As a note to everyone new to Manifold, "Other" is a mechanic for markets with varying possible answers. If you have shares on "Other", they get automatically split whenever new options are added
1. Because the list is not closed, we've had already the School review which was promoted from honorable mention to finalist for example. So we would always need to have the Other option if we wanted to include all options eventually
2. Because this mirrors the contest dynamics. I think the intention of posting one review a week instead of dumping them all at once is to give readers time to think, discuss and reflect on each candidate. Adding all known finalists and directing traders where to read them ahead of time undercuts this intention
3. On a related note I think this way makes each finalist its own event, and illuminates some market dynamics: we can see which contestant makes most impact as it enters the ring and so on
i ask because i think it would be kind of interesting to have all the reviews out and for people who read ahead to be able to place bets beforehand, and then see how any entry shifts in the rankings as it actually gets posted and reacted to, but i can see the intention in doing it your way as well.
(though... sorry... think 1 isn't a real issue? since you can just list all the honorable mentions and finalists in the market, and you can still keep the "other" category too if you want an option for true wildcards.)
I feel like I need to read this again, as though the thesis was more than just “these patterns are imperfect”. There is a lot of food for thought here, of which some might not want to put on their plate.
Always fascinating to see a look into design rules that I never realized were there. Complex mosaic work is especially easy to tune out the details and take in only the big picture.
Perhaps nowhere exemplifies "America’s obsession with simulacra and counterfeit reality" more than the various themed environments of Disney World. In the creation of EPCOT Center, the Morocco pavilion was the only one with artistic coordination from the representative country. Allegedly King Hassan II sent artistic envoys to design the mosaics and buildings.
I now feel prepped with the absolute surface-level-est of retentions to show up and critique those patterns. (But really, I will harbor a much deeper appreciation for the creation behind them)
Unfortunately, management of the Morocco pavilion reverted to Disney corporate sometime during the pandemic. A recent renovation of the outdoor plaza area retiled the previous mosaics with a pattern that resembles nothing so much as the nearby bathroom floor in World Showplace.
Usually, I think the Disney parks are a really well-crafted version of what they are. As someone who lived in East Hollywood and Los Feliz for six years, I loved just walking around the California Adventure park and appreciating all the nods to distinctive individual Art Deco buildings that were contemporaries of Disney's original studio.
But it's been a while since I've been to EPCOT, and the goal there is a bit more difficult.
Yes, usually the architectural mimicry is top-notch for new builds. The evocation of old Hollywood at DHS in Florida is similarly well done. It's when the time comes to refresh, renovate, and repair that they often cheap out on the ornamentation. Two different budget pools I guess.
World Showcase does have some issues with trying to compactify a region's entire architectural history into such tiny spaces that the results occasionally feel like chimeras or follies - for instance the Rose and Crown in the UK pavilion is trying to be every pub at once and blends several centuries of construction styles to limited effect. I think the most impressive placemaking at WDW is actually the fictional Anandapur and Harambe at Animal Kingdom, mimicking in every last detail the cityscapes of Himalayan India/China/Nepal and Kenya/Tanzania/Uganda, respectively. With a South America land under construction next door I'll be interested to see whether they can still work to that same high level in the Iger 2 era.
I would have thought that mimicking the cityscapes of an entire region would be harder than mashing up centuries of pub design into a single one, but I suppose it’s partly an issue of whether one building has to stand for everything, or if you can have a jumble of buildings next to each other.
This essay reminded me of the Dutch artist M.C. Escher, who visited the Alhambra in 1922 and again in 1936. “The rhythm and rhyme” of that Moorish art “resprouted” splendidly into Escher’s work in "the regular division of the plane", now commonly called tessellation.
Thousands of words and skipped over a couple of obvious points: 1) Islamic designs, unlike most western design, is based on a hexagonal grid, with 60 degree intersections. This is because 2) All of these geometric patterns are the result of using a compass to replicate each module. As anyone who has used a compass knows, it's easy to draw a circle and then divide its circumference into 6 equal segments.
Point 1) at least is definitely an untrue overgeneralisation. The pentagonal, decagonal and octagonal symmetries, for example, quite obviously can't have a 60 degree grid underlying them.
I am not suggesting this is directly relevant to today's review, but I recall hearing something when touring one of the nationality rooms at the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh. There was a flaw in the ceiling decorations. Our guide told us this was intentional: the people of this country (I forget which) had a belief that perfection belonged to god, so artists & artisans always left an intentional flaw in their work.
I asked chatgpt about Islamic art. Chatgpt said this is a popular belief about Islamic art (intentional mistakes included to show humility before god), especially prominent in the Sufi tradition, but there is no specific theological injunction. Interestingly, "In Islamic geometric patterns, artists sometimes intentionally introduce slight variations in otherwise highly ordered designs" and "In Persian carpets, it's often said that weavers leave a 'mistake' called a gabbeh or Persian flaw—though scholars debate whether these flaws were truly intentional or just romanticized stories."
Having the person state their thesis is not needed though. The guidelines apply to the post itself, not to some thesis the writer didn’t articulate. The comment itself is clearly unkind and certainly untrue. I for instance am quite interested in what GPT has to say about things. It is not wrong anywhere near often enough to justify just waving away whatever it says. If what it says surprises me, or if it’s important to me to be sure what’s true then I check its answers. And I doubt that my level of trust and interest in GPT answers is highly unusual in this group. As for advancing the discussion, I guess the stinky little post under discussion is an attempt to do that by attacking an info source the writer thinks is dumb as fuck, so they can have one point for that. But they still flunk.
Yeah, I saw that. I am not using one of the newest models, but GPT 4.o. I have definitely caught it hallucinating, but not lately, though I have only checked accuracy on the answers I am about to act on. Of late I have been going to it with many practical questions, some concerning problems of mine, some for patients’ or friends’ problems. For example:
What mechanisms exist to help someone with apraxia succeed in focusing a microscope?
How do I bill BCBS a patient’s Medicare supplement plan given that I have opted out of being a Medicare provider? It is permissible to do this, but the online billing system is set up in a way that requires being a Medicare provider to use it.
I know someone who snores only on the exhale, and has sleep apnea that occurs because he can’t exhale (and so of course has no space in his lungs for new inhaled air). CPAP’s provide positive pressure, and would in fact make exhaling even harder. What would help a person who needs negative pressure, i.e. suction, at the point of exhale?
Where can I find info about using confusional techniques in prompts to get weird unexpected images from image-generators?
I have checked GPT’s answers to the first 2 of the above, and they are correct. I’m pretty sure the third one is correct, because I’ve looked into the matter further and so far what GPT said is correct. The 4th one I have not checked out yet.
Maybe it’s doing a good job with these questions because they are answerable by diligent searching, which GPT can of course do far faster than I can. Could it be that most hallucinating occurs when it is not able to answer a question?
Did you find a good answer to the CPAP question? My partner still sometimes has apneas with CPAP (although less than without) and I think it's usually on the exhale. I'm not convinced that negative pressure would help though, I think maybe positive pressure might still help hold the airway open (but very uncertain!!)
Yes. The statement "Nobody cares about what ChatGPT said." is arguably self evidently false. (There exists at least one person, who cares enough about what ChatGPT says to make this post.)
But I wanted to give the benefit of doubt/ respect the principle of charity.
It could have been a try to establish new rules without taking responsibility for wanting them ("nobody cares" as appeal to authority?), an accusation of low effort or even a kind of (mistaken?) rude empathy (ChatGPT is bad for your thinking process/ life quality, please be careful).
I agree that neadan's comment was unkind and untrue. On the other hand, this is exactly the kind of situation where I would be more distrustful of chatGPT's answer, I think when you ask a leading question like this it tends to just agree with you
Yes, I know. And there's nothing whatever wrong with saying that. I'm not defending GPT here, except in a very limited way. My point is that it is not wrong nearly often enough for its responses to be of no interest.
Well, I personally am less concerned about what ChatGPT says, than what the truth is. It's very much like quoting wikipedia--that's interesting and all, but what we really need are the original sources.
Yes, yes, I agree that we need the original sources. Even if ChatGPT's answer is a completely correct summary, we'll get richer information from the sources. Maybe we should all nudge each other to avoid posts that consist of nothing but a quote from GPT. I am not claiming that a post consisting of nothing but a quote from GPT is a quality post, and certainly not claiming that GPT is always right.
What I am mostly doing here is criticizing Neadan's obnoxiously rude and mean-spirited post. I'm saying it's not just rude, it's also wrong. GPT's responses are certainly not worthless, and it's just not true that nobody wants to hear what it said. I for one do. If it's right, I know more about whatever it was asked about. Even if it's wrong I'm interested. It's kind of a big deal, having these things in our lives now, you know? I'm curious about them. If it was wrong I'm still curious what nonsense it spewed and what put it into nonsense mode. And I don't see how it can possibly be true that my attitude is super-rare here.
Not here, no. But out on the internet? Their comment barely registers as mildly assertive. This is a rather special place, with it's own norms.
As for generative AI, I suspect that as the target audience learns how to engage it, it's influence will wane (much like advertising). By definition, the quality of information you get from an AI can never be better than what is available on the rest of the internet. It's more convenient in some ways, but that only goes so far.
I think the correct way to put this criticism is the same way as one should rephrase "no one cares what it says on Wikipedia". The more constructive way to put either of these is "use ChatGPT and Wikipedia as your first entry into the topic for sure, but then double-check that there is in fact a source backing it up".
I think that in internet discussions, WP is a prima facie source, especially for stuff where the facts are not in dispute in the culture war. If I need the rough area of Iran, WP is good enough. If I talk about a few square kilometers which are in dispute, I might want to get additional sources though.
And obviously, in academic writing, citing WP won't cut it.
I think that M. M.'s post was okay, the bot did not totally dominate their post, and their was even paraphrasing parts of the bot response.
But I can also understand Neadan's knee-jerk response. Letting LLMs run rampant -- especially if their output is unmarked -- can really be detrimental to discussion quality, because quite often, their posts will have the signs of an interesting contribution but on reflection be not very interesting.
If someone posts a Wikipedia article verbatim, I will notice less than five sentences in that I am reading an encyclopedic article. If someone posts a longer text of their own creation, then at least I know that some human cared enough to spend the time reading it -- which does not mean that it is worth reading, but still is some lower bar. With LLM responses, depending on the model and prompt used, I guess it could take me a very long time to figure out "wait a minute, this poster is not trying to say anything, it is just generating words".
Going to disagree here--if you want to inform me regarding Iran's square area, cool, but please give me the source where WP got it (or at least provide a link to the article, so I can look it up).
On substack (where comment links are painful), I would just say "per WP, the area of Iran is 1,648,195 km^2". On sites with Markdown support (e.g. LW, motte), I will put in a link to WP if I quote a full sentence. In general, I trust my discussion partners to have the ability to look up Iran on Wikipedia and read the stat box.
In general, I will not back up any claim I make with sources. I might say "German Chancellor Merz said ...". In the unlikely event that someone will contest that Merz is the Chancellor of Germany, I will then provide evidence for that claim.
In my experience, it is rather easy to anticipate which claimed facts will be disputed, and provide evidence in proportion to how outrageous a claim is.
It is the same in academics. A solid-state physicist writing a paper will use the word electron without citing Thompson 1897, because the whole field works under a paradigm where electrons are a thing. They might even use the electron mass in calculation without citing that, either -- only when the uncertainty of the electron mass is significantly contributing to your overall result is it important whose value you used, but "it is roughly 511keV/c^2" is not a claim which would need to be rigorously backed up.
At issue is the main point of the post (or article, essay, what have you). They main point is the claim being made that the writer thinks is original enough that many people will be interested in reading it (notice how I am walking my talk--my main claim is in the very first sentence of this post). If the main claim is of an objective nature (that is, it's a claim about something "out there" in the world, where people can see it), then it needs to be backed up by a source, plus any subsidiary objective claims that are being used to back up the main claim. Otherwise, no one has any reason to believe you. In your example, I have been assuming a post where the square area of Iran was somehow either the main claim, or more likely was being used to support the main claim ("Iran is a larger country than most people think!"). In that case, in order to be persuasive, the readers need a primary source: "It's larger than France!" [citation].
