’ve already picked up on it: See the threes?)
Example 3: It is a new frontier of the same old struggle: The struggle to be seen, to be understood, to be granted the same presumption of humanity that is afforded so easily to others.
Second, there is a simple typo in this paragraph which should have been caught by AI. He says do instead of to:
And that’s a culture that is carried over into high school, where set books must be memorised, and arguments for or against certain statements must be elaborately made for you *do* reach and surpass the English literature passmark. You could literally recite Shakespeare in the middle of the night right before any exam.
Third, he has a weird habit of using double quotes and single quotes within the same paragraph, in a way that I haven't really seen any AI do before, At the same time though, he doesn't seem to be following a rule across paragraphs? Example:
These detectors, as I understand them, often work by measuring two key things: ‘Perplexity’ and ‘burstiness’. Perplexity gauges how predictable a text is. If I start a sentence, "The cat sat on the...", your brain, and the AI, will predict the word "floor." A text filled with such predictable phrases has low perplexity and is deemed "robotic." Burstiness measures the variation in sentence length and structure. Natural human speech and writing are perceived to be ‘bursty’ ...
//
Now, consider our ‘training’ again. We were taught to be clear, logical, and, in a way, predictable. Our sentence structures were meant to be consistent and balanced. We were explicitly taught to avoid the very "burstiness" that ‘detectors’ now seek as a sign of humanity.
If you don't mind me asking, why were you highly confident it was AI?
I you read/skim his older writing, not only does Pangram not say they are like AI, but also if you as a human read it you wouldn't have clocked them as AI-like either.
Yes, 100% AI-written according to Pangram. He has Substack essays from before 2023. These get a 0% score from Pangram.
He is probably using Claude. I recognize the way it writes (space, then em-dash, then space), but he replaced the em-dashes with hyphens to make it less obvious.
Do not take the other end of this bet unless you like losing money.
My approach is to cultivate broad, mid-brow taste. You should be able to enjoy some of the dumb stuff, and you should be able to appreciate some of the sophisticated stuff.
2. R1 was not a small model. It was respectably sized for its time, particularly in the Chinchilla era. Its problems were unusually bad RLHF/preference data, I think.
3. The Kenyan author's claims should not be taken at face-value. You might be inclined to ignore things like Pangram flagging him as 100% AI because"doesn't that just prove his point?! We shouldn't judge him for sounding like AI or infer that he's using AI, because perhaps the real story is that ironically, it is AI that sounds like him!"... But look at his old writings like https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/kcse-2019-kenyan-tragedy which is almost surely LLM-unaffected due to being written in 2019, when GPT-2s were largely useless for long-form nonfiction writing. Does it *sound* the same as the delve essay - or even *look* the same at the raw typographic level, in terms of wordcount or paragraphs or formatting or word lengths? Note the length and the complexity. I see this all the time with ESL writers online now: they swear they don't use AI or if they do it's just to copyedit, but *mysteriously* around the time of a major LLM release, their posts or comments suddenly massively increased in word count and polish. Mere coincidence, doubtless, or perhaps the minor copyediting unlocked their inner muse... BTW, note that if you plug the end of that 2019 link into Pangram, unlike the 'delve' essay, you get '100% human'.
4. stay tuned for the results of the Unslop contest! https://www.hyperstitionai.com/unslop Last night I was reading through the semi-finalists to judge, and the samples are certainly interesting.
5. I'm amused by any defense of the Nobel Prize in Literature snubbing one of the most influential authors ever, considering that you couldn't tell me anything about 90% of the Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian authors it's awarded in favor of passing over vastly superior candidates. So Tolkien is in excellent company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_in_Literature_controversies#Unrecognized_literary_achievements (I've been unimpressed by the Nobel Prize ever since I was assigned as a kid to do a research project on Pearl S. Buck. Nice woman, good writer, but there were a lot of writers in 1938 who deserved that prize more than she did.)
The Schmidhuber framing explains why eyeball kicks fail twice. First read: high novelty, compresses poorly, feels striking. Second read: pattern recognized, compression gain collapses to zero. RLHF compounds it, since preference data rewards what wows on first pass and never measures decay.
I'm surprised too that Schmidhuber hasn't been brought up yet around here, the nerdy framework should be decently intuitive even to the most art-averse. Things are more "tasteful" the more they capture/compress, including past art history. Derivative stuff reuses previously known structure, unrolling an already known algorithm. New original art says something new, uncovers yet unknown structure, and unlocks new ways of compressing art history, seeing it under a new light.
Doesn't explain everything but definitely deserved a mention.
I presume Pearl Buck's 1938 Nobel had something to do with the Japanese committing the Nanking Massacre in 1937, so they gave the Nobel to a Westerner who wrote sympathetically about the Chinese people.
I'm not sure why AI writing is still so noticeable online (on reddit especially), the current generation of models are a lot better. Are people intentionally the older or smaller models with their more gauche style?
For reference, this is my favorite story that I was able to get Claude to generate. It still has some tells, but not as much as the R1 examples:
A small correction: literary tricks are not "computationally cheap" to LLMs. Every token has to go through all the weights*, so a beautiful turn of phrase costs the same to generate as "Copyright 2026."
*: modulo things like "thinking" and tool use, or doing something clever with Mixture of Experts.
Your counterexample is irrelevant because 'Copyright 2026', as with almost all strings, is extremely low quality and irrelevant text which would be a completely wrong example. It is absurd to suggest that R1 replace its cheap eyeball kicks with a random memorized string like 'Copyright 2026', which would be much worse output. "Your comment is not a correction, it's a Copyright 2026. That's not a computationally cheap insight - that's a mistake."
What it is computationally cheap compared to is an actual insightful point or observation. And the cheapness is dramatic. When I get good AI writing for my poems or stories, I am doing so through inner-monologues which have likely burned through hundreds of thousands or millions of high-end tokens from multiple LLMs (which means that a single LLM, to get the benefits of diversity, would have to burn through several times more, if it could at all). It can take a huge amount of best-of-n sampling to get the next level of quality. And in comparison to that, "it's not X, it's Y" is *incredibly* cheap.
> A small correction: literary tricks are not "computationally cheap" to LLMs.
LLM's use the same amount of compute for every token (modulo some complications about "thinking")
What this means is that any type of writing that is too computationally expensive just doesn't get done.
Imagine a scifi where the author has done a lot of complicated calculations about black holes to get all the time dilation numbers right. This may be great writing. But it's not something small LLM's are capable of.
These literary tricks are "computationally cheap" in the sense that they fit within the weights of a small LLM.
Another complicating factor is that humans are social animals, and so people derive genuine pleasure from liking something, even when they are engaging with it because they think other people like it. When I was a little kid with older brothers, I used to laugh uproariously at jokes on TV that I didn’t get, because my brothers were laughing.
Another example: I went to see the LA Phil premiere one of Philip Glass’s most recent symphonies a year or two ago. My wife and I are a professional musicians, and it was obvious to us that things were really off. There were evidently typos in the charts that somehow had not yet been dealt with, there were weird balance and tuning issues in the orchestra (probably owing to dodgy orchestration by Glass or his helpers), and the vocal soloist was having a really bad night. She was out of tune and wandering off from the tempos (this was obvious because she was often doubled by something in the orchestra, so you could hear them getting out of sync with each other), and the conductor was very visibly trying to get everyone back in sync, with huge downbeats, mouthing bar numbers etc. But the people around us in the audience, most of whom I think were not regular concert-goers but more general arty people, were in a state of bliss, several with their eyes closed. And at the end, they leaped to their feet and applauded like the event had changed their lives. But maybe it had!
My thought/hope is that there is something psychologically beneficial to improving taste. Based on your own story of your children, it does seem like it would be concerning if they were 30 and their favorite song was still the Choo-Choo song. To compare it to literal taste, it seems like the "Salt Sugar Fat" problem again, where companies employ high end research to get us all hooked on cheap cereal. Then again, maybe there was some rationalist counter backlash to the fear about Kellogs and Kraft that I missed. I worry about living in a world where all art is essentially AI-optimized slop that rots our brains.
I still don't know who these tasteful sophisticates are. Most of the artists that I know (all of whom I would consider to have discerning taste) love Lisa Frank precisely *because* of how kitsch it all is. Is there some class of taste-possessing (assuming taste is a useful word) that can only appreciate serious art?
I think what you're seeing there comes down to countersignaling and the omnivorous fashion of recent decades. Liking something obviously kitschy is a classy, high status move, because it shows that you're so far above the people who unironically like it that you have no fear of being mistaken for one.
Is it a symptom of being high status or is it a symptom of having appreciation for a lot of things. I do think there’s some game being played regarding signaling (we do live in a society) but it doesn’t tell us much about “taste” beyond its use in this specific language game. I think the error in this series of essays is the implicit assumption that the status game use of “taste” is definitive of the word.
> The writer argues that these are signs of learning a language in a formal, ossified, officially-good way rather than as the living organism of a spoken tongue. But he could equally note that his Kenyan essay test involves people with limited knowledge of English under high pressure to sound smart, being graded by other people with limited knowledge of English.
Well, I agree with this. But I agree so much that I don't understand how these two claims are supposed to differ from each other.
> In poetry, the one art form where I have a tiny smidgen of taste, I feel sensitized to cliches and stock images. It’s very easy to use a lot of “thees” and “thous”
People attempting to write poetry today using the archaic second-person singular pronoun are very likely to misuse it, which tends to contradict the idea that it's "easy".
I happen to like Steeleye Span, who cover a lot of archaic ballads and get their "thee"s for free. It's usually "thee", for two reasons: (1) objective case has wider applicability than subjective case; but also (2) "thee" rhymes with "me". It's very, very, very common to rhyme those two words, since they're a natural semantic contrast and *they rhyme anyway*.
I tend to think of this as an objective poetic advantage in the structure of earlier English that has been randomly lost in modern English.
> For another, my daughter gets more joy from “Choo Choo Train” than I remember ever getting from anything.
Note that this doubles as an argument against utilitarianism. Which might explain the value some people find in the concept of taste. If your daughter were to grow up to do nothing but wirehead "Choo Choo Train" every waking minute of every day, something would have gone wrong.
(But this particular concept of taste would say that sophisticates generating new, more "tasteful" forms of art is a dysfunction that defeats the purpose of having a sense of taste. I wouldn't go that far.)
Hmm, I suppose that some sports are essentially artistic competition (figure skating, for example), but my mental model of most sports is that they are a form of ritualized warfare. A way to let out the human desire to fight the outgroup without resorting to actual violence.
I think taste amounts to the ability to distinguish high-quality authors from low-quality authors, under a definition of "quality" that could amount to intelligence, or agency, or interesting life experience, or a particularly complex internal monologue, or some combination of these things.
Under this definition, liking a work that is vastly more likely to have been produced by a 150 IQ veteran samurai whose work on ethics defined Japanese culture for generations than it is to have been produced by a 70 IQ call center employee who wanted to maximize the sales revenue of his romance novel and had no outstanding artistic philosophy is an indicator of good taste, and the inverse is an indicator of bad taste.
The practical implication is that "taste" in any subject amounts to "taste in people". Good taste in wine means liking the kind of wine that nets you interesting drinking buddies. Good taste in books means liking the kind of authors that will teach you useful things. Good taste in paintings means decorating your walls in such a way that you surround yourself with the collective subconscious of the men you wish to emulate in your daily life. As art is essentially the means of transmitting culture, assimilating the viewer into the worldview of the artist, I think this fits. Taste is selecting for works whose authors are worth being assimilated towards.
There's something to this, but it sounds like you're somewhat conflating people who make something with people who enjoy that thing, and I think there's a substantial distinction. There's plenty of fascinating art by people who are mentally ill, morally depraved, or in certain cases just not very smart. The most recent example I can think of is Alice Munro, although obviously we could add hundreds of people to the list.
There are also people who have good taste but aren't particularly exemplary in other ways. Actually, I think that might describe most people with good taste.
So there obviously has to be something more to it than just taste in people, at least as conventionally defined. There's some other dimension here orthogonal to most of the qualities that make someone worth emulating.
the missing variable is the operator. cheap tricks with a nervous system behind them still land. expensive tricks with no one home don't. ginsberg meant it. r1 doesn't mean anything.
Ambient 1: Music for Airports is one of my most listened to albums. I enjoy all sorts of other weid music. I also like the Lisa Frank art. The dolphins and the tiger in particular are cute. I also enjoy some incredibly cringe music. "Everybody" by the backstreet boys, Taylor Swift, "Ho Hey" by the lumineers, Cake by the Ocean, etc
I dont see why people cant like a wide range of things.
(meanwhile, the sophisticated people are into some kind of incomprehensible foam with 296 ingredients, which only one chef in the world can prepare properly, which tastes slightly like the color chartreuse).
I am read to filth; I was just recently waving different types of black cardamom a foot Infront of my face and trying to figure out which one smelled the most like it would go with lapsang for fancy desert night, where I humbly cook a simple dessert for my similarly foodie friends so that they can know in their bones that I am BETTER THAN THEM, they don't know about lanxangia tsaoko, fucking plebs that they are.
All I can say is that my good taste allows my to appreciate EG a hot dog with mustard on it on a level beyond the understanding of anyone who isn't persnickety enough to taste sugar out of the jar before using it in a cocktail.
I knew I shouldn’t click the choo choo train link. I knew I would regret it. I could anticipate my revulsion and regret with perfect clarity even as I clicked it. Shoot me.
This would seem to imply that a person who develops a taste for increasingly graphic and intense porn has "higher" taste than a person who is turned on by just cleavage alone?
Seems dubious, there surely has to be a moral dimension to high/low taste distinction.
This seems backwards. Cleavages were popular in their days precisely because "high taste" gatekeepers kept the hardcore stuff locked away, so plebs had no alternative. Whereas if nowadays you go for cleavages when pornhub is freely available you're the weird one.
You're using the term "high taste" in the opposite way to the post. If you've never seen anything sexual in your entire life, and get turned on by cleavage, then you're in the same situation as the children who like saturated colours and sugary foods and rhyming verse. You're easily impressed because you haven't gone through the process of getting bored of the simple stuff and moving onto the more complex/intense/niche stuff. A person who's just started watching porn would get off on pretty vanilla stuff, whereas a porn "connoisseur" would have very niche and extreme preferences, similar to how a music connoisseur would have more niche and dissonant preferences to a casual music listener.
>If you've never seen anything sexual in your entire life, and get turned on by cleavage, then you're in the same situation as the children who like saturated colours and sugary foods and rhyming verse.
Well, since we assume that children like sparkles and unicorns because of evo-psych, by the same token we'd expect adolescents to like naked boobs more than cleavages. I do agree that weird niche porn subgenres are "higher taste" than vanilla stuff, but I classify golden age Playboy as less vanilla than whatever is most popular on Pornhub.
Sure. And in the alternate world where everybody has to wear a burqa all the time except when doing furry cosplay, their first hard-on would be to a furry.
Not sure what your point is. The point I'm making is that people who watch a ton of porn end up with very particular and extreme tastes through the same mechanism that people who listen to a lot of music end up with very particular and extreme tastes. They get desensitised to the "default" things that everyone is born liking (consonance in music, boobs) and end up with "high taste".
You know, I've always been tempted to look down on people with such basic tastes in porn, regardless of it being such an irrational and pathetic attempt at feeling superior to others... The difference with art, of course, is that it's socially acceptable to do this. That's what the "moral dimension" boils down to. You could easily imagine a world where these modernists are just told to eat dirt.
I think the difference is that Modernists and other "high taste" havers are actually correct, and that cultivating a deeper sense of appreciation for art and beauty *does* actually elevate you and make you a better person. Whereas I think the opposite is true of someone who watches tons of porn.
Yes, that's the prevailing narrative. It's an elegant, socially productive narrative, even if it isn't grounded in empirical fact. But it does work well, and in that sense, I guess it is "correct"...
Of course, if it stops working well... if the modernists' hubris does bring about a populist revolt, and thus, their demise, can they really still be considered correct? They would no longer be in a position to decide what is morally right, at the very least.
I'm not saying it's correct as a narrative, I'm saying it's factually correct, empirically speaking. In my own experience I can sense that hardcore porn does not make me a better person, whereas I've often walked away from a lot of art feeling (and acting) genuinely more thoughtful/emboldened/morally conscious.
I notice I am confused. Are there any smart human experts who are in favor of banning cheap tricks for making people happy? Even in architecture, the most elite-gated art form the general public still has to interact with, do the barriers to building the kind of buildings you like really consist of sophisticates arguing that you are dumb and wrong for liking traditional buildings? Do any pro-modern-architecture people online argue that?
I don't understand who this article is directed towards.
>do the barriers to building the kind of buildings you like really consist of sophisticates arguing that you are dumb and wrong for liking traditional buildings
The barrier is that they just ignore you and keep doing their thing.
>I don't understand who this article is directed towards.
Scott does have a bugbear about architecture, but it doesn't make much sense to talk about bans when it's an emergent phenomenon. Governments are likely to preserve tradition when they intervene.
I have bugbear about people who think they prefer traditional architecture , but actually want a mixture of traditional and modern.
Actually, that essay and this one seem like companion essays addressing the same topic from different angles, but also The Colors Of Her Coat seems like it is the response to this essay.
(essentially, all of the sophisticated critics who can't stand cheap tricks are suffering from their own personal semantic apocalypse)
Many adults prefer eating the kind of food children like, really sweet things, fast food and so forth, so they seem to have figured it out, if we accept the model offered in this essay.
Also, that lisa frank art is only a "cheap trick" with modern printing and dyes. Take that cheap bright kiddie art back in time to when the blue was made of ground up gemstones, and it's rare and valuable and some ancient king will pay good money for the sparkly unicorn poster.
I could be spending my time on the subway reading high quality internet content like this, or I could do what it seems 30% of the other people are doing and scrolling social media influencer feeds and short-form video.
Surely there is some notion of quality you endorse!
An interesting implication: Could using lowbrow-desensitized AI to give feedback get an AI to a higher taste rung than minimum-wage RLHF has? Is slop, like sycophancy and hallucinating, merely we’ve been incentivizing?
Suppose that whenever we look at what impreses small models or those with limited ability we come away thinking: there is nothing really there it's all kinda unimportant tricks that impress an audience with limited capacity. At some point shouldn't we generalize and say: there is probably nothing deep about what we find artistic or aesthetically meaningful?
That's not a reason not to enjoy art or writing. I love looking at optical illusions even though I know they are in some sense just cheap tricks. But it does strongly suggest that the feeling of being deep or of imparting meaning etc is probably not a good guide to any truth and that it's probably a mistake to treat art as somehow fundamentally different or more valuable than cheap entertainment.
Meaning can be relative to ourselves. Depth can be a scale that stretches into the distance in both directions.
In mathematics, a proof that you consider trivial/obvious is a proof that doesn't teach you anything new about how to do good maths.
Maybe some superintelligence would consider a proof of P!=NP to be trivial. An obvious special case of much more general principles. But to any human mathematician, it would be an important proof.
> ...and then all the medium-cost tricks, then we end with strategies so difficult that only ten geniuses in the world are skilled enough to execute them, and only ten connoisseurs sophisticated enough to appreciate them.
If you're going to denigrate other people's tastes with mockery, Scott, you should at least educate yourself on the evolution of taste in Western culture. Someone told me they didn't think most people would find Stravinsky's _The Rite of Spring_ beautiful (as a comment in your "Contra Everyone on Taste"). The certainty with which they said such a thing shocked me. Obviously, this person was ignorant of the history and the popularity of Stravinky's atonal _Rite_. Of course, in 1913, the first time that _The Rite of Spring_ was performed, the audience rioted. To tastes trained on it, keyed harmonies of classical music sounded dissonant and a-rhythmic. Critics thought Stravinsky was mocking the music world. However, a year later, it was performed again, and the critics and music audience had come around to it. And now _The Rite of Spring_ is up there as one of the ten most-popular pieces of Classical music (with over two hundred recordings, including being adapted to the soundtrack of Disney's _Fantasia_).
I suspect, therefore, there are more than ten connoisseurs for any avant-garde style you could name. In the same thread I mentioned above, someone noted that Karlheinz Stockhausen's "HYMNEN (Elektronische und konkrete Musik)" is particularly unlistenable. But that piece garnered a thousand likes on YouTube — two orders of magnitude greater than 10. And that 1967 piece influenced the Beatles' "Revolution #9" on The White Album.
Stockhausen's "HYMNEN (Elektronische und konkrete Musik)"
Let us also remember another black sheep of art history. French art critic Louis Leroy coined the term "Impressionism" in 1874 in a satirical review of the first exhibition by an independent group of artists. Leroy used the term as a pun and insult, deriving it from the title of Claude Monet’s painting, "Impression, Sunrise on the Levant". He mocked the works as unfinished sketches. But within thirty years, Impressionism not only became accepted as an art style, but painters all over Europe, North America, South America, and Australia adopted its techniques and style. Indeed, bourgeois Sunday painters are still painting Impressionistic paintings today (and you can see them in small cooperative art galleries all over the US).
Tastes change. And frequently it's the avant-garde that moves the needle. Maybe you can't appreciate what some connoisseurs claim to appreciate. But it's uncharitable at best when you assume it's a trick perpetrated by the artists in cahoots with hoity-toity connoisseurs to con the gullible public.
I'll leave you with Mark Rothko and Adolf Gottlieb's elegant defense of their art in response to the NY Times art critic Edward Alden Jewell's pan of their show. It's worth reading. Even if you disagree with them, you gain a better understanding of why many artists feel the urge to push the limits.
That doesn't seem like mockery to me. Scott says that the road Beethoven-Stravinsky-Stockhausen-??? ends up with only ten geniuses being able to appreciate the eventual result, which seems reasonable. The Beatles obviously aren't a stop on that road, although they were surprisingly sophisticated for the biggest band of all time.
Beethoven-Stravinsky-Stockhausen is a real progression, but it's a progression of [expanding what can be considered music]. Stockhausen's early work is actually very crude for both modern standards and the standards of traditional art music of his time - its value lies in exploration of novel musical techniques. There might as well have been only 10 people who could appreciate what he was doing back then. But those people were his fellow craftsmen who built upon each other's work until the paradigm they worked on reached, and eventually exceeded, the sophistication of orchestral music. And as they did that, more and more people were becoming able to appreciate what they're doing, until eventually the paradigm took over.
The Beatles are very much a stop on that road, albeit somewhat accidental ones - they were coming from a different musical tradition, and incidentally got near-unlimited access to modern studio recording techniques of the kind Stockhausen et al pioneered, at the exact moment when they were becoming genuinely viable and powerful. Perhaps a better demonstration of the progression are the next generation of classically trained musicians of the 1970s - including bona fide worldwide superstars like Kraftwerk and Jean-Michel Jarre. (Jarre is outright a student of Pierre Shaeffer, another avant-garde giant.) And it turns out they didn't just work to increase complexity, they also worked to make the end products more polished, and as a result more palatable to general public.
>it's a progression of [expanding what can be considered music]
Indeed, and from there it was only a short leap to considering all kinds of noise to be music, which both traditions had reached in short order. Apparently much more than ten people do like noise-considered-as-music, so Scott's thesis has so far been proven wrong...
Thanks for this. Sometimes, when people have an obvious chip on their shoulder about the art snobs, the question “who hurt you?” comes up, Reading the Rothko letter reminded me of the answer, which is Rothko. The letter is abusive in content and says that only a feeble minded child should need these (ugly, striking, and obscure) pictures so much as explained—being feeble minded, apparently, I found the explanations helpful, though rude—and then goes on to say that art is about ideas and if the ideas in these works do not strike you like lightning then you should go back to hanging kitsch over your mantle.
I get the impression that high art isn’t really like this anymore; pop sensibility has permeated the elite and they consequently would like to spend a hundred million dollars buying a David Hockney painting that is perfectly pleasant and extremely accessible. If that were all there was, it would be kind of puzzling why anyone would care about the odd little subcommunity of snobs eating foams that taste like chartreuse and admiring textured spheres. But it makes much more sense in the context of a letter in which one of the greats of art, rich, powerful, and celebrated, is being quite clear that finding his sphere tedious shows a weak mind and poor character. It’s understandable that many respond to that by developing a reflexive urge to tell the sphere guys exactly where they can stick it.
Are you purposely distorting what they said? Or did you not understand their points? And it's obvious you didn't do any research into the history of Modernism or the artists involved before responding to my comment. For instance, neither Rothko nor Gottlieb was famous at the time of that exhibition. Jewell, the NY Times art critic, was quite scathing in his put-down of their work, and they replied to him rather elegantly. Anyway, you seem to be mistaking your preconceived notions about art as being valid priors for how artists, the 'Art World', and how the dynamic between the avant-garde and popular culture works. It might be that even if you did the research, you'd still dislike Modernism and Modernists, but a little research would help you to argue your case better. Just sayin.
Of course, whether they're informed or not, you're welcome to your opinions. But you seem to be projecting when you accuse others of having chips on their shoulders. I'll turn your question—"Who hurt you?"—back on you. Is it because you feel left out of the cultural conversation? But you've basically shown that you have no interest in understanding the conversation, yet you still feel the "snobbish elites" need to address your needs?
I think you misunderstood me—I am agreeing that a reason people display hostility to high art is because they feel judged, hurt, and have a chip on their shoulder. Why feel that way? In the letter, Rothko’ reaction to a critic finding his work obscure is to say that “easy program notes can help only the simpleminded,” and he concludes by pronouncing that his aesthetic beliefs do in fact necessitate a spiritual insult to those who are instead attuned to “interior decoration” and “trite tripe.” He is rendering harsh judgment on the intellectual quality and taste of those who do not like his art; and, no surprise, people being harshly judged tend to develop hard feelings. To the extent that the hoi polloi identify high art with the attitude of that letter, it is unsurprising that they tend toward resentment and hostility in response.
It seems so weird to me that you don't entertain the possibility that genius art makes everyone feel things. I'm sure there are some songs that both you and your children would love.
Aussi on dit "je ne sais quoi" pas "je nes sais quoi", connard. C'est ce que je dirais si j'étais un élitiste incapable d'apprécier la beauté dans son universalité.
Oui c'est une blague! C'est vrai que c'est violent, mais je ne voulais pas vraiment insulter l'auteur. Ça reprend le format d'un même (français ?) . La traduction en anglais serait "Also we say 'je ne sais quoi' not 'je nes sais quoi', asshole. That's what I would say if I was an elitist unable to appreciate the universality of beauty". I didn't think it was offensive when I wrote it, but now I realize it may be taken this way if you lack context :/
Also I recommend you try to watch "the hedgehog in the fog" with your kids (by Yuri Norstein). It has no bright colors, the story is not happy, and I predict your kids will like it anyway
I know I'm late to this party but IMO this is a category error. Here you have identified a particular failure case of "bad taste" that results in the creation of bad art but the concept is more general in my mind.
I think "taste" describes a persons general skill at understanding the underlying process that creates aesthetic preferences. This often does include deep knowledge about the process of creating art in a certain medium. So someone with good taste doesn't just have a intuitive bag of tricks that allows them to create a piece of art in an area that is widely regarded as good but rather, they have a deep understanding why it is considered good or bad that generalizes well to other cases. Someone with bad taste may get it accidentally right but they won't understand why a piece of art is considered good or bad by many people or have a good understanding of why another artist made certain choices.
Art isn’t about sensation, it’s about signalling. This is why who made it matters so much - we need to know who is sending the signal. Specifically, signalling creativity. Creative means “novel plus valuable” but you can’t create something truly novel if it’s valuable according to established metrics. That’s why artists are always trying to create things that are valuable by illegible metrics. Enjoyment can be part of an illegible metric but as you note by itself it gets tapped out pretty quickly. Real taste is perceiving illegible metrics that make a work of art good; fake taste is pretending to perceive them. Because they’re illegible it’s hard to tell the difference.
Seems to me that the theory says that there are different "things that people make like"; they can be arranged from easiest to hardest; and everything easier than my current taste is vulgar kitsch that all intellectuals should avoid, and everything more difficult than my current taste is pretentious snobbery that no sane person could actually like.
The first objection is, why not both? They are not necessarily exclusive, so why not combine the cheap tricks that everyone likes with some medium difficulty tricks and some expert tricks, and create art that everyone would like, albeit for different reasons. That is the kind of art we should use in public spaces.
Second, this does not solve the question of whether *some* people who claim to be more sophisticated than you are actually just faking it. Their claims that they can enjoy something you can't are unverifiable for you. Maybe people on artistic levels from 0 to 7 are honest about their emotions, but the level 8 only consists of scammers who coordinate their stories.
That's what I used to call "porn in a general sense", a thing with low-level enjoyable features in abundance, with no higher-level ones: sugar-and-fat sweets, jump scare horrors, alcohol-and-water only beverages, nude physically attractive humans having sex and so on. The thing is, if you are interested in a medium and pay a lot of attention to it, a "porn" version gets old really soon. Sometimes a piece has both high and low features: such as when adults can enjoy a cartoon together with their children if it has features that cater to both audiences.
Actually, paying attention and thinking about the piece of medium is anathema to "porn in general": you notice the seams, the discrepancy and the lacking. Once you stop looking only at the cool cars exploding, you notice the plot not making sense, people behaving in an unrealistic ways and so on. That's the common problem with slop as well.
We tend to respect people with "taste" because they are both better versed in the medium and can predict the evolution of our own taste, to a degree. And when the "porn" version is overused, you can get to a point where low-level likeable features feel jarring or at least unnecessary. That's probably how people get into liking something the general public finds bland.
So here is perhaps a radical idea. AI will never do great art* because great art comes from the unconscious. You often hear song writers or authors describe the creative process not as something they are doing but something they are channeling. The song or book comes from the unconscious. And the unconscious is something we don't understand. It could be vast, it might be in touch with the universal all, or God.
The eyeball-kick failure mode reads as a rater-quality problem, not a capacity problem. RLHF on minimally trained raters rewards surface dazzle, then bigger models amplify whichever wow-moves cluster above the median. R1 and the unnamed OpenAI fictionbot converging on the same shadow-echo-whisper Rolodex despite different model scales and resource priorities is the giveaway. The fix probably looks less like more scale and more like a small expert-rater loop on top of a competent base, which is closer to how publishing actually works.
From a publishing perspective, you shouldn’t have spaces around em dashes or en dashes. Where hyphens join words, and these typographical characters are meant to divide them, grouping words into new thoughts. AI uses them correctly, but as an affectation of its tone and voice. It interjects related thoughts much like a human conversation. But I have a hard time shaking the feeling that it came from an Internet comment. Oh well. Keep on using spaces around your dashes puny humans! There’s no accounting for taste.
Perhaps one of the deepest risks of generative systems is not only producing convincing outputs, but gradually replacing the human processes of interpretive construction behind them.
Fluency can simulate depth while reducing the cognitive friction that genuine understanding often requires.
There’s a lot of tribalism in taste. Whatever the outgroup likes must ipso facto be denigrated to distance ourselves from them. Outgroup for this purpose can be non-connoisseurs, or a different faction of connoisseurs, or political parties, or any other sort of outgroup
There’s also an at least partially true model where connoisseurship is an info hazard that undermines your appreciation of the low and medium cost tricks until some combination of hedonic adaptation to asceticism and arcane knowledge of textures on featureless spheres makes you appreciate the sphere textures more than anybody else but you’re probably still less happy than the plebs enjoying their classical architecture.
For me, personally, novelty is overrated. Quality of execution trumps novelty any day, and novelty can be a negative when it's distracting.
Visual arts don't do anything for me, even the masters, but I can appreciate the quality with which they worked. Music is more my thing, and I can appreciate even the most "overused" things. Beethoven, etc--even though they didn't do anything *new* (from a temporal perspective of someone discovering them now), they did what they did *amazingly well*. And that has value.
Words are even more my thing. And here, abuse of cliche and all that other stuff AI does *is actually a sign of bad writing*. In the cargo-cult mode, mimicking the forms of good writers without actually understanding *when* and *how* to use those forms.
Interesting, I'm the opposite, I prefer novelty over polish, though it depends on the medium. One my favorite video games two years ago was Leap Year (1). From screenshots, it looks like a child made it, but the ideas are very unique and they make for up some puzzles that are unlike anything I had played before.
Two of my favorite movies are Primer and Coherence, both made on a tiny budget. Neither one is visually striking both are very creative, with plots that are deeper than you realize if you aren't paying very close attention.
Music is admittedly different. I do find polish to be important, but I would usually take moderate polish, high novelty over high polish low novelty. However I would place Beethoven in the high polish, moderate novelty category. He was the last classical but also the first Romantic era composer, his later works and most famous works were quite different than anything Haydn would have written.
> then we end with strategies so difficult that only ten geniuses in the world are skilled enough to execute them, and only ten connoisseurs sophisticated enough to appreciate them
This overlooks what underpins the well known actor-critic paradigm in information theory: it is easier to discern than it is to create. I agree that taste is only a meaningful endeavor so long as it is accessible to almost all (perhaps through study). But while listing what’s good or not about something might not be sufficient to recreate it, it can be sufficient to understand why it’s good (thus making taste accessible to all, even if producing something worthy of taste is often near impossible!)
Art that has the subtlety and depth that connoisseurs love and also aspects that appeal to the masses. I think this is possible and generally the best art is like this.
Surprised I am the first to point out that one of the hottest books in literary theory/aesthetics in the last few years was Sianne Ngai's *Theory of the Gimmick*. (Escaped containment in academia and was reviewed in the *New Yorker* and other prestige normie places.)
The book is about why we look down on "gimmicks" in writing and art, and consider them "cheap", which suggests an interesting economic theory of aesthetic value.
Unfortunately, having read the book I can't really recommend it; most of it is dense critical theory about Marxism and various works of art/literature.
>(meanwhile, the sophisticated people are into some kind of incomprehensible foam with 296 ingredients, which only one chef in the world can prepare properly, which tastes slightly like the color chartreuse)
But you made that one up.
Have you considered - I mean, at all - that taste is fundamentally downstream from something practical that we care about, a heuristic to distinguish good from bad? Say, food. We start with sensory input from our taste buds, and it's mostly "yay sugar yay umami", but then we realize maximizing sugar and fat input is actually pretty bad for our bodies, so we need to learn better heuristics for nourishing ourselves. The endpoint of sophisticated food taste isn't "incomprehensible foam", it's fresh whole foods with minimal processing that still provide 296 microelements that your body needs, in correct proportions. (I made the microelements part up for rhetorical purposes, but the first part tracks pretty well with contemporary haute cuisine, I believe.)