Note that I would not expect that level of scholarship everywhere on the internet. Most places are just venues for the exchange of chit chat ("Look at my cat!"). But here I think there is an expectation of a higher level of objectivity. Scott isn't just expressing his opinion about various things, he's actively looking for the truth. So should we.
It’s a common myth, but usually a justification ex post. I have heard it used about everything, including an Orthodox choir of monks in which one of them did not sing in tune. But obviously you can listen to many Orthodox choirs that sing perfectly, see many many perfect designs, and the theological justification for doing something right is much more intuitive than this explanation.
I have never found an actual source for this belief (as in something that an artist said of his work), so I would be very grateful if you found one. It would sound unbelievably pretentious, though: “I could do as well as the Creator himself, but I chose not to”…
Excellent review! Mathematics, art critique, and cultural critique blended together. I loved the incorporation of Eco's essay (which is also a fantastic essay for those who haven't read it), and the incorporation of the author's own work. This is my favorite review so far this year.
I'm pretty sure that the Portuguese word "azulejo" for these tiles comes from the Arabic word "zellij" mentioned in the text! (I think the similarity to the Spanish word "azul" is mostly coincidence.)
I'm glad you touched on modern architecture at the end, because as I read this I started thinking of the opening of The Fountainhead. I'm not an architectural historian, so I don't know how accurate it is, but the claim is that a lot of classical architectural elements were copied for aesthetic reasons from older traditions where they served a functional purpose. This results in a certain lack of authenticity which only gets worse as classical elements continue to be cut and pasted without much understanding or regard for their origins. It gave me a new appreciation for modern architecture, even if I sometimes find it less appealing at first glance.
It seems that there is something similar going on in your examples, with people copying certain designs into spaces that they don't really belong, either in response to popular demand or lack of understanding on the part of the artist. The result may be superficially appealing on the surface, but once you know what to look for, you find incongruities that nag at you and can't be unseen.
>I'm not an architectural historian, so I don't know how accurate it is, but the claim is that a lot of classical architectural elements were copied for aesthetic reasons from older traditions where they served a functional purpose. This results in a certain lack of authenticity which only gets worse as classical elements continue to be cut and pasted without much understanding or regard for their origins.
Why is including things purely for aesthetic reasons bad? Am I being "inauthentic" for wearing clothes with nice patterns instead of drab monochrome colours? Should I toss out my painted coffee mugs and replace them with plain ones? Is it an inauthentic frippery to grow flowers instead of edible plants? If I buy my girlfriend a new pair of earrings for her birthday, am I encouraging inauthenticity by getting her something with purely aesthetic appeal?
This is, of course, a matter of opinion. There's no right or wrong answer here and I don't begrudge anyone their personal tastes.
I like ornamentation (up to a point...as with all things, it can be carried to excess). But I don't like fake things. I love flowers but I don't like fake flowers. I like when my wife wears jewelry, but I'd rather save and splurge on real precious stones than get something made of plastic.
Architecturally, I dislike plastic made to look like wood, stone veneers that are only a few inches thick and serve no structural purpose, and window shutters that are permanently fixed and can't actually cover the windows. I find it lazy and it betrays a lack of creativity. I would prefer that people create a new style to suit new materials, technologies, and techniques, rather than make low-quality, surface copies of old styles. It's similar to movie reboots that lack all the things that made the originals great.
- The materials used (fake flowers vs. real flowers, plastic jewellery vs. real jewellery, plastic made to look like wood).
- The purpose (stone veneers only a few inches thick, window "shutters" that don't cover windows).
The first category, certainly, involves fakeness. But I don't think the second category is "fake" or "inauthentic", unless you suppose that only structural elements can be "authentic". A decorative marble veneer might not serve any structural purpose, but it isn't fake -- it's real stone, not an imitation. We don't complain about non-functional decoration in any other sphere of human endeavour, so complaining about it in architecture seems like an isolated demand for rigour.
I suppose so, although that kinds of ignores the possibility that things can have more than one purpose, or that their purpose can evolve. Just because the Greeks used columns for load-bearing purposes, it doesn't follow that that's the only legitimate use for columns, and that putting some where they aren't needed to support the roof but make the building look nice is therefore wrong.
That's a fair point -- I agree there's a difference between a fake flower and a non-load bearing stone veneer. But I don't think the difference is quite as large as you imply. The stone veneer may be real stone** but it's still masquerading as something it isn't (a solid stone building). I would rather architects find creative ways to make concrete or vinyl attractive while embracing their concrete-ness or vinyl-ness, instead of trying to imitate a different material.
But as I said, this is a matter of personal taste. I like the appearance of stone buildings as much as the next person, and I understand why most people don't care about what's beneath the surface. And I certainly wouldn't refuse to buy a house over an issue like this.
** These are often concrete instead of quarried stone.
I think the magic comes from it being hard to do, and handmade. I get a similar feeling from stone carved stuff that I don't get at all from plastic molded stuff.
At the same time, I got some of that pink insulation from Home Depot, glued and carved it and weathered it until it looked like thick wooden beams that have been outdoors a long time, and hung Edison bulbs from it. I know it's fake, but it has this handmade vibe to it, even if it's crooked. (I know your own handmade stuff has a vibe, but I think I'd get this same vibe from the rustic chandelier if someone else had done it.)
A few inches of stone (or concrete) can serve a purpose in terms of insulation, by adding thermal inertia. Of course you can use insulating material with much more R per inch, but (a) then you need to cover it up (by something fake?) (b) stone could still make sense (particularly in combination with other things) in places where it has been traditionally used and modern insulation materials have to be imported.
From a certain perspective, of course, one shouldn't go out of one's way to vaunt something with the appearance of luxury, but should one vaunt something that is actually extravagant?
The last few paragraphs reminded me of the problem we have in the recreational steamboating community: a lot of steam launches were built on traditional fishing boat bulls (these being, by definition, best suited to small craft in the local waters), but while we have plenty of period drawings of engines and boilers, there are almost no detailed drawings of these boats.
Why would anybody bother making a detailed lines plan of a boat which could be built by local craftsmen in any seaside village? The people with the education and tools to make these drawings were busy working on much larger or more avant-garde projects; by the time the boats in question were old enough to be interesting, most of them had rotted away.
It's similar to how, to my knowledge, the only extant drawings of WWI-era USRA standard steam locomotive designs exist in the hands of a private collector; as diesels came out, railroads scrapped the steam locomotives, and seem to have mostly trashed the drawings too. Who cares about "preserving" something that, until recently, was ubiquitous? By the time anybody thought to try and save some copies, most were gone.
It seems like the author is saying the same is true of architecture: the people with the education and tools to actually do the work on a large scale are uninterested in "common" designs. Why bother? They've seen them 10,000 times, they're all well-documented, any idiot can draw something symmetrical, golden ratio, blah blah blah. Never mind that, empirically, we can't build these things anymore--academically, they're stale to the sorts of people who care enough about the subject to do it for a living.
Oh, indeed! Here's a forum thread with pictures from a recent meet (I did not attend--I should clarify that I never actually got around to building a steam launch myself, though I was active in the live steam model railroading community for years, and ran steam tractors and stationary steam engines at the Antique Gas and Steam Engine Museum in Vista, CA in the early 2010s): https://thesteamboatingforum.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=22523#p22523. Plenty of videos on YouTube, too: just search for "Steam Launch" or "Steamboat Meet".
Elliott Bay Steam Launch Co. sells copies of Steamboats and Modern Steam Launches, a book coversion of a magazine which ran briefly in the early 60s and is the best source of information outside the forum linked above.
Used to be you could go to Beckmann Boatshop and order engines, boilers--even ready-to-run launches. Their flagship product was the Compromise 21, a replica of turn-of-the-century Truscott Boat Manufacturing Company launches. Those days are gone, though; they closed up shop some time around 2021.
I think the nearest anybody comes these days to buying a new boat ready-to-run is to get a Duffy Boat hull and fit it out for steam, but most buy used or build their own. Selway-Fisher has lots of plans for launches using various building techniques.
I was taught in my teens that in Islamic art, it's traditional for the artist to always introduce at least one deliberate flaw, in recognition that only Allah is perfect. I don't know if this is always rigorously followed; personally, I found the idea quite silly when I was introduced to it, because my take was that if only Allah is perfect, then the artists shouldn't have to introduced flaws into their work *on purpose* for their work to reflect that.
I feel like the review suffers though for failing to explore historical or cultural information which might contextualize the observations.
Why is that silly? For a master of a craft, it is trivial to reproduce patterns and smooth lines. Hell, it could be done with mechanical aids even back.
I feel like you’re missing something valuable. Namely, The exact cultural awareness you criticize the author for missing. The act is devotional and cultural.
I'm not saying it's not, but it can be devotional and cultural without being well thought out. My outlook was, if only Allah is perfect, then you don't have to try to make a piece of artwork imperfect. In a way, trying to introduce imperfections on purpose actually strikes me as disrespectful, like saying "if I tried to, I could make my work come out absolutely perfect, but I won't, because that would be muscling in on God's territory." Surely it'd be more respectful to God to acknowledge that he could do better, even if they're doing their best?
Geometric shapes and lines can be perfectly formed. This is a small art vs the universal.
art is a human designed form. Just as we can have a perfectly typed sentence, no grammatical errors or typos. Yes, these are imperfect mediums but within them perfect is possible. Medium eventually take an ossified form.
Introducing a known error is a nod that nothing, even ossified mediums are perfect.
I get the idea. Understanding it, I still find it silly. I've discussed this with someone who grew up Muslim (and was Muslim at the time, although he left the religion about a year later,) and when I explained my perspective on it, he agreed that when you frame it like that, it does seem kind of silly. I could go into more length on why I see it this way, but I don't think there's much point in doing that if you're going to assume that any point of disagreement must be rooted in my not understanding it.
Let’s start here. Can a human draw a perfect square? 90 degree angles and straight lines? Now consider the viewer is human and can it be close enough to fool them? Geometric shapes are a construct. I’m willing to be convinced; being told your opinion is off doesn’t mean the person is closed minded, it means they see a flaw you don’t. So… dive down to the level of geometric drawing (my question above) then build up.
Okay, so, I think there are a couple different levels where we can say that "imperfection" inevitably enters into human work.
On the geometric level, even with our best tools, we're never going to reach Platonic Form level precision. The imperfection might be below the level where a human can detect it, but we can be sure it's there.
On a level that I think is more salient though, even if we grant that the shapes are close enough to being perfectly precise, that doesn't mean that a better design couldn't have been chosen in the first place. You described the possibility of "perfect" sentences before, lacking any typos or grammar errors, and in that sense, perfection is very much possible. But most of the work of writing doesn't come in ensuring that the sentences are correctly constructed in every technicality, it comes in how the words are used to convey the underlying feelings and ideas. It's easy to create a sentence which is without any technical faults, but it's a completely different matter to write a sentence for which no better replacement is possible.
Suppose I'm a big fan of the writing style of Terry Pratchett, and I pay homage to it in my own work by copying his signature use of multiple nested layers of footnotes which go off on comic digressions from the story and inject incidental worldbuilding that doesn't fit into the main narrative. Let's suppose further that I consider him the unchallenged master of this device, and I want to convey that my own work is only an imperfect rendition of his. So, I deliberately make my footnotes less interesting or entertaining, or maybe insert stylistic errors like making the in-text symbols not correctly correspond to the symbols used at the start of the footnotes.
That strikes me as being not an especially respectful way to handle an homage to his work. Because if I really think that his writing is so great, and mine is only an imperfect reflection of his style, I don't need to deliberately make my own writing worse in order for his to seem better in comparison, his will simply be better.
For a fallible human to deliberately limit the perfection of their work so as not to encroach on the territory of a perfect and unlimited God strikes me, not as offering honor to that God, but denigrating it, by implying that humans need to limit themselves so as not to detract from the apparent perfection of his work.
I see your point, but here are a few possible counterpoints.
The imperfections are symbolic act of humility.
They're a way of acknowledging that perfection isn't only unachievable but something that should be even striven for in the first place.