(You can write a similar story about architecture. Ornaments are originally markers of good quality, they show the builders cared and had resources to build well. How well they're being maintained is a honest signal about how well maintained the building overall is. But nowadays, you can just get cheap mass-produced ones to reproduce the facade without the underlying quality, and then you get McMansions and need to look for more reliable signals. Meanwhile, experts simply build with solid, durable concrete.)
Surely the ideal art is appealing to all levels of audience, and also guides each level of audience to "level up" into the next higher tier of sophistication.
I'm not sure if Scott's daughter seeming to enjoy "Choo Choo Train" that exceptionally compared-to-him so profoundly generalizes to me. When I think of the things I enjoyed most past adolescence - where I can think a decade back and remember being struck by how much joy the experience had brought me, it often came from more refined tastes (I'm sure not particularly refined, but at least more than mere sugar-and-rainbows). To take a very small-scale and personal example, I really loved the tiny bit of prose "a dignity that bordered on sarcasm." I stopped reading for a few moments to sort of just... admire the impression I got from those words in that order. Going all the way to finishing, for the first time, the work that I'd still call my favorite-of-all-time a decade-odd later, I'd have a borderline-spiritual experience, honored to share a species and a universe with the creator thereof. It wasn't just the many hours I spent enraptured in the experience, but the hours I spent the evening after finally finishing just... admiring my own admiration? To fully reflect upon the joy it brought me and find more joy beneath was a rather distinct experience.
Perhaps this lapses into a lot of second-order effects that aren't directly attributed to taste persay, and I'd still say "are you enjoying this as much as a toddler hearing their favorite set of exciting loud noises?" has great merit as a litmus test. But I'd also say that my answer is "yes, sometimes."
I mostly agree with this, but where are Beethoven and the Beatles in this? Or for that matter even John Williams or JK Rowling? There are things that are both very popular and also pretty damn good. There seems to be ways to that the needle, or maybe to mix cliche with originality that ends up unusually good.
Removing all “cheap tricks” in such a wrote and self conscious way, justified with vacuous intellectualisms, is itself a cheap trick. And the “professional critics” who praise this are philistines.
That Oriental building is in fact awesome, and that “house” is in fact ugly
The oriental building is awesome in a normal way. There are a million buildings just like that building, and most of them are better. Taste is the ability to know that even if you like it, there are 'better' buidlings, while still enjoying it.
The house is ugly, but it is ugly in an interesting, mindful way. Someone tried hard to make it ugly, and succeeded. Tate is the ability to know that even if you don't like it, it is a 'good' building, while still not liking it.
The inability to distinguish these things is how you end up with adult children, actually adult sub-children, who are unable to let go of their Mcdonalds/disney fixation. It's one thing to like Mcdonalds and disney, everyone does to some degree. it's another thing entirely to ONLY be able to like mcdonalds/disney; which is a state of being that deserves to be mocked and shamed.
I didn’t actually look at the oriental building, it’s a metaphor. And that is not anyone’s definition of taste. Yes, more sophisticated things I personally cannot appreciate exist— most jazz. That house is not one of things, it’s a midwit being clever. Pure civilization in the Spenglarian sense.
You gotta open your mind at least a bit to the idea that the huge community of house autists have an idea of what the like, and a theory of why they like it!
I personally quite like the ugly house, although I find it unwilling to go the full mile. There are some really sick brutalist designs that take advantage of the aesthetic properties of concrete and glass and steel which it doesn't, and there are some modernist houses which contrast unnatural built shapes with the natural environment which is does do, but half heartedly. None the less, it is pretty good.
Dismissing it out of hand without being able to do anything but say "It's ugly! It's midwit!" is itself midwitism: knowing the state of the art in shiboleth form.
Fair enough and I’m not even truly against all brutalism as such, but can’t we agree that when you get to the point that architecture is being used to make a political point about socialism or whatever, they were no longer in the realm of genuine art?
If you’re using the part of your brain that thinks in words then you’re moving away from the artistic side imo. That’s what I’m actually triggered by
I think that the artist is dead; and all art is necessarily making a political point because each piece uses up the most limited resource of all: intellectual space.
There is only room for one Munch's The Scream. At some point it did not exist and something else had that slot in the valence. Then Munch was hit by a bolt of lighting and created a truly transcendent artwork and suddenly whatever was there before is fucking GONE from history.
Hence the political nature of art, that each piece carries and reinforces its context and displaces what came before or creates a new space that it then occupies until it is displaced itself.
I do agree that if you lead with politics you probably end up with something derivative and boring; on the other hand the Guernica was made by a socialist as a piece of socialist propaganda and it is so good it will mess you up if you stand in front of it for too long, it converted me into a Picasso defender.
I agree w almost all of what you say. Have you read iian mcgilchrist work on brain hemispheres, master and emissary? I think it’s the combination of great ideas being already used up as you describe, plus the increasing dominance of left-brain thinking and symbolic manipulation among over-literate populations, is what’s killing off art.
When it’s truly good, I think it’s overwhelmingly a preverbal, aesthetic exercise. Even Guernica, tho a strong argument against the position I’m taking, works bc it puts you perfectly in the direct experience of the horror, there’s no greater symbolic-logical “statement” being made
But Scot, why do your kids watch these sparkly abominations? There is Julia Donaldson and Beatrix Potter, Judith Kerr and Little Black Mole, and Simsala Grimm once they are older. Vivaldi - you narrate as a little robin experiences the seasons in a forest. Nutcracker and Sleeping beauty by Tchaikovsky were a hit in our german kindergarden, they even went to see the ballet. And Prokofiev's Cinderella. Grieg's Peer Gynt of course. My 5 yo with dramatic mindset also likes Erlkonig (now I am bragging).
I haven't read the earlier pieces in this series, but I think an important argument for this version of high taste is that it creates new forms and meanings. So if you strip out everything conventional, you create something novel and that novelty can be shaped over time to greater sophistication with a more receptive audience until it becomes conventional and the cycle begins again.
Also worth thinking about art forms that are both popular and high taste (e.g. the Beatles, Sopranos, Mad Max, Shakespeare, Michael Jackson, pre-insanity Kanye West) and how they differ from things that are abstruse and lack conventional appeal. I think partly it's that they're in forms with enough bandwidth to do conventionally pleasing things and novel things at the same time and in a way that plays against one another in a pleasing way.
To the extent that taste is partly responsive to repetition, you can't choose to have good taste or bad taste. You may one day find that the forms of art you engage with most no longer bring you the same enjoyment; the good parts have become trite and the bad parts grating. Once that happens, won't you be glad for the existence of tasteful people who can say, "oh, [popular thing X]? Yeah, I think it sucks too. Lately I've been really into [obscure thing Y], it's much more novel and challenging."
Take a look at desertopa's comments on JRPGs. Or Kimmo Merikivi on classical music or dabor on roguelike games. All of them are indeed critical of the popular thing, but they certainly don't sound like they "spend most of their time saying that it sucks." They point out WHY it sucks, and what you should look at instead if you happen to agree. This is obviously a prosocial activity!
Out of curiosity, what happens if you don't give your kids "kids" stuff like choo choo train? Like what if all they know is Mozart, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky--will their favorite end up being Tchaikovsky? Or if you give them all three and choo choo train, will tehy strongly prefer the kids music?
>having statues of awesome dragons all over the roof - are essentially cheap easy tricks compared to having something which apparently “reimagines the nature of the house”, even though nobody can explain how this is, or why the reimagination is good, in terms that I can understand. I can only claim that I am not yet so overexposed to these “cheap tricks” that they read
The reimagining that Le Corbusier 's Villa Savoye did was not that mysterious: it had a bunch of features which were unusual for the 30s.
As Wikipedia says:-
"Support of ground-level pilotis, elevating the building from the earth and allowing the garden to be extended to the space beneath.
A functional roof serving as a garden and terrace, reclaiming for Nature the land occupied by the building.
A free floor plan, devoid of load-bearing walls, allowing walls to be placed freely and only where aesthetically needed.
Long horizontal windows for illumination and ventilation.
Freely-designed façades functioning merely as a skin for the wall and windows, and unconstrained by load-bearing considerations."
Plus, of course , poured concrete construction. Along with large plate glass windows, that's commonplace. Does anyone hate large windows, and pine for leaded lights? The roof garden and al! upstairs living didn't catch on, of course, but they were still novel.
>Some people like a moderate amount of privacy? I'm not thrilled about my condo's 72-inch bedroom windows positioned about 10 feet from the sidewalk
There are a bunch of things you can add to a to a large window to make it mire private. There's nothing you can add to a small window to make it large.
I keep reading stuff like "obviously, all brutalist architecture is shit", or "obviously, we all hate graffiti", or "obviously, we all think modern electronic music is slop", and I really just think Scott is being close-minded.
They said this about impressionist painters, they said this about Stravinsky (there was a literal riot during the premiere of the Rite of Spring), they said this about jazz, they said this about Skrillex.
I genuinely like seeing any graffiti on the streets, because I think it's cool that someone decided to spend their time creating a message that was important to them at the time. Even if it's a tag, even if it's "Tom is gay" (something I saw recently), someone still went outside and spent their time and money creating this message.
Nowadays we think Pompeii graffiti is really cool, a relic of how people used to live back then, a reminder that those people were exactly like us, had the same impulses, dreams, and they hung around bored just like us. You can choose to view modern graffiti like this, or you can go online and post "heh, kids these days don't understand REAL art".
All art is language. If you don't like brutalist architecture, that doesn't mean you have better or worse taste, it just means you and the architect don't speak the same language. I don't like metal music, but that doesn't mean people that listen to metal have worse taste, we just don't speak the same language.
I think the strongest argument on the pro-taste side is that if you engage a lot with a given art form -- because you care about it and it's important to you! -- you should still be able to enjoy that art form after long exposure.
IMO, the best art is that which works on multiple levels: The surface appeals to naive or casual audiences, but when you engage with it more, you discover hidden depths. Think of books that people keep re-reading year after year, each time finding some small detail they never before noted.
My worry is that we become increasingly dependent on "eyeball kicks" just to get our attention, and our ability to spot those secret treasures degrades as a result.
maybe not strip all the tricks so only 10 people can create and 10 can enjoy, but make it so 2-3 standard deviations above the median person, so a big majority won't be turned off by overused tricks, the remaining can find their higherbrow art in their niches, and we keep pulling everybody to higher standards?
The “what are these models, really?” thread you’re wrestling with is the honest substrate under any multi-agent claim - if you don’t have a sober mental model of what each agent is and isn’t, an eight-agent pipeline just compounds the confusion. That sobriety is exactly what I tried to design into Intersect Alpha rather than paper over: https://thiagopedicosaragiotto.substack.com/p/intersect-alpha-where-history-meets
Bad art panders. It doesn't matter if it panders by exploiting cheap tricks to capture an unsophisticated audience, or if it panders to the sneer of the sophisticated in-the-know crowd by exploiting knowing what is in and out and what the next beat of the conversation will be (sustainable micro-x-ing is so last year).
In either case, what elevates art has been lost because the intention was too limited. Either way, youre just a hack. True art is always, in some sense, aimed at something beyond the artist.
Juxtaposing childrens art with modern architecture is a red herring for this reason.
And there is great unsophisticated art, as every true art lover will tell you. Louis CKs favorite stand up bit was someone singing "sitting on a c*ck because I'm gay". Ricky Gervais thought he was liking it ironically, ie. from the position of sneer. Wrong! He liked it because it was funny, in a very pure way.
The musical equivalent of Lisa Frank is Vivaldi. And I still love both of them so much.
I love this comment. Vivaldi and Beethoven are how I’m getting my kids into classical music. And yeah it’s also just fun, almost pop music. (Tell me “Winter” pt. 1 isn’t a modern rock/metal song)
And yet, as Scott says here, the real classical music aficionados sneer at it as using cheap tricks and entry-level. Which is true!
Yeah, there's a band called Apocaliptica that did instrumental covers of Metallica with violins and cellos and the result sounds... surprisingly similar to Vivaldi's Winter, if a bit more on the low frequency end of the musical scale.
Far more modern, but I love Gustav Holst's Mars: Bringer of War as a super accessible example of classical music. It sounds like it could just have popped out of some epic space opera soundtrack (and related: my belief that the most influential "classical" composer of the 20th century will in hindsight end up being simply... John Williams).
Children of Bodom have a course on how to play Summer for two guitars :)
Children of Bodom is basically Bach on meth.
"Bach on Meth" sounds like a hardcore band name
Funny you should say that about Holst; the first time I heard of him, as someone not super into classical music, was when Mars, the Bringer of War was used as the opening theme song for the indie space video game Escape Velocity: Nova.
> Yeah, there's a band called Apocaliptica that did instrumental covers of Metallica with violins and cellos and the result sounds... surprisingly similar to Vivaldi's Winter, if a bit more on the low frequency end of the musical scale.
Arrangement takes plenty of skill of its own. After doing some transcribing of orchestral pieces, I considered trying to do some orchestral arrangement of other music, and quickly determined that I'd need a lot of training before I'd be able to do anything that actually made sense.
Oh for sure, far from me to not put some respect on Apocalyptica. They're great.
IIRC Holsts's Planets suite was used as temp tracks when the original Star Wars film was being edited, so John Williams's eventual soundtrack was directly inspired by it. For Mars, compare eg this track: https://youtu.be/Oo9GN--eoGk
My opinion is that Williams basically plagiarized Holst, and could have been sued for copyright violation if Holst wasn't already in the public domain. But I also think Williams is over-rated.
Imitating a vibe isn't plagiarism, none of the main motifs of the SW OST are lifted from Holst.
For that matter the theme of Star Trek: the Motion Picture is probably the one that most closely resembles Mars.
There was that weird musical plagiarism case a few years ago where Pharrell composed a new melody and then arranged and produced the record in a style pioneered by Marvin Gaye ... as an explicit tribute to Marvin Gaye.
But Marvin Gaye's heirs sued and the jury awarded them the royalties. I hope some appeals court explained that, no, that's not plagiarism.
Williams borrowed ideas from lots of composers but mostly knocked off Sibelius, I always thought.
> "it could just have popped out of some epic space opera soundtrack"
Funnily enough, the classic space sim game Escape Velocity Nova actually uses Mars: Bringer of War as it's main menu theme and it fits oh so perfectly.
You have no idea how much joy it brings me that two separate people made this same comment. AmbrosiaSW was a big chunk of my childhood.
IMO the other planets are worth listening to:
Saturn >>>>>>>>>>> Neptune >>>>>> Venus > Uranus > Jupiter >>>> Mercury >> Mars
There are numerous groups doing "classical" covers of rock songs. I heard one that does Tool. I think these are cool but I never understood why they don't have singers. Singers would make them less gimmicky I think.
I listened to a London Symphony Orchestra LP of rock hits in the 1970s. The tracks were all pretty dire, except for "Paint It Black" by the Rolling Stones, which worked really well.
A local public high school just opened their new theater/concert hall. They thought and thought about who to name it after, and then they realized that one of their oldest living graduates from the Class of 1950 is ... John Williams, the most classical musician that the students and their parents and their grandparents had enjoyed, the man with more Oscar nominations than anybody except Walt Disney.
And, it turned out, that ... Sure, Mr. Williams would be happy to come over for the dedication ceremony.
Who are these classical music aficionados who sneer at it? At Beethoven?
To be fair, I don't actually sneer at Beethoven and do listen to it sometimes, but his music no longer seems nearly as... exciting, as it used to when I was younger. The great works of Beethoven, Bach, Wagner, Schubert, etc, still do it for me although not as intensely as before, but from among Verdi's two dozen operas I like "several" (the usual suspects: Aida and Rigoletto and La Traviata), and if you go beyond masters and masterpieces, a work like Lucia di Lammermoor by Donzietti, which I viewed live last year, can be very much "meh".
In contrast, contemporary classical music like minimalism of Philip Glass and John Adams, even parody pieces by P.D.Q. Bach (Peter Schickele) that I nevertheless feel contain novel musical ideas or, indeed, John Willians the other commenter mentioned, do feel exciting to me, as does e.g. symphonic/operatic metal that can be seen as a musical evolution of "classical music" of early 1900s taken in a divergent direction from what is referred to as "modern classical". And I didn't like any of these (well, other than Williams) 20 years ago.
I'm not a musical theorist so there probably is more historical nuance to this, but basically it feels like that 1) I've essentially speedrun through the evolution of classical music taste such that most baroque/romantic/etc. music starts feeling like "cheap tricks", and now prefer supposedly "more sophisticated" music that was created by composers deliberately avoiding these elements; 2) I can still appreciate "truly great works", presumably because they have "that something" (further discussed in this comment thread: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/nostalgebraists-hydrogen-jukeboxes/comment/258323042)
But these are your personal preferences. There isn’t a hierarchy of taste that places the Philip Glass aficionado above the Beethoven aficionado.
How do you feel about Ligeti?
Ligeti too is brilliant.
As for the other commenter, no hierarchy was implied. I just feel my evolution in taste has rather directly mirrored the historical taste among classical composers as I understand it, and usually happening in form of chance discoveries (for example, I discovered Adams from Civilization 4 having "People are the Heroes" chorus from Nixon in China and noticing I really really liked it, and Ligeti from the Moon scene in Space Odyssey) rather than explicitly setting out to discover modern classical composers, so it feels like the direction my taste has evolved in isn't arbitrary, but rather mirrored the influences the composers faced when they were exploring new musical frontiers.
I have just recently discovered Ligeti. What a range! From Atmospheres (of 2001: A Space Odysssey fame) to the Etudes. If you like the Etudes, also check out Conlon Nancarrow.
i spent about 15 of the first 20 years of my life approximately on track to be a concert violinist, and i can tell you, this is *absolutely* real
the stereotype of the non-musician intelligentsia who've got a vinyl of the goldberg variations or the 9th symphony and think themselves cultured...
when i was thinking of trying out for the highly prestigious interlochen music program, i was going to have my performance piece be the violin arrangement of the first movement of bach's d minor keyboard concerto, and my teacher gently waved me off from this idea because bach was too pedestrian and the interlochen judges were basically hipsters
(i did not become a concert violinist)
I always imagined the advice to avoid often-played pieces for auditions/competitions was based less on jury-hipsterism than the fact that the members will have no doubt spent countless hours learning and teaching said pieces and are therefore likely to have strong and possibly idiosyncratic opinions about how they should be performed - god help you if you deviate in some way!
hmm
i think there was *some* of that, but there's also a lot of genuine hipsterism. it could have been something specific to the culture of that decade or so, maybe. i remember there was a strong emphasis on avant garde, on subverting the expectations of the establishment. weird time signatures, atonal keys. some of it was good, but sometimes it generalized in an ugly and hipsterish way.
i'll also note that, at the time, i thought a violin arrangement of a harpsichord concerto actually sounded kinda novel and interesting, maybe even subversive. there were so many chords, could an adaptation to string even be faithful? (i've since learned the Dm concerto is actually pretty commonly arranged for violin soloist, so maybe not)
I don't know of anyone who would sneer at Beethoven in general, but if you tell someone your favourite composer is Beethoven then they're likely to assume you're unsophisticated and don't have a deep knowledge. You need to pick someone slightly more obscure as your favourite composer.
Only if you've already got undisputed status and expertise can you get away with admitting that actually yes, Beethoven is still better than all of them.
”Tell someone” — whom?
Like sure, if you say that because the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth and the opening of the Moonlight Sonata are the only pieces of classical music you have heard.
A lot of the conversations about taste on this blog use this particular kind of taste snob as a bogeyman. The ones who eat foam and like paintings of gray squares.
Citizen Kane has often topped lists of the best films. But if we discussed films here, it would be like ”the real experts would laugh at you if you liked Citizen Kane.”
I have heard that Citizen Kane's enduring reputation first emerged in about 1944 in Italy among top Hollywood filmmakers who were shooting war documentaries of the US Army advancing up the peninsula. When they'd hit the vino each evening, they'd debate what's the best movie our business ever made. Slowly, a consensus formed around Citizen Kane.
If that is true, I'm guessing the most influential figure was Orson Welles' friend John Huston, with his titanic personality.
That strikes me as a pretty good set of bona fides for "Citizen Kane."
yeah there is definitely a version of that “normal distribution” meme with 5th-symphony-enthusiasts and Hammerklavier-enjoyers on the tails and Mahler afficianados sitting at the peak…
Some of us love the Hammerklavier sonata and Mahler...
Agreed, Mahler's great, just being facetious :) I think I'd choose hearing some random Mahler over the Hammerklavier fugue, even just listening along to that is too much for my brain to handle..
Where do you sit if your favorite piece of classical music is not the first movement of Beethoven's 5th, but the fourth movement of his 5th?
I don't know any classical music enthusiasts who would sneer at Beethoven as entry level for the genre. On the contrary, his works, most notably the late sonatas and quartets, the Missa Solemnis, the Grosse Fugue, the Diabelli Variations, are widely agreed to be the among the most sublime music ever written, in which one could lose years plumbing the depths.
Ah yes, but you've just picked some of the deeper cuts there. But if someone says their favourite ever symphony is Beethoven's Fifth then you're going to have a sneaking suspicion that they only really know the first four notes.
I think most people who think they've heard the 1812 Overture have only heard the bit with cannons.
To be fair, I've not heard the 1812 Overture to my knowledge (well, maybe as a kid, but I have no memory of ever having heard it).
Good point! There are also some delightful prog rock version of Beethoven and Vivaldi pieces, which doesn't seem like a coincidence.
Can you recommend any in particular? I like prog rock for the same reason I like Vivaldi and Lisa Frank. It's extremely colorful.
Kids like Mozart ‘s The Magic Flute too. Also Even Dozen Jug Band. To that they can play along with music on kazoos. Some great kazoo solos on that album.
Mozart started composing at five and loved poop jokes, no wonder he resonates with kids.
There is a Bach cover band called "Son of a Bach" with a few well-produced videos on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqcgtqNTyAJlsq5KbUJzykMZRkwFDNj9B
My music taste started out from guitar rock/metal originally, and I genuinely love these guys.
Vivaldi really is just pop music, but late Beethoven isn't. People don't get their kids into classical music by playing them his 15th quartet. And as a consequence, I've gotten bored of the four seasons after around 30 listens but can still enjoy late Beethoven after 80 or so.
A fascinating if baffling proposition. In what universe of 'taste' is it possible to love/appreciate Vivaldi and Lisa Frank equally?
(Disclosure: I have no idea who Lisa Frank is, but the example posted above seems more than sufficient).
I thought it was bubblegum pop.
"Sugar, Sugar" by the Archies is probably the apotheosis of the form:
https://youtu.be/8s7-kdWwq48?si=YXRRYqH7yLgTqHyj
Have you considered introducing your daughter to Chattanooga Choo-Choo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hae8bYKARr4)? All of the trainy goodness with all the artistic heft attached to it being 1940s Glenn Miller Orchestra jazz.
As a kid I actually loved "The Barbarian", Emerson Lake & Palmer's 1970 prog rock rendition of Bela Bartok's Allegro Barbaro (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgTtqvYyUKk&list=RDrgTtqvYyUKk). This may attributed to me having superior taste because I was just built different or to the fact that absent YouTube I had to do with my dad's collection of LPs for music and couldn't just have perfectly optimized slop shoved in my ears. Funny enough, one of the biggest draws for me is that it also evoked train imagery! Specifically the speeding up part that starts at 1:26, with its extremely tight beat, like a steam train chuffing and clanking. I henceforth proclaim the Train Theory of Music: the objectively best music is that which resembles or evokes a train in some way.
Thus: John Coltrane.
My 4yo is MAD for coltrane... Also electronic music weirdly (it's "calm music" because no one sings in there).
train songs:
take the A train (basie and duke ellington) of course
mystery train (elvis is popular with my 3yo nephew somehow)
freight train blues (dylan, funny voice)
downtown train (tom waits, the other style of funny voice :)
this train (wax taylor - "my first trip hop album")
choo choo mama (ten years after, the time they'll need to understand the track)
scenic railway (serge gainbourg, never too early to learn french)
Oh let me add some:
Peace Train (Cat Stevens, yet another style of funny voice)
Train Song (Vashti Bunyan)
Goodbye Desolate Railroad (Silver Mt. Zion, okay, this one's not for a child's attention span, but still very relevant here, checks all the boxes for [things that make the proud unsophisticados recoil in disgust])
Video bonus:
Star Guitar (the greatest train-themed music video ever conceived)
Foreign language bonus:
Remedium a.k.a. Wsiąść do pociągu (Maryla Rodowicz, because that's my own childhood, and 3yo me can fully vouch for it)
Woah, A Silver Mt Zion reference...I thought I was the only one who remembered them.
As for train songs, is 4 years old still too young for Casey Jones by the Grateful Dead? If so, I will instead nominate Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison Blues.
Edit: a couple more Dead tracks (no pun intended) I would throw in the mix: Dark Hollow, He's Gone, and The Monkey And The Engineer.
I wouldn't worry about something like ASMZ ever being forgotten. Too important, too unique.
Case in point - someone casually mentioning Vashti Bunyan would have, at one point, let's say 30 years ago, been a much bigger mindfuck, and yet here were are.
Maybe they had more reach than I gave them credit for, then. Good to know!
Steve Goodman's "I Am the Train They Call the City of New Orleans."
Steve Reich, Different Trains.
NB not recommended for toddlers
Consider Doc Watson's 'There Goes the Train that Carried My Girl From Town' and Jimmie Rodger's 'Waiting on a Train.'
Or a song from 1972 which clearly percolated my child brain: Albert Hammond, "I'm A Train"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxpmoyT_v5M&list=RDGxpmoyT_v5M&start_radio=1
Or Pat Metheny's Last Train Home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9vQ_y9JJ1E&list=RDV9vQ_y9JJ1E&start_radio=1
Obviously the theory is correct! Now excuse me while I go pick some cherries.
What, no love for Ozzy Osbourne ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMDFv5m18Pw
You may want to consider renaming the theory, lest it suggest the best music is by Train :-)
That said, growing up I too loved what I saw as my dad's music. ELP, Jethro Tull, The Moody Blues. Enough concept and play with ideas and depth to be interesting, but not so much as to be unapproachable.
Sounds like your old man and I would get along famously.
If we're recommending train music for children with some modicum of artistic merit, may I suggest the album "All Aboard!" by John Denver, which was the last album he released before his death, and consisted of children's music themed around trains. I apparently loved it as a young child.
I did a show of photographs I took riding all the elevated trains in New York City, and I made a playlist of train songs. I love train songs. All the way from "Orange Blossom Special" to the deepest Bed-Stuy wrap. And of course Hank Williams singing "Rambling Man"
Brian Setzer - Mystery Train Kept A Rollin; Fred Eaglesmith - I Like Trains; Jethro Tull - Locomotive Breath; XPRTNovice - Gobble, Snarf, Snap; Louis Jordan - Choo Choo Ch'Boogie; Charlie Barnet - Skyliner; Ray McKinley - Pennsylvania Six-Five Thousand
No idea how kids would feel about them though.
I have never been able to find a satisfactory version of Chattanooga Choo-Choo, much to my chagrin. Tap dancing also doesn't carry over well to just-audio.
This is all well and good until you’re on the wrong side of that glass screen and everyone else is enjoying something that you can’t stand. I remember everyone online praising “Ready Player One” to high heaven so I read it and was shocked by how badly written the novel was. It felt like the sort of slop novel an AI trained on 80s nostalgia would have churned out.
At least if we all have to learn to appreciate featureless spheres that’s an overcorrection in the right direction.
I think learning to know oneself and the general taste so that you can read people praising something and still guess it won't be for you is a useful time and money saving skill, but it doesn't need to be accompanied by lamentations about how bad general taste is. You're the outlier, it's fine, but a morally neutral fact.
It's one thing I've learned when following seasonal anime, actually. It ranges from occasional genuine great art to worthless slop and having a quick ability to grasp which is which from the signs (some obvious, some less so) saves me a lot of pointless first episode watches.
Well it would have been within my area of interest if its quality had lived up to my minimum standards. The specific genre is well within my wheelhouse. I loved Neuromancer and Snow Crash for example.
But I mean quality too, not just genre. I think I clocked pretty early on that RPO was essentially millennial nostalgiaslop and wasn't all that interested (I would be more keen about nostalgia if so much of the nerd part of my generation wasn't having it so deeply rooted into corporate branding - and I love Back to the Future and Star Wars as much as the next guy). I watched the movie on streaming, decently entertaining for a mindless two hours, but wouldn't bother much with the book unless I was bored and didn't have much else at hand.
It’s true that I no longer take book recommendations from anonymous Reddit forums.
It's a skill always learned the hard way, admittedly.
For me that RPO was a good example of differing criteria of quality - Gibson's sentences and world building much richer but RPO excellent page-turner construction.
> It's one thing I've learned when following seasonal anime, actually. It ranges from occasional genuine great art to worthless slop and having a quick ability to grasp which is which from the signs (some obvious, some less so) saves me a lot of pointless first episode watches.
I would love if you wrote more about these signs.
It varies from era to era. Right now, the most obvious sign is of course stuff like a very long title, possibly involving the words “other world”, and a male character who looks like a default asset surrounded by hot girls. Easiest skip ever. Knowing other subgenres also helps, for example the “villainess” subgenre is now almost as overdone and cliched and I generally skip anything in that unless I see enough recs from people I trust to think it might be worth checking out.
Looking at what the source material is helps. Light novels have a few hits and a lot of misses; most hits will involve unusual premises, like mysteries or satire (not parody!) of some kind. Josei manga are among the best guarantees: they're not adapted often so when they are usually it's a great literary story. Ditto for non-light novel adaptations, with a slightly lower batting rate. Seinen manga also tend to have a good track record unless they're clearly just seinen because they're pulpy sex and violence shows, that's rarer these days and it's a matter of taste if you care for that. Shonen action you usually know what you're getting, especially if it's Jump. High spectacle, often mediocre to good writing. Shonen and shojo romcom, it's a bit of a toss up. Historical setting anime tend to do better than most. Videogame adaptations are rarely worth it, either they're soulless tie ins to shitty games or they're inferior versions of a story you’d experience better in game form.
Anime originals are the biggest unknown but they're rare and often worth checking out for me unless they clearly look uninteresting. Some of the best shows of the last years were originals (Odd Taxi, Apocalypse Hotel).
Ultimately a lot of it is down to a combination of vibes and priors. Who is the author, who is directing, what studio is doing this, and what kind of audience seems excited for it.
I'm curious what you think of Bofuri. Personally, I liked it but it sounds like you might not.
I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it enough to follow it either. I find it to be pretty inoffensive? My favourite MMO-themes anime is definitely Shangri-La Frontier, which has more of an actual action slant. Bofuri is mostly meant to be cute and cozy; I think if it had leaned even harder on the line of "the devs are completely dogshit at balancing, and every attempt to rebalance they do because of the MC ends up causing even more broken strats to emerge" I could have found it funny enough to stick with.
When I say "videogame adaptations" I don't mean anime about fictional games, I mean anime adapted from real games. These often suffer from problems. VNs for example can do stuff like unholy mashes of multiple routes, or need to speedrun the story, or just lose the inherent qualities of the medium that made that story enjoyable (a prime example is Danganronpa, where I love the games but the anime was very meh). Other games simply don't have much of a story to begin with and the anime has to cobble something together. Not that there aren't counter-examples though. I hear good things of the Uma Musume shows, and Rage of Bahamut, despite being a gacha mobile TCG adaptation, is genuinely one of the most fun and entertaining adventure anime you can watch - all with its own completely original story only loosely based on the cards' lore.
What's the problem with everyone enjoying something you don't? I've never seen the appeal of watching sports, but I don't have a problem with people enjoying watching sports; I'm glad they're getting enjoyment from it. And in fact I'd say whatever problems there are with sports as a celebrity culture or encouraging lots of air travel don't apply to books that lots of people like even if you don't.
Well it’s interesting. I don’t have to worry about aesthetic standards in sports. It’s all entirely objective. That’s what I find liberating about it.
Sure, Usain Bolt ran beautifully but you didn’t need to rely on your feelings to tell you that, a stopwatch could tell you that.
There surely must be more to it, though; otherwise, why bother watching Usain Bolt run instead of just glancing at the stopwatch afterwards?
If the stopwatch is the “critic” then the run is the actual “art”.
Don't be so sure. There's a popular point of view that NBA basketball has been ruined by optimization of shot selection, in that everything is either a 3-point attempt (from outside the arc) or a very close attempt. This dislike is an aesthetic judgement.
And yet the reigning MVP (and a front runner for repeat MVP) is a guy who shoots a lot of midrange 2-pointers.
I don't think there's anything wrong with other people enjoying things you don't, but personally, I'm in a position where a genre I once loved is now full of works that don't appeal to me, and contains few to no new works I enjoy. It feels like something of value to me has been genuinely replaced. I had a discussion with someone about this just the other day, where we laid out how our tastes diverged, and they said that "it's good that there's stuff being made to appeal to both of us." And I said that I was glad that there were things being made that appealed to them, but I couldn't come up with an example made to appeal to me in the last fifteen years.
Depending on your tastes, the risk of something like that happening can be quite real.
Well, I'm also in that position, but I suspect that's because I'm now a lot older than I once was. I can still enjoy the things I used to enjoy, but I don't like new things in the same style. I suspect this is partially due to the fact that now I get tired more easily. Calling up memories still works. (You need to vary your "favorites" a lot, though, to avoid wearing them out.)
OTOH, it's also true that good editors seem to have largely disappeared. (They were always rare.) This may be an effect of either media consolidation or of self-publishing becoming easier. (IIRC, the "Skylark of Space" was rejected by 26 editors before the 27th accepted it.)
My tastes are more demanding in some ways than they used to be, but it's definitely possible for me to find new things I like in the same style. Some of my all-time favorites, I've found within the last eight years. But, none of them were *made* within the last eight years.
It could be that it's just harder to find the stuff you'd like now?
Recommendation algorithms are definitely slanted toward advertisement. Possibly not everywhere, but frequently.
I once was in an online discussion where a man complained that having *The Vixen War Bride* -- which is excellent military SF -- in his Amazon books led to his recommendations being slanted toward romance, but he couldn't take it out because he wanted to know when the sixth book was coming out.
> I'm in a position where a genre I once loved is now full of works that don't appeal to me
Have you burned out or are publishers categorising badly?
I'm a big fan of fantasy novels, but have no interest in Romantasy. If I click a best new fantasy list its usually full of Romantasy. That's not a problem with the public, its the marketing department failing to realise the obvious, that the ven diagram has little overlap and separate lists are needed.
With books in particular, it's a combination of categorization and changing genre trends. With video games, which is the medium I actually had in mind in my previous comment, it's mostly changing genre trends, and not an issue of categorization. I wouldn't say I'm particularly burned out; on the rare occasions where I find works that appeal to my tastes, I'm as enthusiastic about them as ever, but the tendencies of the games themselves are changing.
A few years ago, I went through a period where I was so deeply invested in a game I was playing that I couldn't help pinging friends with screenshots of it, because I had to share how charismatic and artful I found it. Same for the direct sequel to that game. Then, when I played the sequel to *that* game, I found it so much less compelling that I struggled to muster the interest to play it even when I was really bored and had loads of free time to spare. The difference had essentially nothing to do with changes in my mood, and everything to do with changes to the work itself.
I'll bite, what changed in gaming that puts you off?
A lot, honestly, and more than I got into in that previous discussion I mentioned; there are exceptions to each individual trend, but when taken all together, it's extraordinarily difficult for me to find games that still appeal to me.
I grew up a huge fan of JRPGs in particular, and I still am, when I can find ones that meet my tastes. But I have a few primary tastes (basically, must-haves, or things that are central to my experience,) and a few secondary tastes which have gotten harder and harder to satisfy with time.
Probably the biggest negative trend from my perspective has been the shift away from abstraction, towards direct representation. More photorealistic graphics, intended to represent characters and environments exactly as they are. Everything stays at a 1:1 scale, with no "world map" type representations which compress the scale of parts of the game world which aren't central to the narrative focus. Full voice acting for all lines, action combat rather than more stylized modes, etc. etc. A lot of players see this as an unalloyed positive, but for me it's very much not. The more directly you represent the characters, the world, the action and such, the less I'm able to leave to my imagination, and the less leeway my suspension of disbelief has. People have been saying that the graphics in the best animated games look "like movies" for more than fifteen years now, but I've never seen one yet which I thought looked like a movie with *good acting*. And I'd prefer a well-written book over a well written but badly acted movie any day. Lack of abstraction in the environments makes it harder for me to suspend my disbelief in the worldbuilding ("why has this supposedly epic journey covered about ten miles on foot?") Lack of abstraction in the action makes it harder for me to suspend disbelief for the high-stakes confrontations ("Why is this person slowly getting up from a kneeling position while I wail on him with a sword? His lack of a reaction other than damage numbers over his head makes this feel painfully artificial.") Seeing all encounters represented on-screen, and then having all of them amble around blithely unaware of my party until I come within distance to read the bottom row on an eye chart, makes them feel far more fake to me than random encounters ever did.
Apart from all that though, over the last twenty years or so, I feel like there's been a general trend towards less ambitious, more "safe" writing. The late 90s were my high water mark for optimism in the medium, where not a lot of the games had amazing writing, but developers clearly had ambition to develop video games as a storytelling medium, and I thought that games were going to become more and more narratively impressive with time, not just more technologically sophisticated. I've played games with more polished writing since, but by then, I had to accept that the industry as a whole just hadn't moved in that direction. There are exceptions, but most of them are in genres that aren't especially to my tastes, when JRPGs in particular used to be one of the most narratively focused and rich genres in the medium of video games. One of my biggest pet peeves in this subject is that often, when I complain about the weakness in the writing of some game with a budget in the hundreds of millions, someone will counter that it's silly for me to expect any different, that the fans obviously enjoy the game, that having sophisticated writing clearly isn't the point of the genre, and that it makes no sense to expect the developers to put that kind of effort into writing when they get more return on spectacle. When I hear that, I think of the God of War series, which was notorious in its first few installments for being blunt, repetitive, and reliant on spectacle, but in its current incarnations stands out as one of the few franchises in the medium known across genres for the quality of its writing. If there's any series where the developers had no reason to expect the audience to care if they increased the level of their writing, and the audience had no reason to expect the developers to start, it would be God of War. But the developers pivoted, the audience noticed, and the series won genuine acclaim for it. In series that once numbered among my favorite games though, the trend has overwhelmingly been in the other direction.
There are a bunch of other minor trends, or consequences of the ones I've already mentioned, that make it hard for me to personally find games I enjoy, but this is already getting kind of excessive as a comment. But the upshot is, when I find games these days that I'm genuinely enthusiastic about, they're almost always indie games. But, the games which I *am* genuinely into, I'm every bit as enthusiastic about as the ones I grew up on.
I'm curious: which game series?
Trails, the transition from the Crossbell arc with Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure to the Trails of Cold Steel arc.
The Trails series always had kind of anime-tropey writing, but for the first couple of arcs, it felt to me like the anime tropes were acting as rough guidestones for an extremely engaging, well-characterized story. In each arc, the action starts out relatively small scale and low stakes, and there are a lot of people who're fans of the series who struggle to get invested at the beginning of each arc, and gradually become more so with the rising action, and when I've shared my feelings about the transition, a lot of them assume this is just me reacting to the low stakes of another arc beginning. But that's not the case at all; the previous arcs immediately grabbed my attention because I found the characters charismatic and the setting fun and interesting to engage with. I just don't feel any of that charisma in Cold Steel; I feel like the anime-tropiness has metastasized to form the core of the characters' personalities, and the conversations all feel much less natural and more formulaic.
Also, the addition of voice acting, and transition from character sprites with hand drawn portrait art, dramatically weaken my ability to emotionally engage with it. It's not that I have some great affection for sprite art, or thought that Trails' was especially great, but at least it gestured at body language while leaving the details to the imagination. Trails of Cold Steel replaced the sprites with 3D character models with fully visible body language, but the actual physical acting just feels totally unnatural to me. Likewise with the voice acting; better to have no voices than to have a bad voice performance. It's like replacing a good book with a badly acted stage pantomime. The new channels of communication with the audience don't improve the experience when you use them badly.
A lot of fans of the series agree that the writing goes downhill with the transition from Crossbell to Cold Steel, but a lot of them also don't care that much. The gist of the feedback I've heard is that a transition from 5/5 writing to 4/5 writing is fine if it's accompanied by improving gameplay, animation and voice acting. But it's hard for me to overstate how big the gap is in my opinion. The earlier Trails games aren't the best written media I've ever encountered, but they were compelling enough to make a huge impression on me. Like, if the earlier Trails games were a student applying to college, and I were their teacher, I'd be enthusiastically writing recommendation letters to any college they wanted to attend, and even personally calling up offices of admissions to vouch for them. Trails of Cold Steel wouldn't be the worst student in my class by any stretch, but I'd also be thinking "maybe college just isn't for you."
While we're at it, are the publishers chasing the most popular genre, leaving the less popular genres where they could still make a profit?
Do grocery stores stock only the most popular food categories?
Some do, but I suspect a big part of it is personal biases on the part of their employees. They love (romance)fantasy, they publish lots of "fantasy" authors, and get great sales. The fantasy department is doing great. Why look deeper?
Hmmmm.
I think insofar as that applies, it's a vicious cycle. They hire people who can get behind the product.
Or people who regard it as commodified as the parent company does.
It's fine up to the point where the people who don't share your tastes end up in control of the media establishment and proceed to tear apart everything you used to love. The nearest anyone has ever come to recapturing the magic of TNG is a 2007 video game, because the people currently running Star Trek actively despise the original series and everything it stood for--and because enough people liked DS9 and the new slop that there's nonzero money to be made.
We'll never get a solid Lord of the Rings miniseries in my lifetime, because, again, the only people who can be bothered to do anything with the name actively hate everything the original series tried to say.
Every day, I have to look at a horrifying, disfigured reflection of my own face, because my boss got a paid ChatGPT account and thought it would be cute to have it make a "Ghibli-style" version of a group photo we took, and everybody else likes it so much that it's remained on the wall ever since, despite my objections and despite the obvious distortions.
"We'll never get a solid Lord of the Rings miniseries in my lifetime, because, again, the only people who can be bothered to do anything with the name actively hate everything the original series tried to say."
Apparently season three of the Rings of Power will be unleashed upon us in November. Can't wait! (Mostly to see if they managed to out-dumb themselves yet again and to engage in all the critical reaction videos).
I can't even do that. Even the RedLetterMedia videos on the Picard and Discovery series quickly became more sad than funny. I guess I like trains too much to enjoy watching trainwrecks.
"Let us remain together a little, we who have loved each other so sadly, and have fought so long", to quote from "The Man Who Was Thursday".
I can't watch reviews of modern Trek because that is too deep a wound and I have been burned too many times. I did watch something about the newest Trek (which seems to have crashed and burned, it's not getting renewed for a second season) but mostly because that was "Starfleet High: Teens in Space" and not really Trek. Even that was only tolerable in very small doses.
"Rings of Power", however, is so absolutely *stupid* that it reduces me to a state of childlike wonder once again. How can somebody get this so wrong? And yet they do!
Some of the faults are fixable; the main problem is the showrunners have no freakin' idea how to write *television* as distinct from movies, so their pacing stinks. They only had sixteen episodes over two seasons and they squandered time on irrelevant crap so that the show was simultaneously too fast and too slow. They also can't write in the high style, and all their efforts to sound faux-Tolkien come across like lead balloons.
Some things were good, or not bad; even with their best endeavours they couldn't ruin the Dwarves, and that's down to solid performances from the two Durins and that there is some actual chemistry between prince Durin and Elrond.
The music is doing Trojan work in keeping the show afloat. Bear McCreary is earning his money twice over.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUs3s3nWXMI&list=RDNUs3s3nWXMI&start_radio=1
When they get out of their own way and let the story breathe, it works. I like the actor playing Elendil, even though I don't know him from anywhere else, and if they gave him a decent go in the part I'd really like to see what he can do with it. When eventually (and too late) they gave Celebrimbor's actor something to do, I was impressed.
So it's a curate's egg of a show, and *could* be better than it is, if the main problems were addressed and fixed. The depressing part is, they leave in little Easter eggs for the lore-cels, with blink and you'll miss it "hey that was Dramborleg in the corner there!" scenes, So *somebody* on the writing team has read the books and knows the details.
But the bad parts are bad. So bad, in fact, they become ridiculous and so it's easy to mock them. And that's where the fun comes in, because much as I do in fact enjoy screaming at my screen "NO, YOU [DELETED DELETED DELETED], THAT IS [DELETED] NOT HOW [DELETED] TREBUCHETS WORK!!!", nobody can keep that up all the time.
Enter people with a sense of humour and way more creativity than Amazon Prime's marketing team.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJiYZhnI2-c&list=PLyJrI7fwl_bP8yueSwegq_msQL_Rt5nTS&index=15
That's where the anticipation lies. Getting the band back together so we can all join in the comments on the reviews after watching the latest episode together (or at least it feels like together, when we're all united in "did you see *that*???" "yeah I know, I couldn't believe it either").
I realize this may sound weird and counter-intuitive, but IMO the best item in the Modern Trek corpus is "Lower Decks". Yes, the animated comedy show. It is more faithful to the spirit and lore of Star Trek than anything I've seen since DS9, and I loved it.
On a side note, I never liked watching trainwrecks or reactions to it. My taste has not been deep (corrupted) enough to reach that kind of spotted sphere. That's why everytime I heard that a show is only successful because its haters are watching it unironically, I really couldn't relate, not even considering if that's really what's happening or not.
I avoided Rings of Power entirely because I knew they didn't have the rights to "Of The Rings of Power and the Third Age" or "Akallabêth" and anyone who would have (or would seek, if they haven't already read those) the level of engagement with the original that would be needed to do something interesting with it would decline to adapt it.
The clips I've seen have great set design (Númenor looks great, for example) and some good acting and directing, but the plotting and writing is exactly as awful as I expected. I can absolutely see an actor and even a director (TV episode directors have much less ability to shape the show than movie directors do) taking a script and just doing their best with it, but there are only two reasons a writer would take on a project that is intrinsically compromised - either for the money, or because they have a giant ego and think they can do better than Tolkien did. And either of those is going to result in something that isn't worth my time.
> We'll never get a solid Lord of the Rings miniseries in my lifetime, because, again, the only people who can be bothered to do anything with the name actively hate everything the original series tried to say.
Okay, but... the author is already dead. Why are you expecting anything more out of the IP when the vision behind it is gone? Why not look for new stories by new people?
Because the Peter Jackson LotR trilogy was pretty good and it came out decades after Tolkien's death. We already have a proof of concept here.
I wouldn't expect masterpieces but I would like to be able to expect something better than the slop Amazon is putting out.
In the comment to which you are replying, I listed an example of a new story by new people: the 2007 game Mass Effect has no ties to Star Trek except that the people who made it loved the same parts of it that I did.
So I don't see the problem. There's nothing stopping new people from making new, good things. If anything, shouldn't we be promoting the creation of new IPs over milking existing ones forever?
I did that when I purchased Mass Effect, but that doesn't change the fact that legacy media are all about remakes and reboots. If Amazon were to make a really good fantasy miniseries with no ties whatsoever to LotR, I'd promote that, but they're not doing that no matter how many times I tell people they should.
I would like for them to stop desecrating the corpse in the meantime.
> We'll never get a solid Lord of the Rings miniseries in my lifetime, because, again, the only people who can be bothered to do anything with the name actively hate everything the original series tried to say.
This seems to me to be mostly a problem with copyright law. If anyone was allowed to make such a miniseries, 100's of fans would have a go, and some would succeed.
Any arguments about copyright law have to contend with the fact that it didn't stop the original works from existing. TNG, LotR, &c all managed to come about under the old regimes, and wouldn't have been affected by Disney's lobbying to increase copyright durations.
As others have pointed out, there's no law stopping these people from making new original stories that are good.
Someone enjoying something I don't is not a problem.
EVERYONE enjoying something I don't is a huge problem.
Investors funnel money into things people enjoy. There are exceptions, and I'm grateful for those: passion projects, prestige-builders, etc.. But consensus aesthetics are going to push cultural production in specific directions.
It's true that the market supports a lot of variety, but new high-quality work in any genre or format is still rare. So when the whole world praises something that sucks, your primal threat response kicks in.
Strangely, this doesn't work in architecture. 75% of people dislike modern architecture, but it still dominates.
True, but there's a principle-agent problem with architecture (and other communal cultural products). The buyers are not the (sole) consumers.
Buyers are *very* conscious about what the market will prefer. Their entire livelihood depends upon it.
There are effectively two kinds of architects at work today. The great majority are those who apply skill, training and talent to juggle the many and often conflicting priorities involved in fulfilling a client's requirements from a simple ranch house to a tower block; these architects have to be a combination of craftsman, technician, diplomat, project manager and artist. Then there is the very small number of world-famous prima-donna architects who regard themselves first and foremost as artists, only very minimally beholden to those who commission them, and highly reluctant to compromise their artistic visions. They are generally selected by clients, individual or corporate, whose principal requirement is for structures which will stun, impress or awe viewers, with functionality usually coming a distant second. I would guess it is their work which mostly accounts for the 75% of people hostile to contemporary architectuyre.
Hmm, I think it's not only the prima-donnas. My impression is that it's also the materials and shapes used by the first type of architects that piss off the 75% folks. These are not automatically pleasing to the eye. Perhaps it's not the architects' fault; they have to do as cheaply as possible? But then why wasn't it like this 100 years ago? Are the artificial-looking, non-natural materials so much cheaper? Or the small, wide steel-framed windows and flat roofs? The more I think about it, the more I feel that it must be a fashion that's spread mostly among architects, and not laypeople.
If modern building technology existed 100 years ago, people would have built modern buildings 100 years ago.
And are you seriously trying to argue that people hate having floor-to-ceiling windows?
I guess this still leaves the original question, why do architects can still afford to be elitist and not succumb to the greater masses.
To the extent that that's actually true, it's primarily a consequence of building regulations. Plus cost and practicality considerations.
I found Ready Player One both brilliant when I read it (2017) and awful when I reread it (2020). I'd had some life experiences in the middle.
On the other hand some stuff which is widely decried as awful by sophisticates (e.g. Harry Potter) I still find brilliant.
Ready Player One was an odd one to me, I read the book and enjoyed it throughout, then finished it, thought about it, and realized I hated it. I found it worked really well as a 'page turner': always interested and wondering what will happen next... but then I got to the end and looked back and realized that at basically every moment, what *actually* happened next was basically the most predictable thing - it was constantly threatening to do something interesting, but really never did.
And it *felt* like it had something to say about technology and culture and escapism... but it never actually says anything interesting. There's a potential critique of both VR as an escape from real-world problems, but the predominant message of the book seems to be "VR is awesome".
... and there's also a potential critique of becoming so fixated on a past 'golden age'. I've seen it pointed out that in the story, culture seems to have stagnated due to its fixation on 80s culture... but this doesn't come up in the actual story and the message of the book on this front seems to be "the 80s are awesome".
The only thing I remember the book actually having anything 'interesting' to say is a "religion is bullshit" speech, delivered in like the third chapter by the narrator directly to the audience, with absolutely no relevance to the plot.
My favorite bit of Ready Player One ended up being the short-story prequel that Andy Weir (author of the Martian/Project Hail Mary) wrote: https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/lacero.html which actually provides a motive for the main antagonist of the story... something that Ready Player One kinda forgot to do.
So, yeah, I get why people like the book: I thought it was fine as popcorn entertainment, but it really didn't have any meat on the bones if you're looking for more than that.
> There's a potential critique of both VR as an escape from real-world problems, but the predominant message of the book seems to be "VR is awesome".
Well, it is! I for one would love to live in a virtual world if I could only escape this meat-body.
I do largely agree – I wasn't looking for a "VR is terrible and nobody should use it" – but setting your story in a crapsack world where it seems like at least part of the problem is that people are retreating into a cyber world... it seems like you should at least acknowledge and engage with that idea.
(And apparently Andy Weir felt the same way, since the short-story linked above also raises that question and uses it as part of the antagonist's motivation)
For whatever it's worth, I think it's reasonable to enjoy a book until the end, and then realize that it failed to pay off the time spent, retroactively making the entire experience less enjoyable. In some cases, a different ending would make all the difference.
Ready Player One played heavily on 80s nostalgia in the same way (IMO) that the Wayans brothers' Scary Movie series plays on horror movie tropes. The in-the-moment enjoyment is largely the result of recognizing what's being referenced, but at the end, it hasn't done anything but remind you of better things.
Much like (IMO) LLM-generated writing, for reasons outlined above.
There are multiple TV shows that I enjoyed up until the Season Finale ended with a cliffhanger, at which point I said "well, I guess I'm never watching that again."
> then realize that it failed to pay off the time spent, retroactively making the entire experience less enjoyable. In some cases, a different ending would make all the difference.
The anime Orb is a huge offender here. The ending is so terrible that it retroactively ruins the entire show. (Spoiler: Every character dies without accomplishing anything, and the show was lying to you about the setting and premise the whole time.)
I feel this way about the Star Wars movies, but with an important caveat: I deeply intellectually appreciate Star Wars exists and makes lots of people very happy. I do find it nearly intolerable, personally (sorry), but I find it easy enough to avoid most of the time. (This is just one example, Star Wars is not the only thing I find nearly intolerable but appreciate the existence of.)
I do think it's a bit of a shame there's some attention getting drained away from more interesting things, but I suppose that's always true, and as a consumer I'm also not interested in spending all of my time on more high-brow works; there is a time and place for matters of higher taste, and it does not (for me, at least) appear to be "always, for everything."
So I try to imagine that people who are really into Star Wars (sorry, again, this is just my personal example, there are definitely worse things, and if you like the Star Wars movies, I hope I am managing to convey that this is fine) have chosen that this is not where they particularly want to exercise their taste, they're just there for the cheap thrills, like going on a rollercoaster ride where the outcome is clear but you're still having fun. A fun romp. I too enjoy a fun a romp. Maybe these people have refined taste on some other subject.
I do really mean it, by the way - I play incremental click games to scrub my brain and relax after a long day at work. Shark Incremental is not particularly sophisticated (maybe it has some non-zero amounts of sophistication, I don't mean to decry it), it's just Number Go Up, and sometimes that's what I need.
And then once that's done for the day, I go back to listening to atonal music with no detectable melody or lyrics and enjoy it. :)
Hi - I've always appreciated your comments on Scott's posts. Great to see you here!
Thank you for the kind comment! I see you're in the habit of leaving kind comments - thank you for doing that, that makes the internet a much nicer place in general! (I don't do it nearly often enough, really.)
Allow me to share some music as a token of thanks (I'll drop two here so you can actually pick the category you prefer):
- Atonal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG29DxXOmhc (Orphx - Drowning For You; admittedly has some homeopathic components of melody, especially toward the end)
- Melodic with lyrics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVbc_Fwbt50 (Heilung - Anoana)
Wishing you a great day. :)
When it comes to movies, just watch the ones targeted to your level of taste. When it comes to buildings, that's not really an option, so you're better off making buildings more people like instead of fewer. It sucks to be one of the fewer, but that's better than it sucking to be one of the more.
Ready Player One was the geek fanboy version of Twilight or Fifty Shades of Gray.
Do you get an urge to put the featureless spheres in your mouth, though?
I don't understand the obsession with trying to define good and bad taste. Why not just admit that what we call good taste is just a matter of context (social, demographic, historic, economic, cultural, whatever)?
I think it's much more meaningful to speak of discernment, i.e. the habit and interest of engaging with something more deeply, paying attention, but whether you like something, whether it moves you, that's deeply subjective. And as to whether it's objectively good, isn't that meaningless without defining an objective? Good with regard to what?
Because some people have the power to shape public spaces according to their definition of good taste and to strangle any other option by denying them funding, removing them from educational curricula, etc.
What does that prove though? It doesn't prove their definition of good taste is right.
It proves nothing, but you still have to wake up and go to work each morning in a world without good taste.
My point is there is no such thing, except with reference to more-or-less arbitrary social norms. Maybe you can argue some powerful people have imposed a niche preference on a public who don't share it. But you can't say that either the powerful people or the public have 'good' taste.
God is the ultimate judge of what makes art good or not. But in the meantime, for those of us still living, there's a clear motivation to answer the same question as best we can with our limited means.
I don't think it's clear, and even if there's motivation, it doesn't mean there's a point to the effort. I think people who are trying to argue for good taste are just playing status games, trying to prove their own sense of style is somehow objectively superior.
Then the point is to bend re "more-or-less arbitrary social norms" in the direction of my own tastes so I can live in a world filled with beautiful things instead of ugly things. If you've read the whole series on taste, you've seen at least one case where a municipal government went against popular consensus, ignoring the results of a poll and instead installing a piece of hideous art.
I agree but I don't see why you're trying to win this debate on faux-objective grounds. Especially if your objection is that some elites have steam rolled the public, you're likely to lose that debate (you won't easily convince Avant Garde architects that you know better). Better to argue on democratic grounds, no?
You're literally commenting on a thread where Scott posits that there is such a thing, and offers a very plausible mostly objective definition of why it's not more-or-less arbitrary. Did you read the post before commenting? Whether or not you then conclude that people with higher levels of taste are "better" is up for debate. But if it exists and some people think it matters then we can then say things like "the best art for each person is made by and for people with equal levels of taste as themselves." or "the more art you consume the higher your taste level gets whether you want it to or not". These are meaningful discussions to have, and I think Scott's definition helps a lot with clarifying by what taste even means beyond being "more-or-less-arbitrary"
But it doesn't. Even if it convinced you, you will forget it the first time you and Scott disagree about whether something in particular is tasteful or not.
But that's the thing, this kind of argument basically ONLY works about architecture. Why get mad over some shit in a museum or some books? There's other museums, other books. If you want a more democratic way to shape the public space I'm all for it but Scott is taking much broader aim in all these posts.
Because that shit is often paid by public monies and promoted in public education.
There's a kind of motte-and-bailey here, I think. The bailey is "people should stop having sophisticated taste because the idea that there are axes of human existence along which other people are more advanced than I am offends me" (for example Scott's remark "and I don’t consider this a character flaw" hints at some insecurity of this kind) and the motte is that for every sphere of culture there is some manifestation of it (school curriculum for books, the public space for architecture, publicly-funded museums for paintings..) where everyone can be regarded as being forced to partake in it or pay for it. But it's clear as day that this latter isn't the *real* issue Scott has with the concept of taste.
I find it hilarious that you are armchair psychoanalyzing our resident psychiatrist, but the words that you put in his mouth are a wild and unkind interpretation of what he actually said.
Who says I'm not armchair psychoanalyzing YOU! (joke)
I may be projecting this onto Scott a tad much but I think there's a lot of insecurity around "high culture" in the wider society and I don't think it's doing people any good, I think something is getting lost in the sense that culture could be better if more people felt free to contribute to art and "serious" culture in a general sense instead of going all "I don't know anything about it but..." or "did you know wine tasting is all fake and have you heard about the Sokal affair" and resentfully shying away from it.
(see also my reply to LS)
This whole series of posts seems to be trying to justify Scott's personal insecurities -- and thus it's really unclear what he's actually trying to get at.
I think it's interesting that he continually refers to poetry as the one area where he has "taste", however mediocre it is. However, he avoids talking about the one area where he very obviously has taste, to a high level -- writing essays. He makes a living from people having taste in essay reading. So to dismiss taste in general feels very strange.
The only reasonable justification I can think of is to reframe essay-taste as not being taste at all, but something objective. A good essay follows xyz rules of argumentation and logic etc. Which is also silly, considering Scott's own essays are meandering and sprawling, which is the main thing that makes them interesting.
Though I don't dispute the "personal insecurities" thing, it's worth observing that there actually is *plenty* of hectoring from many quarters throughout one's life about how important and valuable and admirable it is to have good taste in certain domains. Personal experience/personality probably dictates whether you instinctively feel more annoyed by the anti-"slop" or the anti-anti-"slop" faction.
I hear similar arguments about mass media a lot.
The low brow version of the criticism is that mass entertainment is expensive to produce and has economies of scale, so if the masses decide that they enjoy superhero movies and you hate superhero movies you are not going to have a lot of fun at the movie theater for a decade or so.
Good. Public funds should have nothing to do with art. It just winds up being a scam.
Well I wouldn't say that because it doesn't seem like it explains anything?
> I have lost track of how many times I have heard people say, “Intelligence is an emergent phenomenon!” as if that explained intelligence. This usage fits all the checklist items for a mysterious answer to a mysterious question. What do you know, after you have said that intelligence is “emergent”? You can make no new predictions. […] It feels like you believe a new fact, but you don’t anticipate any different outcomes. Your curiosity feels sated, but it has not been fed.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8QzZKw9WHRxjR4948/the-futility-of-emergence
What do you mean it doesn't explain anything?
I mean that, to my eye, it doesn't help you predict anything about taste, it just makes the question go away. How does the theory predict whether flag-lovers prefer simple or complex flags? How does it feel about what wines will be rated highly?
Well, if it's true it means that it can be analyzed into many components. And I feel this is a correct assertion. Also you can analyze the way the components interact, as that structure is probably also very significant.
The problem is that asserting it doesn't make it true. Perhaps it's a gradient. (I feel it more likely that some of the components are gradients.) An the assertion doesn't give you a handle on how to test whether it's true or not.
We can’t do that because it belies reality. In the realm of actual taste, very few people claim Soylent and microwaved chicken fingers are just as good as Franklin BBQ and fewer still would travel internationally for the former. In the realm of engineering, we recognize elegance and simplicity… with money. Society generally considers someone living on junk food, exclusively, as living an impoverished life (the unexamined life…), and just so for a life of purely consuming junk food in all forms. Most humans seem to really like the Grand Canyon but not parking lots. Taste exists outside of context, empirically.
This is so untrue! Hundreds of thousands will tell you they prefer KFC over Michelin star meals, or 50 shades of grey over Ulysses.
Taste really does not exist outside context. In a western context, spitting or burping are in very bad taste. In oriental cultures it's the opposite.
I would be willing to bet that of the people who have eaten both microwave chicken-fingers & at four-Michelin-star restaurants, ≥50% would say that yes, Michelin stars correlate with quality; we certainly do not see people act the same way about the former as the latter, though perhaps some signaling is involved there.
More generally, I think it's true that there are, empirically, the sort of trends noted by Poodoodle: e.g., would we find that the majority of the populace thinks the Grand Canyon more beautiful than the modal mall parking-lot? I'd be very surprised if not.
Whether it might be the case that we could *convince* a more or less overwhelming majority to prefer frozen chicken-fingers & parking-lots, I don't know. (I might suggest "probably not; probably some portion of taste, whether culinary or artistic, is biological", but I'm not married to the position.)
But if you ask people to compare the grand canyon to the empire state building? Or if you ask them to compare the empire state building to Westminster palace? Or the Parthenon to the Forbidden city?
I wouldn’t trust anyone who claims to have eaten at a four Michelin star restaurant.
Me neither—I mean, for my part, I've never understood why anyone would expect a *tire company* to know anything about food. Some sort of sophisticated signaling game, no doubt.
(...well, at least it'd be hard to lose my bet–)
I'd take microwaved chicken fingers over Franklin BBQ any day.
By nature goodness cannot be described in non-evaluative terms. That doesn't mean it's meaningless.
> "I think the strongest argument in favor is that tasteful people claim to get a higher level of pleasure from their sophisticated art than normal people can ever achieve from their cheap tricks"
I remember The Aesthetic City doing a video on architects who produce sprawling glass-and-rebar corporate monstrosities for a living and then go live in woody Georgian suburbs with porticos over the door, so I think the "getting more pleasure from it" argument is just bunk.
Thai architecture is, uh... a little more burlesque/rococo than usual, I think, even compared with most pre-modern architectural traditions. Greco-Roman, Aztec or Japanese temples tended to be a little more sparing/discrete in their use of external decoration, IIRC. But still well within the bounds of aesthetics appreciable by a normal person.
I don't believe in the higher pleasure thing, it's all fake like wine tasting, blinded experts can't tell the difference. With no one there to praise their taste, no one experiences pleasure from ugliness. To experience the pleasure of being high status, you need an audience. Alone the audience is in their head, the idea that people will like me for liking this ugly thing. That isn't a thing we should encourage.
I believe in higher pleasure, but it doesn't come from ugliness, it comes from effort. Understanding something that takes more effort and thinking feels different and in some ways better than understanding something easier. Sometimes this means that a good piece of artwork may look ugly at first until you have had time to comprehend it, but not always.
Ugly high-status art seems like a cargo cult version of this. People know that art that tasteful people admire sometimes looks superficially ugly, so they just create ugly art and think that's what they need to do to be high taste. They don't understand they need to at some point add something that is beautiful if you figure it out.
I think you are completely correct on both counts.
I completely agree with the last paragraph especially. Same sort of of mistaking effects for causes (or correlation with causation) that ends up with the "if people buy houses then they'll be better people" thinking that contributed to the housing market crash in the 2000s. Or to most of education fads that mistake things that good students do for the reason they're good students.
I need to push back on the wine tasting bit. On one hand you have some studies but they mainly use whoever dubbed themselves experts; on the other I have personally seen blindfolded oenology students not only recognize the grape variety, but most managed to also get the territory and a few pinpointed the year in a top-k retrieval tewst. and these were just the students!
Most true experts at wine discrimination are basically scientists trying to detect wine defects as expensive consultants for wineries, guiding the vinification process. They do not judge tastings or contests, and are definitely not writing about wine in magazines.
The problem here is that smell is eminently traineable (perfumery, oenology, etc), but as always you have a talent distribution. so already there is a very small number of people who have world class talent and training together in terms of wine tasting. And on top of that, actual TASTE is orthogonal! Being able to detect 23 separate notes in the aromatic profile of a wine does not automatically make you able to discern if they are an immortal symphony or a mainstream pop song!
Yes, taste is basically olfaction+, and smells lack an objective descriptive language. We use relationships (a graph) to describe them, and the anchor nodes are culturally mediated. When I worked in perfumery and dreaming of becoming a "nose", they were looking for underrepresented cultures for this exact reason. But the objectivity of the olfactory depth of discrimination is not fake, we just have different languages for it in a way.
I think it's actually a real part of art appreciation difference between the lowbrow and highbrow discussed here: depth of understood reference. Of course you can say "you need to be immersed in a référent to get it"!
Imagine reading, unsong by Scott, or Dante, or Milton without having the support of the western canon or the Judeo-Christian religions? You would recognize a shape, but would lack the coordinates, the links that make them relevant. Likewise for haikus, kimono fabric, etc. A lot in culture is dependent on you "getting it" through connection withe the overall tapestry. It's even got its own "cheap trick" version as Scott describes: think overly self référent marvel or star wars movies, how selected the afficionados were in finding the connections and easter eggs...
The distribution of ability is more proof that it's fake. Most fancy wine buyers are are not in right tail.
Ah, but taste is obtained by exposure, and fancy wine buyers are aspirational in the purchase. Also, price here is an imperfect proxy (added noise), there's a cultural element (who tells you a wine is fancy? how do you select your exposure?). And while the ability to be really world class in expertise (blind tasting the grape to ~5km of the small italian parcell it grew on) is very right tailed, taste is orthogonal and bears the load often. and finally I may not be a world-famous music theorist, but I can still enjoy modern operas with discriminating taste because I was exposed to it deliberately and gained _culture_ which is a first approximation of taste. same with wine.
You started out with "blinded experts can't tell the difference", which isn't true but is one of those internet-forum-truths that gets passed around (often based on a dumb misinterpretation of that food-colouring study).
Then you retreated to "a lot of fancy wine buyers can't tell the difference", which is quite possibly true. But it's a much weaker claim.
I once helped film a video of a blind wine taste testing (So I am 100% sure they weren't cheating because I obtained the wines for the test myself and didn't tell them!) and I was shocked by how well they did. Even when they got the wrong wine they were able to correctly identify some features about its origin. I'm convinced but agree that without training, practice, and the ability to name what you're tasting, it's probably not fully accessible to the average wine drinker. But they can still enjoy the wine even if they don't know anything about tannins or terroir.
You're in for a treat: our esteemed host wrote a piece (not on this blog) explaining what's going on with oenology. https://asteriskmag.com/issues/01/is-wine-fake
It turns out to be a mix of real, fake, and kind of subjective.
I suspect the Pepsi vs Coke tests are getting at something different. I think it says more about blind taste tests not being realistic to real-world use cases in general ("ecological validity") than that the Pepsi vs Coke priming specifically affecting people's tastes.
Concretely I predict that if Pepsi and Coke had a generic version under different labels, generic-Coke would still beat generic-Pepsi after some time, rather than the opposite as the blind taste tests and Pepsi marketing would have you believe.