They're intended for the audience, not the artist. That is, they're an instructional tool meant to teach the viewer that things made by human hands always have flaws, even if they aren't easily perceived.
"I found the idea quite silly when I was introduced to it, because my take was that if only Allah is perfect, then the artists shouldn't have to introduced flaws into their work *on purpose* for their work to reflect that"
It's a (subtle) admission by the artist that they know they are imperfect.
I think there are a couple different ways of judging it as a practice. One is to ask whether it seems particularly coherent or well thought out as a symbol, whether it does a good job representing the thing it's supposed to convey under close examination. Personally, I don't think it does.
The other is to ask, does it do a good job eliciting the norms or values it's supposed to cultivate? Does it help shape people's characters in the desired direction? My intuition is that it doesn't seem like a very good practice for this either.
This is of course something I could be wrong about, and I formed this impression when I first heard about the practice, some time in my early to mid teens, when I knew very little about Islamic culture, and didn't have any particularly strong impression of it in any direction. But as I've learned more about Islamic culture from people who've grown up in it, one impression that they've consistently shared with me is that cultivating a sense of humility or fallibility among authority figures or people in positions of expertise is something that Islamic culture, along the general continuum of human civilizations, is quite bad at. So I continue to suspect that the tradition, if regularly observed, probably isn't very effective for that purpose.
You are suggesting it isn't perfect itself (which seems on point).
It's not an overt act (being overt has its own issues).
If it's completely private to the artist, there's no risk.
Maybe, the point is that imperfection is always there even if it doesn't appear to be (you might need to put some effort into looking for the imperfection).
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"I found the idea quite silly when I was introduced to it, because my take was that if only Allah is perfect, then the artists shouldn't have to introduced flaws into their work *on purpose* for their work to reflect that."
It seems very obvious that it couldn't work for this purpose (it's fairly absurd to think that it could work) . If you think somebody is doing something absurd, maybe, you are wrong about their reason. You are also begging the question here.
It's not begging the question to say that something strikes you as a poor idea, to investigate the evidence being open to being persuaded otherwise, and find that the evidence actually does suggest that it was a bad idea after all.
It actually has to be an idea before it can be poor (or not). You are kinda assuming the idea is real (that it's a real reason for people). That's the "begging the question" part.
The idea (as you presented it) seems fairly absurd. If that's the case, it's seems likely that there aren't many people (you'd care about) believe in it.
I'm not sure if you are giving the artists enough credit to accuse them of being silly.
I'm not sure how widely observed it is, but it's definitely a practice that people who've been brought up in Islamic societies have agreed is a real tradition that they've also heard of and have been told is practiced for those reasons.
When I was first taught about it, I wasn't convinced it was necessarily a real practice, just that it didn't seem like a good idea to me. I still don't know how widespread or universally observed it was, but I've received some pretty strong assurances that it is at least a real practice.
I want to see this expanded. What if you use Penrose tilings? What if instead of tiling a plane, you tile a sphere or hyperbolic geometry? I'm also wondering how hard it is to make a program that can randomly generate tilings. I skimmed a lot of this, so sorry if you already answered some of that.
The last few paragraphs of this piece remind me of Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. Despite the title, the book is really about art, and one of his theses is that artists usually get to a point in their work where they want to send a message, but the message could be about something in the world (e.g., "poverty"), or it could be about art itself.
Did you solicit comment from the Metropolitan Museum or the artisans responsible for the works in this room? I realize it's not your central point but it does kinda feel like you are dunking on them in a way that they should be entitled to comment and notice.
I doubt they'd want to publish a response. Anyway, it's pretty rare for cultural commentary-type writing to solicit responses from the artists they're discussing. You wouldn't necessarily expect a book reviewer to reach out to the author, even if they were critiquing the book.
A very fine review, but ... a review of Geometric patterns - seriously? All about form, none about content ... Bertolt Brecht had this fable: FORM AND FABRIC
Mr. K. was looking at a painting that gave some objects a very idiosyncratic shape. He said: "Some artists, when they look at the world, are like many philosophers. In the pursuit of form, the material gets lost. I once worked for a gardener. He handed me a pair of secateurs and told me to prune a laurel tree. The tree was in a pot and was lent out for festivities, so it had to be in the shape of a ball. I immediately began to cut off the wild shoots, but no matter how hard I tried to achieve the spherical shape, I couldn't do it for a long time. Once I had cut off too much on one side, once on the other. When it finally became a ball, it was very small. The gardener said disappointed: 'Well, that's the ball, but where's the laurel?"
Good review, but art is just boring. I would've liked it more if it started with the Syria anecdote and devolved into other topics. But that's just to say I wanted it to not be an art review
I am super curious about your experience of "art" as "boring". Is it boring to talk about? Is it boring to look at? All art or just some kinds? Do you feel aesthetic appreciation for things that aren't art as such? What about non visual art (music, say, or perfume)? Do you feel aesthetic appreciation but find that itself boring? If you have a few minutes to discuss this I am really interested in hearing more.
I like listening to music, but a lot of art culture is like pop music, which is bad
>or perfume
Mostly bad smelling
>Do you feel aesthetic appreciation but find that itself boring?
Paintings and things people create just to be art are usually very boring and I don't appreciate them. Like I don't appreciate the patterns at all in this piece. A skyscraper looks cooler than all of the included images. But you can of course make ugly skyscrapers. But I've also seen rectangular prism shaped skyscrapers that are better than everything reviewed in this piece. Like this random one I just googled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Chicago_(building) looks cooler than everything in this piece.
This is fascinating because I think I hold almost diametrically opposed feelings or intuitions on each and every one of these answers. Perhaps pop music is the exception, as it is so repetitive that even the variations seem rather more synthetic than playful.
I think there's something that is missing from this review that surprised me, which is the motivation behind the process. The review takes the perspective of the modern artist seeking aesthetic for its own sake, which is fair enough, as I assume that's the author's own viewpoint. But if we are interested in why the tradition seems to be broken in the modern day to increasingly greater degrees, I think it's worth reconsidering why the tradition exists in the first place.
For the Islamic artist, the process itself glorifies God by exploring the emergent harmonies of mathematics. The line that is telling here is the note that the design emerges 'like magic' from a relatively simple set of principles. I.e., it is a sign of a God who reveals Himself through the beauty of His creation, and the highest order of that creation (this being the Platonic influence creeping in) exists not in the material, natural world but instead in the abstract world of ideas and form. Through the process, the artist instantiates the beauty of mathematics into the natural world, thus creating a window through which the divine light might captivate observers. The more you study it, the more apparent this becomes. It is the regularity and systematicity itself that is the key here, not the mere fact of being beautiful -- the fact that the regularity and systematicity can reliably reproduce beauty is the thing that seems oddly divine.
So, where does this leave us with regard to the modern tradition, and with regard to the Eco essay? I think it's clear that the underlying motivation is no longer animating the process, at least as applied in the Met room, and instead it is mere craft. The artisans are most likely Muslims, to be sure, but to what extent are they concerned with this original motivating force versus the desire to simply uphold an ancient tradition and create pretty objects that testify to the glory of their people and their history? The willingness to disregard the fundamental principles of the art seems to indicate the latter, to me. A piece of craftsmanship is good when it is perceived as beautiful and meets the needs of the customer. A piece of sacred art *cannot* be good if it undermines the very thing that is meant to be divine.
What distinguishes great art from craft is that great art is not simply an attempt to create a beautiful object, it is an argument about *what is beautiful*. It says look, here is the wellspring of beauty, and if you are attentive, and if you care, you too can see what I see, you too can learn why I loved this thing more than all the other things.
Going back to our arguments about the modern architects from this lens, the idea that a layperson finds X thing beautiful is not particularly interesting to them if they are trying to be artists rather than craftsmen. The question is what their building says about the nature of beauty (and this is why the class signaling argument is both wrong and correct at the same time -- it's not profane signaling, but it is a form of aesthetic signaling that is making an argument that the austere and the simple can be beautiful)
This is a fascinating point, although once we open this topic I can’t help but ask, if this conjecture of “art to craftsmanship” is true, when and how did this transition happen? Were the medieval craftsmen just more erudite in theology? Did come from different social strata than their modern counterparts? Was there a break in the passing down of traditions or did the knowledge just get gradually lost without a scripture holding it together? Etc etc. All just to say that I have no idea *who* created the medieval patterns and *who* was in charge of making sure the underlying theological implications were sound. To establish that probably requires a more historical/sociological investigation of the pattern-making process, not just the patterns themselves.
You're asking great questions and ones I'm unfortunately not capable of answering, as to some extent I am extrapolating from things I know about Catholic art which (obviously) cannot be perfectly mapped onto this. That said, I would suspect that it's a combination of two things. First, in the medieval era, skilled artisans were a very elevated class. In a world where nearly everyone is involved in food production, the people who *aren't* involved in food production are all part of a relatively elite segment of the population, even if the true elites are of course much more exalted than the artisans.
But also, even if they themselves weren't more learned in theology, their patrons (and whoever the patrons had overseeing the project in their stead) certainly would've been more learned in theology than the patrons are today. A door leading to a madrasa must, of course, satisfy Islamic scholars who teach at the madrasa.
Indeed my instincts are also that, for designers to all agree to adhere to a set of not immediately discernible rules (at least not easily discernible without first being told about them), there must be a class of critics judging and enforcing those rules, often consisting of both the designers/craftsmen themselves and patrons/connoisseurs. This is the pattern behind almost every artistic form that has been distilled and perfected so quite reasonable to venture a guess that that also applies here.
One other relevant point is that iconic depictions are frowned on in many Islamic traditions (though there are clearly some, particularly in South Asia, that do depict nature and even humans).
>As a final thought, I wonder if this experience is generalizable. The debate over the virtue or vice of modern architecture has been going on for years on ACX, and one of the baffling knots that Scott has tried to untangle is: what is going on with architects? Why are their tastes so different from the laypeople?
As victim, I found it fascinating how many architecture students who loved classical aesthetics become thoroughly brainwashed into modern aesthetics at architecture school. In no small response to fact that architects generally has to work with the dominant building systems of the era, which is steel + concrete + prefabricated cladding. One learns to love and celebrate modernity through Stockholm syndrome. Many architecture students delude / post rationalize modernism aesthetics to a degree, in no small response to fact that they had to work with it out of economic necessity. There's boutique firms and programs who can still build traditional / vernacular buildings at exorbitant prices, but they're luxury products, the kind necessarily not viable for mass consumption.
Like many things, "culture" is a second level manifestation of economic and industrial realities. Old housing typologies and building methods are not viable in the age of modern building materials and technology. Same commodification + value engineering forces behind everything we manufacture as process matures. It doesn't help that because building are still (relatively) durable objects, changes in the building industry are extremely conservative once new materials are locked in.
Ornamentation that genpop loves to wank over may come back once it can be done cheaply at scale, labour for such things are cost prohibitive unless you have a pool of underclass or willing to wait decades. It's why modern architecture focus on structural details, the kind of component assembling with very little "craft" but still expresses craftsmanship and a builders expertise. It's also much easier to draft... both by hand and CAD/computers. The 100 year switch over to unified blueprints that has to be copied and distributed in increasingly fast turn over rates for expedited construction incentivized away from intricate detail work. Bezier curves are hard, it gets filtered out by designers/producers who don't want to do hard things. So you get strange angles instead, because it's easy to rotate in software... and software snapping is satisfying.
You say this all as if it's negative, but I think it's exactly the positive point that the review is putting forward. Each tradition of art has its own creative process, and when you understand it and work within it (rather than against it), it creates its own beauty. When the materials and process change, so does the decorative style. It's not that you get "brainwashed" into liking modernist aesthetics - it's that you see why modernist aesthetics make sense for modern materials and methods, and you still appreciate the traditional aesthetics, but only when done with the traditional materials and methods, and not when slapped on as a superficial decoration.
Not negative, just throwing my 2c on why it seems like modern architecture taste seems so divergent with genpop. Apologies for unstructured ramble:
Something to be said about how some beauty is not intuitive and has too be trained like acquired taste, i.e. beauty that needs to be understood. Not that I can speculate whether some architectonics is "inherently" beautiful or appreciation is culture all the way down, but there are some forms where simian brain seems to be wired to find beautiful... versus training an audience to understand the logic of a new form of beauty. It's vexing personally, there's nothing more artificial then build environments but at the same time humans also evolve with concept of dwelling. Yet there's a lot of (maybe suspect) science that consistently conclude people find vernacular building more appealing than international/modernism styles, even cross culture (i.e. foreign traditional styles that participants have no cultural attachment to). There "feels" like something inherently not human-centred about the abstraction of "modern" architectonics.
With respect to creative process - there is also a sheer... scale of mental concession in architecture due to insurmountable-ness of economic/industrial realities. It's not one of those disciplines where you can get together with the boys to experiment past any reasonable scale. Almost every other creative field is scaled so very experimental things can be done on the frequent if you can cobble together a small team of like minded people and some 4-5 digit funding. That stops once complex regulations/compliance/legal enters the picture and projects enters 7-9 digit category, it's degree of filter forces most practitioners to "understand" modern aesthetics that then gets pushed onto gen pop that frequently don't. Cue press releases on why XYZ design is pioneering / good design by architects trying to educate the public but the public looks at said design and think... that's still ugly.
It also doesn't help modern building is very complex - a lot of lipstick on a pig going on, where pig is the disguised building systems / mechanics / machines that sustains artificially conditioned built environments. There's lot of ugly guts going on to keep things unprecedently comfortable relative to vernacular / beautiful styles, but it's the kind of environment gore (pipes / conduits / wires, industrial building materials (plastic vapor barriers, gross looking insulations), adhesives, rough fasteners etc) that seems to offend genpop sensibilities. A surprising amount of people get really pissed off when old buildings get upgraded / retrofitted to modern code and they see exposed infra... intuitively they know that's for the lights and AC and stuff that enables modern standards... but to them, the lay, it's just ugly.
The problem with the "unprecedented comfort" argument is that many of the things people hate about modern architecture also make it harder to keep buildings comfortable. Big glass boxes are naturally hot in summer and cold in winter without a lot of AC and central heating; conversely, vernacular styles are often easier to keep at a comfortable temperature, because they're usually developed specifically for the climate and weather conditions of the local area (the Twitter account WrathOfGnon is good on this). If comfort's the main goal, the sensible choice would be to use vernacular techniques, with the ugly guts hidden inside the walls where you don't have to look at them. This also has the advantage of not being ugly.
You miss the fact that big glass boxes let in a lot of light. For people spending a lot of time indoors, sunlight goes a long way towards making a building pleasant to live in. Studying in traditional-style libraries can be downright depressing, and I am more willing to tolerate a lack of sunlight than most.
This makes perfect sense except for the fact that the laity seems to mostly disagree with the elites. Modern buildings are ugly. I suppose it's possible that a 16th century urbanite felt the same way about a gothic cathedral the way I do about a glass rectangular prism, but I kinda doubt it. You don't have to get brainwashed into thinking a cathedral is artistically imposing, let alone pretty.
Interesting! My theory is that architecture schools select for people who like modern architecture, and most architects would be shocked to learn there is a substantial population that doesn't. As a non-architect who loves modern architecture, and was baffled to read Scott's post criticizing it.
Can you explain what you dislike about modern architecture? My guess is that people dislike modern architecture primarily because of a preference for ornate decoration, whereas I usually find ornate decoration to be too visually noisy.
Rather than ornate decoration per se I'd guess it's a lack of organic patterns, the underlying implication of being stranded in a space which prioritizes the convenience of machines, and only grudgingly tolerates what humans need. Hard, flat surfaces of glass, concrete, or metal are easy to define, fabricate, and keep clean, but the acoustic environment they create is oppressive.
This supports my hypothesis that some modern-architecture-haters have aesthetic tastes influenced by dissatisfaction with some element of modern life. Would you say that's accurate?
For my side of things, I don't get that vibe from modern buildings at all. I studied abroad at Cambridge, which has no shortage of gorgeous traditional libraries, and many modern ones too, whose design seemed like an afterthought. Despite this, I ended up studying in the modern libraries near exclusively after a week. The traditional libraries had tiny windows and no bright fluorescent lights, which got depressing quick. In my experience, modern buildings tend to be much more human-friendly.
<i>Ornamentation that genpop loves to wank over may come back once it can be done cheaply at scale, labour for such things are cost prohibitive unless you have a pool of underclass or willing to wait decades.</i>
It already can be done cheaply at scale -- go to any garden centre, they have loads of little statues, and in principle there's no reason you couldn't buy a few and stick them on top of a building as decoration. Or if you don't like that, architects can and have produced nice effects with patterns of differently-coloured bricks, which we can and do mass produce already.
Really good! I was already seeing most of it as a response to a lot of Scott's recent posts on modern art and architecture, so it was good to see it brought out explicitly at the end.
I think there's a general issue with any skilled tradition, whether it's an art or a craft or a science or a humanity. The practitioners develop a deep sense of what matters and what is valuable in the tradition, but they also explore the space of what is possible with the current methods, and find it to be exhausted, and seek out novelty. The masses may sometimes appreciate the productions (particularly when they become familiar) but doesn't experience the exhaustion, and doesn't see the motivation for the new movements. If the practitioners have no outside feedback, they can go off in a spiral in directions that really don't matter to anyone else. But if their primary feedback is from the masses, then they never develop the sophisticated understanding of what is valuable in the tradition - they just aim for a superficial interest.
What seems to be essential is an interlocking culture of many such traditions, each interacting with the ones adjacent to it, keeping each other grounded in something of external meaning, but supportive of experimental new directions, and particularly the ones that do have something to contribute to other specialists, and thus indirectly to everyone else.
You sometimes get excesses, like dada and postmodernism and string theory, but they usually get pulled back by their neighbors.
The only criticism I had is that I don't think I ever see "literati" in the singular - I felt like it had to be "literatus", but that seemed even wronger.
I loved this review! When I doodle I often mess around with geometric shapes and stars and such, and this review opened my eyes to a whole world of geometric doodling possibilities! Makes me want to go out and learn more about Islamic geometric patterns, and previously I had no interest in them whatsoever.
> The debate over the virtue or vice of modern architecture has been going on for years on ACX, and one of the baffling knots that Scott has tried to untangle is: what is going on with architects? Why are their tastes so different from the laypeople?
Layperson with a genuine aesthetic preference for modern architecture here. I've long assumed my opinion was the obvious majority, and was baffled when I first read Scott's posts taking for granted that people hated modern architecture. The simplest hypothesis is that architecture as a profession simply selects for the % of people similar to me, and the architects in question would be shocked to learn any substantial number of people disagree with them, just like I was.
What do I mean, "genuine aesthetic preference for modern architecture"? I've seen many famous examples of traditional and modern architecture in person, and usually prefer the modern. The Burj Khalifa is more appealing than Sagrada Família. Seattle is a prettier city than Edinburgh. I enjoy walking through cities just to admire the skyscrapers, and I even have a tapestry of a futuristic cityscape on my bedroom wall. I don't dislike traditional architecture, but it's rarely as impressive.
What do I like about modern architecture? Lights, mostly. I love buildings with colorful displays running up the sides at night. Dubai and Hong Kong are excellent for this. I also like sleek metal, bright pops of color, and massive mirror facades that melt into the sky during dawn or dusk. I love concrete too, I find blocks of exposed concrete aesthetically appealing in the way jagged cliffs and roaring rivers are appealing. Yes, I like brutalism too.
Why didn't I realize there were a substantial number of people who disliked modern architecture before reading about it on ACX? Architecture aesthetic doesn't come up organically all that often. When I saw people talking about architecture, it was often while browsing r/cityporn or r/cyberpunk or something, which are naturally populated with modern architecture lovers. I had seen people criticize modern architecture before, but usually in political contexts. A trad conservative lamenting the fall of the West, or a socialist bemoaning late-stage capitalism. It was easy to slot those complaints under a distaste for what modern architecture represents, independent of any standalone aesthetic objections.
Do I understand why many other people don't like modern architecture? Maybe. The opinions of modern-architecture-haters are as strange and unintuitive to me as mine are to them. On a purely aesthetic level, my best guess is that modern-architecture-haters enjoy ornate decoration much more than I do, while not being impressed by sleekness, shininess, or sheer scale nearly as easily. For some people it's just aesthetic, but I suspect that for some people, like the disaffected tradcon or socialist, the dislike for modern architecture is related to some deep sense of dissatisfaction with modern life. It's likely no coincidence that I, lover of modern architecture, feel content with and well-suited to modern life. But the causality could go either way.
> The Burj Khalifa is more appealing than Sagrada Família.
Wait, what? Disregarding that these are not the same class of buildings (office skyscraper vs church), there is simply no comparison: the Sagrada has a thousand little details to explore. There is no visual exploration with a skyscraper. And the Sagrada is unique, no other than Gaudi could have dreamed it up. As it is still constructed it also has like medieval cathedrals the quality that time itself is part of the building, it changed through history, because after Gaudi different architects followed his style with their own variation.
The Burj Khalifa is very tall, I grant you that, but does it have columns which stand on Turtles? How awesome is that? I had to laugh out loud when I stood before it.
Behold the subjectivity of taste! Thanks for your comment, it helped me develop a better understanding of how my aesthetic preferences differ from yours.
If you think there is no visual exploration with a skyscraper, you've never really looked at one. If you want to see what I see, go find one with a lot of windows as most of them do, preferably one of those seamless glass facades. Watch how the windows reflect the sky and the surrounding buildings and trees, a portrait of the city it lives in. Walk around the building, and watch the portrait shift. Look at the textures of the skyscraper, the delicate glass and noble steel and harsh concrete. Look at the curves and angles of it as it interweaves with its neighbors, poetry embedded in space. No visual exploration? Maybe you haven't done any.
To you, the "thousand little details" of an ornate traditional building are intriguing. To me, unless exceptionally well-executed, they are often muddled and noisy, offering only more layers of mediocrity. Westminster Abbey, for example. Ornate stone carvings are static, dead as a glass mirror or glowing lights are alive.
The Sagrada Família did pass the bar for "exceptionally well-executed." I liked it. The organic tree-like columns were cool. The stained glass carried hard, tapping into some of the same the appeal that LED displays do. It's far more aesthetically pleasing than your typical office building or suburban house.
But it didn't inspire my soul quite how the Burj Khalifa did. Have you seen the Burj Khalifa in person? Have you seen it at night, wreathed by the purest white light, ethereal like an angel's sword? Despite being a church, the Sagrada Família is not half as divine. I will grant the interior of the Burj Khalifa is unimpressive, but the view from the top more than makes up for it. How you can look down and find the tops of lesser skyscrapers where one would expect the ground to be. How you can look up and see a glimmering city rising from dust. Where are you getting that in Barcelona?
I would not say the history of the Burj Khalifa is any less aesthetically compelling, either. Less wholesome, maybe, but it offers a certain je ne sais quoi.
(The turtles are cute and whimsical, but not more appealing to me than say, a 90th percentile work of street art in downtown LA. That is a compliment, I like graffiti).
I have the same complaint about this review as I do about the previous one, in which the reader must slog through a long detailed account of advanced and difficult lab techniques: Their authors didn’t put nearly enough smarts and effort into addressing the question of why all these details matter. These 2 reviews are in the same class as a finalist from 2023 that was a condensed version of a book about how bees & hives work, complete with copies of illustrations from the book. I think reviews of this kind appeal to people who find lots of details about how things work intrinsically interesting. I am like that about a few things, but about most things it takes a larger context, and an interesting one, to capture my attention regarding how a certain thing works and make it feel worth my while to master a welter of details.
I read the first 2/3 of this review quite carefully, looked at the images, and grasped the points about how t-intersections etc violated the rules of covering an area with this kind of pattern. And I do agree that these violations were displeasing to the eye. But I just don't care that much about some deviations in geometric patterns at MMoA, and the writer did not place their account of these deviations inside a structure that would have made them matter to me. Now that I think of it, chunks of info about details are sort of like museum displays — you can’t just plunk the item of interest on a shelf, you need to surround it related objects and written contextual info.