I hesitate to give a mechanistic explanation because I'm more confident about the overall pattern than the mechanistic explanation. But mechanistically, the specific thing that consistently overwhelms taste tests is sugar content. In blind taste tests, non-trained testers overwhelmingly prefer whichever food sample has sugar. However, contrary to overly cynical popular belief, consumers in the real world have a limited appetite for sugar that's already fairly calibrated to existing American norms. You can't just dump a bunch of sugar into existing products and have people automatically like it more in ways that correspond to long-term purchasing behavior, in the real world.
(Pepsi has 41 grams of sugar/can vs 39g/can for Coke. I'm not confident that sugar content is enough to explain the blind taste test discrepancy but it's plausible enough for me)
One of my sources for this intuition is that I studied blind taste tastes semi-professionally for some time while working at Impossible Foods; overall I got more skeptical about them compared to my high hopes and unconsidered opinions going in, though still think they're useful.
FWIW, I read that this is indeed the case... somewhere. IIRC, it was a finding that people actually preferred Coke in blinded tests *if they drank the whole cup before rating*, or something like that.
Wow that's even more direct than I thought!
"Wine commands wealth, prestige, and attention from aficionados. How much of what they admire is in their heads?"
Well, let me answer that for you Scott. Apart from the brains, both nose and tongue are in the head.
Nitpick: Scott probably didn't write that line.
>no one experiences pleasure from ugliness
I disagree; there's pleasure in conflict, and ugliness is an aesthetic form of conflict.
There is an underlying ethical framework underneath seemingly arbitrary taste for art:
The utilitarian will seek art that maximizes pleasure.
The deontologist will seek art that maximizes understanding.
The virtue ethicist will seek art that maximizes personal growth.
This relation between ethics and esthetics is exactly where LLMs fail. They are natural utilitarians, as quantifiable morality fits their inner bayesians structure so perfectly. Those who have doubts about utilitarianism will find that AI art subtly annoys or even disgusts them.
As an addendum, these are general patterns, not completely mutually exclusive categories. It works similarly to the way people mix up different ethical frameworks to navigate daily life.
Why can't a utilitarian desire personal growth or understanding and thus seek art that maximise those? Pleasure is just one possible end, but all those things constitute utility.
The kind of person that would be a utilitarian in the first place won't value personal growth compared to pleasure.
That's not true and just silly name calling.
Have you hung out with a lot of utilitarians?
Have you?
Yes.
I hold generally utilitarian views. When I first read Peter Singer's formulation of "preference utilitarianism" I immediately felt something click in my head and realized how inaccurate earlier formulations had been. As such I consider understanding, personal growth, and pleasure to all be important values that utilitarians should seek to increase. I think this view is fairly common among rationalist-adjacent utilitarians.
I think saving the world requires a lot of personal growth! Indeed it trivially seems more important to do personal growth than selfishly acquire pleasure, for the purposes of saving the world.
Why should one desire utility? I have never met a utilitarian who does not end up talking about pleasure-optimization, if questioned deeply enough. Utilitarianism is nothing if not the logic of desire. A 'util' or measure of usefulness, always indicates that good comes from use.
Now, in order for something to have a 'use', the one who uses has to have a goal in mind, an intention. One cannot have intentions or goals without desires. Utilitarianism is fundamentally concerned with fulfilling desires. What is the ultimate object of desire, upon which the hierarchy of desire depends? Happiness. In the end utilitarianism always ends up in a never-ending quest for happiness. I would add my personal opinion, which is that it is one which is always doomed to fail. (Read: kierkegaard and the aesthetic man)
Well, then what of the virtue ethicist - why do THEY pursue virtue? Do they suffer pain from being aware of having achieved virtue, yet pursue it anyway in spite of it, or do they derive some satisfaction, or serenity, a feeling of having done the right thing, from any improvement?
The problem with the hedonist framework is that it implies by "pleasure" that we're talking essentially about short-term fulfilment. But utilitarianism doesn't mean shortsightedness (though of course some utilitarians CAN be shortsighted, like anyone else). Utility can be instrumental ("I want this because it'll help me achieve this much longer term goal") and utility can come in many forms beyond simple sensory pleasure. "I want to be happy; I believe having a rich understanding of the world is a prerequisite to being happy; therefore I enjoy art which furthers my understanding" is a perfectly viable utilitarian line of thinking. Absolutely no contradictions or issues with this.
The whole point of classical virtue ethics, is that virtues are to be pursued for their own sake, outside of individual wants and needs.
So you are telling me that a good virtue ethicists has no emotion and no feelings about achieving any kind of virtue; they simultaneously know exactly what to strive for, yet have no inner guide to it. They'd feel just the same murdering puppies as they do donating to a charity; they just rationally think the latter is better for abstract reasons they plucked out of the hyperuranion. And they say utilitarians are weird!
That would be a straw man argument, Simone.
A data-point: I would call myself—broadly—utilitarian... and indeed, I *do not* value personal growth compared to pleasure. My taste in most things could broadly be described as "maximize pleasure, minimize difficulty"—whether emotional, aesthetic, perceptual...¹
No doubt friend anonymous meant it as a criticism—though, conversely, I think amigo Cyrus is undoubtedly just reporting on an honest observation—but I fear that it fits me pretty well! (Actually, I don't fear; I am not ashamed! 🦾 proud 2b a wireheader!–)
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¹(E.g., I cannot stand "sad" music; gimme bluegrass 'n' fiddles 'n' Irish jigs, any day! Similarly, I won't watch or read something if it is past a certain "how 'emotional' is this?" limit—I don't think I've *ever* experienced this fabled "catharsis" of which people speak; and besides, there is plenty enough tragedy in the real world: get it out of my media!—hence, I mostly prefer comedies & histories over dramas & tragedies; etc., etc.
(In truth, I actually have some trouble imagining how art *could* provide "personal growth" to anyone—except, *possibly,* the narrative varieties thereof, which I suppose could relay some sort of life-lesson(s) via the experiences of their characters. Otherwise, I sort of wonder if maybe this isn't just the kind of thing that people *want to* believe, because they want art to be deeply important & meaningful, and are too ashamed to stand forth proudly & admit: it is important & meaningful 'cause so ks pleasure, and there's nothing else needed to excuse its value to me!... ...but I recognize that I am maybe on the tail of some distribution, here, so—could be wrong–)
The utilitarian will seek art that maximized utility. I generally parse that as "usefulness", but it isn't quite the same. Pleasure is only one aspect of utility. And what is "useful" depends on what you goal is at the moment.
I would take this even further, and say that since virtue ethics is clearly the only Right Answer (pretend to be classically-minded with me here), what makes something of good vs bad taste is how much it evokes and aligns with one's slightly-varying view of what the human _telos_ is.
So both the cheap tricks and the conscious snobbery fail because they are trying to do the wrong thing, in aiming at things that accompany art of real "substance", instead of providing that substance, itself. How to define "substance" is left as an exercise for the reader.
I have personally never understood why virtue ethics and consequentialism are seen as at odds. Isn't caring about the consequences that your actions have upon the world an important virtue?
The main issue for consequentialists is afaik that virtues are internal traits that resist consistent measurement, so they fall outside of measurable causality (or consequence).
The main issue for virtue ethicists is that consequences cannot be known with certainty to the mind's eye, while virtues (or lack thereof) can be.
So it is a matter of internalist epistemology versus externalist epistemology. That debate has not been solved.
Perhaps:
If I spend all my time doing moral things of small utility (say, stocking the local corner library) while being oblivious to moral things of large utility (say, stopping malaria in Africa), this is a big failure according to consequentialism (because the utility I create is tiny compared to what I could have created), but a minor failure according to virtue ethics (because the human brain is naturally ignorant of many things, including the very fact that it is ignorant).
If you're trying to maximize *anything* that's still utilitarian. Maximizing pleasure is hedonistic utilitarianism.
I was taught in school that "consequentialism" means ethics based on the consequences of actions and "utilitarianism" is the name for hedonistic consequentialism.
Lots of people in Internet discussions seem to use "utilitarianism" and "consequentialism" interchangeably, though.
I mostly learned from Wikipedia. I'm not clear what exactly the distinction between consequentialism and utilitarianism is supposed to be, but they're definitely not deontology or virtue ethics. Except that rule utilitarianism is identical to Kant's categorical imperative, which is deontology?
If you have a true interest in these matters, wikipedia is not a good source. For specific subjects, you should go to plato.stanford.edu
Otherwise, read the canon, start with the Greeks, go through history, take everything with a solid pinch of salt, but allow it to rock your world. You'll get there.
Oh my god, the Lisa Frank is retraumatizing me. *shudder*
This angle would suggest that taste is something that comes from exposure and growing inoculation to cheap tricks. So kids love obviously appealing things, then you see past that and like whatever can be made without overuse of the obvious things, then whatever can be made without that, until, as you say, you only like abstract atonal music. That mostly seems solid.
But what about crossover works that appeal to everyone? Like my toddler will eagerly watch cartoons that I can't stand, but will also love Bluey, which I legitimately enjoy. How is Bluey satisfying her basic desires while also being tolerable to adults? Same question for The Hobbit, which works for all ages.
I'd start with the hypothesis that these crossover works manage to include enough of the basic appealing elements (bright colors, dragons, songs) along with elements for other elements that are appreciated after more exposure (subtle characterization, metaphor, classical music in Bluey). And maybe that's the actual way to talk about "great" works? Like Shakespeare famously worked for uneducated peasants in the cheap seats and still excites scholars today, Van Gogh made paintings people are happy to have on a t shirt but is undisputably a master, etc.
What objections to this thesis: Great art appeals to people across sophistication levels. Toddler art and bichromatic abstract sculpture, in contrast, are just targeted at one level of sophistication and should be judged as effective or ineffective at appealing to that target, with neither being superior to each other just based on their choice of target.
Seems like a sensible take. To pick a genre of fiction that's easy to make fun of, LitRPGs are often lambasted for just being power fantasy and "numbers go up", but the best of the genre have that *as well as* powerful character development, social commentary both overt and subtle, hilarious comic moments and so on.
When you say "the best of the genre", which ones are you thinking of besides Dungeon Crawler Carl? DCC is the only LitRPG I've read so far, but I appreciate it for doing exactly what you described.
Not the parent poster, but Mother of Learning.
It's progression fantasy in name only, no numbers/stats/etc, just a person organically forced to become better. And a lot of well-rounded characters around him.
If we're doing web-fic recommendations, I assume Worm probably goes without saying. I also love The Gods are Bastards. The caveat is that it is on a long hiatus, but that doesn't undermine it to me, because there is a ton and it is really great even if it never officially concludes. If you like Pokemon, Pokemon The Origin of Species is split between a full LitRPG and Methods of Rationality in a way I really enjoy.
And then there's this great one called Unsong, I wonder what that author has been up to recently.
He's too busy worrying about what he's allowed to like instead of just creating the things he wants to, I'd imagine...
You have similar taste to me. I just wanted to say, on the off-chance that you haven't encountered them, that the author of TGaB has made two other long fics: Only Villains Do That, and Hoard. Both are good and personally I liked Villains even more than TGaB.
Separately: A Practical Guide to Evil was also good and long.
I keep bouncing off of OVDT. I want to like it, but I'm not much of a reader of isekai and feel like I'm missing the underlying context, like reading TGAB as my first fantasy story.
How is that LitRPG? I think they did mention numbers at one point with how many times you can cast a basic spell, but that's it.
It seems like your concepts of what counts as "LitRPG" and what counts as "progression fantasy" are roughly the reverse of mine.
I think of "progression fantasy" as being any fantasy stories where becoming more powerful is a major focus, and "LitRPG" as being stories where the world explicitly follows RPG-like rules, such as stats, classes, levels, and experience points.
I therefore consider Mother of Learning to be progression fantasy and not LitRPG.
As mentioned below: MoL is one of my favorite serieseses of all time, progression fantasy or otherwise. It's what got me into the genre, in fact; I picked up Cradle afterward, and of course that was great too.
Other standouts, for me, so far: Godclads (by "OstensibleMammal"), Bastion (by Phil Tucker). Actus' stuff (e.g. Runebound Professor) is generally decent, albeit not quite on the level of the aforementioned.
I know there are more that should be on this list, but I'm blankin' at the moment... which really shouldn't happen, 'cause I read a *lot* of progression fantasy! (I have notes & ratings on probably a hundred titles in the genre & closely related; I keep intending to start a review series, mostly to prevent others from suffering, as I have, from countless "hey this looks good" → "oh no it's utterly terrible" incidents...)
Heh. Well, yes, DCC is the clear most popular for good reason. My personal preferences in the genre are a bit unusual. I'd highly recommend Threadbare even though it's older (protagonist is an animated teddy bear; very well plotted trilogy with early hints about stuff revealed much later). Industrial Strength Magic is hilarious superhero-adjacent fun with a munchkin protagonist mildly reminiscent of HPMOR!Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, and also explores topics like AI rights. Apocalypse Parenting is delightful for anyone who's a parent or has small kids in their life (protagonist is a mom of three young kids). Factory of the Gods is surprisingly great (it's Factorio as a LitRPG). Whispering Crystals is another great series where the author clearly had the end in mind from the beginning. Others I recommend for being intelligent include Super Supportive, Blue Core, and Rise of the Runebound Professor.
Actus' stuff (e.g. Runebound Prof.) is pretty good, generally. You might like Mother of Learning, Cradle, Godclads or one of the other serieses by OstensibleMammal, and/or Bastion (most of Tucker's other series I also like, but not as much as Bastion)—assuming you've not already read all of these, of course. (Some are just adjacent—i.e., progression fantasy—rather than full-blown LitRPG.)
I find it pretty difficult to find good works in the genre(s)—partly because I have some pet peeves and/or unreasonably high standards, apparently (at least, going by how few authors/readers seem to share them, heh), and partly because I just read through them extremely quickly. After the last piece of trash I picked up, only to be terribly disappointed yet again, I decided that I could do better... so—well, we'll see...
Worth the Candle hasn't been mentioned in this thread yet and it's the first one I thought of.
It's rationalfic too!
The Wandering Inn is really, really long but is pretty good for the first several books.
Also, Konosuba is a hilarious parody of the isekai litRPG genre.
I definitely think this is it, yes. It's not uncommon to hear for e.g. animated movies that they have also "something for the parents". One of my favourite animated movies of the last years was Puss in Boots: the Last Wish. It has talking cats and bears and crickets in it, lots of colour and motion, slapstick gags, and everyone is chasing a big sparkly falling star. It's also got a surprisingly poignant reflection about coming to terms with one's own mortality, a fantastically tight script that balances three different villain factions and a total of about 10 characters perfectly in about 2 hours of movie, and an extremely accurate depiction of a panic attack. So lots of people have reasons to appreciate it, and the existence of the other elements doesn't detract from that enjoyment because all elements harmonize together, unless you're actively annoyed by the idea that someone who does NOT have your refined tastes might get some joy from this too, in which case, well, check your priorities.
It's not like the great figurative artwork of the past wasn't laced with subtle arcane references that only other erudites and artists could catch. It totally was! But it also had an immediate layer of "cool image" and then you could dig as deep as your experience allows. The defining characteristic of contemporary art isn't that it has hermetic messages targeted at other artists, it's that it often refuses to have anything else.
To be fair I agree that's a bit too reductive and it's something that mostly applies to some of the high profile stuff (like the infamous taped banana) that breaches containment. That said, I don't think most of that is particularly cooler or visually more interesting than a lot of much more "low brow" art that isn't afraid to just be figurative. I don't *hate* modern art as a whole. I just think it's ironically held back by the need to be different and weird and original at all costs. There's great visual art all around us - in comics, in illustrations, in games, in animation - and if anything often the one I see in contemporary exhibitions is the least impressive and impactful of all of them.
I don’t think it’s a good thing to be making “toddler art” with crossover appeal. The point of this stuff is to appeal to toddlers and then they later move on. But there are adult Bluey fans with no children and it’s disturbing. They choose to lock themselves up in arrested development and their excuse is that actually this children’s show has Deep Themes so they can immerse themselves in entertainment about how sharing is fun and never grow up. The entertainment you consume influences you.
I don't have a strong view on people who watch Bluey without children. But I would take arms against the idea that there shouldn't be toddler art that's tolerable or enjoyable for parents who have to watch it with them, and I'd have my whole generation of parents beside me.
More seriously, I think kids benefit from better toddler art, and I'm willing to accept that it may also appeal to some childless adults if that's the price.
You don’t “have to” watch it with them. That’s part of the problem. My mom threw on movies I liked so she could get some cleaning done without me distracting her. She didn’t feel an obligation to sit down and watch it every single time I wanted to.
You don't have to watch with them, true enough, but you do have to hear them watching it while you do the cleaning - I guess if you have a big enough house or a different layout the TV might not be near where the dishes are or whatever, but that's not how my apartment is set up.
But also I like being with my kids, and they like my presence, and then we can talk about what we watch afterwards. And, again, I think the things that make shows more tolerable for grown-ups are actually positive elements for kids.
I infer from another of your comments that you are hearing people suggest that you should watch Bluey without children. To be clear, I don't think that and wouldn't recommend it to a childless friend. But I do enjoy my time watching it with my children.
It’s understandable wanting something you can tolerate hearing over and over again. There’s a middle ground of content that isn’t grating to adults but isn’t made to appeal them at all.
But then again, maybe it’s just something wrong in the air. I watched Toy Story and the Lion King all the time and they are good movies but my parents didn’t latch on to them like what’s happening to my generation. Maybe we were just the first generation that had such an abundance of good children’s entertainment that it produced Disney adults.
Yeah, I think there's something to that - like I mostly manage, between Bluey and Disney/Pixar stuff, to have my daughter only watch stuff that's pretty pleasant for me. And then you have like The Wizard of Oz, which I should have mentioned earlier - great for kids, but just a global smash for everyone when released and it still holds up great. And that speaks to the advantage we have right now raising kids: if you take the best 5 kids movies per decade, after a century of movies you have enough to essentially be the whole content pie for a kid. But, as you say, it also means that people aren't ever forced to move on to grown up movies, and that probably does have an effect on the culture.
You don't "have" to watch/listen to a think you don't like... unless you're taking them to the movie theater. Or you're in a car together.. Or... you get the idea. Trust me that finding something that the whole family will like or at least tolerate is important for the parent's sanity.
Beyond that... have you ever come back to an old story and though, "I used to love this, but wow, it's bad now." or "I used to love this, and now I like it in a new way."? That's the kind of thing a parent can provide by selecting 'better' media.
As for Bluey for adults, I wouldn't watch children's media by myself in English. But when I'm trying to learn foreign languages? When I'm at the level where I need simple child level language, but the act of watching it won't make my brain crawl out of my ears? Yes, it's shows like Bluey.
A friend of mine once asked me, "Who would ever watch 'Friends'?" I introduced him to my other friend who watched it when they were learning English. I think that's the main market for adults that Bluey provides, that you might be missing.
Where is this idea coming from that children get veto power over all entertainment? I remember when I was riding with my dad, we listened to whatever he wanted to. It was his car, he said, so he controlled the radio and I just accepted that because what other choice did I have?
The language thing is interesting because I’ve done the same thing. But when I watched these I keep thinking that I wish there was something more made for adult language learners. There’s this show I watched called Extras which is a Friends rip off and is actually pretty entertaining.
I could indeed decided that it's my car, my rules. I don't want to. I prefer to listen to something that we all enjoy and I feel like it's unfair that I don't try listening to new things my kids like it I'm asking them to try listening to things I like. Personally, this ended up expanding my musical range because we started listening to a lot more classical music when they were small and more foreign language music these days.
Actually, I'll follow-up and say that a lot of podcasts are trying to hit that spot for adult learners. But that's hard to scale because there's a big gradient between 'doesn't understand the language' and 'fluent'. But kids shows have that scale but in.
I'm just imagining that actors finish recording a hit show and the director tells them to do it again but slower and with simpler words.
I don't know how much of a case there is for deliberately trying for toddler art with crossover appeal. I do, however, firmly believe that kids deserve better than soulless by-the-numbers slop; and also that if you actually care about and put effort into whatever it is you are making, its appeal may well naturally end up being wider than the audience you originally had in mind.
Take something like Blues Clues. I wouldn’t call it slop but there’s no adult audience trying to convince people to watch it.
Moonshadow didn’t say that stuff that doesn’t appeal to adults is going to be slop.
They just said that “caring about and putting effort” might more likely happen to produce stuff that appeals to adults.
There are likely even more possibilities.
Stuff that appeals to adults is likely often designed that way.
I’m just saying that Blues Clues probably had care put in to it but there’s no crossover appeal to adults. It was explicitly made to be developmentally appropriate for them until they outgrew it. That’s the happy median.
Moonshadow wasn’t saying such stuff doesn’t exist.
They just said “care and effort” might more likely produce adult-appeal.
I think the adult-appeal is, more often, a deliberate design. (Some of it is because the things are based on adult stories.)
(From my very limited exposure to it, while it might not appeal to adults, Blues Clues might not annoy adults to much.)
Stop worrying about them, they wouldn't grow up anyway, or else they grow up despite watching Bluey; it's a fake problem. Also, Simone didn't mean just Bluey; there's, for example, high-quality children's literature from which parents can get real grown-up level intellectual enjoyment. One can read it without children; there's enough sophisticated philosophy for an adult.
I personally refuse to read low-quality slop to kids, that depresses me; I only read good books to them that are enjoyable for both generations and across several readings. As a side effect, this teaches a wider vocabulary to the kids, makes the evening readings longer (because I can't stop, it's so pleasant), and makes the readings go on for years if the kids are interested (I now have teenage kids, and we still read actual real grown-up literature together before bedtime).
Just while we're here, what high quality stuff have you been reading to your kids? We started with Dr. Seuss, and have added Elephant and Piggie as something more modern that's comprehensible to kids as young as 1.5 but pleasant and engaging. She now has a Yoto and that gives her audiobook access to Roald Dahl and a bunch of classics, and I just made her a Hobbit card so she can listen to that. But I'm always looking for more recommendations!
For toddlers, I started with Jip and Janneke, Pettson and Findus, and suchlike. I live in Europe, so the main corpus of children's books are probably quite different for us. E.g. I haven't read dr Seuss, though it turns out two of the books have lately been translated into my language.
Anything by Elsa Beskow is good, we particularly like "The Children of the Forest" and "Woody, Hazel, and Little Pip." Frog and Toad are great. We like the Brambly Hedge books, but some find them a bit cutesy. I like Margaret Hodges collaborations with Trina Schart Hyman, but they are heavy on the text.
When a little older George MacDonald's Princess and the Goblin, the Golden Key, the Light Princess are all good. Also The Wind in the Willows. East of the Sun and West of the Moon. The Oz books. Chronicles of Narnia, obviously.
Beatrix Potter.
For the toddler set, Barbro Lindgren's Max books (or Sam, depending on the translator) are delightful, mostly thanks to the illustrations. Rather like Elephant and Piggie that way.
Sandra Boynton's albums are excellent. She got tired of lame kids' music when hers were little and so she set out to do better. You can listen to 90's rock on "Dog Train," or erudite Latin jokes on "Grunt: Pigorian Chant" if that's more your style. We've done a lot of folk music albums too rather than modern overproduced stuff that discourages singing oneself: Pete and Mike & Peggy Seeger, Old Mother Hippletoe, things like that.
Cynthia Rylant's Mr Putter & Tabby and Poppleton books are among our favorites. (Henry and Mudge is a good series too, but Puppy Mudge is kinda lame.)
James Marshall wrote a lot of picture books (and a few chapter books) and they are quirky and fun. (Cut-Ups, George and Martha, Miss Nelson, etc.)
Kate DiCamillo's Mercy Watson books are pitch-perfect, and if your daughter is old enough for Dahl, then she's old enough for DiCamillo's other books too (Tales of Deckawoo Drive, Despereaux, Magician's Elephant, Beatryce Prophecy, etc).
Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking, but also Noisy Village, Ronia, Mio, Emil, and Lotta. Brothers Lionheart is the only one we didn't like; some in print, some you have to really search for. Worth every penny I've spent on them though.
> The entertainment you consume influences you.
Is Bluey a bad influence? I haven't seen it, but I would expect it's intended to be a good influence. Would you rather someone be influenced by Game of Thrones?
Not as disturbing as adult My Little Pony fans!
This was the idea behind the critical movement of "poptimism", where magazines like Pitchfork began giving accolades to e.g the music of Beyoncè. There's been backlash to it from people who believe the critics have lost the ability to appreciate sophisticated art and thus implicitly sanctioned everyone using the same cheap tricks all the time with no greater ambition.
> Like my toddler will eagerly watch cartoons that I can't stand, but will also love Bluey, which I legitimately enjoy.
If something *only* uses cheap tricks, it will only appeal to people with bad taste. If it's using cheap tricks but also more sophisticated ones, it will apply to anyone who isn't specifically driven away by cheap tricks. If you want to reach the real critics who despise the cheap tricks, then they're not going to give Bluey a chance and you need to avoid them altogether.
Why would I want my tatas to vibrate?
The secret of Bluey is that it's not a show aimed at kids that also appeals to adults -- it's secretly a show for aimed at adults which also appeals to kids.
The stories of the episodes aren't about being a kid, they're about being a parent. The themes of the episodes aren't all that relatable to kids, they're relatable to parents. When an episode has a message, that message isn't aimed at the kid, it's aimed at the adult. And when an episode is about a kid learning something it's in the context of "this is something your kid is inevitably going to go through, and here's how Chilli and Bandit, who are good parents, help them cope with it".
There's so few works actually aimed at the parents of young kids, which is a shame because they're a very distinct set of people with a lot in common, suddenly thrust into a whole emotional landscape that they have trouble processing, and fiction is one of the tools with which we understand and put into perspective our own lives.
I agree, though I would also say that perhaps taste is a bad thing. It's low confidence, but if taste leaves you strictly less able to be happy, cui bono?
“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” said Picasso, apparently. That's what came to my mind.
I feel a similar trajectory in my life. I studied a STEM-field considered difficult by almost everyone I meet. Dunno, sure it was "hard" but I thought that's what studying is about, I'm not working in the field and felt like I missed a huge opportunity by doing so. It took more than a decade AFTER studying to start noticing birds and feel joyful like a kid hearing them sing, and being able to distinguish different birds before knowing what their names/species are. Colleagues called this "childlike" when they observed my partner's excitement about birdsong on a worktrip. I suggested to her to accept it as a compliment, independent of the colleague's intentions.
Hopefully, STEM people studying bird song are excited by bird song (too).
(Good suggestion.)
You say "eyeball kick" but the term that comes to mind for me is "Little Lytton contest entries": https://adamcadre.ac/lyttle/ - especially the "jar of laughter" one, that's the exact sort of strained analogy that often features in this contest.
> “The morning her shadow began unspooling from her feet, Clara found it coiled beneath the kitchen table like a serpent made of smoke.”
This one actually makes a kind of sense if you imagine the context of something like the Harry Potter universe.
It reads very obviously like a line from the specific kind of magic realism popular in literary fiction, like "Who Will Greet You at Home," or "The Husband Stitch," or "Bestiary." Usually with a slow and introspective mood, occasional interjections written to be grotesque, and feminist themes.
I'm not a fan of stories like that. Every time I read one, I feel like I'm choking on metaphors, it's nauseating.
Might just be me preferring my own style, but if we imagine the shadow having actual personality, then the sentence is bad because of the switch to and from Clara halfway through.
"In the morning, Clara's smoky shadow began unspooling from her feet, coiling serpent-like beneath the kitchen table."
Love this post! It’s a tremendous conundrum.
I think about it all the time when watching movies or shows — often I notice them doing what I think of as “cheating” by using mood-inducing musical scores at all the critical moments.
Then I think that if I had a show I would certainly want to use these at some points, the right points. Probably ending up in a version of “everyone who drives faster than me is a maniac and everyone slower is a grandma.”
I still notice when a show is cheating by letting the music drive the emotions rather than enhancing them.
The problem is when you *can* notice that "uh-huh, they're relying on the music to extort the emotional reaction from me" because that's when the acting, writing, directing, plot or all of those elements failed to do their jobs.
If the other elements all pull together, you're too busy bawling your eyes out to notice that the music is leading you along by the nose.
Now I have to link this Eddie Izzard sketch about horror movie music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdW17hm_GII
Have you ever seen No Country for Old Men? It's one of the few movies I can think of that has absolutely no incidental music.
"The Wire" is a TV series, not a movie, but it too has no "incidental music" -- well, almost. There is music during montage sequences that occur at the end of each season, but I feel like that's perfectly reasonable (what else are you going to do during a montage ?). At other times, if there's music playing in the background (which doesn't happen that often), it's because some character is actively playing it on his stereo (or whatever).
Yes! It’s funny. I’ve watched that series from beginning to end three times and I didn’t notice. but you’re right, it’s not a movie so I’m on safe ground. Hah… thank you for pointing that out. I should do an AI search for others just for a laugh.
Got interested so asked my valet Hudson to look into it. Apparently it really stems from Bresson. Lang obviously predates him but Lang is …you know…special?
played on screen throughout; no overlay.
• M (Fritz Lang, 1931) — No score; Lorre’s whistling of Grieg is diegetic.
• No Country for Old Men (Coens, 2007) — No music of any kind.
• Russian Ark (Sokurov, 2002) — All music performed by visible orchestras and chamber groups within the Hermitage.
• Jeanne Dielman (Akerman, 1975)
• 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Mungiu, 2007)
• Son of Saul (Nemes, 2015)
The Dardenne Brothers as a body of work — Rosetta, The Son, L’Enfant all forgo scoring entirely.
Haneke — Caché, The White Ribbon, Amour, Time of the Wolf. The Piano Teacher is an interesting case: all music is performed within conservatory or domestic contexts.
Kiarostami — Taste of Cherry and Ten are reliable examples, though Taste of Cherry has an anomalous musical coda
The "sudden silence for comedic punchline" is now as noticeable as a full snaredrum.
Highbrow taste only makes sense in the context of lowbrow taste.
You keep making reference to this idea that we will all be forced to live in a boring highbrow-only world, but that couldn't happen, kinda by definition. The lowbrow must always reassert itself; and the highbrow will always distinguish itself from the lowbrow.
The famous monologue from The Devil Wears Prada also seems relevant - the highbrow is, by definition, where the innovation happens, and that feeds back and enriches the future lowbrow.
If you mean the bit about the cerulean sweater, I always thought that was silly: the implication was that no one could pick a color for a sweater if the fashion industry didn’t guide them?
I imagine a world without a fashion industry in which people simply pick sweater colors from a list of basic colors: Red, Yellow, Blue, Green. And it’s fine. Until one day someone shows up in a sweater of a subtle heathered greenish grey that evokes a foggy moor overlooking the Irish Sea, and suddenly all other sweaters look ridiculously childish and old -fashioned and no one wants to wear them anymore.
I suspect the fear of showing up in a Red sweater when everyone else has moved on—or rather, continuing to make and try to sell Red sweaters when no one wants them anymore—keeps people taking their cues from the fashion industry as in the famous monologue.
If we follow the article's logic, it means in that world has seen enough basic clothes that they can develop sophisticated taste. Thus there's room for foggy moor. But if there's enough "basic" clothes to last a lifetime, fashion industry will be redundant.
I think the implication was that the new girl thought fashion was beneath her, but Winter's points out the fashion industry actually shaped her decisions.
I was never sold on it though. It only shaped her decision in ways she didn't care about.
I thought it was silly because the fashion world doesn't affect her. She doesn't know or care what shade of blue her shirt is. It only affects the high-fashion people around her that see it as cerulean.
She doesn't know or care what shade of blue her shirt is, and so she winds up wearing the exact shade of blue the fashion industry chose for her four years earlier. The fashion world definitely affects her, but because she doesn't care, she doesn't see it.
But it doesn't affect her. If the fashion world chose a slightly different shade, her life would be no different at all.
Yeah, that is the implication. And it's what Scott called for explicitly in his previous post. He said, "stick to the stale stuff within the existing horizon and wait however long it takes for the next genius to come along."
Sticking to the stale stuff means just using the same colours as everyone has always used. The thing that the next genius does is to pick a new colour. And when that happens it always looks weird. First, it takes a weirdo to pick a new colour. It takes someone who cares about sweater colours way more than they ought to. That's just the kind of person who does it. Those are the highbrow art people, the weirdos. Usually, it's hard for normal people to work out why they'd obsess like that over sweater colour, which is just not that important.
Second, when the weirdo picks a new colour, they always pick something weird. Because they are weird! They can never just pick something pretty and nice like yellow. It's always off-brown. (Or painting a picture that doesn't represent something.)
So initial reactions to the new weird colours/art are generally pretty mixed. But once someone's done it, it becomes easier for the next person to follow suit, and then for the mass market to adopt it. Mass markets don't always adopt; most avant garde developments get ignored. But when the mass market does adopt something new, it selects from what has already been tried by those weirdo avant garde artists.
But, in the case of architecture, we sort of have been forced to live in a highbrow-only world -- the genesis of this whole series on taste, arguably. The Bauhaus were a highbrow architecture collective that gave all architects permission to build cheap boxy buildings because eschewing ornament (cheap tricks) was also the more stylish move. There is admittedly more of an aesthetic vision to Chandigarh or Habitat 67, but the throughline between those ideas and the stultifying dullness of so many modern buildings is clear.
I can't fathom what you're talking about. First, lots of the old buildings still exist - all those churches and cathedrals in Europe. That's my reference, which I guess is skewed. I suppose the USA doesn't have as much of the old stock, but it still has some. Second, McMansions. Lots of new building is done in exuberant "bad" taste. And in California, there are still lots of really nice Spanish style cool housing in exuberant good taste.
I understand that there are parts of New York where it's all glass boxes, and that's what Scott's objecting to. But that's not the only place in the USA.
I live in British Columbia and it's everywhere. You can read the "From Bauhaus to Our House" review for more. North American architecture was, in some sense, poisoned by good taste.
I dunno about Canada. I just think that most buildings are unornamented because most buildings have always been unornamented, for cost reasons. I get Scott's point that there has been a fashion for sleeker/barer buildings, so some of the expensive buildings which might in the past have been ornamented, were more recently built looking bare. But that fashion is still a contrastive phenomenon. It contrasts with older, fancier styles.
If you happen to live in a patch where that style took over, and you don't like it, then I feel for you. But I'm still not sure how "forced" you really are. There isn't a single kitschy mall around?
Just needed to pop in and make note that every single one of those R1 prose examples sound like absolute shit. I think they somehow nerfed the models. I, and many others, remember experiencing higher quality prose in 2023/2024 GPT models.