The present writer does say a bit about various larger issues that are relevant: Are the flaws in the patterns at MMoA mostly the result of Disneyfication, or would the original artisans have made the same sort of exceptions? In original Islamic decoration, are the errors made deliberately, our of fear of or respect for some godlike being? How does the artist's commitment change over time, and how in the presence of AI? But only a bit is said about each of these large and interesting issues, and there is no big overarchiing issue housing this welter of details about lines, angles, rules, patterns, etc. at the damn Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The author of the amyloid plaque post started off by raising the issue of why the amyloid plaque hypothesis has survived so long, and that question seems of intrinsic interest, as well as being a good case study of something that happens in all branches of science: researchers go down a blind alley and then for some reason camp out there there for years or decades But after raising the question of why researchers camped out in Amyloid Alley, the writer wanders off into the minutia of making a transgenic mouse, etc. I kept thinking that all this detail was in the service of demonstrating some major point. I thought, for instance, that maybe once you know all these details it becomes obvious that the original study faked some of its data. But no, all that detailed lab info was never packed together into a big snowball and thrown at some isssue, it was just a snowy area the reader had to trudge through. The high point of that review, for me, was the writer stating that the results of the study could have been used as successfully as evidence against the amyloid hypothesis as it was in fact used as evidence for it. That’s a great point. But it could have been made just as well without all the earlier granular detail about the lab work.
I can’t see any grounds for saying that there’s something wrong with liking a bunch of detail about how various things are made and done in the physical, practical world, but I’m surprised that so many people here liked these last 2 reviews. If Scott wrote stuff like this I sure wouldn’t be here, and I guess I’d imagined that many people here had the same preferences. Scott’s reviews and almost-reviews usually start with a close-up of something, tell us some details and then pull back and lay out some generalization they suggest, then pull back more and ask big questions about the generalization. Can this possibly be true? If it is, how does it fit with what we know about X & Y? Why is it so jarringly discordant with our intuitions? That’s the kind of thing I’m here for.
I think this is a great observation. In this review, much description and assessment without a what for.
In the amyloid review, I thought the deep dive into making a transgenic mouse may have been there to counterbalance the sense that the amyloid paper in question did everything wrong. But if that was the point, it went on too long. I'd contrast that with the analysis of the experimental evidence, which was essential to the argument of the review.
I actually felt that stretches of Alpha School had the same problem—laundry listing and historical chronicling to what end? But Alpha School has advantages: the subject matter isn't novel to us or overly complex, and we've all thought about how learning could be improved.
Maybe in all cases this is what a professional editor is for.
Follow up: Do you feel the same way about Scott's recent Missing Heritability post? I don't, but I've written (mediocre) GWAS papers, so I'm familiar with the terrain.
I didn’t read that one. I am actually very interested in that topic, but must have been tired or busy the week it came out. I will get around to it at some point. But my impression from skimming was that all the detail in the Missing Heritability post was in the service of figuring out whether the missing heritability demonstrates that various things are not very heritable, or instead that what we call heritability is quite complex and you can only draw conclusions from it if you take the complexities into account. Also seemed that the reason Scott was taking on the problem of the complexities of heritability was that heritability is highly relevant to things of great interest to him and to many here: Intelligence, mental illness, how to build better and happier people. So the welter of detail in that one was within the structure of a larger issue, heritability, and that larger issue was inside another structure, the question of what’s the right model of intelligence and mental illness. So I don’t think that piece by Scott suffers from the flaw I’m pointing out here in the last 2 reviews. Did you think it did? Or that some of his pieces do?
I'm pretty new here, so I don't have much reading history. I liked the piece. Each section posed and answered or at least explored a subsidiary question of the larger topic. My question was just meant to poke at the distinction between details on topics in which each of us are and aren't interested.
A lot of people here are engineers, and engineers, to be good at what they do, probably need to be people who find the details of how things work intrinsically enjoyable to learn and think about. I think I got some of that wiring myself, because I have made things all my life, and figured out hoq to make various materials and bits of software do novel things, and really enjoyed the process. And my mother took some test in the Navy where the tester told her she was the kind of person who could put a disassembled clock back together, gear by gear. (And when I was a kid our hous had water clocks and rotating doors that she'd designed and built.) But I didn't get a massive load of that trait, and so for lots of things I just get bored by a detailed account of how they work. What I most deeply like is philosophy and big weird abtract questions. Also care a lot about prose quality and really enjoy a finely turned phrase. So overall I'm not wired to be a fan of the kind of piece that tends to win these contests here. How about you?
My preference is for essays that *feel* like there's no structure at all, where you get lost in the qualia. But I have a background in science and law. When I write essays, I think I'm doing qualia and when I read it back it's full of structure.
It's a good point. I stopped halfway through because I didn't care. Even that reference to the HTS guy stopped me and I read that part. Anything to put all this shit in context.
Oh, sry, meant MMoA. And yep, I read the first 2/3 very carefully. Looked at every single illustration and picked out the details mentioned in the text. Read the final 1/3, also, but less thoroughly.
I wanted to like this more than I actually did. The conclusion/epilogue do a lot of the heavy lifting, showing how this coulda been a Profound(tm) review constructed from seemingly-mundane pieces. But I think ultimately it's demonstrative of the strain when one attempts to write a book-style review of a non-book theme. Kinda reminded of last year's comic book review: there's lots of nerd-snipey detail and coverage of process, but unless one comes already predisposed to like/appreciate such things...it's sort of just a blur. At least there's no strong claim being made here, like Islamic geometric patterns are the architectural equivalent of The Odyssey or whatever.
More specific illustrations would have helped to visualize geometric ideas, for those of us not particularly capable of visualizing sevenfold symmetry etc on the fly. The breakdown of the jali's patterns into comprehensible digital tiles was very helpful, for instance - more of that throughout woulda been great. (Ironically, I think this essay woulda been better in book form. Something about the vertical-only scrolling of a blogpost makes it harder to tie the graphics to the relevant text. Being able to easily flip back and forth and physically trace lines with my fingers woulda aided comprehension, I feel.)
Whoever wrote this article lacks proper education to explore this topic and certainly did not do any research on the making of the Moroccon court. The imperfections, what the author calls "mistakes" are deliberate attempts to create a play of light and space. MET has a wide archieve with academic articles and videos, explaining the decision process. This is quite an amateur attempt for understanding centuries long tilemaking and woodworking traditions and its representations at the MET. Because the topic is interesting, I am afraid it doesn't necessarily mean it is a good article.
I don't think this was at all similar to what went on with 20th century architects, who, according to Tom Wolfe's book, which I think scott posted a review of, was explicitly ideological and anti-aesthetic. Nor was it like what happened with 20th century composers, which was aesthetic, but based on a redefinition of "music" as scores to be studied rather than sounds to be heard, so that it was actually a completely different media.
The boundary between formal art and organic art begins with minor irregularities in repeated patterns, as in Penrose tilings and these mosaics, and extend to chaos. It marks the limit of how far an artist who loves natural beauty can move in that direction under iconoclastic rules. So in retrospect, it isn't surprising to find it in Islamic mosaics. You can find a conceptually similar movement in the Book of Kells, which has some recursive patterns, which are another route from repeated tiles to chaos.
This is making me think of what modern mathematics could add. An aperiodic monotile was found only a couple of years ago. And unlike some creations of pure mathematics, it's actually a sensible shape to make a tile. Or penrose tiles.
Ah finally an article that actually feels like a *review*. The other ones sometime feels like a regular essay or explanation. It even has pet EA/ACX topic at the end for the audience. Good luck.
"If I were to take a guess, Islamic geometric patterns, like many forms of decorative art, probably occupy a vague and under-defined space in most people’s minds. Up until a few years ago, if someone had asked me to describe them, I probably could have listed a few general features but definitely would have been unable to create an example. Further, if presented with several patterns, some expertly executed and some not so much, I likely would have struggled to distinguish the masterful from the amateurish. This is perhaps not unlike how people have difficulty picking out the correct double storey “g” from a lineup. In general, we enjoy decorations, but we don’t think too deeply about them, and we can’t always tell the excellent from the good, or the good from the mediocre."
I'm going to assume the author of this piece came from an Islamic background, as this immediately jumped out to me as extremely bizarre. Of course it'd be weirder to be less familiar with the letter g than the intricacies of Islamic geometric art as a European. Odd way to start that threw me off.
On my only visit to the Met circa 2010, there was a similar room that I recall was furnished with Christian church architectural artifacts of Anglican and/or Catholic traditions.
At the time, those were my own religious traditions. I did not like the room. I recall trying to explain how uncanny it was to my friends who did not share that background.
What it was lacking was the actions one goes there to do. When you enter a space like that in situ, it's either humming with a certain kind of activity and people, or resting expectantly in between those activities.
I compared it to being a serious sports player, accustomed to going into a stadium for practices and games, wearing cleats and uniforms, and looking for teammates and a ball zipping around. Then someone recreates a "stadium" room inside the Met - but it's never seen gameplay, and it's just full of tourists mulling around and peering at samples of plastic turf. Weird.
I know I'm late to the party here, but I enjoyed this one. How does one review art, or analyze it, or critique it? Well, here the reviewer sets out his criteria, explicitly states what he's looking for, and then explores whether the art meets that standard. You don't have to agree with his criteria for what makes a good Islamic geometric pattern! But he is giving his opinion of what does.
The one thing I would have liked from this review, if possible, was more investigation into/exploration of what the artists of these pieces were thinking when they made their designs. Were the artists cognizant of the rules they were breaking? Did they do it on purpose? Did they have some other meaning behind their art? I often wonder about how artists working within a particular tradition reconcile the desire to innovate or do their own thing with staying true to the 'rules.'
Coincidentally, I have a very tall stack of books about Islamic art that I checked out from the library today, so I was very glad to learn something about how these patterns work.
Very Impressive.
As always, I'm here with the manifold market for who the contest winner will be. This one seems like a strong contender!
https://manifold.markets/BayesianTom/who-will-win-acxs-everythingexceptb
As a note to everyone new to Manifold, "Other" is a mechanic for markets with varying possible answers. If you have shares on "Other", they get automatically split whenever new options are added
curious why you've decided to do it this way when Scott has already posted the list of finalists?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-387
1. Because the list is not closed, we've had already the School review which was promoted from honorable mention to finalist for example. So we would always need to have the Other option if we wanted to include all options eventually
2. Because this mirrors the contest dynamics. I think the intention of posting one review a week instead of dumping them all at once is to give readers time to think, discuss and reflect on each candidate. Adding all known finalists and directing traders where to read them ahead of time undercuts this intention
3. On a related note I think this way makes each finalist its own event, and illuminates some market dynamics: we can see which contestant makes most impact as it enters the ring and so on
cool, thanks for explaining.
i ask because i think it would be kind of interesting to have all the reviews out and for people who read ahead to be able to place bets beforehand, and then see how any entry shifts in the rankings as it actually gets posted and reacted to, but i can see the intention in doing it your way as well.
(though... sorry... think 1 isn't a real issue? since you can just list all the honorable mentions and finalists in the market, and you can still keep the "other" category too if you want an option for true wildcards.)
Seems like it would be pretty easy to predict the winner using number of positive comments each of the contenders gets.
I usually just use the number of likes the post gets as a proxy for final popularity. Not perfect but definitely correlated.
I feel like I need to read this again, as though the thesis was more than just “these patterns are imperfect”. There is a lot of food for thought here, of which some might not want to put on their plate.
As ever, when the word "Islamic" is put to anything, it's very likely the food is tainted somehow.
Jesus, when did hate speech become this normalized in the SSC community?
Always fascinating to see a look into design rules that I never realized were there. Complex mosaic work is especially easy to tune out the details and take in only the big picture.
Perhaps nowhere exemplifies "America’s obsession with simulacra and counterfeit reality" more than the various themed environments of Disney World. In the creation of EPCOT Center, the Morocco pavilion was the only one with artistic coordination from the representative country. Allegedly King Hassan II sent artistic envoys to design the mosaics and buildings.
I now feel prepped with the absolute surface-level-est of retentions to show up and critique those patterns. (But really, I will harbor a much deeper appreciation for the creation behind them)
Thanks for the post!