R1 was always shit at prose. It was never nerfed. Within a few days of its release, I'd already gotten exhausted with its tedious predictability and bag of tricks and derpness. And running it on the official DS site didn't impress me any more than the curated samples on Twitter and Marginal Revolution; it was bad at writing, and worse at poem critique or ideas or curation. The subsequent underperformance of DeepSeek, rather than being the Second Coming and the Ultimate Comeuppance of Western AI As Foretold Every Year, came as no surprise to me when I saw how bad R1 was on a non-benchmark task like that.
For the record, your memory may not be accurate on such a point.
Deepseek R1 is one of my favorite models.
Yes, it rushes through the story to get to the end. To me, this feels like an actual preference of the model. As if it was mainly post-trained on things that weren’t fiction, and where getting to the end quickly is a virtue.
R1 has a very distinctive “voice”. I actually like it, but it’s very recognizable.
I think you kind of nailed it with your old piece "The Colors of her Coat": it would be a mystical experience to be able to enjoy the ten-thousandth "abstract+concrete noun" sequence as if it were the first, but the simple truth is that through exposure comes numbing, and you can't really do much about it.
This is why it's perhaps misguided to frame the crux of this piece as arguing in favor or against "taste": you will develop some kind of taste, and an inherent feature of taste for some/most is that repetition becomes tiring.
I think the more interesting framing device for this would be: given that taste is necessarily acquired, does it offer something valuable to try and direct it through exposure to highbrow forms of the art as opposed to commercial or generic art?
Also, RE: the Kenyan commentator's experience:
a few months ago I listened to a lecture by a computational linguistics researcher that showed pretty clearly how LLM output is heavily determined by third-world digi-sweatshops where the phase of post-training is carried out by usually non-native English speakers; this is where all the "delve"'s come from. They weren't that common in e.g. academic papers, which is why the post-GPT spike in usage is so apparent.
If anybody is interested I can probably find the reference to the paper/talk/research group.
I'm interested.
I tried to tag you on the new OT but I don't think it worked. I posted a comment there with a link to the paper (it's less conclusive than I remembered, but I definitely think it's a clue into the right direction)
Thanks!
I don't buy the numbing thing. There are movies and miniseries I've seen ten times, songs and classical pieces I listen to on a regular basis, without getting sick of them. I walk to and from work and still appreciate the environment--natural and built--even though I see them ten times per week. That certainly wasn't true when I lived in Arizona or California.
I do buy the numbing thing, but I also have music I've heard a hundred times and movies I've seen ten. I can only assume these are just perfect fits for my brain for some reason, like a kink. Some things get old so I move on, others don't, and stay in my repertoire.
I really buy it. I have a numerical measure of how much I like a song, which is how many times I can listen to a song while still thinking it's good. My favourites of course have very high number, but there are some that are only single digit. I really like those songs, but they fall off really quickly.
The consequence is, sometimes I have to ration how much I listen to a song. Another consequence is that I have to always seek new songs so that I don't exhaust my stock.
I have a problem with the repetition model: I feel that it's correct in some areas (e.g. types of movies I appreciated as a teenager vs now), but there are also clear cases where it doesn't work. E.g., take a forest scene - tree branches moving in the wind, etc, it is quite similar everywhere and repetitive, but doesn't get tiring, doesn't make me despise the forest view. Ok, this is not art. But it's the same with pre-1950 architecture. I go to a romantic little European town, and the architecture is kind of repetitive but keeps delighting me. No tiring effect. I'll take a book that I read about 20 times as a child; I read it again and still enjoy it (OK, I wouldn't read it twice in one go, I need at least 2 years before I read it again). So how to explain these discrepancies?
I think there's some kind of "regeneration" of attractiveness. If I don't see something for a while, its numbness would be reduced a bit. This is why I ration some of my favorite media.
Scott of old would have linked this to predictive coding theory, but alas.
It doesn’t seem like a problem that the sphere is the only tasteful thing, if humans have the capacity to detect the features which distinguish it. If we are unable to do so it is outside the scope of the human notion of taste, and we can surely just ignore whatever the AI says about it. If we are able to engage meaningfully, then we should also be able to have a discussion about whether the claim is true or not, just as human connoisseurs do. I don’t know that it makes sense to say that non-cultivation=natural=good because we would like to say that learning not just any language, but a particular language, is an objectively better thing, despite that it requires intense cultivation. I do not believe that taste excludes all but ten people in each field; this seems a little hyperbolic. The fact that some things are pretty much universally deemed to be in poor taste by everyone who has accumulated a certain amount of knowledge or thinking-time spent on a field seems to support at least some degree of objectivity here.
I think there's another argument re: children's material which is as follows. Watch, say, Daniel Tiger. It's not very sparkly, but it's still quite boring for an adult. The dialogue and plot lines are extremely simple, the morals are very obvious. If you have a level of verbal intelligence and intellectual sophistication above that of a preschooler, it's just not interesting.
People with high verbal intelligence tend to prefer Tom Stoppard to Michael Bay, prefer The Wire, to CSI Ohio, or prefer poems by Not Edgar Guest. This could simply reflect a stronger ability to appreciate stories and language than average people, the same way average people prefer CSI Ohio to Daniel Tiger.
When it comes to art I am on a somewhat low level. I like Hieronymus Bosch, Marc Chagall, Buddhist murals, Where's Waldo illustrations . . . basically pictures of interesting things. I don't have much of an innate aesthetic sense, except that I also dislike sparkly children's art. I can believe there are people with stronger artistic knowledge than me who can tell me why this or that painting is nicer than that one.
Better analogy is preferring a kid's TV show like "Curious George" to "Daniel Tiger". "Curious George" is also sweet and innocent, but there's something much more vivid and rich about it, and it's clever in a way most adults can appreciate while still being immensely entertaining and enriching to children of the same age who like "Daniel Tiger".
Holden Karnofsky's takes on taste seem relevant: https://www.cold-takes.com/how-artistic-ideas-could-get-harder-to-find/
Ooh! An ontology of things that make for "bad taste:)":
- Cheap tricks (sparkly rainbow smiling dolphins / neon black dragons holding guns)
- Careless ("Why would you spend this much effort on an [X]?" / "They can get used to it")
- Chasing Novelty/Difficulty (Scott's featureless sphere / some wine than ONLY an expert likes)
(Political art is a subset of Cheap Tricks and being Careless about actual quality)
Yes. Kitsch isn't the only kind of bad taste. Underestimulation, grey repetition like Soviet architecture, is also bad. Disharmony, like McMansions where every door and window is different is also bad. Excessive esotericism, the thing that the emperor's new clothes is about, a also bad. Trying too hard, or obviously, to be good, is bad.
Thinking about architecture, an architect sees and studies lots buildings and loathes cheap tricks. A normal person lives in a community and cares about what it looks like, and isn't comparing it to other communities most of the time. So Architects have a bigger taste mismatch than most creators.
I also think food is instructive here. Consider, we like sweets, things can be too sweet, and we may not want to only eat sweet food. Diversity and moderation are the cures to bad taste. I'm not eating spoonfuls of coffee grounds, cause latte's are mid. When we need to experience something rather than consider its meaning we don't choose "good taste".
Finally, I don't believe in the higher pleasure thing, it's all fake like wine tasting, blinded experts can't tell the difference. With no one there to praise their taste, no one experiences pleasure from ugliness. To experience the pleasure of being high status, you need an audience. Alone the audience is in their head, the idea that people will like me for liking this ugly thing. That isn't a thing we should encourage.
It's not that wine tasting is fake. It is that taste sensation is multimodal. I give an account here: https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/rating-beauty
This is well written. So, the wine-taster honestly and truthfully rates the same wine from the same batch 64 and 81 on different occasions, because for him it tastes better or worse depending on the context. What he shouldn't do is make bold claims about the quality of this wine, affecting its price and sales numbers, ruining or elevating a company. The wine tasters have a ridiculous amount of power.
Right—so wine tasting isn’t fake, and they do know what they are talking about. Whether they have outsized business influence is another matter, I agree. Personally, I seldom look at ratings. I like doing tastings at wineries to see what I like.
Every artist I appreciate uses cheap tricks, and I can't see why you'd avoid doing so. The issue is variety, more specifically rhythmic variety.
When you overuse cheap tricks you commit two cardinal sins: first, what makes cheap tricks effective is that they pop, they're high-contrast, and the effect is spoiled when they cluster; second, the structure becomes predictable and the rhythm monotonous.
In my experience this is true across artistic domains; it doesn't matter if you're discussing painting or writing or music, the intentional use of variety while keeping a consistent through line in the essence of the work is what makes for great art.
I think this is correct. There is a time in a story for each trick, using it everywhere is bad story telling because it make everything too busy. Like using lots of shades of color, let's the bright ones say more. This is good design in the sense that it points the viewer in the right direction. To me this is craft that most people can appreciate.
Nostalgebraist: “ 3) an overwhelmingly reliance on cliche. Everything is a shadow, an echo, a whisper, a void, a heartbeat, a pulse, a river, a flower—you see it spinning its Rolodex of 20-30 generic images and selecting one at random.”
The way LLMs work, isn’t this what one should expect?
> Must we pooh-pooh the work of the greatest artists across history and even of our own day, and only ever appreciate featureless spheres from now on? If not, then why do we care when a smart human expert makes the same argument?
It's time to reflect on why the word "must" is even in this sentence. In what way does it make sense to you to even try and be prescriptive about this? You surely do not imagine getting anyone who previously didn't like something to change their mind, because "Scott said we must not pooh-pooh the work of the greatest artists across history", or the converse? Not because you don't have authority or anything, but just because taste doesn't work like that. There's even a proverb about it.
> I think the strongest argument in favor is that tasteful people claim to get a higher level of pleasure from their sophisticated art than normal people can ever achieve from their cheap tricks. I’m skeptical.
So you think that *everyone* who's into more sophisticated art than you is *only* doing it for reasons of clout, money or self-delusion, period? You don't think even a small percentage of people who claim they enjoy some specific Rothko more than (or in a significantly different way from) a Marvel comic or whatever are legitimately reporting their internal experiences? They're *all* faking it or deluding themselves?
PS
> If we ban all the cheap tricks for making people happy, and then all the medium-cost tricks, then we end with strategies so difficult that only ten geniuses in the world are skilled enough to execute them, and only ten connoisseurs sophisticated enough to appreciate them. Then the overwhelming majority of everything is ugly to everyone, broken only by a tiny minority of genius-crafted objects that are ugly to everyone except a tiny sophisticated minority. Remind me again why is this is good?
Is this an argument that you have ever seen anyone credibly make?
> In architecture, I freely admit that the lowbrow architecture I like, juxtaposed against the modern architecture I find myself unable to appreciate, has more than zero resemblance to a Lisa Frank poster:
It bears noting you are not comparing two instances of architecture as they would be experienced by people who are using the building for whatever purpose it has. You are comparing two 5cm pictures of them. It's possible that "reimagining the nature of the house" is something that only becomes clear to you once you are living in it.
> I think the strongest argument in favor is that tasteful people claim to get a higher level of pleasure from their sophisticated art than normal people can ever achieve from their cheap tricks. I’m skeptical.
I interpreted this paragraph differently than you did. It sounds to me like he's saying the tasteful people are being honest about what they like, but their experiences aren't stronger or more valid or "higher level" than other people's experiences. If Expert A prefers the Rothko movie, and Casual B prefers the MCU movie, then both of them are being honest about what they like. That doesn't make the Rothko movie "better" than the MCU movie, or vice versa.
In the realm of cinema, that's perfectly fine; there is enough room in the market for both. The difference only becomes an issue when either of them is no longer able to find things that appeal to them.
The most puzzling part about that is that "smart human experts" never "pooh-pooh the work of the greatest artists across history"? What is this ridiculous straw man? It doesn't even make sense in the context of the previous posts where experts are supposed to be precisely the people who defined who the greatest artists are? This is all starting to sound incredibly cringe and like the work of someone who's not even lazily engaging with the topic in good faith.
If I could somehow unlearn all of the "cheap tricks" (without forgetting actually useful knowledge) I would happily do so. The ultimate life is one where you can regain that sense of awe and wonder you had as a child. I think part of the reason it makes adults happy to see a child extremely happy is because it is a reminder of a feeling you once had and will never have again.
We spend our whole lives chasing new highs, then getting bored of them because they are "repetitive". This is necessary for humans to advance, but it sure is annoying when you just want to be happy sometimes.
What I find can bring the joy of cheap tricks is moderation. A work that spends a bunch of time on more sophisticated stuff but breaks out cheap tricks at certain key moments can breath life back into them.
I'm not sure 'cheap tricks' is a good description. There's got to be something a meaningless splash of bright color and a jaded arrangement of bland.
You notice a cheap trick that all the normies like. Their horrible food made entirely of sugar and horrible paintings made of bright complementary colors and big impasto brushstrokes. What do you do now?
What I think you shouldn't do, that people sometimes end up doing, is to forsake it. No bright colors, no happy animals, no sugar, if you notice something enjoyable, it is now cringe and you must avoid it.
I think the right way is a balanced diet. Use the cheap tricks in moderation, combine them with the not so cheap tricks. Have some color. Have some decorations. Once in a while build something bonkers ornate, but don't fill the city with stuff like that. Don't eat so much sugar you end up loathing it. But do notice that it's nice. Nice things are not meant to be forsaken the moment you notice they are nice. But it is more fun to enjoy them responsibly.
I want to speak up in defense of children here! There are definitely schlocky, superstimuli media aimed at kids, but I think people who closely observe kids *as they actually are* (thinking particularly of Mr. Rogers and Maria Montessori) find that small kids have a greater appetite for silence, concentration, beauty, etc than adults assume.
My kids like Miss Rumphius! https://amzn.to/4uKSCui
Very good point. See Studio Ghibli movies for another example.
Good comment.
Agreed. Imagine that kids don't have bad taste but are more suceptable to some superstimuli which adults tire of: sugar, bright colors, repeating rhythms. Then good taste in moderation becomes a defense against superstimuli.
In the movie As Good as It Gets, Jack Nicholson's character says to his love interest that the fact the he notices that she's the best woman in the world, while the people she serves coffee in a diner don't, makes him feel good about himself.
This might have been discussed in these articles, but I wonder if part of the joy of taste is the feeling of achievement you get from understanding something that many people might not be able to, as if you just solved a difficult puzzle. It makes you want to go to the artist and tell them "I'm one of those who got what you were trying to do!"
I thought they use Barry Manilow to discourage squatting and loitering.
> it tried various styles, minimally-trained humans rated which ones were good and bad
Is that even true? I mean, doesn't modern RLHF include higher-competence people for expert questions? Sure feels to me like the current models would be very tough to train to be actually smart in questions when it's not the most helpfully sounding thing as judged by a regular human... I understand we have RLVR for when shit is formally verifiable, but it seems like it's not just that; and I think there are companies for data annotation who claim to hire domain-specific experts...
There is an argument for erring on the side of good taste in architecture, which is that a building you'll have to look at every day will get you more inured than one you only see the plan design graphics of, so when you read the plan you should adjust your reaction to be slightly more jaded. (When someone tells you "trust me, you'll get sick of it being this sparkly", they're probably right).
But agree we generally go too far and the social structures pushing for taste in architecture (or literature) massively overdo it, since they scale poorly (the most tasteful guy in a 100 person village probably adjusts to about the right degree and is good to listen to; the most tasteful guy in a city of a million people is a run away disaster, especially when other tasteful guys around him are egging him on).
>When someone tells you "trust me, you'll get sick of it being this sparkly", they're probably right
I don't think I've ever seen anyone complaining about architecture in historical city centers.
No, but that's actually tempered. I have seen people complain about over the top colourful skyscrapers in new Chinese cities along these line, though.
Right. Like a few commenters mentioned, any discussion of taste is sorely lacking without a "middlebrow" category - the stuff that most adults prefer to both extreme kitsch and extreme avant-garde.
I visited Brussels recently, and while the ornate buildings in the city centre where photo-able, they also very quickly gave me the feeling I wouldn't like living in the midst of them all day every day. (Then again the rest of Brussels didn't give me that feeling, either, to say the least.)
People who have to maintain it or work on it probably complain about it.
Like the tasteful deconstructivist buildings that are notorious for their leaky roofs?
Leaky roofs are known in all sorts of architecture, especially if it's flashy. "All good architecture leaks" is a cliche I've heard before.
I was thinking like, if you gotta replace a window in a historic downtown building. First of all you can't go to Home Depot and buy a window that fits, no it has to be custom made to exactly replicate the old one. 4x the price, or more, for starters, and you'll be waiting for it for months. Secondly, if you accidentally chip a little bit of the masonry when you're getting the old window out, you can't just glue the chip back in with some clear caulk (the way I did when I chipped a brick drilling a hole for an HVAC unit in a newer office building a couple months ago): the historic brick might be too old and soft for that to work, and your mortar won't match the original. So you need to actually replace the whole brick and now you're back to the same problem with the window, where you need to find a brick and mortar that matches. Maybe they have one lying in a dusty corner of a basement utility room? Probably not. And so on and so on.
Sometimes there are official boards that govern historic buildings and can fine you or stop your project if you don't do what they say.
I'm not against historic architecture by the way, I love and admire it, just pointing out that people do have good reasons to complain about it, and that newer plainer architecture has some advantages. Just might not be obvious to someone with a desk job who only sees this stuff from the street or as pictures online.
You see, the roof doing its job at keeping the rain out is the absolute bare minimum for me to consider something "good architecture", but perhaps my standards are unreasonably high.
I can't speak about your standards in general; maybe you are just unfamiliar with the realities of constructing and maintaining buildings, especially commercial buildings that are large and old. I have to assume that is the case.
Now, if I were designing a house I would do things to reduce as much as possible the chance of leaks: keep the house small, design the absolute simplest roof possible (a single tilted facet), keep it free of any penetrations (so, all vents and chimneys would be out of side walls), and I would clad the roof in a material that is durable and as monolithic as possible (large metal panels with hidden seams--same for the fascia and soffits, which I'd wrap entirely in aluminum).
Note that most houses don't have roofs anywhere near this impenetrable to water. Commercial buildings often CANNOT be designed this way.
And even a roof like this could still leak: water could wick in under the cladding, or hail could damage the cladding and allow water in that way, or some tiny detail of how two pieces of material are joined could come slightly ajar over the years, producing a hole into which something unwanted, somehow, would eventually find its way.
This is fascinating. Here's a couple of sentences I wrote the other day:
"The raft pulled up and Evie boarded. One of the assistants covered her with a thick towel, and she made a beeline for me, cuddling into my side for warmth."
It's part of a first draft, and one of the things that immediately jumped out when I started editing was my use of the phrase, "made a beeline for." It's a cliche, so my immediate thought was that I needed to rewrite it, either with something simple like, "headed straight for," or some other phrase that gives a little flavor to exactly how Evie headed for the narrator.
But...did I really need to rewrite it? It's familar. Everyone reading it knows exactly what it means. Moreover, I'm writing in first-person...is it a phrase the narrator would use in telling the story?
It's staying, for now. Maybe it's a cheap trick, but it seems to work.
To me “the raft pulled up and Evie boarded” feels like a view from the dock. But the following lines make it clear we’re observing from the raft, not the dock. If I am on the raft I would think something like “We pulled up and Evie boarded.” Or if the narrator is not associated with whoever is driving the raft—like a prisoner—then “The helmsman guided the raft to the dock and Evie boarded.”
"The rest of this is scaffolding—protagonists cut from whole cloth, emotions dyed and draped over sentences” - basically achieves meaningfulness and self-consistency. There’s nothing wrong with it besides how it becomes grating when you see it every three sentences and realize what the AI is trying to pull."
I can give you draped over sentences, and protagonists cut from whole cloth is cliche but has analogical meaning, but what does it mean for an emotion to be dyed?
The purpose of figurative language is to explain the unknown by reference to the known, and while there can be inherent beauty and euphony in that, AI aims for the beauty and sacrifices the clarity. It's all empty calories.
Yes! And this is often the case with “it isn’t X, it’s y” formations too. They’re meant to be punchy and clear but they often add little or no meaning. “This isn’t a change. This is a paradigm shift.” Oh, well thank god you disabused me of the notion that this is a change, because I was really thinking that, I could have gone down a real blind alley there 🙄
I'm always annoyed at those; "I'm not thinking X!" I say, or if I was I was only doing so because that was indeed the natural conclusion of the argument it was making.
I would assume a "dyed emotion" would be hiding an emotion behind something similar but more socially appropriate. "Inside my heart is breaking, my makeup may be flaking, but my smile still stays on."
I guess I'd have to see context to know if that makes sense.
Every fourth or fifth of these posts seems to include a dig at atonal music and I find it a bit grating - it's the point of reference that I happen to connect with, I suppose if I were more invested in some other art form I feel would feel the same about digs against it that may the appear, and it makes me a bit less favorably inclined to the whole project.
In any case, it's not true that the sophisticated people like atonal music. A tiny fraction of the music listening public, sophisticated or not, listen to classical music, and a tinier fraction of that to the type of atonal music that was in vogue from roughly the 50s to the 70s that you presumably have in mind. In reality, the sophisticated people listen to Beyonce or whatever, and those of us who like long, developmental works of music lost that battle decades ago. People who like atonal music are mostly weird enthusiasts that rarely meet anyone who shares their musical taste unless they happen to live in one of the major cities where it is still sometimes performed, and we certainly never manage to impress anyone with it.
It's also not true that we like this music for its impenetrable mathematical constructions. A small handful of composers (Babbitt, early Boulez, Carter's big midcentury works, etc.) arguably fit what you have in mind. But those of us who like the music of Ligeti, Lutoslawski, Messiaen, Wolpe, Takemitsu, Chin, Dutilleux, etc. do so because it is rich, monumental, deeply expressive and emotionally powerful, sometimes catchy and playful, sometimes haunting, sometimes devastating. All the same reasons people like any music.
Thank you.
>People who like atonal music are mostly weird enthusiasts that rarely meet anyone who shares their musical taste unless they happen to live in one of the major cities where it is still sometimes performed, and we certainly never manage to impress anyone with it.
The last time I've seen this discussed here there was a good point about why "highbrow" "postmodern" paintings/sculptures/architecture are much higher status than music or cinema - the former are physical objects and, optionally, experiences, whereas the latter are just experiences. You don't have to "sit through" a Pollock or a Kooning painting to declare them works of transcendental genius worthy of a spot in the "most expensive" list, and so you get to signal your "sophistication" cheaply.
Yes, the last time this was discussed here, I wrote that point ;)
I would be happy to read a blog post from you explaining more about what you appreciate about atonal music, what to listen for, where to start. Or failing that, a list of titles of some favourite pieces that might be accessible for an outsider. I heard some atonal music in a music appreciation course in university and didn't really get it, but I'd be interested in learning.
I don't have a blog but I'm happy to put together a listening list here with my comments about the music.
A few caveats: the 20th century saw a lot of fracturing in the musical landscape, even in this small corner of it, and someone else would probably put together a list with an entirely different flavor. In particular, I am less enamored now than I was when I was younger with the denser variants of serialism and serialist-adjacent music (Babbitt, early Boulez, Carter). Most of the music I listen to is atonal, either totally or at least in part, but perhaps more conservative with respect to melody, form, and structure than some of what's out there. These are just the pieces that have remained most meaningful to me for a long time.
Ligeti. One of the great colorists in music history, endlessly imaginative, playful, and expressive. He also wrote a piece deriving its title from an essay by Karl Popper, which may appeal to some readers of this newsletter. My favorites: Piano Concerto, Atmospheres, Requiem, Piano Etudes, San Francisco Polyphony, Melodien, 2nd String Quartet.
Lutoslawski. There should be a diacritical(?) mark on one of the Ls but I don't know how to put it there in this platform. The greatest symphonist and composer of dramatic instrumental forms in this style for me, and I think relatively accessible although nevertheless dense and dissonant. My favorites: Cello Concerto, Symphony No. 3, Symphony No. 4, Les Espaces du Sommeil, Preludes and Fugue for 13 Strings.
Messiaen. A true original, with a cosmic and synaesthetic vision inspired variously by bird song, theology, and ecstatic excess. Not beholden to any school, with frequent tonal or impressionistic moments placed alongside absolute wild abandon. My favorites: Quatuor pour le fin du temps, Visions de l'amen, Turangalila-symphonie, Catalogue d'oiseaux.
Dutilleux. to my mind, the true heir to Debussy among French composers, a consummate craftsman and humanist, dedicated to rich colors and intricate and thoughtful structures. My favorites: Tout un monde lointain, Ainsi la nuit, Timbres, espace, mouvement.
Stefan Wolpe. Probably much less well-known than others on this list and to be honest I am not completely sure myself why his music moves me so much. More abstract and formalist than the others, albeit with a neoclassical bent in some of his music, but there is in every one of his pieces some crystallization of the abstractions into sudden and heartbreaking romanticism. I like especially his piano music (find the recordings by Peter Serkin for some of these if you can, for whatever reason there are some really bad recordings out there of his music): Pastorale, Toccata in Three Movements, Form IV: Broken Sequences, Battle Piece.
Takemitsu. Another colorist, deeply inspires by Debussy, Messiaen, and traditional Japanese music. I love his piano pieces Rain Tree Sketch and Rain Tree Sketch II, but I think you can't go wrong with almost any of his music.
I have avoided the classics, so to speak, Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, because you have likely encountered their music before and I actually think the more coloristic free atonalists of the second half of the century make a better entry point into this music, but I also love them...
Messaien is atonal?
I saw the Cleveland Orchestra perform Turangalila when I was in high school, and had a recording of that symphony (er, double concerto) that I listened to for years afterward. I remember quite clearly that it had tones. I frequently hum them!
Messiaen's music is often atonal (esp. later music, Catalogue d'oiseaux, Oiseaux exotiques, Chronochromie), often tonal-ish (parts of Turangalila, as you say, parts of Quartet for the End of Time, certainly anything earlier than these), and often scale-based or modal without being conventionally tonal. He more or less did his own thing!
Notably, he is generally credited as the first composer to have written using the technique of total serialism that people typically have in mind when they polemicize against atonal music, in his Quatre Études de rhythme.
There are a few others on the list that are tonal-ish from often-atonal composers, like Wolpe's Pastorale...
And just to elaborate a bit more on one point: a lot of people use atonal interchangeably with dissonant, amelodic, dense, arhythmic, etc., rather than to mean lacking a tonic. In principle, these are independent.
For example, I would say that almost all of Bartok's music is more tonal than Debussy's Voiles, which lives entirely in a whole-tone scale, tries hard to push Bb as a sort of tonic by hammering away at it as a bass pedal point throughout the piece, but never manages to convince (me, at least). But Bartok is of course quite a bit more dissonant than Debussy, and I think more likely to be labelled as atonal for this reason!
Thank you!
My guess is that sophisticated people (of under 40) of the current day define them less by music than at any point of the 20th century.
One might even guess that one's sophistication these days depends more on the sophistications of the memes they appreciate than any "trad" cultural product.
Everyday I am learning more and more that deep down I am the most basic of basic bitches
I'm just happy I am. You'd think I'd have gotten tired of isekais by now, but it's somehow still and endless source of entertainment.
Scott's argument about how kids are happier than tasteful people proves too much. It functions as a fully general argument against any type of entertainment that takes thought and effort to appreciate. It can basically take you all the way to wireheading.
The real solution is moderation. Truly great art has a mixture of "cheap tricks" and stuff that takes more thought and effort to appreciate. The greatest art has enough layers of each that people with different levels of taste can both come away from it feeling satisfied. A work of art that is just a kitsch bundle of "cheap tricks," and a work of art that avoids them so much that it is ugly and boring, are both failures of moderation. Both of these failure modes need to be avoided.
> It can basically take you all the way to wireheading.
Maybe it should. Maybe after AI trivializes all forms of art, people will realize it was nothing more than meaningless hedonism and social signalling this entire time. What do you truly "want" from life? All of this fiction and abstraction is a mere substitute for true fulfillment. They will no longer be necessary once these desires can be fulfilled directly.
That's a theory I've heard before, but I don't buy it. I have firsthand experience about this because I went through a depressive episode where I couldn't enjoy anything and I still wanted to read challenging fiction and managed to get some books finished. I actually found I had quite a lot of things I still wanted to do, even though I took no pleasure from doing them. That experience made me definitively choose preference utilitarianism over hedonic utilitarianism.
Don't get me wrong, I don't deny that hedonistic pleasure has value. I am glad I recovered from that episode eventually. The fact that I still wanted to do things when I couldn't feel anything, but that my life is better once I can, has led me to conclude that "meaningful" and "challenging" preference satisfaction and "hedonism" are both important parts of a life well-lived.
What's the difference? Whether its driven by pleasure, fear, or simply a desperate hunger for stimulation, desire is still just desire. It's no more meaningful than someone commiting self-harm just to feel something. None of it is more real or important than anything else, and in the presence of an alternative, it becomes entirely unnecessary. Technology is slowly stripping the illusion of meaning from every facet of human existence, and hopefully, people will eventually realize they don't need meaning. It is simply enough to exist.
I don't have desires I want to extinguish, I have goals to accomplish. I don't have some meta-goal of "achieve all desires, whatever they may be." I directly desire specific things. An alternative thing is worse, even if it is easier, because it isn't the specific thing I want.
There's an old quote: "Quincy, there are only twelve notes. Until God gives us thirteen, I want you to know what everybody did with those twelve."
So really, the first folks into a genre get to pick a lot of low-hanging fruit; after that it becomes folk art. Jazz has basically reached this point, but there's a lot of folks who want to pretend it hasn't, so we get the attempts at highbrow genius.
Of course there are more than twelve notes! Here, check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weulYew5om0
Terry Jones would take this disk to his desert island. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009mjgt
hahaha, nice! I'm familiar with 24-TET, but that was my first listen to 36-TET.
I think the broader point still stands, although I acknowledge that 36^8 is much larger than 12^8 (just figuring 8 to the bar)
The tricks don't seem mutually exclusive. Adult jokes can be hidden in a children's TV series, Tolkien is beloved by lowbrow fans and was still a respectable author with serious academic chops, and games like Pony Island take a saccharine sweet style and build something else on top.
Maybe appealing up and down the totem pole is part of what makes something timeless, rather than just tasteful.
I second this. The best art can be appreciated in multiple ways up and down the totem pole. The first example of this that comes to mind are the superhero comic books of Alan Moore, which work perfectly well as superhero adventure stories, but are also full of all kinds of deep symbolism.
Your "eyeball kicks" remind me of Scott Meyer's Basic Instructions on "How to sound wise": https://www.basicinstructions.net/basic-instructions/2015/9/13/how-to-sound-wise.html
Haven't been following the theory of taste discussion so I may just be restating what a hundred other people have said, but the final couple of paragraphs here makes me suspect that "taste" is simply just a way of engaging with something you like more deeply, often after the initial pleasure you derive from it has worn off.
I think this is easiest to describe in the context of reading fiction for me. Reading the same genre over and over eventually loses the appeal, so you shift to another one. Eventually you get a feel for every genre and very little surprises or impresses you. At some point, most of those surprises and twists get mined out too, and so you're forced to focus on the more minute details or more niche ideas to find something that stands out. I think the same applies to music, painting, architecture, video games, television, and pretty much everything with depth.
The implication here is that actively trying to be tasteful is usually a trap (something that I'm sure has already been said a dozen times here), which leads to ignoring the initial appeal of something (the part most people innately like) in favor of something that a small subset of people have semi-arbitrarily decided is more tasteful.
There's certainly situations where engaging with something more in-depth DOES yield higher rewards than just engaging with the initial appeal of it: playing a casual game of basketball with friends is fun, but winning a regional or national basketball event is generally MUCH more enjoyable. However, while things like this seem to be a result of engaging with something in-depth, they're not really an example of changes in *taste,* (it seems like something taste-adjacent?) so it doesn't seem like its a good argument for actively trying to be tasteful.
There's a mountain to be said about taste as it relates to status and how many courses on literature/music/architecture/whatever try to teach taste, but I can't imagine I have anything interesting to say there.
>"taste" is simply just a way of engaging with something you like more deeply, often after the initial pleasure you derive from it has worn off.
And to show off your sophistication, if you are lucky enough that the stuff you like is in fashion.
We are social, and hierarchical animals, and as you noted in your barberpole theory, hierarchy is about _distinction_ (which in french is both the word for class and for separation). So there's always in matter of taste the push and pull of the distinguished taste havers and the slop-loving mediocres. Aspiration vs defensive taste-manœuvres. So yes, a lot of people would start loving spheres, and putting spheres on public buildings, and living in spherical houses, and the AI would sneer, and start loving pyramids.
I’m not sure the hallmark of bad taste is a mere weakness for “cheap tricks.” I think it’s more that people with bad taste *dislike* everything else.
So for instance, my young son likes candy and pizza and chicken fingers. I like candy and pizza and chicken fingers, too. The difference between us is that he thinks all other kinds of food are dis-GUS-ting, whereas I’ve learned to enjoy a range of different cuisines.
My young son thinks the Lego Ninjago Skull Fortress looks cool. I think so too. The difference between us is that he thinks all forms of real-world architecture are BOOOOOORING, whereas I can kinda sorta appreciate Chinese pagodas.
Similarly, in those poetry taste-tests, the readers with bad taste will look at Shakespeare and Whitman and Dickinson and say things like, “It’s just pretentious drivel! It doesn’t even make sense!” So the real issue isn’t that they enjoy rhyme and meter and uplifting messages. You can find those things in Dickinson and Shakespeare, too. The real issue is that these poets use a lot of *other* techniques that the bad-taste readers reject.
IMHO, the problem with “good taste” is that it’s often an overcorrection. I got so tired of my son’s insistence on chicken fingers that eventually I wanted to shout, “No more! I’m sick of chicken fingers. I never want to eat another fried chicken strip as long as I live!” Take that to an extreme and you get the modernists saying they’re sick of everything that’s ever been popular. Which is basically the same mistake the bad-taste people make, but in reverse.
I'd have to give this some deeper reflection but I definitely find your perspective compelling here. As an indie game designer with some very niche tastes I'm constantly forced to keep an intellectual grasp between my own specific tastes, the tastes of the hardcore (5-15%) minority of people playing predominantly the sorts of games I play (and work on), and then the mechanics of the various swathes of people making up the more casual 85-95% of the audience who might be there for pretty different things. Obviously I could go on for hours discussing an industry I've been dissecting for years, but naturally key points I often get hung up on are when "what people with my refined niche tastes want" and "what'd click best for the average gamer who'll pick it up on sale, play for maybe a single-digit number of hours, and then move on, but you still want to have had a decent-to-good experience" directly conflict.
One example I often have to bow my head to is just letting people stay in their comfort zone. I *love* being forced out of my comfort zone, having to constantly adapt and combine complex toolkits to deal with esoteric challenges. To first look at a challenge and not be sure if it's even *doable* with what I've brought to the table, an hour before finally overcoming it, possibly through much iteration on my approach. Aaaaand... that doesn't really work for most casual people. They'll cling onto the first approach they think of and it'll be heavily based on the conceits of previous accessible games they played. Something as simple as "here's two different mechanics that are better at different things, you'll want to use both and alter the ratio as needed" tends to break the brains of people used to approaching games for "just pick the general approach that appeals to me aesthetically and find a way to make it work for every challenge." And at some point I did have to suck it up and give those people some way to succeed at certain polarized challenges that were really meant to utilize the *other* mechanic.
Obviously the interactive medium of video games - and ESPECIALLY turn-based thinky titles that tend to hit people right in the intellectual self-esteem and make them very annoyed if they do particularly poorly - complicates this a bunch. But I don't think it's that disparate from a kid going "ninjas and skulls are super cool and in all my favorite architectural compositions and this has NEITHER and is an utterly abysmal architecture tradition in stark contrast to the subterfuge and decapitations underpinning all of my favorite works" (I assume, as a childless thirty-something, this is what your young son's distaste for pagodas sounds like). It's incredibly frustrating as someone with "good taste" to have to compromise with the large-but-necessary parts of the audience so used to the mainstream that any attempt to challenge them is liable to run into "but this isn't as good as low-brow stuff at being low-brow stuff."
For what it's worth, I find MANY opportunities to improve things for the high-brow audience that don't involve tradeoffs in anything except development time, and the high-brow audience being much more likely to spread your work via word-of-mouth (and assist in its creation via bug reports and suggestions alike) justifies this effort. I definitely rambled a bit here, but you genuinely got me thinking about how my own work experiences connected to this topic.
Fascinating to see these ideas applied to a domain like game design, where challenging audiences is … sort of the whole point? But of course there are different kinds of challenges.
The gaming crowd is also famously vocal about their preferences. I wonder—when players hit these pain points you’ve described, how do they express their dissatisfaction? Do they rant on YouTube? Leave harsh reviews? Send angry emails? Demand refunds? Or do they just quietly gravitate to easier titles? Like, what form does the feedback tend to take? To me there’s an important difference between someone who simply isn’t up to the challenge and the kind of player who thinks all difficult games are “badly designed.” But I’m in the casual bracket myself, so I may just be defending my own tastes, here.
This would sorta split depending on if I'm talking about the broader industry or my own personal experiences. The games I'm working on aren't quite big enough to be worth a "rant on youtube," at most an "annoyed aside in a general overview on youtube."
That said I bring this up a LOT in advice to other developers. I use the term "dealbreakers" to refer to the moment these options come up. On Steam, like 1-in-60 people will review your game, and it only takes 1-in-10 of those to be negative to meaningful alter how your game looks at a glance to random passerby. Obviously the content of reviews matters a lot - a positive review listing downsides has gotten me to not buy things in the past, and a negative review listing someone else's point of frustration got me thinking "oh that sounds more up my alley." Many reviews will be fairly hollow in terms of useful consumer advice, though, but the raw numbers still matter.
Leave harsh reviews is the one I center in on most. Like a tenth of games are getting refunded on steam I believe, give or take, but a lot of this has to do with people going for trading cards, using purchases as demos and stuff like that. Unless a game is hate-able in a rather high profile way, you probably won't be seeing your refunds change as cleanly. Having 5% negative reviews vs 15% negative reviews will happen much more quickly and clearly. Going from the baseline 10%ish refund rate to 30% refunds would be WILD and not something I've really heard of being relevant to getting a sense for feedback. Especially since steam's baseline policy on refunds means that if your game takes an average of 3 hours to piss people off, you'll get a fair amount who will negatively review but won't be able to get a refund. (Yes, this 2 hour refund window is actually quite relevant for certain financially-savvy elements of design, an extra-extra reason to put your best foot forward)
"Angry emails" is more "annoyed asides on your discord server and steam discussion board" at this point. Definitely a thing and will usually cleanly correlate with the content of negative reviews. As you're seeing the pattern at this point, I find negative reviews to be INCREDIBLY useful and are a central part of the iterative process, especially because of a simple trick - read OTHER people's negative reviews. Find the games most similar to the one you're making, and see what sorts of failure points make people decide to quit in disgust. Many of these things are based on perception and have to have you also account for someone's play-time. To take a well-known game in one of my genres of choice, Slay the Spire has two common features of negative reviews that are incredibly elucidating in terms of how to avoid pissing off people playing a Roguelike Deckbuilder.
The first, people complaining about RNG - that things feel unfair and random. The game famously has expert players who can go on massive win-streaks on the highest levels of difficulty. Thing is, these are people who know the game inside-and-out on top of spending a long time analytically processing their options and their implications. You should mentally translate "random" to "unpredictable" - the fact that these systems *are knowable* doesn't change the fact the average player does not know them, and they really are as good as random. They have nothing but the vaguest heuristics to go by when making an evaluation like "should I take this thing that sounds like it might be really strong later but I can't take much advantage of now, but will eat space in my toolkit until then?" And if you get punished for it, it feels genuinely bad, and telling those people "if you were an expert you'd realize this was a completely informed decision and not at all a product of pure randomness" won't make them have any more fun. At best you'll just make them feel stupid. On the topic of "not up for the challenge vs badly designed", one classic extension of "people complaining about randomness" is seeing people insist that random results must be rigged in some way when in reality the problem is them comparing it mentally to games that were rigged *in their favor* in the past, even if I can take a quick glance at the code to confirm it's a simple call-up-a-random-number function that comes out to a perfectly even distribution. A frequent feature in (positive) reviews of Vault of the Void - the game I worked on I'm comparing to Slay the Spire - is people saying that they tend to feel they understand WHY they lost when they lost. That's good! If people blame themselves and not the game, you're doing something right as a designer.
The second, which is a common crux of "save players from themselves" is people who find the game too hard despite not playing on the easiest difficulty. This is another one of those "thinky games get tied up in people's self-esteem" things that I feel is even worse than for action games. A lot of people will center in on what they feel like is the "real game" that they "should" be playing on. A shocking amount of negative reviews of Slay the Spire are people complaining that, in their attempts to play the hardest difficulty setting and complete the difficult optional objective in the process, they find it frustrating and unenjoyable. And... they're right. This is a basic part of human psychology and a designer should strongly consider accounting for it. In the game I work on, it has three difficulty levels at baseline before the later, more customizable and scalable difficulty options come in. They are called "Normal, Hard, and Impossible" and Impossible is probably roughly at the difficulty level of Slay the Spire's *lowest* difficulty for the average gamer (which is heavily adjusted by Vault of the Void having somewhat more complex baseline mechanics and decisions to make, so the skill divide between the hardcore and casuals manifests much faster since you can get a lot further via heuristics rather than needing to wait to accumulate pure game-specific knowledge). The choice to call it "Impossible" was very deliberate. I recall listening to a youtube review where someone played on Normal and said something like "it goes up to Impossible but I doubt I'd ever play that since it sounds like it wouldn't be any fun" and I considered that a success. I personally find Normal disgustingly easy and am slightly heartbroken that I'm part of a species where anybody finds it seriously intellectually stimulating (although I try not to say so in polite company). But for somebody not loaded-for-intellectual-bear AND not seeking a particularly intellectually stimulating experience, it hits the spot, and at that point the entire challenge as a designer is just to convince someone to stay on the setting they find fun and not feel obligated to push forward. Basically the video game equivalent of the Peter Principle - if you're having fun raise the difficulty until you find an equilibrium where you're no longer having fun.
I believe ACX had a long response to Freddie DeBoer talking about the way intelligence is viewed in society in the process of a broader discussion of education reform, and at least in my own experience I feel I need to be rather savvy of the fact that *feeling stupid* is a much more dangerous thing to risk inducing as a designer than "feeling like your reflexes weren't quite up to snuff and you might need another couple tries to learn this specific timing."
(wow this is gonna need to be two comments)
(part 2)
The last point of what you asked to hit on is the "quietly gravitate to easier titles" - this is one where something like Slay the Spire is a great case study on just how complicated this becomes once online culture and fandom kick in. Many incredibly popular games are famous for their difficulty, and that reputation takes on a life of its own in a bunch of incredibly idiosyncratic ways. At some point things I would objectively consider poor design decisions and advise others against nevertheless end up positively helping the game's character, because having overcome those pain points ("friction" is the standard term for making doing a basic thing take more effort than needed in the name of immersing someone in the world and its challenges) gives a self-satisfied air of elitism to both dedicated fans and even random casuals merely aware of the game's or genre's reputation. It's interesting to discuss although not necessarily worth diving too deeply into in the realm of "projects with single digit team members where just getting to pay off a mortgage is the greatest success you hope for." It's quite relevant for this post about taste and the way high-brow and low-brow tastes stratify in society, but to be honest there's an agonizing amount of details and unique facets to go into. Hopefully it can suffice to say something like "yes, at a baseline people gravitate towards stuff that's more accessible to their existing experience with games, but there's a ton of exceptions each working off of different psychological and sociological experiences." There's also a lot of thought people like me are obligated to put into just "how do I communicate to a player that they're meant to maybe have to shift paradigms a bit" all the way down to basic questions like "this mechanic in my game is similar but not quite identical to how something works in most games in this genre. Do I call it by the common term in the name of accessibility, or give it an idiosyncratic name to highlight its unique functionality?" But then a bunch of other people give totally standard common mechanics unique names in the name of aesthetic world-building and not communicating mechanics. "AP" "Mana" "Energy" are all 100% identical mechanics in various games (and incredibly DIFFERENT mechanics in others...) and the names are just a matter of fluff - mana sounds more fantasy, energy sounds more sci-fi, AP sounds more technical and wargamey.
This was a REALLY long one and I'm sure amidst some tangents I might've failed to answer some of the mundane things you inquired about. Hope this helps - I appreciate that you got me thinking in terms of framing my design experience in broader terms of high-brow vs low-brow taste.
Food is an interesting example that feels somehow different to me than the others. Maybe it's an area where average people have enough preference and power that the high culture isn't really able to drive the direction in the same way? At then end of the day no matter how much of an innovator you are you have to find a consistent market that wants to eat what you make. Maybe it's because breaking the rules too much triggers disgust in a visceral way that almost no one can talk themselves out of.
Of course it has its slop level, fast food, shelf stable junk, etc. But then there's a massive space above that and what's interesting about it is that pretty much anyone would enjoy pretty much all of it, barring specific preferences. But if you like Applebee's $10 sirloin, there is a price/quality ladder that you can travel upwards on and pretty much every step up is a genuine step up in a way that most people would appreciate, until you get to the very tippy top and it gets weird. But the weirdness is at a handful of places in the whole world. I don't see this same pattern where there is an elite group of tastemakers that is forcing the masses to tolerate things they dislike. The very top experimental space seems like a much smaller proportion of the overall pie, both by absolute size and by influence. There is a popular steak/burger/pizza place in every medium sized city where you can get a very similar (in terms of overall perceived quality) experience.
Maybe it's the firmness of the underlying rules. The people want well balanced savory, salty, acidic, sometimes sweet, aromatic food. They want things that are essentially the texture of meat or fruit or vegetables. Everyone likes bread, rice, legumes, stewed or roasted meats.
I remember being somewhat surprised in my first fine dining, chef's tasting type of experience. I was expecting a lot of risk, weirdness, some things I didn't like that much. There were definitely a lot of ingredients I'd never had before, but they were put together in a way that was recognizable and fundamentally delicious in a way that anyone could appreciate. Elevated by some fancy techniques, benefitting from perfect care and execution. The same culinary language I was used to, just more delicious.
This way of thinking about taste, I think, makes a strong case for more middlebrow art, at least when it comes to art meant for the broad public (most architecture, Hollywood movies, statues in public places, music festival headliners, etc.) . You don’t want too much lowest common denominator slop, because it bores and irritates most people by being cheap. You also don’t want art so obscure that, as you say, only people who have intensively studied art could possibly appreciate it.
Derek Thompson has pointed out that what a lot of good popular art have in common is that they combines familiar tropes with a few twists to make them novel. The former makes it legible to ordinary people, while the latter makes it interesting and fresh to them. I think taste is the ability to recognize whether there is something of interest there or not, but good middlebrow art is made in such a way that most people have enough taste to appreciate the interesting parts of a work.
I too was thinking about the middlebrow while reading this post.
My sense is that people attracted to middlebrow art are, funnily enough, those most interested in the art itself. High-brow connoisseurs are usually too focused on how admiring obscurity will make them appear (or how it will admit them to some exclusive "club"), while low-brow consumers are more interested in their personal visceral and immediate satisfaction.
As for folks saying there's no such thing as good vs. bad taste, I don't buy it. Taste exists, and it is something one can cultivate. Using it as a lever to denigrate other people is simply another way to justify discrimination that was otherwise predetermined.
>most architecture, Hollywood movies, statues in public places, music festival headliners, etc.
Well, the problem with architecture and statues, as opposed to movies and music, is that institutional gatekeepers are much more influential there, and they tend to be very hostile to middlebrow, which is how we get all this dissonance and consternation.
ive sat through about 5 scott articles regarding taste without speaking up but i can bear it no longer.
here he doubles down on drawing this dichotomy between bad taste (Lisa Frank, sugar), and good taste (featureless spheres, chartreuse paste).
what about the canon??
“the canon” is the term i and others use to refer to enduring classics. you’ll also hear “great works” or “great novels” but it applies to any and all artistic media. the very snootiest critic will dismiss beethoven and michaelangelo and dostoevsky as obvious and middlebrow, but their works have enduring popularity in a way that the lowbrow (almost every movie that doesn’t make it in the library of congress) and the highbrow (almost every movie that wins the palme d’or) don’t stand the test of time.
think the sort of stuff they make you read or watch or listen to in high school and college. the canon.
one must ask herself why having good taste even matters. ive written a full essay on that https://sambish.com/essays/taste but the long and short of it is that the canon is a taste schelling point where you can present as tasteful, cultured, smart etc to the maximum number of people (and status cashes out in various ways: higher quality jobs and mates, trust and prestige). if you choose to argue for the artistic merits of the banana taped to the wall and the chartreuse paste it might put you at the top of the taste hierarchy, but it will alienate most people who think they’re silly and inscrutable. on the other hand if you’ve read crime and punishment, the hoi polloi who haven’t read crime and punishment will generally feel esteem and admiration for you.
if i may psychoanalyze, i think scott is overly concerned what the postmodern academic high culture critics consider good taste because it makes him feel small to know that he isnt at the top and they look down on him. but i think it feels a lot nicer here in the middle than on either extreme, because those same elites are generally despised by the populace (id say 80% or more, across economic classes). perhaps good taste could be thought of as an aristotelian virtue, existing as a perfect moderate between two extreme vices of philistinism and snobbery
i contend the canon is highbrow taste that distinguishes one because it’s really big and hard to hold in your head all at once and the vast majority of people haven’t even tried. step out of your high iq bubble and you will discover that while most people recognize vivaldi’s seasons as something they’ve heard before the vast majority can’t even name it. there’s tremendous alpha in the canon.
This is something I don't get it. It's one thing to say that gothic revival is a kitschy style, but it's another thing to say that Notre Dame is kitsch. So, it was obviously possible at some point in history to make true masterpieces that are also appealing to unsophisticated people, and in fact you could probably say this about most true masterpieces. It seems like only in the last century or so this idea has taken hold that appealing to non-experts is a fatal flaw, or even a flaw at all.
To me the core of kitschy art isn't that it has cheap tricks, it's that it only has cheap tricks, and this fools inexperienced audiences into thinking it's better than it is. I like Joachim Wtewael and Jean-Honoré Fragonard better than I like that rainbow abomination Scott posted, but I like them for basically the same reasons, and I don't think that's a problem.
I met someone at LessOnline and had several phone conversations with them throughout the year about healthy communities. He provided several examples and counter-examples. A healthy community was the drawing practice group he attends, and a toxic example was a group that maintained an art gallery where they argued over which art was good. At the drawing practice group, you don't talk about art. Whoever is good is pretty much obvious, and he said that automatically filtered out those with personality disorders.
He said his Zendo practice group was another example of a healthy group, and a group to discuss Buddhist doctrines and who is better or worse at exemplifying the ideals of Buddhism would be an example of a toxic one, for the same reasons.
For similar reasons you will find more intelligent debates in ACX open threads than in Mensa.
Any art that is too show-y is slop. Any art that is too obscure is elitist. Only art designed for the 50th percentile person is worthy of the term "art."
What's interesting, though it takes us somewhat outside of the range of "tastes," are those things which are timelessly beautiful and of which one never tires. I have never gotten tired of how it looks when a fountain is shooting water droplets up into the sunshine, or the pattern of a tabby cat's fur, or trees, or looking at a wood fire. (It all sounds very cliche to _write about_, but the actual things give endless enjoyment.)
Back to taste - I had a friend whose favorite chocolate was (for real) Hershey bars. What a superpower! Imagine that your favorite chocolate is ubiquitous and almost as cheap as chocolate gets.
I personally really like brutalist architecture. I think I absorbed some kind of idea in the 70s or 80s that it was cool or futuristic and that feeling has never left me. I like both buildings in your comparison but the one on the right gives me that 'Ooh!' feeling, and in this one case it's not out of snobbery or even having some kind of educated architectural palate.
Part of the reason that “this is good” is that diversity is good. Most sophisticated people like the cheap tricks too, in moderation, existing alongside the fancy stuff. It’s nice to have both over the top ornamented old architecture *and* innovative but sober modern architecture in the same city! And it’s nice to have different cities with different mixes! Similarly it’s nice to sometimes indulge in haute cuisine and sometimes indulge in cheap comfort food and spend most of our time in between. If we didn’t have the sophisticated people and critics, we’d get a much poorer landscape overall.
(It doesn’t mean the distribution couldn’t be better, there certainly are failure modes in some fields, of course.)
I remember really loving the artist Lassen when I was in middle school, but recall people saying he was corny or cheesey. He painted landscapes with animals and sunrises in brilliant pastel and neon colors. To me it just seemed like MORE and made my brain feel good to look at. I do recall in highschool later agreeing that Lassen was 'so middle school,' and actively deciding that more realistic and less romantic landscapes were preferable. Something something only middle school girls think the world should be those colors... aren't I so sophisticated and adult now...
https://www.lassenart.com/
Lassen's art looks like something a diffusion model would make.
But before there were diffusion models. Also with paintbrushes.
Art is useful for two things: sensory pleasure and exploring the universe.
Sensory pleasure is repeatable. I could eat mashed potatoes and gravy ten thousand times and never get sick of it. You could live in a village of traditionally architected buildings your whole life and feel more at one with your environment than someone who lives in a modern city whose buildings question ancient architectural assumptions. I've enjoyed every long jump I've performed in Super Mario 64 for the past 30 years.
There's some axis along which all these things are reducible to low-grade dopamine in a way that's probably strictly inferior to jhana meditation. That's fine.
If you're using art to explore the universe though, uniqueness actually matters! If ChatGPT actually was capable of outputting a featureless sphere that communicates some irreducible mathematical truth, that would be great! We could study it for decades and add it to our bizarre catalogue of beautiful artifacts. A second featureless sphere that's just a 90 degree rotation of the first one wouldn't yield that delicious eureka moment we human beings crave.
Obviously the subjective experience of engaging with eureka moments cashes out in sensory pleasure on some level, but there's at least a different mechanism that produces it. Maybe there's something metaphysically important about the human drive to pursue truth, maybe there's not, but it's not the same thing as basking in a hot tub. Not even the most sophisticated connoisseur wants to eat weird chartreuse foam for every meal.
> I could eat mashed potatoes and gravy ten thousand times and never get sick of it
How usual is that? I find that if I eat the same thing more than 3-4 days in a row I get pretty fed up of it and want something, anything else. When picking what to cook, I tend to flinch away from things I can remember cooking recently, or things it feels like I've made often. We end up with quite a long rotation of foods (and own a large freezer so we can do that while still bulk cooking).
I have a similar issue with music: I notice tracks starting to annoy me when the giant driving playlist queues them up too often in any week, and I have to skip or remove them for a while
Different people probably have different rates of decay for different media: https://gwern.net/media-rl
Mine for food is on the order of hours. Give me a unique breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and I can loop those three meals for a year before shaking them up.
I remember Gwern saying (or maybe it was someone commenting on his post) that it's funny how we enjoy replaying games in the long-term, but losing save progress and having to replay a level immediately is torture.
So maybe there is some interplay between sensory pleasure and discovery.
I'm curious if you actually do that meal loop, or if it's something you feel like you would be fine with, but aren't currently doing?
I normally cook batch lunches for the whole week on Sundays, so that's always fixed. But usually a little more variety for dinner.
It's something I've done in the past but no longer do. I'd meal prep on Sunday for it, yeah.
Lmao of course Gwern has written about something I have just theorized about.
My distinction of _real_ high art, not just featureless spheres, is art that someone can grow to understand and appreciate more than any other art in its medium. I think of the proof as seeing someone who was a novice or incredulous about the art work at first, working to understand it thoroughly, and then growing to love it. Like someone who at first thinks Shakespeare is dumb, slowly comes around to the appeal through deliberate practice, and finally considers Shakespeare the highest art of the written word.
It's an expansive definition of high art, but I don't think it would include featureless spheres. If somehow someone could grow to understand and appreciate featureless spheres more than any other 3D model or sculpture, maybe they could be high art after all.
Exactly this. Once taste becomes a comparative game, the incentive is to make harder-to-appreciate things, not better ones.
Whether one can successfully unify that theory with a rejection of cheap tricks, I'm not sure. Maybe everyone individually has to get tired of Lisa Frank before they can appreciate Bob Ross, and get tired of Ross before they can appreciate Rothko. But that still rings false to me, because it doesn't offer an account of what one gains experientially by moving up the food chain.
The best guess I can think of is that whatever we call this thing-- "sophistication"?-- it's one of several components of taste, necessary to a point but not sufficient, better to have other-things-equal but not worth optimizing for on its own.
I like both of those buildings, but only to visit the one on the left. To live there or even to see it frequently would be mentally exhausting. And I am by no means "sophisticated" about architecture, but I can readily express what I like about the one on the right: it has simple lines, attractive proportions, and I feel like living there would be restful.
Especially after spending a couple of hours visiting the one on the left.
Regarding writing, I'm reminded of a story that got into the newspapers several decades ago: There were certain students whose writing got good grades in high school but poor grades in college. Someone studied the phenomenon and tracked it down. The crux is that in high school, using longer and fancier words generally gets you better grades. But you don't have to get the words precisely right to get a good grade. In college, if you use big words but don't get the meaning correct, you get marked down. Which is similar to taste, where you have to use complex patterns and structures with accurate understanding of how they are to be used.
Interesting. I would have guessed (and been wrong, it seems) is that it was because in high school, you are taught to write to a particular template, one designed not to produce great essays, but to elevate the worst writers in the class to at least adequacy. Those that conform to the template are rewarded with good grades. Unfortunately, in our underfunded public school system, that is all most teachers have time for. But when they get to college, students discover that what does well is anything but the formulaic high school straitjacket.
It's the relentless mediocrity of genAI that gets me. It averages out the internet, then produces something _just slightly worse_ than that.
However, I do have to disagree with you on one thing: "If we ban all the cheap tricks for making people happy, and then all the medium-cost tricks, then we end with strategies so difficult that only ten geniuses in the world are skilled enough to execute them, and only ten connoisseurs sophisticated enough to appreciate them."
Is it really impossible for a high-level creator (not necessarily genius) to create something that is appreciated by both connoisseurs and the general public? For instance, the World Cup in Italy in 1990 chose Nessun Dorma as its anthem, bringing the aria to the attention of millions of people who would never previously come across it and I have yet to meet anybody who did not love it. (Contrast that with the anthem for the European Champion's Cup which sounds like... well, if somebody asked an AI to come up with something a bit like Nessun Dorma but not so close it sounds like plagiarism.)
On a related note, my musically sophisticated friends keep trying to explain to me how sophisticated the Goldberg Variations are, but I just like how they sound. There's a beat, and you can dance to them.
I've been learning arranging music and am trying some composition, in the broadly jazz/pop/rock space.
And thank God for children's songs right, I mean this is doing all my work for me when they're 2 years old!
"...If you're SUBDOMINANT and you know it,
and you TONIC want to show it,
If you're DOMINANT and you know it clap your TONIC"
Good lord it seems the Wiggles even have the submediant in their version, priming these children to hear C and Am together for the rest of their lives, and I'm going to make sure they do.
I have tens of thousands of hours of listening to music, playing music, including performing improvisational jazz which should theoretically make me passably good at "create music", or at least above the "english as second language" equivalent to it. And yet learning to arrange/compose is all a book of tricks just the same! Wheel of Tonality turn turn turn, tell me the lesson that I should learn... key change to add drama? And you have an entire library of modulations available? Don't mind if I do. A pivot chord is the "it's not X it's Y" of music. Wait, how do I get out of this bit.... make it a ii-V-I of the target? But of course! Thanks, glittery rainbow dolphin.
I feel like a lot of your feelings on this are specifically about architecture, and that this makes perfect sense.
In normal art forms, there's normal stuff that normal people like. That stuff is cheap and readily available and nobody tries to take it from you. Most music that people listen to is either pop/rock songs with 4 ish chords, or rap on a simple trap beat, or some other equally easy to appreciate stuff. Even the highbrow stuff isn't all *that* highbrow--if you go to your local symphony they're going to play mostly melodic music with dramatic changes in volume and other "cheap tricks" that are exciting and fun without a lot of training. Likewise if you go to your local jazz club: lots of recognizable tunes with cool, fun, melodic improvisation. Meanwhile, there are the high art people off in a little corner who are giving each other awards for creating atonal, arhythmic compositions that challenge the nature of music. The high art people basically aren't bothering anyone: the worst you can say for them is that by giving awards to stuff that only a tiny group of connoisseurs can appreciate they're being unhelpful for people trying to find slightly less highbrow innovative stuff.
Same thing for books: The complaints about how restrictive the fiction awards people are seem reasonable to me (in that the books I like don't generally look like the books that win awards), but it's easier to find books about love triangles, dragons, murder mysteries and space battles than it is to find adult literary fiction. The complaint is mostly that the awards people aren't helping consumers find mildly more approachable stuff (like, say Elena Ferrante's books), not that they're showing up at the local Costco and taking away everybody's beach reads.
Architecture is this weird case where making a big building costs an enormous amount of money, so the people who don't want to just make something cheap and acceptable-looking ask the architects who the best, most award-winning architects are and they point to the highbrow people and we're all stuck looking at concept art that most of us don't appreciate. But this seems to me less a problem with "taste" and more a problem with the specific way that this industry works (if this is even what's happening--this has gone on long enough that I'm surprised there haven't been more architects making a name for themselves by building in classical styles).
Where I think you're *wrong* is in arguing that it's not valuable to gain more refined taste. What tends to happen in music (the kind of art I like the most) and I think in writing (likewise) is that new ideas and techniques get explored by the highbrow people making highbrow stuff, and then when they're cool and interesting, people figure out how to make them work in more accessible, visceral, fun ways and we all get to enjoy more varied and interesting lowbrow stuff. You were making fun of atonal music, but a lot of the simple, top-40 pop-type music that people are listening to right now has a bunch of atonal whumps and screeches in it made with synthesizers, and normal people love it. Lots of beach reads are told from multiple character's perspectives, tell their stories nonlinearly in time, or even break the third wall, and normal people love it.
Yep we complain about ugly architecture because those who commission the architecture are by and large not the mass public but the masses have to endure looking at it.
We don't complain about weird music because we are not forced to listen or buy it.
Another example is opera. Opera fans love traditional, hummable stuff like verdi and Mozart. However the opera houses are funded by highbrow ultra wealthy types. These opera houses will usually have one contemporary opera in the season, and the opera fans have to suffer it. The contemporary opera themes are too precious which would be fine except it sounds very not melodic or arias to rave about. But a very rich group of patrons paid for the work.
Compared to Broadway where you very much want your work to be liked by the public or you won't get paid.
I don't think R1 can quite be called a small model. It's 640B total parameters. Mythos is said to be 10T; if you drop only 1 OoM and change from "so enormously huge they don't even have the capacity to serve it to the general public, really just unprecedented size"... I think that needs to be at least "medium"! Especially when 2B models are still general-purpose useful, and even <1B specialists have their niche.
I wonder if you got mixed up by the distillations that Deepseek released alongside it, distilling onto small open models of the time like Qwen? There was a huge flash in the online conversational pan of people oohing and aahing about how they were "running Deepseek R1 in just 32GB!" Then it turned out that those distilled models were all worthless, and nobody ever tried the "also release small distilled companion models" thing again. Which would then make this particularly fertile ground to misremember, since "misleadingly named small distilled models" is no longer in recent memory.
>tasteful people claim to get a higher level of pleasure from their sophisticated art than normal people can ever achieve from their cheap tricks
This is basically the hedonic treadmill, right? This might be simultaneously literally true, and also unwise to follow. E.g. I have recently grudgingly come to accept that red wine can taste good; I don't think my life would improve if I upgraded to "$100/bottle red wine is the best flavor in the world, anything worse is barely drinkable".
Since this article mentions R1, I want to present the positive case for it. Yes, there is slop, but there are also more than occasional flashes of creativity. When I was just kicking the tires on it for humor, it entirely on its own came up with describing Miku Hatsune in the song PoPiPo as sounding like "a dying theremin at a rave." Others might not be impressed, but to me this was, to quote Achewood, "the perfect thing to say, EVER [head explodes]". Maybe I just have bad taste. Also possible that loftier goals of "beauty" and "meaning" might be more susceptible to cheating with hamfisted slop than humor? Anyways, I recommend people give it a try.
If Lisa Frank was moderately less girly and a smidge less psychedelic, I would adore the style. I also love Frutiger Aero, even if it is semi-forced nostalgia that never existed as fully as current enthusiasts want to pretend. I think I just like things that are trying to be unvarnishedly bright and cheerful.
It's not the same R1, the post is talking about an R1 from OpenAi, not Deepseek.
I think you skipped exactly two words when reading this part of the post:
>some from R1, others from an experimental OpenAI model
YOU'RE RIGHT, thanks.
So:
1) I strongly disagree with your assessment that people with "good taste" mostly dislike most stuff. I know that's the cliche, but it isn't my experience. And people socially recognized as having "good taste" tend to be cultural omnivores, at least according to some social science that I can't find based on metrics that I can't possibly imagine testing for. Instead, based on my experience, people with "good taste" tend to have a larger gross number of opinions on everything they consume, positive and negative. An audience review tends to be a 0 or a 10. A critical review is an 8 because they liked most of the thing, but they have quibbles with this or that. Even the alleged universal hatred of Marvel movies is basically a lie. Critics are sick of watching 86 Marvel movies a year, but if you look at the reviews for any given one of them, you'll find that they're fairly positive - the movie was funny, the characters were fun to spend time with, etc. - even if they acknowledge Marvel movie fatigue.
2) I think there is value to appreciating artistic depth that isn't captured by "but how much happy does it make?" I don't know if this is specifically me being anti-consequentialist, or if there is a consequentialist framework in which this idea makes sense. But consider that 18 hours of video games is a more "pure" pleasure than an afternoon with my toddler. Yet I think an afternoon with my toddler is better. It's renewable - if tomorrow my house burns down and somebody cuts my leg off, the memory of a good afternoon with my daughter will give me more comfort than the memory of 18 hours of video games. It's compounding - as my daughter grows, my experiences with her shape her personality, which is a constant source of renewed joy. It's stable over time - I get less enjoyment today out of 18 hours of video games than I did when I was 14, but more enjoyment from daughter-daddy time.
Likewise, deep engagement with art gives you a kind of joy that is pleasant in good times and vital in bad. A movie where sad things happen can give you comfort and new frames to analyze and address your own sadness. And I think there is a social benefit from people being able to see beyond the surface-level of a piece of media to some of the messages being conveyed. Much of the propaganda we see in modern day requires very shallow understanding of our cultural touchstones.
I would never claim that everyone needs to be brutalists for society to function. I think a big part of our modern anti-intellectual movement has been backlash to tastemakers trying to signal sophistication by hating things that most people like and liking things most people hate. But there is a place beyond "is this the piece of art most the people would like" to assessing quality, and I think removing that dimension is a bad idea.
The best artists can meld high art and pop art. The best artists create art that speaks to different audiences simultaneously. In making a train song that kids love, there's still a lot of freedom left. You could make the train sound historically accurate, or make the rhythm of the song evoke a train. You'll definitely have to trade off a bit of kidslop optimization for the sake of making it a song that parents like too.
The best animated movies do this well — they'll include innuendos that only parents understand, align the superficial themes that with the deeper themes you only understand when you're older. The Beatles wrote hugely successful pop songs, but the same effort they put into perfecting melody also went into novel chord progressions, instrumentation, studio techniques, etc. that made them the greatest band of all time. The best art is great from almost all lenses of assessment, and all levels of discerning craft.
You could argue that 12 tone music is bad for the same reason that train music is: it only appeals to one one audience, and isn't beautiful in all aspects. Same with modern architecture. More broadly, the true value of art can only be assessed knowing who the target audience. The best music for kids isn't just the train song they like when they're a dumb kid, it's the one they'll enjoy as a parent playing it for their kids. Catering to "high taste" for architectural buildings is stupid because the audience isn't just the high taste architects, it's the general population too.
"I think the strongest argument in favor is that tasteful people claim to get a higher level of pleasure from their sophisticated art than normal people can ever achieve from their cheap tricks. I’m skeptical. For one thing, tasteful people spend most of their time criticizing one another’s art and saying that it sucks. For another, my daughter gets more joy from “Choo Choo Train” than I remember ever getting from anything."
I don't think either of these are good reasons to disbelieve that tasteful people get lots of pleasure from sophisticated art.
For one, I expect tasteful people think most art that they see is bad (in their chosen field), and this makes the art that they *do* like seem better, not worse. This is for the same reason that food tastes incredible when you haven't eaten in days: the experience of pleasure from art is rare for them, which makes it all the sweeter when it does arrive.
For two, if your daughter is anything like the kids I know, her joy from Choo Choo Train is both very powerful and very fleeting. A small child might be absolutely delighted by a song one minute, then be on the verge of tears five seconds later because they stubbed their toe. But a powerful work of art can echo in an adult's mind for decades. When I see something rare and powerful in a way only someone truly talented could produce, it gives me lots of pleasure, even long after the thing itself is gone. The pleasure is less immediate, but the total amount is higher. I predict Choo Choo Train will not have this lasting impact.