Unfortunately, management of the Morocco pavilion reverted to Disney corporate sometime during the pandemic. A recent renovation of the outdoor plaza area retiled the previous mosaics with a pattern that resembles nothing so much as the nearby bathroom floor in World Showplace.
The original King Hassan II-approved mosaic, photographed in 2016: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GOoihoOa8AACGMo.jpg
The tragic new look: https://media.wdwnt.com/2024/05/wdw-epcot-morocco-tiles-IMG_3176.jpg
Oh no! They went to Home Depot!
How stupid it is when people cannot renovate without destroying things, cutting down trees, etc.
it’s weird to me that people who are in theory, talented, have no talent for designing within constraints.
Wow, that is tragic!
Usually, I think the Disney parks are a really well-crafted version of what they are. As someone who lived in East Hollywood and Los Feliz for six years, I loved just walking around the California Adventure park and appreciating all the nods to distinctive individual Art Deco buildings that were contemporaries of Disney's original studio.
But it's been a while since I've been to EPCOT, and the goal there is a bit more difficult.
Yes, usually the architectural mimicry is top-notch for new builds. The evocation of old Hollywood at DHS in Florida is similarly well done. It's when the time comes to refresh, renovate, and repair that they often cheap out on the ornamentation. Two different budget pools I guess.
World Showcase does have some issues with trying to compactify a region's entire architectural history into such tiny spaces that the results occasionally feel like chimeras or follies - for instance the Rose and Crown in the UK pavilion is trying to be every pub at once and blends several centuries of construction styles to limited effect. I think the most impressive placemaking at WDW is actually the fictional Anandapur and Harambe at Animal Kingdom, mimicking in every last detail the cityscapes of Himalayan India/China/Nepal and Kenya/Tanzania/Uganda, respectively. With a South America land under construction next door I'll be interested to see whether they can still work to that same high level in the Iger 2 era.
I would have thought that mimicking the cityscapes of an entire region would be harder than mashing up centuries of pub design into a single one, but I suppose it’s partly an issue of whether one building has to stand for everything, or if you can have a jumble of buildings next to each other.
That's exactly it, the Animal Kingdom lands have more acres to play with than the World Showcase pavilions do.
Yikes, that new one looks like something you'd find in a public toilet. I can almost smell the disinfectant (and other things) just looking at it.
This essay reminded me of the Dutch artist M.C. Escher, who visited the Alhambra in 1922 and again in 1936. “The rhythm and rhyme” of that Moorish art “resprouted” splendidly into Escher’s work in "the regular division of the plane", now commonly called tessellation.
Thousands of words and skipped over a couple of obvious points: 1) Islamic designs, unlike most western design, is based on a hexagonal grid, with 60 degree intersections. This is because 2) All of these geometric patterns are the result of using a compass to replicate each module. As anyone who has used a compass knows, it's easy to draw a circle and then divide its circumference into 6 equal segments.
Point 1) at least is definitely an untrue overgeneralisation. The pentagonal, decagonal and octagonal symmetries, for example, quite obviously can't have a 60 degree grid underlying them.
I am not suggesting this is directly relevant to today's review, but I recall hearing something when touring one of the nationality rooms at the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh. There was a flaw in the ceiling decorations. Our guide told us this was intentional: the people of this country (I forget which) had a belief that perfection belonged to god, so artists & artisans always left an intentional flaw in their work.
I asked chatgpt about Islamic art. Chatgpt said this is a popular belief about Islamic art (intentional mistakes included to show humility before god), especially prominent in the Sufi tradition, but there is no specific theological injunction. Interestingly, "In Islamic geometric patterns, artists sometimes intentionally introduce slight variations in otherwise highly ordered designs" and "In Persian carpets, it's often said that weavers leave a 'mistake' called a gabbeh or Persian flaw—though scholars debate whether these flaws were truly intentional or just romanticized stories."
Nobody cares about what ChatGPT said. If we were, we would just go and use the product. Get your mind out of the gutter.
This does not seem kind to me. Could you state your thesis more generally, so I can decide if it's necessary or true?
Having the person state their thesis is not needed though. The guidelines apply to the post itself, not to some thesis the writer didn’t articulate. The comment itself is clearly unkind and certainly untrue. I for instance am quite interested in what GPT has to say about things. It is not wrong anywhere near often enough to justify just waving away whatever it says. If what it says surprises me, or if it’s important to me to be sure what’s true then I check its answers. And I doubt that my level of trust and interest in GPT answers is highly unusual in this group. As for advancing the discussion, I guess the stinky little post under discussion is an attempt to do that by attacking an info source the writer thinks is dumb as fuck, so they can have one point for that. But they still flunk.
Worth noting that ChatGPT hallucinations are worse in the new version: https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/chatgpt-is-getting-smarter-but-its-hallucinations-are-spiraling
Yeah, I saw that. I am not using one of the newest models, but GPT 4.o. I have definitely caught it hallucinating, but not lately, though I have only checked accuracy on the answers I am about to act on. Of late I have been going to it with many practical questions, some concerning problems of mine, some for patients’ or friends’ problems. For example:
What mechanisms exist to help someone with apraxia succeed in focusing a microscope?
How do I bill BCBS a patient’s Medicare supplement plan given that I have opted out of being a Medicare provider? It is permissible to do this, but the online billing system is set up in a way that requires being a Medicare provider to use it.
I know someone who snores only on the exhale, and has sleep apnea that occurs because he can’t exhale (and so of course has no space in his lungs for new inhaled air). CPAP’s provide positive pressure, and would in fact make exhaling even harder. What would help a person who needs negative pressure, i.e. suction, at the point of exhale?
Where can I find info about using confusional techniques in prompts to get weird unexpected images from image-generators?
I have checked GPT’s answers to the first 2 of the above, and they are correct. I’m pretty sure the third one is correct, because I’ve looked into the matter further and so far what GPT said is correct. The 4th one I have not checked out yet.
Maybe it’s doing a good job with these questions because they are answerable by diligent searching, which GPT can of course do far faster than I can. Could it be that most hallucinating occurs when it is not able to answer a question?
Did you find a good answer to the CPAP question? My partner still sometimes has apneas with CPAP (although less than without) and I think it's usually on the exhale. I'm not convinced that negative pressure would help though, I think maybe positive pressure might still help hold the airway open (but very uncertain!!)
Yes. The statement "Nobody cares about what ChatGPT said." is arguably self evidently false. (There exists at least one person, who cares enough about what ChatGPT says to make this post.)
But I wanted to give the benefit of doubt/ respect the principle of charity.
It could have been a try to establish new rules without taking responsibility for wanting them ("nobody cares" as appeal to authority?), an accusation of low effort or even a kind of (mistaken?) rude empathy (ChatGPT is bad for your thinking process/ life quality, please be careful).
"The statement "Nobody cares about what ChatGPT said." is arguably self evidently false."
It's self-evidently hyperbole. (Saying it's false is kinda pedantic.)
Guilty as charged. :)
Suffice to say it would not hold to most kinds of rigour. That's why I asked for a restating above.
PS: I see what you did there. Is getting pedantic on pedantry recursive pedantry?
I agree that neadan's comment was unkind and untrue. On the other hand, this is exactly the kind of situation where I would be more distrustful of chatGPT's answer, I think when you ask a leading question like this it tends to just agree with you
Yes, I know. And there's nothing whatever wrong with saying that. I'm not defending GPT here, except in a very limited way. My point is that it is not wrong nearly often enough for its responses to be of no interest.
Well, I personally am less concerned about what ChatGPT says, than what the truth is. It's very much like quoting wikipedia--that's interesting and all, but what we really need are the original sources.
Yes, yes, I agree that we need the original sources. Even if ChatGPT's answer is a completely correct summary, we'll get richer information from the sources. Maybe we should all nudge each other to avoid posts that consist of nothing but a quote from GPT. I am not claiming that a post consisting of nothing but a quote from GPT is a quality post, and certainly not claiming that GPT is always right.
What I am mostly doing here is criticizing Neadan's obnoxiously rude and mean-spirited post. I'm saying it's not just rude, it's also wrong. GPT's responses are certainly not worthless, and it's just not true that nobody wants to hear what it said. I for one do. If it's right, I know more about whatever it was asked about. Even if it's wrong I'm interested. It's kind of a big deal, having these things in our lives now, you know? I'm curious about them. If it was wrong I'm still curious what nonsense it spewed and what put it into nonsense mode. And I don't see how it can possibly be true that my attitude is super-rare here.
Not here, no. But out on the internet? Their comment barely registers as mildly assertive. This is a rather special place, with it's own norms.
As for generative AI, I suspect that as the target audience learns how to engage it, it's influence will wane (much like advertising). By definition, the quality of information you get from an AI can never be better than what is available on the rest of the internet. It's more convenient in some ways, but that only goes so far.
I think the correct way to put this criticism is the same way as one should rephrase "no one cares what it says on Wikipedia". The more constructive way to put either of these is "use ChatGPT and Wikipedia as your first entry into the topic for sure, but then double-check that there is in fact a source backing it up".
Thanks for the steelman. :)
I think that in internet discussions, WP is a prima facie source, especially for stuff where the facts are not in dispute in the culture war. If I need the rough area of Iran, WP is good enough. If I talk about a few square kilometers which are in dispute, I might want to get additional sources though.
And obviously, in academic writing, citing WP won't cut it.
I think that M. M.'s post was okay, the bot did not totally dominate their post, and their was even paraphrasing parts of the bot response.
But I can also understand Neadan's knee-jerk response. Letting LLMs run rampant -- especially if their output is unmarked -- can really be detrimental to discussion quality, because quite often, their posts will have the signs of an interesting contribution but on reflection be not very interesting.
If someone posts a Wikipedia article verbatim, I will notice less than five sentences in that I am reading an encyclopedic article. If someone posts a longer text of their own creation, then at least I know that some human cared enough to spend the time reading it -- which does not mean that it is worth reading, but still is some lower bar. With LLM responses, depending on the model and prompt used, I guess it could take me a very long time to figure out "wait a minute, this poster is not trying to say anything, it is just generating words".
Going to disagree here--if you want to inform me regarding Iran's square area, cool, but please give me the source where WP got it (or at least provide a link to the article, so I can look it up).
On substack (where comment links are painful), I would just say "per WP, the area of Iran is 1,648,195 km^2". On sites with Markdown support (e.g. LW, motte), I will put in a link to WP if I quote a full sentence. In general, I trust my discussion partners to have the ability to look up Iran on Wikipedia and read the stat box.
In general, I will not back up any claim I make with sources. I might say "German Chancellor Merz said ...". In the unlikely event that someone will contest that Merz is the Chancellor of Germany, I will then provide evidence for that claim.
In my experience, it is rather easy to anticipate which claimed facts will be disputed, and provide evidence in proportion to how outrageous a claim is.
It is the same in academics. A solid-state physicist writing a paper will use the word electron without citing Thompson 1897, because the whole field works under a paradigm where electrons are a thing. They might even use the electron mass in calculation without citing that, either -- only when the uncertainty of the electron mass is significantly contributing to your overall result is it important whose value you used, but "it is roughly 511keV/c^2" is not a claim which would need to be rigorously backed up.
At issue is the main point of the post (or article, essay, what have you). They main point is the claim being made that the writer thinks is original enough that many people will be interested in reading it (notice how I am walking my talk--my main claim is in the very first sentence of this post). If the main claim is of an objective nature (that is, it's a claim about something "out there" in the world, where people can see it), then it needs to be backed up by a source, plus any subsidiary objective claims that are being used to back up the main claim. Otherwise, no one has any reason to believe you. In your example, I have been assuming a post where the square area of Iran was somehow either the main claim, or more likely was being used to support the main claim ("Iran is a larger country than most people think!"). In that case, in order to be persuasive, the readers need a primary source: "It's larger than France!" [citation].
Note that I would not expect that level of scholarship everywhere on the internet. Most places are just venues for the exchange of chit chat ("Look at my cat!"). But here I think there is an expectation of a higher level of objectivity. Scott isn't just expressing his opinion about various things, he's actively looking for the truth. So should we.
So Neadan, how did you come by your knowledge about what most people here, few people, and nobody but the person you’re trying to zap care about?