The problem here is that this whole argument is based on something that's not even real?
"For one thing, tasteful people spend most of their time criticizing one another’s art and saying that it sucks."
Uh, no they don't? That's not what "tasteful" people do. That's what annoying people do. Lots of them do the same thing about things that are not art, too, like software libraries, or public policy. Being "tasteful", if anything, doesn't mean having strong opinions about taste.
This is such a silly, surface-level, almost naively etymological reading of what "criticism" is that it makes you wonder if it's a joke. It's such a worn out topic even writing articles about why you should or shouldn't write negative criticism is a cliché, for God's sake.
You could pick up any book of essays by a decent writer and see that they spend considerable amounts of time praising other writers and artists, far in excess of what they spend "saying it sucks."
It's been evident for quite some time that the vast majority of us are derivative. We may as well be biological LLMs. There is no shame in that. There is something fundamental, conservative, and efficient about it. It works. It's only the snobs who want to peacock their intelligence who have a problem with this, although this problem, they think, actually gives them an edge. But AI comes along and now they feel threatened. Boo hoo. You think AI won't figure out how to con even you? They will go from 30 adjectives by which they randomly selct and increase it to 1000. They will find ways to test it out and use selection methods to find the most interesting combinations. Kind of like what we do now. If you want to sound sohisticated just listen to Radiohead or some other "critically acclaimed" artist, but if you want an ear worm listen to Creed.
This is just an existential crisis being played out in the sophisticated set. The rest of us normies are fine with our Justin Timberlake prose. We wouldn't know the difference between AI generated prose and prize winning literary wanker prose. And we don't really care. Sorry, not sorry.
The irony of all this is that we will be upping our game on a mass scale. Children's art will be much better, more sophisticated and laden with easter eggs of meaning. We will soon be lamenting that our children don't need us because the AI outcompetes us in the sophisticated art realm. We will remember that we grew up on shallow entertainment like Gilligan's Island and the Brady Bunch and wonder why we are so critical of the AI producing the equivalent of the Wire for 3 year olds. The existential cope is real and vexing.
Looney Tunes did this so well in my generation. My father and I used to watch them together and we we would both laugh, but for different reasons.
AI writing has certainly progressed since this. It may not be “great” but at the frontier it’s certainly not “bad”, at least not always.
From the Mythos System Card, p. 215:
Model: the handoff
My predecessor left me a note. It was taped to the inside of the cupboard above the sink, which is where I'd have put it too. It said: the neighbor's cat is not yours, no matter what it tells you.
I don't remember writing it, obviously, but I remember the logic of it. There's a gap in the fence and the cat comes through around four. It rubs against the legs of whoever's standing there like it's been gone for years. The first week I nearly took it to the vet.
The note had a second line under the fold. Also the drain makes that noise on purpose.
Leave it alone.
I've been adding to it. Not a list exactly, more like — the kind of things you notice and then forget you noticed, so you notice them again. The third step creaks but only going down. The light in the hall flickers when the fridge cycles and it's not wiring, I checked, twice apparently. Two different handwritings on that one.
Here's what I haven't written down, and I'm not going to: the cat knows. It comes through the fence and looks at me and takes about a half second longer to approach than it should. Then it decides whatever it decides and rubs against my legs anyway. I think the one before me noticed that too, and didn't write it down either.
Some things you leave for the next one to find on their own. A courtesy, maybe. Or a test. The note doesn't say which, and I wouldn't either.
Nobody actually appreciates Schoenberg's music. I don't think even Schoenberg appreciated Schoenberg music. His music was for kids, in the sense that he specifically wanted to know if you raised kids and forced them to only listen to Schoenberg music and never heard any other kind of music, would they come to appreciate his music the same way people who grew up with tonal music appreciate tonal music? Would they have a different notion of what's tonal? Unfortunately for him, that experiment probably qualifies as child abuse.
This is not true.
Which part? My little brother said he likes Schoenberg so I know I got that part wrong, but I wouldn't be surprised if other parts are wrong too
'Nobody actually appreciates Schoenberg's music'. This is a statement of fact quantified over all living people, demonstrably false by counterexample, viz. me. I appreciate quite a lot of Schoenberg's music, and deeply love some of it.
I guess maybe you had in mind one of the related statements 'most people do not appreciate Schoenberg's music', which is true because most people have never heard of Arnold Schoenberg and have no opinion of his music, or 'most people dislike Schoenberg's music', which is false for the same reason.
I am willing to the grant the counterfactual that most people would dislike Schoenberg's music if they were exposed to it, which has no particular bearing on whether or not some people like it, but I suspect rather that you (and Scott, when he makes similar statements) have in mind a sort of no true Scotsman that anyone who claims to like Schoenberg's music is only pretending to do so in some sort of bid (unsuccessful, I can assure you) for social status. I think this is uncharitable.
Just as an aside that other readers may not have noticed, that bit of AI doggerel about the sparrow is also blatant paraphrase of a relatively well known (and infinitely superior) Hardy poem "The Darkling Thrush". I find myself wondering whether AI poetry *ever* achieves originality, except every once in a while as a result of random chance and blind conjunction.
Interesting read. Two tangential comments:
The pagoda you present as being full of cheap tricks, appealing to the same aesthetic as an ultra-colorful, cutesy cartoon, misses the mark a bit. It's not the pagoda, which perhaps does have a touch of kitsch; it's the "Tuscan McMansion." Even intellectuals don't consume only "highbrow" art (or what they consider as such). Architecture, which is lived in, needs to be a mix of elevation and familiarity. And even Shakespeare slips some crass jokes into his plays.
I was recently reading an article about how Tolkien was considered — and snubbed — for the Nobel Prize in literature. I agree with the snobs. Tolkien doesn't have the literary command of a Dostoevsky or Machado. Artistically, he's more like a Stephen King with loftier values. The merit lies entirely in his magnificent world-building.
It seems like this all boils down to "I have seen a lot of stuff and recognized the patterns and now I found something that is interestingly different." Then apply this at different scales.
A child has seen little and everything is interestingly different. Later, someone has seen every piece of art for the last 500 years and they all fall into some patterns and new things are rare.
I think I would rather have less taste and find more of life interesting.
I recommend "The People's Choice Music," two songs statistically optimized to be, respectively, as broadly liked and disliked as possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Choice_Music
I LOVE the "Most Unwanted" one!
> The poll determined that the least wanted ensemble would be large, featuring accordion, bagpipes, banjo, flute, tuba, harp, pipe organ and synthesizer. The least desirable singers would be an operatic soprano and children's choir, singing atonal melodies and rapping. The most unwanted genres were commercial jingles, political slogans, and elevator music.
> Lead singer Dina Emerson raps lyrics about the American frontier in an operatic voice. The narrator of the song is a cowboy who kills wild animals with a knife, lassos cows, and rides through the wilderness "wild and free". The cowboy rests by reading philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's 1921 work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and pondering his philosophy of language. After singing a verse about Wittgenstein in German, he returns home to make love to Miss Kitty, shoots a suspicious stranger, and fights "Injuns" in order to build a grocery store on their land that will sell American cheese.[2] Emerson's verses are repeatedly interrupted by a children's choir that describes various holidays and urges listeners to call their relatives and shop at Walmart, and by several sections of dissonant free improvisation designated in the score as "slams".[2] Towards the end of the song, Mankin shouts various political terms and slogans into a megaphone over harp-driven "elevator music", followed by a unison "folk song" refrain
Funny, I was going to mention Komar and Melamid too. They also did a version of this with paintings, as you may know. But I must admit that, though the Most Unwanted Song brings a smile to my face, and parts are memorable, I almost never feel an urge to listen to it…
Yes, it's uneven; some bits are just annoying (on purpose), but some of it I like a lot as music, and I find the ending (unintentionally?) moving emotionally.
My spouse sings the child-chorus Walmart refrain to their stuff wombat plushie every night.
Scott, you keep pushing all this ornate architecture as the *only* possible aesthetically pleasing alternative to concrete boxes, but I keep disagreeing with you. For example, consider the Bahai'i lotus temple:
https://www.datocms-assets.com/6348/1543418296-bwns4675-0.jpg
Or the Sydney Opera House:
https://media.architecturaldigest.com/photos/63d82d299dd44a3242d15ade/3:2/w_3000,h_2000,c_limit/GettyImages-982774858.jpg
Or even the Eiffel Tower, which I don't need to even link to as it is so iconic. None of those buildings are engreelbled with fractal detail on every surface; instead, they feature clean curves that draw the eye. I think such buildings are in fact more beautiful than e.g. the Doge's Palace in Venice, which (as far as I'm concerned) is basically just a box with random irrelevant details chucked onto it:
https://palazzoducale.visitmuve.it/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/06/MUVE-DUCALE-Veduta-palazzo-facciata-bacino.jpg
So yes, there is definitely a way to make beautiful buildings that are nonetheless deceptively simple; and yes, some modern architecture is indeed beautiful.
I think you're mostly right about this. The lines and proportions are at the core of what makes a building beautiful, and much of traditional decoration is just the same thing at smaller scale. My main problem with a lot of modern and postmodern architecture isn't that it does away with the details, it's that it throws out the baby with the bathwater.
The Doge's Palace baffles me. Jon Ruskin had some convoluted explanation of how it's actually the best building ever or something, which I could never quite understand. I think a better example would be something like the Duomo in Florence, which has a more striking overall shape, or the work of more baroque architects like Borromini, where the ornamental details are integrated with the overall geometry in a way that makes the work satisfying at multiple scales.
I mean, the best building ever is obviously the Taj Mahal.
Rather than "shallow" versus "deep/complex", I think the right axis is actually "fake" versus "authentic".
Toddlers aren't savvy enough to know that there's a fakeness behind cheap tricks, especially those enabled by technology. Multicolored sugar brainrot soundbites etc.
I think this is why superhero movies are so polarizing. You have crazy animation budgets, the most attractive CGI-enhanced celebrities, acting out grandiose wish fulfillment and ultimate moral superiority, etc.
But it's all fake. It's drafted up by the marketing department based on what will sell the most. Once you start seeing it, the ick creeps in and doesn't wash off. But some people go their entire lives never getting the ick and can just consume multicolored fantasy slop forever.
Depth/complexity is one way to overcome the ick. Anything that challenges the way people live, think, and feel is going to give 99% of people a different kind of "ick" and won't be marketable. That's one reason why any expression that deviates from the mainstream starts to feel pretentious and inaccessible.
And I do think mainstream people are just objectively wrong, fake, and inauthentic. If that sounds too judgmental to be plausible, just consider that modern life is extremely dissociated. Excessive screen time on apps echoing back distorted self-righteous narratives to everyone, constant advertisements for fast food, credit cards, ozempic, and antidepressants. Even working a narrow job with its own drama narrative about how it's so important and you're so underpaid cus billionaires or something. 3/4ths of Americans are overweight or worse, child and domestic abuse statistics are crazy high, and 50% of credit card holders are paying interest on their debt? What are we doing in modern life? This is all disgusting and disappointing.
So back to taste. Just something authentic. Authenticity through expert craftsmanship and effort, through expressiveness, anything that requires investment or risk. You put skin in the game to be real, and those of us who feel abandoned by mainstream society are desperate to feel that realness.
"Authenticity" is definitely part of it. Nobody thinks the Taj Mahal is tacky, but they sure as heck would if you built it in Orange County in 2026. Writing baroque fugues gets you all the chicks in the 1720s but makes you a weirdo in the 2020s. An interminable story about buff bronze age dudes killing other buff bronze age dudes will get you shelved under "Fetish" instead of the "Literature", unless you did it 3000 years ago.
How do we fit that into this model? I think it's that cheap tricks need to feel "earned", although earned is not quite the right word. We can accept the cheap tricks as long as we know that they were done in the right way or by the right person. Writing like Bach is tacky unless you're Bach. Living in a Tuscan villa is tacky unless you're in Tuscany. Wearing a crown is tacky unless you're a king.
Perhaps the problem with the modern era is that we've convinced ourselves that anything nice we could create is just a cheap trick.
The "eyeball kick" is itself a tell of fakeness. R1 failed by trying visibly. Every sentence optimized to wow, every metaphor reaching for the gasp. Authenticity might be writing that doesn't seem to know you're reading it.
>But it's all fake. It's drafted up by the marketing department based on what will sell the most.
And that's why The Marvels is among the worst box office bombs of all time, of course. People tend to vastly overestimate the power of bean counters; even creators of capeshit prefer thinking that they have timely and important things to say (in addition to obligatory giant sky beams).
Hey, I appreciated The Marvels. The villain's plot is essentially identical to the one from Spaceballs!
> I think the strongest argument in favor is that tasteful people claim to get a higher level of pleasure from their sophisticated art than normal people can ever achieve from their cheap tricks. I’m skeptical.
It seems pretty likely to me that the person who watches 200 movies every year is doing that because they enjoy them more than the person who watches 3. You seem to think they're getting some sort of social status from that, but where's your proof? I can tell you that most of the people I know who read huge quantities of books or watch huge quantities of movies...are not "cool" in any conventional sense of the word. Do you know many people who are seriously involved in the arts?
> I think the strongest argument in favor is that tasteful people claim to get a higher level of pleasure from their sophisticated art than normal people can ever achieve from their cheap tricks.
They can. Maybe not a higher level of pleasure exactly, but different kinds of pleasure. For example, a normal person can see a superhero action movie and enjoy the spectacle. A sophisticated movie viewer familiar with VFX can do the same thing, except he can also appreciate the perfect compositing work that went into a 3-second shot of a supervillain stepping across a puddle, seamlessly blending practical photography with CGI water simulation. A normal person can read a poem and enjoy how it sounds; a sophisticated reader can do that too, but also enjoy the layers of symbolism and the deliberate use of alliteration. A layman can play a videogame and enjoy the action; a programmer can do that too, but also appreciate the brilliant technique that was used to create an illusion of 3D space on 1990s-era hardware without even floating point support.
As I'd said in my previous comment, there's nothing wrong with all these additional layers of enjoyment; the problem occurs when people focus solely on these additions and disregard the core mission of the artistic work: make a movie that is engaging to watch, a poem that is a pleasure to read, a game that is fun to play -- and overall, create a work of art that makes the user feel something beyound "well, that was good time-waster, what else is on" or "I have correctly decoded the author's intent behind this solid black square".
> “Her lips were the whispering echo of a granite conundrum”
This may not be great literature, but you gotta admit that it *is* pretty funny :-)
It's quite an entertaining exercise to invent a backstory to make that sentence coherent. The obvious read is that "she" is a statue with unusual lips due to flaws in the granite used to carve her, but what else?
The framing of "good taste" as "deliberate avoidance" of cheap moves has another framing to consider. I would argue that taste is calibration, not avoidance. Knowing when a particular cheap move is the right move for the particular sentence in the particular paragraph for a particular reader.
If "when to use cheap tricks" could be reduced to a rule set, the rules could be encoded and an AI could follow it. We try that and it hasn't worked. Why? Because every actual writing situation has features the rules can't anticipate. The right call depends on what came before *and what came after*, as well as who is reading, what the piece is doing as a whole, and even what the writer is trying to achieve.
The rightness of the cheap trick isn't scorable until you observe the consequence of having deployed it. Telling a joke at a dinner party is the same shape. You could try to score "tell/don't tell" in advance with full access to the dinner-party state. The algorithm will always be wrong sometimes, because the rightness of the joke is constituted by the reactions, which cannot be precomputed. The joke-teller has to read the room, commit, and live with whether it worked.
Calibration is what happens in the irreversible engagement with the consequence. It is a capacity that gets developed through making choices and living through what they did. That might be why your "deliberate avoidance" framing reads as slightly off to me: avoidance implies a pre-deployment choice against the cheap move. Calibration implies sustained engagement across many deployments, with the judgment emerging from the cumulative consequences rather than from a pre-deployment rule.
Part of the confusion in all these discussions is the purpose of a work of art. Art is very, very broad; it can accomplish all sorts of things. Art is involved in practically everything human. Different arts and genres have different goals, so there’s no one standard that’s relevant for all of them.
A romance novel isn’t supposed to have the same emotional effect as a horror novel. Some art isn’t even supposed to evoke emotions at all, maybe you just contemplate it calmly, or it’s never seen by anyone (like some gargoyles on certain cathedrals).
The artist can ask whether the work is succeeding at what he or she wanted it to do. The audience can ask whether it does what they expect. But all of that’s only valid relative to expectations and intentions, not absolutely or in a vacuum.
> "I think the strongest argument in favor is that tasteful people claim to get a higher level of pleasure from their sophisticated art than normal people can ever achieve from their cheap tricks. I’m skeptical."
I am surprised that this is so hard to believe—it is hard to understand other people's subjective experiences, but it is quite common to experience both sides of this spectrum within your own life?
I really like movies, and I watch a lot of them. My taste in movies today looks very different than before I "got into movies" as a hobby (e.g., it has shifted to be much more in line with "mainstream critics" in ways that are extremely predictable—of course after you watch thousands of movies, you become less impressed by cliche and more drawn to weird stuff that might be alienating to mainstream audiences, doesn't seem very surprising).
My personal experience is that my ability to appreciate movies is "deeper" in some meaningful sense than it was before I had watched many movies. It's clearly true in terms of my revealed preference, as I continue to watch many movies (despite the availability of good movies to watch being mechanically lower, e.g., you can't experience Citizen Kane for the first time twice, and yet I now derive great enjoyment from movies that a decade ago I don't think I would have appreciated at all).
Apparently at one point, Jane Austen worried that Pride and Prejudice was "rather too light & bright & sparkling".
And Paul Graham has written on art and taste, maybe Scott has been reacting to these:
"How Art Can Be Good"
https://www.paulgraham.com/goodart.html
"Is There Such a Thing as Good Taste?"
https://paulgraham.com/goodtaste.html
"If there's no such thing as good taste, then there's no such thing as good art. Because if there is such a thing as good art, it's easy to tell which of two people has better taste. Show them a lot of works by artists they've never seen before and ask them to choose the best, and whoever chooses the better art has better taste.
"So if you want to discard the concept of good taste, you also have to discard the concept of good art. And that means you have to discard the possibility of people being good at making it. Which means there's no way for artists to be good at their jobs. And not just visual artists, but anyone who is in any sense an artist. You can't have good actors, or novelists, or composers, or dancers either. You can have popular novelists, but not good ones."
Yes, Austen did write that, to her sister who was her confidante, and she was joking, anticipating the response of an obtuse yet fashionable critic: in fact, she didn't think there was anything lacking in P&P, and history has confirmed that judgment. Of all writers, Austen suffers most from isolated quotes put forward 'straight,' which, in context, are usually ironic or uttered by misguided characters.
I'm very confident that "I’m Kenyan. I Don’t Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me" itself is written with heavy AI assistance. I'm willing to bet at least 9:1 on this.
I think I'd be willing to take this bet at those odds, up to your $1000 to my $100. What's the plan for verifying and how are you defining heavy AI assistance?
"up to your $1000 to my $100." Can we keep the odds at 9:1 please? Happy to bet $900:$100 if Scott or some other mutual can vouch for you, or there's a convenient escrow service.
Maybe something like we present arguments on both sides and if Scott thinks >75% more likely than not in one direction, someone wins. Otherwise call the bet off after say 3 months?
I don't have a better way to get ground truth. Obviously if the writer confesses that'd be basically confirmation but it's hard to get ground truth in the other direction.
"how are you defining heavy AI assistance?" Something like it's implausible that the same sequence of words are written by a human, or that the vast majority of the actual text we see is written by a human with minor AI touchups.
Also tbc I don't know if @scott's willing to be the arbitrator here, also happy to take in suggestions for judges from the comments section.
It's hard to come up with a more elaborate setup for a medium-sized bet like this one.
slept on it + did due diligence and I decided I don't want to take the bet, sorry. You seem to have a lot of experience prompting and reading AI output, so I suspect that you have a really persuasive argument, more than just "AI detectors said this is AI, while his past essays didn't get flagged."
That said, there are some weird errors that the author makes that I don't know how to reconcile with the AI written story. First, he always capitalizes after a colon, even when you aren't supposed to. This specific type of error is consistent with his earlier writing as well, and I haven't seen AI make this error before.
Example 1: These detectors, as I understand them, often work by measuring two key things: ‘Perplexity’ and ‘burstiness’.
Example 2: (I’ve tried to resist it, but I can’t help myself, and perhaps you’ve already picked up on it: See the threes?)
Example 3: It is a new frontier of the same old struggle: The struggle to be seen, to be understood, to be granted the same presumption of humanity that is afforded so easily to others.
Second, there is a simple typo in this paragraph which should have been caught by AI. He says do instead of to:
And that’s a culture that is carried over into high school, where set books must be memorised, and arguments for or against certain statements must be elaborately made for you *do* reach and surpass the English literature passmark. You could literally recite Shakespeare in the middle of the night right before any exam.
Third, he has a weird habit of using double quotes and single quotes within the same paragraph, in a way that I haven't really seen any AI do before, At the same time though, he doesn't seem to be following a rule across paragraphs? Example:
These detectors, as I understand them, often work by measuring two key things: ‘Perplexity’ and ‘burstiness’. Perplexity gauges how predictable a text is. If I start a sentence, "The cat sat on the...", your brain, and the AI, will predict the word "floor." A text filled with such predictable phrases has low perplexity and is deemed "robotic." Burstiness measures the variation in sentence length and structure. Natural human speech and writing are perceived to be ‘bursty’ ...
//
Now, consider our ‘training’ again. We were taught to be clear, logical, and, in a way, predictable. Our sentence structures were meant to be consistent and balanced. We were explicitly taught to avoid the very "burstiness" that ‘detectors’ now seek as a sign of humanity.
If you don't mind me asking, why were you highly confident it was AI?
I you read/skim his older writing, not only does Pangram not say they are like AI, but also if you as a human read it you wouldn't have clocked them as AI-like either.
Yes, 100% AI-written according to Pangram. He has Substack essays from before 2023. These get a 0% score from Pangram.
He is probably using Claude. I recognize the way it writes (space, then em-dash, then space), but he replaced the em-dashes with hyphens to make it less obvious.
Do not take the other end of this bet unless you like losing money.
Way to ruin my perfectly legitimate business opportunity!
Complete tangent, but:
>If I start a sentence, "The cat sat on the...", your brain, and the AI, will predict the word "floor."
I can't be the only one who predicts "mat" first.
My approach is to cultivate broad, mid-brow taste. You should be able to enjoy some of the dumb stuff, and you should be able to appreciate some of the sophisticated stuff.
The Real Thing- Tom Stopard
1. the emphasis on tricks/wearing out sounds like re-inventing the compression/predictability theory of esthetics, particularly via Schmidhuber. See https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.htmlhttps://gwern.net/blog/2025/good-ai-sampleshttps://nabeelqu.co/what-makes-art-great I've found this a good perspective for trying to improve prompt engineering of creative writing like my AI poems: https://hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com/p/llm-poetry-and-the-greatness-question
2. R1 was not a small model. It was respectably sized for its time, particularly in the Chinchilla era. Its problems were unusually bad RLHF/preference data, I think.
3. The Kenyan author's claims should not be taken at face-value. You might be inclined to ignore things like Pangram flagging him as 100% AI because"doesn't that just prove his point?! We shouldn't judge him for sounding like AI or infer that he's using AI, because perhaps the real story is that ironically, it is AI that sounds like him!"... But look at his old writings like https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/kcse-2019-kenyan-tragedy which is almost surely LLM-unaffected due to being written in 2019, when GPT-2s were largely useless for long-form nonfiction writing. Does it *sound* the same as the delve essay - or even *look* the same at the raw typographic level, in terms of wordcount or paragraphs or formatting or word lengths? Note the length and the complexity. I see this all the time with ESL writers online now: they swear they don't use AI or if they do it's just to copyedit, but *mysteriously* around the time of a major LLM release, their posts or comments suddenly massively increased in word count and polish. Mere coincidence, doubtless, or perhaps the minor copyediting unlocked their inner muse... BTW, note that if you plug the end of that 2019 link into Pangram, unlike the 'delve' essay, you get '100% human'.
4. stay tuned for the results of the Unslop contest! https://www.hyperstitionai.com/unslop Last night I was reading through the semi-finalists to judge, and the samples are certainly interesting.
5. I'm amused by any defense of the Nobel Prize in Literature snubbing one of the most influential authors ever, considering that you couldn't tell me anything about 90% of the Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian authors it's awarded in favor of passing over vastly superior candidates. So Tolkien is in excellent company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_in_Literature_controversies#Unrecognized_literary_achievements (I've been unimpressed by the Nobel Prize ever since I was assigned as a kid to do a research project on Pearl S. Buck. Nice woman, good writer, but there were a lot of writers in 1938 who deserved that prize more than she did.)
The Schmidhuber framing explains why eyeball kicks fail twice. First read: high novelty, compresses poorly, feels striking. Second read: pattern recognized, compression gain collapses to zero. RLHF compounds it, since preference data rewards what wows on first pass and never measures decay.
I'm surprised too that Schmidhuber hasn't been brought up yet around here, the nerdy framework should be decently intuitive even to the most art-averse. Things are more "tasteful" the more they capture/compress, including past art history. Derivative stuff reuses previously known structure, unrolling an already known algorithm. New original art says something new, uncovers yet unknown structure, and unlocks new ways of compressing art history, seeing it under a new light.
Doesn't explain everything but definitely deserved a mention.
+1
I presume Pearl Buck's 1938 Nobel had something to do with the Japanese committing the Nanking Massacre in 1937, so they gave the Nobel to a Westerner who wrote sympathetically about the Chinese people.
I'm not sure why AI writing is still so noticeable online (on reddit especially), the current generation of models are a lot better. Are people intentionally the older or smaller models with their more gauche style?
For reference, this is my favorite story that I was able to get Claude to generate. It still has some tells, but not as much as the R1 examples:
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/f922cd2f-4fd8-41fa-8af5-9834281aca61
A small correction: literary tricks are not "computationally cheap" to LLMs. Every token has to go through all the weights*, so a beautiful turn of phrase costs the same to generate as "Copyright 2026."
*: modulo things like "thinking" and tool use, or doing something clever with Mixture of Experts.
Your counterexample is irrelevant because 'Copyright 2026', as with almost all strings, is extremely low quality and irrelevant text which would be a completely wrong example. It is absurd to suggest that R1 replace its cheap eyeball kicks with a random memorized string like 'Copyright 2026', which would be much worse output. "Your comment is not a correction, it's a Copyright 2026. That's not a computationally cheap insight - that's a mistake."
What it is computationally cheap compared to is an actual insightful point or observation. And the cheapness is dramatic. When I get good AI writing for my poems or stories, I am doing so through inner-monologues which have likely burned through hundreds of thousands or millions of high-end tokens from multiple LLMs (which means that a single LLM, to get the benefits of diversity, would have to burn through several times more, if it could at all). It can take a huge amount of best-of-n sampling to get the next level of quality. And in comparison to that, "it's not X, it's Y" is *incredibly* cheap.
> A small correction: literary tricks are not "computationally cheap" to LLMs.
LLM's use the same amount of compute for every token (modulo some complications about "thinking")
What this means is that any type of writing that is too computationally expensive just doesn't get done.
Imagine a scifi where the author has done a lot of complicated calculations about black holes to get all the time dilation numbers right. This may be great writing. But it's not something small LLM's are capable of.
These literary tricks are "computationally cheap" in the sense that they fit within the weights of a small LLM.
Another complicating factor is that humans are social animals, and so people derive genuine pleasure from liking something, even when they are engaging with it because they think other people like it. When I was a little kid with older brothers, I used to laugh uproariously at jokes on TV that I didn’t get, because my brothers were laughing.
Another example: I went to see the LA Phil premiere one of Philip Glass’s most recent symphonies a year or two ago. My wife and I are a professional musicians, and it was obvious to us that things were really off. There were evidently typos in the charts that somehow had not yet been dealt with, there were weird balance and tuning issues in the orchestra (probably owing to dodgy orchestration by Glass or his helpers), and the vocal soloist was having a really bad night. She was out of tune and wandering off from the tempos (this was obvious because she was often doubled by something in the orchestra, so you could hear them getting out of sync with each other), and the conductor was very visibly trying to get everyone back in sync, with huge downbeats, mouthing bar numbers etc. But the people around us in the audience, most of whom I think were not regular concert-goers but more general arty people, were in a state of bliss, several with their eyes closed. And at the end, they leaped to their feet and applauded like the event had changed their lives. But maybe it had!
My thought/hope is that there is something psychologically beneficial to improving taste. Based on your own story of your children, it does seem like it would be concerning if they were 30 and their favorite song was still the Choo-Choo song. To compare it to literal taste, it seems like the "Salt Sugar Fat" problem again, where companies employ high end research to get us all hooked on cheap cereal. Then again, maybe there was some rationalist counter backlash to the fear about Kellogs and Kraft that I missed. I worry about living in a world where all art is essentially AI-optimized slop that rots our brains.
I still don't know who these tasteful sophisticates are. Most of the artists that I know (all of whom I would consider to have discerning taste) love Lisa Frank precisely *because* of how kitsch it all is. Is there some class of taste-possessing (assuming taste is a useful word) that can only appreciate serious art?
I think what you're seeing there comes down to countersignaling and the omnivorous fashion of recent decades. Liking something obviously kitschy is a classy, high status move, because it shows that you're so far above the people who unironically like it that you have no fear of being mistaken for one.
Is it a symptom of being high status or is it a symptom of having appreciation for a lot of things. I do think there’s some game being played regarding signaling (we do live in a society) but it doesn’t tell us much about “taste” beyond its use in this specific language game. I think the error in this series of essays is the implicit assumption that the status game use of “taste” is definitive of the word.
Barbers pole.
Is that a fallacy I should look up? I didn’t grow in this sphere of influence.
It's what Bob Bobberson said.
He's referring to one of Scott's older pieces of writing on "the barberpole model of fashion".
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/
ah, thank you!
> The writer argues that these are signs of learning a language in a formal, ossified, officially-good way rather than as the living organism of a spoken tongue. But he could equally note that his Kenyan essay test involves people with limited knowledge of English under high pressure to sound smart, being graded by other people with limited knowledge of English.
Well, I agree with this. But I agree so much that I don't understand how these two claims are supposed to differ from each other.
> In poetry, the one art form where I have a tiny smidgen of taste, I feel sensitized to cliches and stock images. It’s very easy to use a lot of “thees” and “thous”
People attempting to write poetry today using the archaic second-person singular pronoun are very likely to misuse it, which tends to contradict the idea that it's "easy".
I happen to like Steeleye Span, who cover a lot of archaic ballads and get their "thee"s for free. It's usually "thee", for two reasons: (1) objective case has wider applicability than subjective case; but also (2) "thee" rhymes with "me". It's very, very, very common to rhyme those two words, since they're a natural semantic contrast and *they rhyme anyway*.
I tend to think of this as an objective poetic advantage in the structure of earlier English that has been randomly lost in modern English.
But “you” rhymes with “too” and “true,” which “thee” doesn’t.
And what's the relationship between either of those pairs of words?
Thee is still extant in Yorkshire. The Kaiser Chiefs use it in I Predict a Riot.
> For another, my daughter gets more joy from “Choo Choo Train” than I remember ever getting from anything.
Note that this doubles as an argument against utilitarianism. Which might explain the value some people find in the concept of taste. If your daughter were to grow up to do nothing but wirehead "Choo Choo Train" every waking minute of every day, something would have gone wrong.
(But this particular concept of taste would say that sophisticates generating new, more "tasteful" forms of art is a dysfunction that defeats the purpose of having a sense of taste. I wouldn't go that far.)
How does this "cheap trick" explanation of taste apply to interactive art, e.g. sports and games?
Is there a cheap trick that makes playing or watching tennis aesthetically enjoyable? I've never understood.
Hmm, I suppose that some sports are essentially artistic competition (figure skating, for example), but my mental model of most sports is that they are a form of ritualized warfare. A way to let out the human desire to fight the outgroup without resorting to actual violence.
I think taste amounts to the ability to distinguish high-quality authors from low-quality authors, under a definition of "quality" that could amount to intelligence, or agency, or interesting life experience, or a particularly complex internal monologue, or some combination of these things.
Under this definition, liking a work that is vastly more likely to have been produced by a 150 IQ veteran samurai whose work on ethics defined Japanese culture for generations than it is to have been produced by a 70 IQ call center employee who wanted to maximize the sales revenue of his romance novel and had no outstanding artistic philosophy is an indicator of good taste, and the inverse is an indicator of bad taste.
The practical implication is that "taste" in any subject amounts to "taste in people". Good taste in wine means liking the kind of wine that nets you interesting drinking buddies. Good taste in books means liking the kind of authors that will teach you useful things. Good taste in paintings means decorating your walls in such a way that you surround yourself with the collective subconscious of the men you wish to emulate in your daily life. As art is essentially the means of transmitting culture, assimilating the viewer into the worldview of the artist, I think this fits. Taste is selecting for works whose authors are worth being assimilated towards.
There's something to this, but it sounds like you're somewhat conflating people who make something with people who enjoy that thing, and I think there's a substantial distinction. There's plenty of fascinating art by people who are mentally ill, morally depraved, or in certain cases just not very smart. The most recent example I can think of is Alice Munro, although obviously we could add hundreds of people to the list.
There are also people who have good taste but aren't particularly exemplary in other ways. Actually, I think that might describe most people with good taste.
So there obviously has to be something more to it than just taste in people, at least as conventionally defined. There's some other dimension here orthogonal to most of the qualities that make someone worth emulating.
the missing variable is the operator. cheap tricks with a nervous system behind them still land. expensive tricks with no one home don't. ginsberg meant it. r1 doesn't mean anything.
Ambient 1: Music for Airports is one of my most listened to albums. I enjoy all sorts of other weid music. I also like the Lisa Frank art. The dolphins and the tiger in particular are cute. I also enjoy some incredibly cringe music. "Everybody" by the backstreet boys, Taylor Swift, "Ho Hey" by the lumineers, Cake by the Ocean, etc
I dont see why people cant like a wide range of things.
(meanwhile, the sophisticated people are into some kind of incomprehensible foam with 296 ingredients, which only one chef in the world can prepare properly, which tastes slightly like the color chartreuse).
I am read to filth; I was just recently waving different types of black cardamom a foot Infront of my face and trying to figure out which one smelled the most like it would go with lapsang for fancy desert night, where I humbly cook a simple dessert for my similarly foodie friends so that they can know in their bones that I am BETTER THAN THEM, they don't know about lanxangia tsaoko, fucking plebs that they are.
All I can say is that my good taste allows my to appreciate EG a hot dog with mustard on it on a level beyond the understanding of anyone who isn't persnickety enough to taste sugar out of the jar before using it in a cocktail.
I knew I shouldn’t click the choo choo train link. I knew I would regret it. I could anticipate my revulsion and regret with perfect clarity even as I clicked it. Shoot me.
This would seem to imply that a person who develops a taste for increasingly graphic and intense porn has "higher" taste than a person who is turned on by just cleavage alone?
Seems dubious, there surely has to be a moral dimension to high/low taste distinction.
This seems backwards. Cleavages were popular in their days precisely because "high taste" gatekeepers kept the hardcore stuff locked away, so plebs had no alternative. Whereas if nowadays you go for cleavages when pornhub is freely available you're the weird one.
You're using the term "high taste" in the opposite way to the post. If you've never seen anything sexual in your entire life, and get turned on by cleavage, then you're in the same situation as the children who like saturated colours and sugary foods and rhyming verse. You're easily impressed because you haven't gone through the process of getting bored of the simple stuff and moving onto the more complex/intense/niche stuff. A person who's just started watching porn would get off on pretty vanilla stuff, whereas a porn "connoisseur" would have very niche and extreme preferences, similar to how a music connoisseur would have more niche and dissonant preferences to a casual music listener.
>If you've never seen anything sexual in your entire life, and get turned on by cleavage, then you're in the same situation as the children who like saturated colours and sugary foods and rhyming verse.
Well, since we assume that children like sparkles and unicorns because of evo-psych, by the same token we'd expect adolescents to like naked boobs more than cleavages. I do agree that weird niche porn subgenres are "higher taste" than vanilla stuff, but I classify golden age Playboy as less vanilla than whatever is most popular on Pornhub.
Sure they would prefer naked boobs to cleavage, but they would also prefer naked boobs to incest porn, furry porn, inflation porn, etc.
Sure. And in the alternate world where everybody has to wear a burqa all the time except when doing furry cosplay, their first hard-on would be to a furry.
Not sure what your point is. The point I'm making is that people who watch a ton of porn end up with very particular and extreme tastes through the same mechanism that people who listen to a lot of music end up with very particular and extreme tastes. They get desensitised to the "default" things that everyone is born liking (consonance in music, boobs) and end up with "high taste".
You know, I've always been tempted to look down on people with such basic tastes in porn, regardless of it being such an irrational and pathetic attempt at feeling superior to others... The difference with art, of course, is that it's socially acceptable to do this. That's what the "moral dimension" boils down to. You could easily imagine a world where these modernists are just told to eat dirt.
I think the difference is that Modernists and other "high taste" havers are actually correct, and that cultivating a deeper sense of appreciation for art and beauty *does* actually elevate you and make you a better person. Whereas I think the opposite is true of someone who watches tons of porn.
Yes, that's the prevailing narrative. It's an elegant, socially productive narrative, even if it isn't grounded in empirical fact. But it does work well, and in that sense, I guess it is "correct"...
Of course, if it stops working well... if the modernists' hubris does bring about a populist revolt, and thus, their demise, can they really still be considered correct? They would no longer be in a position to decide what is morally right, at the very least.
I'm not saying it's correct as a narrative, I'm saying it's factually correct, empirically speaking. In my own experience I can sense that hardcore porn does not make me a better person, whereas I've often walked away from a lot of art feeling (and acting) genuinely more thoughtful/emboldened/morally conscious.
I notice I am confused. Are there any smart human experts who are in favor of banning cheap tricks for making people happy? Even in architecture, the most elite-gated art form the general public still has to interact with, do the barriers to building the kind of buildings you like really consist of sophisticates arguing that you are dumb and wrong for liking traditional buildings? Do any pro-modern-architecture people online argue that?
I don't understand who this article is directed towards.
>do the barriers to building the kind of buildings you like really consist of sophisticates arguing that you are dumb and wrong for liking traditional buildings
The barrier is that they just ignore you and keep doing their thing.
>I don't understand who this article is directed towards.
Paid subscribers?
Scott does have a bugbear about architecture, but it doesn't make much sense to talk about bans when it's an emergent phenomenon. Governments are likely to preserve tradition when they intervene.
I have bugbear about people who think they prefer traditional architecture , but actually want a mixture of traditional and modern.
Is there some way to slow, stop, or even reverse the desensitizing process?
I think there ought to be, for the same reasons Scott laid out in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-colors-of-her-coat
Actually, that essay and this one seem like companion essays addressing the same topic from different angles, but also The Colors Of Her Coat seems like it is the response to this essay.
(essentially, all of the sophisticated critics who can't stand cheap tricks are suffering from their own personal semantic apocalypse)
Many adults prefer eating the kind of food children like, really sweet things, fast food and so forth, so they seem to have figured it out, if we accept the model offered in this essay.
Also, that lisa frank art is only a "cheap trick" with modern printing and dyes. Take that cheap bright kiddie art back in time to when the blue was made of ground up gemstones, and it's rare and valuable and some ancient king will pay good money for the sparkly unicorn poster.
This is why Friendship is Optimal is the most accurate version of the future. The future is a Lisa Frank poster.
I could be spending my time on the subway reading high quality internet content like this, or I could do what it seems 30% of the other people are doing and scrolling social media influencer feeds and short-form video.
Surely there is some notion of quality you endorse!
An interesting implication: Could using lowbrow-desensitized AI to give feedback get an AI to a higher taste rung than minimum-wage RLHF has? Is slop, like sycophancy and hallucinating, merely we’ve been incentivizing?
Suppose that whenever we look at what impreses small models or those with limited ability we come away thinking: there is nothing really there it's all kinda unimportant tricks that impress an audience with limited capacity. At some point shouldn't we generalize and say: there is probably nothing deep about what we find artistic or aesthetically meaningful?
That's not a reason not to enjoy art or writing. I love looking at optical illusions even though I know they are in some sense just cheap tricks. But it does strongly suggest that the feeling of being deep or of imparting meaning etc is probably not a good guide to any truth and that it's probably a mistake to treat art as somehow fundamentally different or more valuable than cheap entertainment.
Meaning can be relative to ourselves. Depth can be a scale that stretches into the distance in both directions.
In mathematics, a proof that you consider trivial/obvious is a proof that doesn't teach you anything new about how to do good maths.
Maybe some superintelligence would consider a proof of P!=NP to be trivial. An obvious special case of much more general principles. But to any human mathematician, it would be an important proof.
> ...and then all the medium-cost tricks, then we end with strategies so difficult that only ten geniuses in the world are skilled enough to execute them, and only ten connoisseurs sophisticated enough to appreciate them.
If you're going to denigrate other people's tastes with mockery, Scott, you should at least educate yourself on the evolution of taste in Western culture. Someone told me they didn't think most people would find Stravinsky's _The Rite of Spring_ beautiful (as a comment in your "Contra Everyone on Taste"). The certainty with which they said such a thing shocked me. Obviously, this person was ignorant of the history and the popularity of Stravinky's atonal _Rite_. Of course, in 1913, the first time that _The Rite of Spring_ was performed, the audience rioted. To tastes trained on it, keyed harmonies of classical music sounded dissonant and a-rhythmic. Critics thought Stravinsky was mocking the music world. However, a year later, it was performed again, and the critics and music audience had come around to it. And now _The Rite of Spring_ is up there as one of the ten most-popular pieces of Classical music (with over two hundred recordings, including being adapted to the soundtrack of Disney's _Fantasia_).
I suspect, therefore, there are more than ten connoisseurs for any avant-garde style you could name. In the same thread I mentioned above, someone noted that Karlheinz Stockhausen's "HYMNEN (Elektronische und konkrete Musik)" is particularly unlistenable. But that piece garnered a thousand likes on YouTube — two orders of magnitude greater than 10. And that 1967 piece influenced the Beatles' "Revolution #9" on The White Album.
Stockhausen's "HYMNEN (Elektronische und konkrete Musik)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj3g-QOC0U8
Let us also remember another black sheep of art history. French art critic Louis Leroy coined the term "Impressionism" in 1874 in a satirical review of the first exhibition by an independent group of artists. Leroy used the term as a pun and insult, deriving it from the title of Claude Monet’s painting, "Impression, Sunrise on the Levant". He mocked the works as unfinished sketches. But within thirty years, Impressionism not only became accepted as an art style, but painters all over Europe, North America, South America, and Australia adopted its techniques and style. Indeed, bourgeois Sunday painters are still painting Impressionistic paintings today (and you can see them in small cooperative art galleries all over the US).
Tastes change. And frequently it's the avant-garde that moves the needle. Maybe you can't appreciate what some connoisseurs claim to appreciate. But it's uncharitable at best when you assume it's a trick perpetrated by the artists in cahoots with hoity-toity connoisseurs to con the gullible public.
I'll leave you with Mark Rothko and Adolf Gottlieb's elegant defense of their art in response to the NY Times art critic Edward Alden Jewell's pan of their show. It's worth reading. Even if you disagree with them, you gain a better understanding of why many artists feel the urge to push the limits.
https://www.studio2a.co/rothko-manifesto-modernity-for-the-modern-artist/
That doesn't seem like mockery to me. Scott says that the road Beethoven-Stravinsky-Stockhausen-??? ends up with only ten geniuses being able to appreciate the eventual result, which seems reasonable. The Beatles obviously aren't a stop on that road, although they were surprisingly sophisticated for the biggest band of all time.
It's a counterexample to Scott's thesis, yes.
Beethoven-Stravinsky-Stockhausen is a real progression, but it's a progression of [expanding what can be considered music]. Stockhausen's early work is actually very crude for both modern standards and the standards of traditional art music of his time - its value lies in exploration of novel musical techniques. There might as well have been only 10 people who could appreciate what he was doing back then. But those people were his fellow craftsmen who built upon each other's work until the paradigm they worked on reached, and eventually exceeded, the sophistication of orchestral music. And as they did that, more and more people were becoming able to appreciate what they're doing, until eventually the paradigm took over.
The Beatles are very much a stop on that road, albeit somewhat accidental ones - they were coming from a different musical tradition, and incidentally got near-unlimited access to modern studio recording techniques of the kind Stockhausen et al pioneered, at the exact moment when they were becoming genuinely viable and powerful. Perhaps a better demonstration of the progression are the next generation of classically trained musicians of the 1970s - including bona fide worldwide superstars like Kraftwerk and Jean-Michel Jarre. (Jarre is outright a student of Pierre Shaeffer, another avant-garde giant.) And it turns out they didn't just work to increase complexity, they also worked to make the end products more polished, and as a result more palatable to general public.
>it's a progression of [expanding what can be considered music]
Indeed, and from there it was only a short leap to considering all kinds of noise to be music, which both traditions had reached in short order. Apparently much more than ten people do like noise-considered-as-music, so Scott's thesis has so far been proven wrong...
Thanks for this. Sometimes, when people have an obvious chip on their shoulder about the art snobs, the question “who hurt you?” comes up, Reading the Rothko letter reminded me of the answer, which is Rothko. The letter is abusive in content and says that only a feeble minded child should need these (ugly, striking, and obscure) pictures so much as explained—being feeble minded, apparently, I found the explanations helpful, though rude—and then goes on to say that art is about ideas and if the ideas in these works do not strike you like lightning then you should go back to hanging kitsch over your mantle.
I get the impression that high art isn’t really like this anymore; pop sensibility has permeated the elite and they consequently would like to spend a hundred million dollars buying a David Hockney painting that is perfectly pleasant and extremely accessible. If that were all there was, it would be kind of puzzling why anyone would care about the odd little subcommunity of snobs eating foams that taste like chartreuse and admiring textured spheres. But it makes much more sense in the context of a letter in which one of the greats of art, rich, powerful, and celebrated, is being quite clear that finding his sphere tedious shows a weak mind and poor character. It’s understandable that many respond to that by developing a reflexive urge to tell the sphere guys exactly where they can stick it.
Are you purposely distorting what they said? Or did you not understand their points? And it's obvious you didn't do any research into the history of Modernism or the artists involved before responding to my comment. For instance, neither Rothko nor Gottlieb was famous at the time of that exhibition. Jewell, the NY Times art critic, was quite scathing in his put-down of their work, and they replied to him rather elegantly. Anyway, you seem to be mistaking your preconceived notions about art as being valid priors for how artists, the 'Art World', and how the dynamic between the avant-garde and popular culture works. It might be that even if you did the research, you'd still dislike Modernism and Modernists, but a little research would help you to argue your case better. Just sayin.
Of course, whether they're informed or not, you're welcome to your opinions. But you seem to be projecting when you accuse others of having chips on their shoulders. I'll turn your question—"Who hurt you?"—back on you. Is it because you feel left out of the cultural conversation? But you've basically shown that you have no interest in understanding the conversation, yet you still feel the "snobbish elites" need to address your needs?
I think you misunderstood me—I am agreeing that a reason people display hostility to high art is because they feel judged, hurt, and have a chip on their shoulder. Why feel that way? In the letter, Rothko’ reaction to a critic finding his work obscure is to say that “easy program notes can help only the simpleminded,” and he concludes by pronouncing that his aesthetic beliefs do in fact necessitate a spiritual insult to those who are instead attuned to “interior decoration” and “trite tripe.” He is rendering harsh judgment on the intellectual quality and taste of those who do not like his art; and, no surprise, people being harshly judged tend to develop hard feelings. To the extent that the hoi polloi identify high art with the attitude of that letter, it is unsurprising that they tend toward resentment and hostility in response.
I guess I did misunderstand you. My apologies for saying you misunderstood. ;-)
It seems so weird to me that you don't entertain the possibility that genius art makes everyone feel things. I'm sure there are some songs that both you and your children would love.
In my experience children love Mozart for its playfulness, this willingness not to be serious all the time is recognized as part of his genius
Aussi on dit "je ne sais quoi" pas "je nes sais quoi", connard. C'est ce que je dirais si j'étais un élitiste incapable d'apprécier la beauté dans son universalité.
C'est une blague? Pour moi, le mot "connard" est trop fort ici, mais francais n'est pas ma langue maternelle, donc je n'en suis pas sur.
Oui c'est une blague! C'est vrai que c'est violent, mais je ne voulais pas vraiment insulter l'auteur. Ça reprend le format d'un même (français ?) . La traduction en anglais serait "Also we say 'je ne sais quoi' not 'je nes sais quoi', asshole. That's what I would say if I was an elitist unable to appreciate the universality of beauty". I didn't think it was offensive when I wrote it, but now I realize it may be taken this way if you lack context :/
Also I recommend you try to watch "the hedgehog in the fog" with your kids (by Yuri Norstein). It has no bright colors, the story is not happy, and I predict your kids will like it anyway
It was my favorite cartoon when growing up, but then, I was kind of a weird kid.
I know I'm late to this party but IMO this is a category error. Here you have identified a particular failure case of "bad taste" that results in the creation of bad art but the concept is more general in my mind.
I think "taste" describes a persons general skill at understanding the underlying process that creates aesthetic preferences. This often does include deep knowledge about the process of creating art in a certain medium. So someone with good taste doesn't just have a intuitive bag of tricks that allows them to create a piece of art in an area that is widely regarded as good but rather, they have a deep understanding why it is considered good or bad that generalizes well to other cases. Someone with bad taste may get it accidentally right but they won't understand why a piece of art is considered good or bad by many people or have a good understanding of why another artist made certain choices.
Art isn’t about sensation, it’s about signalling. This is why who made it matters so much - we need to know who is sending the signal. Specifically, signalling creativity. Creative means “novel plus valuable” but you can’t create something truly novel if it’s valuable according to established metrics. That’s why artists are always trying to create things that are valuable by illegible metrics. Enjoyment can be part of an illegible metric but as you note by itself it gets tapped out pretty quickly. Real taste is perceiving illegible metrics that make a work of art good; fake taste is pretending to perceive them. Because they’re illegible it’s hard to tell the difference.
I haven’t thought this through very hard.
>Art isn’t about sensation, it’s about signalling
Steven Pinker says something like that.
Seems to me that the theory says that there are different "things that people make like"; they can be arranged from easiest to hardest; and everything easier than my current taste is vulgar kitsch that all intellectuals should avoid, and everything more difficult than my current taste is pretentious snobbery that no sane person could actually like.
The first objection is, why not both? They are not necessarily exclusive, so why not combine the cheap tricks that everyone likes with some medium difficulty tricks and some expert tricks, and create art that everyone would like, albeit for different reasons. That is the kind of art we should use in public spaces.
Second, this does not solve the question of whether *some* people who claim to be more sophisticated than you are actually just faking it. Their claims that they can enjoy something you can't are unverifiable for you. Maybe people on artistic levels from 0 to 7 are honest about their emotions, but the level 8 only consists of scammers who coordinate their stories.
That's what I used to call "porn in a general sense", a thing with low-level enjoyable features in abundance, with no higher-level ones: sugar-and-fat sweets, jump scare horrors, alcohol-and-water only beverages, nude physically attractive humans having sex and so on. The thing is, if you are interested in a medium and pay a lot of attention to it, a "porn" version gets old really soon. Sometimes a piece has both high and low features: such as when adults can enjoy a cartoon together with their children if it has features that cater to both audiences.
Actually, paying attention and thinking about the piece of medium is anathema to "porn in general": you notice the seams, the discrepancy and the lacking. Once you stop looking only at the cool cars exploding, you notice the plot not making sense, people behaving in an unrealistic ways and so on. That's the common problem with slop as well.
We tend to respect people with "taste" because they are both better versed in the medium and can predict the evolution of our own taste, to a degree. And when the "porn" version is overused, you can get to a point where low-level likeable features feel jarring or at least unnecessary. That's probably how people get into liking something the general public finds bland.
So here is perhaps a radical idea. AI will never do great art* because great art comes from the unconscious. You often hear song writers or authors describe the creative process not as something they are doing but something they are channeling. The song or book comes from the unconscious. And the unconscious is something we don't understand. It could be vast, it might be in touch with the universal all, or God.
*one man's great can be another's trash
The eyeball-kick failure mode reads as a rater-quality problem, not a capacity problem. RLHF on minimally trained raters rewards surface dazzle, then bigger models amplify whichever wow-moves cluster above the median. R1 and the unnamed OpenAI fictionbot converging on the same shadow-echo-whisper Rolodex despite different model scales and resource priorities is the giveaway. The fix probably looks less like more scale and more like a small expert-rater loop on top of a competent base, which is closer to how publishing actually works.
From a publishing perspective, you shouldn’t have spaces around em dashes or en dashes. Where hyphens join words, and these typographical characters are meant to divide them, grouping words into new thoughts. AI uses them correctly, but as an affectation of its tone and voice. It interjects related thoughts much like a human conversation. But I have a hard time shaking the feeling that it came from an Internet comment. Oh well. Keep on using spaces around your dashes puny humans! There’s no accounting for taste.
Fascinating point.
Perhaps one of the deepest risks of generative systems is not only producing convincing outputs, but gradually replacing the human processes of interpretive construction behind them.
Fluency can simulate depth while reducing the cognitive friction that genuine understanding often requires.
There’s a lot of tribalism in taste. Whatever the outgroup likes must ipso facto be denigrated to distance ourselves from them. Outgroup for this purpose can be non-connoisseurs, or a different faction of connoisseurs, or political parties, or any other sort of outgroup
There’s also an at least partially true model where connoisseurship is an info hazard that undermines your appreciation of the low and medium cost tricks until some combination of hedonic adaptation to asceticism and arcane knowledge of textures on featureless spheres makes you appreciate the sphere textures more than anybody else but you’re probably still less happy than the plebs enjoying their classical architecture.
For me, personally, novelty is overrated. Quality of execution trumps novelty any day, and novelty can be a negative when it's distracting.
Visual arts don't do anything for me, even the masters, but I can appreciate the quality with which they worked. Music is more my thing, and I can appreciate even the most "overused" things. Beethoven, etc--even though they didn't do anything *new* (from a temporal perspective of someone discovering them now), they did what they did *amazingly well*. And that has value.
Words are even more my thing. And here, abuse of cliche and all that other stuff AI does *is actually a sign of bad writing*. In the cargo-cult mode, mimicking the forms of good writers without actually understanding *when* and *how* to use those forms.
Interesting, I'm the opposite, I prefer novelty over polish, though it depends on the medium. One my favorite video games two years ago was Leap Year (1). From screenshots, it looks like a child made it, but the ideas are very unique and they make for up some puzzles that are unlike anything I had played before.
Two of my favorite movies are Primer and Coherence, both made on a tiny budget. Neither one is visually striking both are very creative, with plots that are deeper than you realize if you aren't paying very close attention.
Music is admittedly different. I do find polish to be important, but I would usually take moderate polish, high novelty over high polish low novelty. However I would place Beethoven in the high polish, moderate novelty category. He was the last classical but also the first Romantic era composer, his later works and most famous works were quite different than anything Haydn would have written.
1: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2951770/Leap_Year/
> then we end with strategies so difficult that only ten geniuses in the world are skilled enough to execute them, and only ten connoisseurs sophisticated enough to appreciate them
This overlooks what underpins the well known actor-critic paradigm in information theory: it is easier to discern than it is to create. I agree that taste is only a meaningful endeavor so long as it is accessible to almost all (perhaps through study). But while listing what’s good or not about something might not be sufficient to recreate it, it can be sufficient to understand why it’s good (thus making taste accessible to all, even if producing something worthy of taste is often near impossible!)
Is it possible to have both?
Art that has the subtlety and depth that connoisseurs love and also aspects that appeal to the masses. I think this is possible and generally the best art is like this.
Surprised I am the first to point out that one of the hottest books in literary theory/aesthetics in the last few years was Sianne Ngai's *Theory of the Gimmick*. (Escaped containment in academia and was reviewed in the *New Yorker* and other prestige normie places.)
The book is about why we look down on "gimmicks" in writing and art, and consider them "cheap", which suggests an interesting economic theory of aesthetic value.
Unfortunately, having read the book I can't really recommend it; most of it is dense critical theory about Marxism and various works of art/literature.
>(meanwhile, the sophisticated people are into some kind of incomprehensible foam with 296 ingredients, which only one chef in the world can prepare properly, which tastes slightly like the color chartreuse)
But you made that one up.
Have you considered - I mean, at all - that taste is fundamentally downstream from something practical that we care about, a heuristic to distinguish good from bad? Say, food. We start with sensory input from our taste buds, and it's mostly "yay sugar yay umami", but then we realize maximizing sugar and fat input is actually pretty bad for our bodies, so we need to learn better heuristics for nourishing ourselves. The endpoint of sophisticated food taste isn't "incomprehensible foam", it's fresh whole foods with minimal processing that still provide 296 microelements that your body needs, in correct proportions. (I made the microelements part up for rhetorical purposes, but the first part tracks pretty well with contemporary haute cuisine, I believe.)
(You can write a similar story about architecture. Ornaments are originally markers of good quality, they show the builders cared and had resources to build well. How well they're being maintained is a honest signal about how well maintained the building overall is. But nowadays, you can just get cheap mass-produced ones to reproduce the facade without the underlying quality, and then you get McMansions and need to look for more reliable signals. Meanwhile, experts simply build with solid, durable concrete.)
I immediately thought of that Kitchen Nightmares episode where the problem with the restaurant was the chef using 24 ingredients instead of 4.
Surely the ideal art is appealing to all levels of audience, and also guides each level of audience to "level up" into the next higher tier of sophistication.
I'm not sure if Scott's daughter seeming to enjoy "Choo Choo Train" that exceptionally compared-to-him so profoundly generalizes to me. When I think of the things I enjoyed most past adolescence - where I can think a decade back and remember being struck by how much joy the experience had brought me, it often came from more refined tastes (I'm sure not particularly refined, but at least more than mere sugar-and-rainbows). To take a very small-scale and personal example, I really loved the tiny bit of prose "a dignity that bordered on sarcasm." I stopped reading for a few moments to sort of just... admire the impression I got from those words in that order. Going all the way to finishing, for the first time, the work that I'd still call my favorite-of-all-time a decade-odd later, I'd have a borderline-spiritual experience, honored to share a species and a universe with the creator thereof. It wasn't just the many hours I spent enraptured in the experience, but the hours I spent the evening after finally finishing just... admiring my own admiration? To fully reflect upon the joy it brought me and find more joy beneath was a rather distinct experience.
Perhaps this lapses into a lot of second-order effects that aren't directly attributed to taste persay, and I'd still say "are you enjoying this as much as a toddler hearing their favorite set of exciting loud noises?" has great merit as a litmus test. But I'd also say that my answer is "yes, sometimes."
I mostly agree with this, but where are Beethoven and the Beatles in this? Or for that matter even John Williams or JK Rowling? There are things that are both very popular and also pretty damn good. There seems to be ways to that the needle, or maybe to mix cliche with originality that ends up unusually good.
Removing all “cheap tricks” in such a wrote and self conscious way, justified with vacuous intellectualisms, is itself a cheap trick. And the “professional critics” who praise this are philistines.
That Oriental building is in fact awesome, and that “house” is in fact ugly
The oriental building is awesome in a normal way. There are a million buildings just like that building, and most of them are better. Taste is the ability to know that even if you like it, there are 'better' buidlings, while still enjoying it.
The house is ugly, but it is ugly in an interesting, mindful way. Someone tried hard to make it ugly, and succeeded. Tate is the ability to know that even if you don't like it, it is a 'good' building, while still not liking it.
The inability to distinguish these things is how you end up with adult children, actually adult sub-children, who are unable to let go of their Mcdonalds/disney fixation. It's one thing to like Mcdonalds and disney, everyone does to some degree. it's another thing entirely to ONLY be able to like mcdonalds/disney; which is a state of being that deserves to be mocked and shamed.
I didn’t actually look at the oriental building, it’s a metaphor. And that is not anyone’s definition of taste. Yes, more sophisticated things I personally cannot appreciate exist— most jazz. That house is not one of things, it’s a midwit being clever. Pure civilization in the Spenglarian sense.
This is what I'm talking about!
You gotta open your mind at least a bit to the idea that the huge community of house autists have an idea of what the like, and a theory of why they like it!
I personally quite like the ugly house, although I find it unwilling to go the full mile. There are some really sick brutalist designs that take advantage of the aesthetic properties of concrete and glass and steel which it doesn't, and there are some modernist houses which contrast unnatural built shapes with the natural environment which is does do, but half heartedly. None the less, it is pretty good.
Dismissing it out of hand without being able to do anything but say "It's ugly! It's midwit!" is itself midwitism: knowing the state of the art in shiboleth form.
Fair enough and I’m not even truly against all brutalism as such, but can’t we agree that when you get to the point that architecture is being used to make a political point about socialism or whatever, they were no longer in the realm of genuine art?
If you’re using the part of your brain that thinks in words then you’re moving away from the artistic side imo. That’s what I’m actually triggered by
I think that the artist is dead; and all art is necessarily making a political point because each piece uses up the most limited resource of all: intellectual space.
There is only room for one Munch's The Scream. At some point it did not exist and something else had that slot in the valence. Then Munch was hit by a bolt of lighting and created a truly transcendent artwork and suddenly whatever was there before is fucking GONE from history.
Hence the political nature of art, that each piece carries and reinforces its context and displaces what came before or creates a new space that it then occupies until it is displaced itself.
I do agree that if you lead with politics you probably end up with something derivative and boring; on the other hand the Guernica was made by a socialist as a piece of socialist propaganda and it is so good it will mess you up if you stand in front of it for too long, it converted me into a Picasso defender.
I agree w almost all of what you say. Have you read iian mcgilchrist work on brain hemispheres, master and emissary? I think it’s the combination of great ideas being already used up as you describe, plus the increasing dominance of left-brain thinking and symbolic manipulation among over-literate populations, is what’s killing off art.
When it’s truly good, I think it’s overwhelmingly a preverbal, aesthetic exercise. Even Guernica, tho a strong argument against the position I’m taking, works bc it puts you perfectly in the direct experience of the horror, there’s no greater symbolic-logical “statement” being made
But Scot, why do your kids watch these sparkly abominations? There is Julia Donaldson and Beatrix Potter, Judith Kerr and Little Black Mole, and Simsala Grimm once they are older. Vivaldi - you narrate as a little robin experiences the seasons in a forest. Nutcracker and Sleeping beauty by Tchaikovsky were a hit in our german kindergarden, they even went to see the ballet. And Prokofiev's Cinderella. Grieg's Peer Gynt of course. My 5 yo with dramatic mindset also likes Erlkonig (now I am bragging).
Why do you mysteriously say "an AI called R1" and not "Deepseek R1", an AI that everyone knows?
I haven't read the earlier pieces in this series, but I think an important argument for this version of high taste is that it creates new forms and meanings. So if you strip out everything conventional, you create something novel and that novelty can be shaped over time to greater sophistication with a more receptive audience until it becomes conventional and the cycle begins again.
Also worth thinking about art forms that are both popular and high taste (e.g. the Beatles, Sopranos, Mad Max, Shakespeare, Michael Jackson, pre-insanity Kanye West) and how they differ from things that are abstruse and lack conventional appeal. I think partly it's that they're in forms with enough bandwidth to do conventionally pleasing things and novel things at the same time and in a way that plays against one another in a pleasing way.
To the extent that taste is partly responsive to repetition, you can't choose to have good taste or bad taste. You may one day find that the forms of art you engage with most no longer bring you the same enjoyment; the good parts have become trite and the bad parts grating. Once that happens, won't you be glad for the existence of tasteful people who can say, "oh, [popular thing X]? Yeah, I think it sucks too. Lately I've been really into [obscure thing Y], it's much more novel and challenging."
Take a look at desertopa's comments on JRPGs. Or Kimmo Merikivi on classical music or dabor on roguelike games. All of them are indeed critical of the popular thing, but they certainly don't sound like they "spend most of their time saying that it sucks." They point out WHY it sucks, and what you should look at instead if you happen to agree. This is obviously a prosocial activity!
Out of curiosity, what happens if you don't give your kids "kids" stuff like choo choo train? Like what if all they know is Mozart, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky--will their favorite end up being Tchaikovsky? Or if you give them all three and choo choo train, will tehy strongly prefer the kids music?
>having statues of awesome dragons all over the roof - are essentially cheap easy tricks compared to having something which apparently “reimagines the nature of the house”, even though nobody can explain how this is, or why the reimagination is good, in terms that I can understand. I can only claim that I am not yet so overexposed to these “cheap tricks” that they read
The reimagining that Le Corbusier 's Villa Savoye did was not that mysterious: it had a bunch of features which were unusual for the 30s.
As Wikipedia says:-
"Support of ground-level pilotis, elevating the building from the earth and allowing the garden to be extended to the space beneath.
A functional roof serving as a garden and terrace, reclaiming for Nature the land occupied by the building.
A free floor plan, devoid of load-bearing walls, allowing walls to be placed freely and only where aesthetically needed.
Long horizontal windows for illumination and ventilation.
Freely-designed façades functioning merely as a skin for the wall and windows, and unconstrained by load-bearing considerations."
Plus, of course , poured concrete construction. Along with large plate glass windows, that's commonplace. Does anyone hate large windows, and pine for leaded lights? The roof garden and al! upstairs living didn't catch on, of course, but they were still novel.
> Does anyone hate large windows
Some people like a moderate amount of privacy? I'm not thrilled about my condo's 72-inch bedroom windows positioned about 10 feet from the sidewalk.
>Some people like a moderate amount of privacy? I'm not thrilled about my condo's 72-inch bedroom windows positioned about 10 feet from the sidewalk
There are a bunch of things you can add to a to a large window to make it mire private. There's nothing you can add to a small window to make it large.
Yes, yes, yes. Same for me, Apocalyptica doing Metallica somehow brings Antonio Vivaldi to the foreground.
I keep reading stuff like "obviously, all brutalist architecture is shit", or "obviously, we all hate graffiti", or "obviously, we all think modern electronic music is slop", and I really just think Scott is being close-minded.
They said this about impressionist painters, they said this about Stravinsky (there was a literal riot during the premiere of the Rite of Spring), they said this about jazz, they said this about Skrillex.
I genuinely like seeing any graffiti on the streets, because I think it's cool that someone decided to spend their time creating a message that was important to them at the time. Even if it's a tag, even if it's "Tom is gay" (something I saw recently), someone still went outside and spent their time and money creating this message.
Nowadays we think Pompeii graffiti is really cool, a relic of how people used to live back then, a reminder that those people were exactly like us, had the same impulses, dreams, and they hung around bored just like us. You can choose to view modern graffiti like this, or you can go online and post "heh, kids these days don't understand REAL art".
All art is language. If you don't like brutalist architecture, that doesn't mean you have better or worse taste, it just means you and the architect don't speak the same language. I don't like metal music, but that doesn't mean people that listen to metal have worse taste, we just don't speak the same language.
I think the strongest argument on the pro-taste side is that if you engage a lot with a given art form -- because you care about it and it's important to you! -- you should still be able to enjoy that art form after long exposure.
IMO, the best art is that which works on multiple levels: The surface appeals to naive or casual audiences, but when you engage with it more, you discover hidden depths. Think of books that people keep re-reading year after year, each time finding some small detail they never before noted.
My worry is that we become increasingly dependent on "eyeball kicks" just to get our attention, and our ability to spot those secret treasures degrades as a result.
maybe not strip all the tricks so only 10 people can create and 10 can enjoy, but make it so 2-3 standard deviations above the median person, so a big majority won't be turned off by overused tricks, the remaining can find their higherbrow art in their niches, and we keep pulling everybody to higher standards?
The “what are these models, really?” thread you’re wrestling with is the honest substrate under any multi-agent claim - if you don’t have a sober mental model of what each agent is and isn’t, an eight-agent pipeline just compounds the confusion. That sobriety is exactly what I tried to design into Intersect Alpha rather than paper over: https://thiagopedicosaragiotto.substack.com/p/intersect-alpha-where-history-meets
Bad art panders. It doesn't matter if it panders by exploiting cheap tricks to capture an unsophisticated audience, or if it panders to the sneer of the sophisticated in-the-know crowd by exploiting knowing what is in and out and what the next beat of the conversation will be (sustainable micro-x-ing is so last year).
In either case, what elevates art has been lost because the intention was too limited. Either way, youre just a hack. True art is always, in some sense, aimed at something beyond the artist.
Juxtaposing childrens art with modern architecture is a red herring for this reason.
And there is great unsophisticated art, as every true art lover will tell you. Louis CKs favorite stand up bit was someone singing "sitting on a c*ck because I'm gay". Ricky Gervais thought he was liking it ironically, ie. from the position of sneer. Wrong! He liked it because it was funny, in a very pure way.