If you think ChatGPT is bad, you should see the kinds of things human beings say to each other.
It’s a common myth, but usually a justification ex post. I have heard it used about everything, including an Orthodox choir of monks in which one of them did not sing in tune. But obviously you can listen to many Orthodox choirs that sing perfectly, see many many perfect designs, and the theological justification for doing something right is much more intuitive than this explanation.
I have never found an actual source for this belief (as in something that an artist said of his work), so I would be very grateful if you found one. It would sound unbelievably pretentious, though: “I could do as well as the Creator himself, but I chose not to”…
I think the reasoning is more (especially post-Tower of Babel), "Look, Lord, just to be clear I'm not even TRYING to think I'm perfect."
Hey, what happened to the long discussion that followed this post? apfelvortex and Eremolalos had great points.
Excellent review! Mathematics, art critique, and cultural critique blended together. I loved the incorporation of Eco's essay (which is also a fantastic essay for those who haven't read it), and the incorporation of the author's own work. This is my favorite review so far this year.
I enjoyed this very much, maybe I can get a round of Azul going again this weekend.
I'm pretty sure that the Portuguese word "azulejo" for these tiles comes from the Arabic word "zellij" mentioned in the text! (I think the similarity to the Spanish word "azul" is mostly coincidence.)
https://www.britannica.com/art/azulejo
I'm glad you touched on modern architecture at the end, because as I read this I started thinking of the opening of The Fountainhead. I'm not an architectural historian, so I don't know how accurate it is, but the claim is that a lot of classical architectural elements were copied for aesthetic reasons from older traditions where they served a functional purpose. This results in a certain lack of authenticity which only gets worse as classical elements continue to be cut and pasted without much understanding or regard for their origins. It gave me a new appreciation for modern architecture, even if I sometimes find it less appealing at first glance.
It seems that there is something similar going on in your examples, with people copying certain designs into spaces that they don't really belong, either in response to popular demand or lack of understanding on the part of the artist. The result may be superficially appealing on the surface, but once you know what to look for, you find incongruities that nag at you and can't be unseen.
The concrete examples is stone temples.imitating the proportion and earlier wooden temples, although they could have been more lightly constructed.
>I'm not an architectural historian, so I don't know how accurate it is, but the claim is that a lot of classical architectural elements were copied for aesthetic reasons from older traditions where they served a functional purpose. This results in a certain lack of authenticity which only gets worse as classical elements continue to be cut and pasted without much understanding or regard for their origins.
Why is including things purely for aesthetic reasons bad? Am I being "inauthentic" for wearing clothes with nice patterns instead of drab monochrome colours? Should I toss out my painted coffee mugs and replace them with plain ones? Is it an inauthentic frippery to grow flowers instead of edible plants? If I buy my girlfriend a new pair of earrings for her birthday, am I encouraging inauthenticity by getting her something with purely aesthetic appeal?
This is, of course, a matter of opinion. There's no right or wrong answer here and I don't begrudge anyone their personal tastes.
I like ornamentation (up to a point...as with all things, it can be carried to excess). But I don't like fake things. I love flowers but I don't like fake flowers. I like when my wife wears jewelry, but I'd rather save and splurge on real precious stones than get something made of plastic.
Architecturally, I dislike plastic made to look like wood, stone veneers that are only a few inches thick and serve no structural purpose, and window shutters that are permanently fixed and can't actually cover the windows. I find it lazy and it betrays a lack of creativity. I would prefer that people create a new style to suit new materials, technologies, and techniques, rather than make low-quality, surface copies of old styles. It's similar to movie reboots that lack all the things that made the originals great.
I think you're conflating two separate things:
- The materials used (fake flowers vs. real flowers, plastic jewellery vs. real jewellery, plastic made to look like wood).
- The purpose (stone veneers only a few inches thick, window "shutters" that don't cover windows).
The first category, certainly, involves fakeness. But I don't think the second category is "fake" or "inauthentic", unless you suppose that only structural elements can be "authentic". A decorative marble veneer might not serve any structural purpose, but it isn't fake -- it's real stone, not an imitation. We don't complain about non-functional decoration in any other sphere of human endeavour, so complaining about it in architecture seems like an isolated demand for rigour.
I get the impression that Ryan is complaining about using pseudo
-structural things as ornamentation, whereas things that are clearly ornamental are fine.
I suppose so, although that kinds of ignores the possibility that things can have more than one purpose, or that their purpose can evolve. Just because the Greeks used columns for load-bearing purposes, it doesn't follow that that's the only legitimate use for columns, and that putting some where they aren't needed to support the roof but make the building look nice is therefore wrong.
That's a fair point -- I agree there's a difference between a fake flower and a non-load bearing stone veneer. But I don't think the difference is quite as large as you imply. The stone veneer may be real stone** but it's still masquerading as something it isn't (a solid stone building). I would rather architects find creative ways to make concrete or vinyl attractive while embracing their concrete-ness or vinyl-ness, instead of trying to imitate a different material.
But as I said, this is a matter of personal taste. I like the appearance of stone buildings as much as the next person, and I understand why most people don't care about what's beneath the surface. And I certainly wouldn't refuse to buy a house over an issue like this.
** These are often concrete instead of quarried stone.
I think the magic comes from it being hard to do, and handmade. I get a similar feeling from stone carved stuff that I don't get at all from plastic molded stuff.
At the same time, I got some of that pink insulation from Home Depot, glued and carved it and weathered it until it looked like thick wooden beams that have been outdoors a long time, and hung Edison bulbs from it. I know it's fake, but it has this handmade vibe to it, even if it's crooked. (I know your own handmade stuff has a vibe, but I think I'd get this same vibe from the rustic chandelier if someone else had done it.)
A few inches of stone (or concrete) can serve a purpose in terms of insulation, by adding thermal inertia. Of course you can use insulating material with much more R per inch, but (a) then you need to cover it up (by something fake?) (b) stone could still make sense (particularly in combination with other things) in places where it has been traditionally used and modern insulation materials have to be imported.
From a certain perspective, of course, one shouldn't go out of one's way to vaunt something with the appearance of luxury, but should one vaunt something that is actually extravagant?
A fun and simple Islamic tile generator: https://tilemaker.qfi.org/
That was pretty fun! http://tilemaker.qfi.org/gallery?id=25769
I don't know, looks more spirography than the examples given in the review.
The last few paragraphs reminded me of the problem we have in the recreational steamboating community: a lot of steam launches were built on traditional fishing boat bulls (these being, by definition, best suited to small craft in the local waters), but while we have plenty of period drawings of engines and boilers, there are almost no detailed drawings of these boats.
Why would anybody bother making a detailed lines plan of a boat which could be built by local craftsmen in any seaside village? The people with the education and tools to make these drawings were busy working on much larger or more avant-garde projects; by the time the boats in question were old enough to be interesting, most of them had rotted away.
It's similar to how, to my knowledge, the only extant drawings of WWI-era USRA standard steam locomotive designs exist in the hands of a private collector; as diesels came out, railroads scrapped the steam locomotives, and seem to have mostly trashed the drawings too. Who cares about "preserving" something that, until recently, was ubiquitous? By the time anybody thought to try and save some copies, most were gone.
It seems like the author is saying the same is true of architecture: the people with the education and tools to actually do the work on a large scale are uninterested in "common" designs. Why bother? They've seen them 10,000 times, they're all well-documented, any idiot can draw something symmetrical, golden ratio, blah blah blah. Never mind that, empirically, we can't build these things anymore--academically, they're stale to the sorts of people who care enough about the subject to do it for a living.
I love learning that there exists a recreational steamboating community
Oh, indeed! Here's a forum thread with pictures from a recent meet (I did not attend--I should clarify that I never actually got around to building a steam launch myself, though I was active in the live steam model railroading community for years, and ran steam tractors and stationary steam engines at the Antique Gas and Steam Engine Museum in Vista, CA in the early 2010s): https://thesteamboatingforum.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=22523#p22523. Plenty of videos on YouTube, too: just search for "Steam Launch" or "Steamboat Meet".
Elliott Bay Steam Launch Co. sells copies of Steamboats and Modern Steam Launches, a book coversion of a magazine which ran briefly in the early 60s and is the best source of information outside the forum linked above.
Used to be you could go to Beckmann Boatshop and order engines, boilers--even ready-to-run launches. Their flagship product was the Compromise 21, a replica of turn-of-the-century Truscott Boat Manufacturing Company launches. Those days are gone, though; they closed up shop some time around 2021.
I think the nearest anybody comes these days to buying a new boat ready-to-run is to get a Duffy Boat hull and fit it out for steam, but most buy used or build their own. Selway-Fisher has lots of plans for launches using various building techniques.
I was taught in my teens that in Islamic art, it's traditional for the artist to always introduce at least one deliberate flaw, in recognition that only Allah is perfect. I don't know if this is always rigorously followed; personally, I found the idea quite silly when I was introduced to it, because my take was that if only Allah is perfect, then the artists shouldn't have to introduced flaws into their work *on purpose* for their work to reflect that.
I feel like the review suffers though for failing to explore historical or cultural information which might contextualize the observations.
Why is that silly? For a master of a craft, it is trivial to reproduce patterns and smooth lines. Hell, it could be done with mechanical aids even back.
I feel like you’re missing something valuable. Namely, The exact cultural awareness you criticize the author for missing. The act is devotional and cultural.
I'm not saying it's not, but it can be devotional and cultural without being well thought out. My outlook was, if only Allah is perfect, then you don't have to try to make a piece of artwork imperfect. In a way, trying to introduce imperfections on purpose actually strikes me as disrespectful, like saying "if I tried to, I could make my work come out absolutely perfect, but I won't, because that would be muscling in on God's territory." Surely it'd be more respectful to God to acknowledge that he could do better, even if they're doing their best?
Geometric shapes and lines can be perfectly formed. This is a small art vs the universal.
art is a human designed form. Just as we can have a perfectly typed sentence, no grammatical errors or typos. Yes, these are imperfect mediums but within them perfect is possible. Medium eventually take an ossified form.
Introducing a known error is a nod that nothing, even ossified mediums are perfect.
If you don’t get that, keep calling people silly.
I get the idea. Understanding it, I still find it silly. I've discussed this with someone who grew up Muslim (and was Muslim at the time, although he left the religion about a year later,) and when I explained my perspective on it, he agreed that when you frame it like that, it does seem kind of silly. I could go into more length on why I see it this way, but I don't think there's much point in doing that if you're going to assume that any point of disagreement must be rooted in my not understanding it.
Legit try me.
Let’s start here. Can a human draw a perfect square? 90 degree angles and straight lines? Now consider the viewer is human and can it be close enough to fool them? Geometric shapes are a construct. I’m willing to be convinced; being told your opinion is off doesn’t mean the person is closed minded, it means they see a flaw you don’t. So… dive down to the level of geometric drawing (my question above) then build up.
Okay, so, I think there are a couple different levels where we can say that "imperfection" inevitably enters into human work.
On the geometric level, even with our best tools, we're never going to reach Platonic Form level precision. The imperfection might be below the level where a human can detect it, but we can be sure it's there.
On a level that I think is more salient though, even if we grant that the shapes are close enough to being perfectly precise, that doesn't mean that a better design couldn't have been chosen in the first place. You described the possibility of "perfect" sentences before, lacking any typos or grammar errors, and in that sense, perfection is very much possible. But most of the work of writing doesn't come in ensuring that the sentences are correctly constructed in every technicality, it comes in how the words are used to convey the underlying feelings and ideas. It's easy to create a sentence which is without any technical faults, but it's a completely different matter to write a sentence for which no better replacement is possible.
Suppose I'm a big fan of the writing style of Terry Pratchett, and I pay homage to it in my own work by copying his signature use of multiple nested layers of footnotes which go off on comic digressions from the story and inject incidental worldbuilding that doesn't fit into the main narrative. Let's suppose further that I consider him the unchallenged master of this device, and I want to convey that my own work is only an imperfect rendition of his. So, I deliberately make my footnotes less interesting or entertaining, or maybe insert stylistic errors like making the in-text symbols not correctly correspond to the symbols used at the start of the footnotes.
That strikes me as being not an especially respectful way to handle an homage to his work. Because if I really think that his writing is so great, and mine is only an imperfect reflection of his style, I don't need to deliberately make my own writing worse in order for his to seem better in comparison, his will simply be better.
For a fallible human to deliberately limit the perfection of their work so as not to encroach on the territory of a perfect and unlimited God strikes me, not as offering honor to that God, but denigrating it, by implying that humans need to limit themselves so as not to detract from the apparent perfection of his work.
I see your point, but here are a few possible counterpoints.
The imperfections are symbolic act of humility.
They're a way of acknowledging that perfection isn't only unachievable but something that should be even striven for in the first place.
They're intended for the audience, not the artist. That is, they're an instructional tool meant to teach the viewer that things made by human hands always have flaws, even if they aren't easily perceived.
"I found the idea quite silly when I was introduced to it, because my take was that if only Allah is perfect, then the artists shouldn't have to introduced flaws into their work *on purpose* for their work to reflect that"
It's a (subtle) admission by the artist that they know they are imperfect.
(If it's even true!)
I think there are a couple different ways of judging it as a practice. One is to ask whether it seems particularly coherent or well thought out as a symbol, whether it does a good job representing the thing it's supposed to convey under close examination. Personally, I don't think it does.
The other is to ask, does it do a good job eliciting the norms or values it's supposed to cultivate? Does it help shape people's characters in the desired direction? My intuition is that it doesn't seem like a very good practice for this either.
This is of course something I could be wrong about, and I formed this impression when I first heard about the practice, some time in my early to mid teens, when I knew very little about Islamic culture, and didn't have any particularly strong impression of it in any direction. But as I've learned more about Islamic culture from people who've grown up in it, one impression that they've consistently shared with me is that cultivating a sense of humility or fallibility among authority figures or people in positions of expertise is something that Islamic culture, along the general continuum of human civilizations, is quite bad at. So I continue to suspect that the tradition, if regularly observed, probably isn't very effective for that purpose.
You are suggesting it isn't perfect itself (which seems on point).
It's not an overt act (being overt has its own issues).
If it's completely private to the artist, there's no risk.
Maybe, the point is that imperfection is always there even if it doesn't appear to be (you might need to put some effort into looking for the imperfection).
=============
"I found the idea quite silly when I was introduced to it, because my take was that if only Allah is perfect, then the artists shouldn't have to introduced flaws into their work *on purpose* for their work to reflect that."
It seems very obvious that it couldn't work for this purpose (it's fairly absurd to think that it could work) . If you think somebody is doing something absurd, maybe, you are wrong about their reason. You are also begging the question here.
It's not begging the question to say that something strikes you as a poor idea, to investigate the evidence being open to being persuaded otherwise, and find that the evidence actually does suggest that it was a bad idea after all.
It actually has to be an idea before it can be poor (or not). You are kinda assuming the idea is real (that it's a real reason for people). That's the "begging the question" part.
The idea (as you presented it) seems fairly absurd. If that's the case, it's seems likely that there aren't many people (you'd care about) believe in it.
I'm not sure if you are giving the artists enough credit to accuse them of being silly.
I'm not sure how widely observed it is, but it's definitely a practice that people who've been brought up in Islamic societies have agreed is a real tradition that they've also heard of and have been told is practiced for those reasons.
When I was first taught about it, I wasn't convinced it was necessarily a real practice, just that it didn't seem like a good idea to me. I still don't know how widespread or universally observed it was, but I've received some pretty strong assurances that it is at least a real practice.
I want to see this expanded. What if you use Penrose tilings? What if instead of tiling a plane, you tile a sphere or hyperbolic geometry? I'm also wondering how hard it is to make a program that can randomly generate tilings. I skimmed a lot of this, so sorry if you already answered some of that.
"So, I asked ChatGPT to make a Moroccan Court...."
The last few paragraphs of this piece remind me of Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. Despite the title, the book is really about art, and one of his theses is that artists usually get to a point in their work where they want to send a message, but the message could be about something in the world (e.g., "poverty"), or it could be about art itself.
Did you solicit comment from the Metropolitan Museum or the artisans responsible for the works in this room? I realize it's not your central point but it does kinda feel like you are dunking on them in a way that they should be entitled to comment and notice.
I doubt they'd want to publish a response. Anyway, it's pretty rare for cultural commentary-type writing to solicit responses from the artists they're discussing. You wouldn't necessarily expect a book reviewer to reach out to the author, even if they were critiquing the book.
Yeah I'm impressed by what's written but I'm so detached to the subject that I don't know if the criticisms are actually unwarranted
A very fine review, but ... a review of Geometric patterns - seriously? All about form, none about content ... Bertolt Brecht had this fable: FORM AND FABRIC
Mr. K. was looking at a painting that gave some objects a very idiosyncratic shape. He said: "Some artists, when they look at the world, are like many philosophers. In the pursuit of form, the material gets lost. I once worked for a gardener. He handed me a pair of secateurs and told me to prune a laurel tree. The tree was in a pot and was lent out for festivities, so it had to be in the shape of a ball. I immediately began to cut off the wild shoots, but no matter how hard I tried to achieve the spherical shape, I couldn't do it for a long time. Once I had cut off too much on one side, once on the other. When it finally became a ball, it was very small. The gardener said disappointed: 'Well, that's the ball, but where's the laurel?"
Good review, but art is just boring. I would've liked it more if it started with the Syria anecdote and devolved into other topics. But that's just to say I wanted it to not be an art review
I am super curious about your experience of "art" as "boring". Is it boring to talk about? Is it boring to look at? All art or just some kinds? Do you feel aesthetic appreciation for things that aren't art as such? What about non visual art (music, say, or perfume)? Do you feel aesthetic appreciation but find that itself boring? If you have a few minutes to discuss this I am really interested in hearing more.
>Is it boring to talk about?
Yes
>Is it boring to look at?
Yes
>What about non visual art (music
I like listening to music, but a lot of art culture is like pop music, which is bad
>or perfume
Mostly bad smelling
>Do you feel aesthetic appreciation but find that itself boring?
Paintings and things people create just to be art are usually very boring and I don't appreciate them. Like I don't appreciate the patterns at all in this piece. A skyscraper looks cooler than all of the included images. But you can of course make ugly skyscrapers. But I've also seen rectangular prism shaped skyscrapers that are better than everything reviewed in this piece. Like this random one I just googled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Chicago_(building) looks cooler than everything in this piece.
Wow, that is a gorgeous skyscraper.
This is fascinating because I think I hold almost diametrically opposed feelings or intuitions on each and every one of these answers. Perhaps pop music is the exception, as it is so repetitive that even the variations seem rather more synthetic than playful.
I think there's something that is missing from this review that surprised me, which is the motivation behind the process. The review takes the perspective of the modern artist seeking aesthetic for its own sake, which is fair enough, as I assume that's the author's own viewpoint. But if we are interested in why the tradition seems to be broken in the modern day to increasingly greater degrees, I think it's worth reconsidering why the tradition exists in the first place.
For the Islamic artist, the process itself glorifies God by exploring the emergent harmonies of mathematics. The line that is telling here is the note that the design emerges 'like magic' from a relatively simple set of principles. I.e., it is a sign of a God who reveals Himself through the beauty of His creation, and the highest order of that creation (this being the Platonic influence creeping in) exists not in the material, natural world but instead in the abstract world of ideas and form. Through the process, the artist instantiates the beauty of mathematics into the natural world, thus creating a window through which the divine light might captivate observers. The more you study it, the more apparent this becomes. It is the regularity and systematicity itself that is the key here, not the mere fact of being beautiful -- the fact that the regularity and systematicity can reliably reproduce beauty is the thing that seems oddly divine.
So, where does this leave us with regard to the modern tradition, and with regard to the Eco essay? I think it's clear that the underlying motivation is no longer animating the process, at least as applied in the Met room, and instead it is mere craft. The artisans are most likely Muslims, to be sure, but to what extent are they concerned with this original motivating force versus the desire to simply uphold an ancient tradition and create pretty objects that testify to the glory of their people and their history? The willingness to disregard the fundamental principles of the art seems to indicate the latter, to me. A piece of craftsmanship is good when it is perceived as beautiful and meets the needs of the customer. A piece of sacred art *cannot* be good if it undermines the very thing that is meant to be divine.
What distinguishes great art from craft is that great art is not simply an attempt to create a beautiful object, it is an argument about *what is beautiful*. It says look, here is the wellspring of beauty, and if you are attentive, and if you care, you too can see what I see, you too can learn why I loved this thing more than all the other things.
Going back to our arguments about the modern architects from this lens, the idea that a layperson finds X thing beautiful is not particularly interesting to them if they are trying to be artists rather than craftsmen. The question is what their building says about the nature of beauty (and this is why the class signaling argument is both wrong and correct at the same time -- it's not profane signaling, but it is a form of aesthetic signaling that is making an argument that the austere and the simple can be beautiful)
This is a fascinating point, although once we open this topic I can’t help but ask, if this conjecture of “art to craftsmanship” is true, when and how did this transition happen? Were the medieval craftsmen just more erudite in theology? Did come from different social strata than their modern counterparts? Was there a break in the passing down of traditions or did the knowledge just get gradually lost without a scripture holding it together? Etc etc. All just to say that I have no idea *who* created the medieval patterns and *who* was in charge of making sure the underlying theological implications were sound. To establish that probably requires a more historical/sociological investigation of the pattern-making process, not just the patterns themselves.
You're asking great questions and ones I'm unfortunately not capable of answering, as to some extent I am extrapolating from things I know about Catholic art which (obviously) cannot be perfectly mapped onto this. That said, I would suspect that it's a combination of two things. First, in the medieval era, skilled artisans were a very elevated class. In a world where nearly everyone is involved in food production, the people who *aren't* involved in food production are all part of a relatively elite segment of the population, even if the true elites are of course much more exalted than the artisans.
But also, even if they themselves weren't more learned in theology, their patrons (and whoever the patrons had overseeing the project in their stead) certainly would've been more learned in theology than the patrons are today. A door leading to a madrasa must, of course, satisfy Islamic scholars who teach at the madrasa.
Indeed my instincts are also that, for designers to all agree to adhere to a set of not immediately discernible rules (at least not easily discernible without first being told about them), there must be a class of critics judging and enforcing those rules, often consisting of both the designers/craftsmen themselves and patrons/connoisseurs. This is the pattern behind almost every artistic form that has been distilled and perfected so quite reasonable to venture a guess that that also applies here.
One other relevant point is that iconic depictions are frowned on in many Islamic traditions (though there are clearly some, particularly in South Asia, that do depict nature and even humans).
>As a final thought, I wonder if this experience is generalizable. The debate over the virtue or vice of modern architecture has been going on for years on ACX, and one of the baffling knots that Scott has tried to untangle is: what is going on with architects? Why are their tastes so different from the laypeople?
As victim, I found it fascinating how many architecture students who loved classical aesthetics become thoroughly brainwashed into modern aesthetics at architecture school. In no small response to fact that architects generally has to work with the dominant building systems of the era, which is steel + concrete + prefabricated cladding. One learns to love and celebrate modernity through Stockholm syndrome. Many architecture students delude / post rationalize modernism aesthetics to a degree, in no small response to fact that they had to work with it out of economic necessity. There's boutique firms and programs who can still build traditional / vernacular buildings at exorbitant prices, but they're luxury products, the kind necessarily not viable for mass consumption.
Like many things, "culture" is a second level manifestation of economic and industrial realities. Old housing typologies and building methods are not viable in the age of modern building materials and technology. Same commodification + value engineering forces behind everything we manufacture as process matures. It doesn't help that because building are still (relatively) durable objects, changes in the building industry are extremely conservative once new materials are locked in.
Ornamentation that genpop loves to wank over may come back once it can be done cheaply at scale, labour for such things are cost prohibitive unless you have a pool of underclass or willing to wait decades. It's why modern architecture focus on structural details, the kind of component assembling with very little "craft" but still expresses craftsmanship and a builders expertise. It's also much easier to draft... both by hand and CAD/computers. The 100 year switch over to unified blueprints that has to be copied and distributed in increasingly fast turn over rates for expedited construction incentivized away from intricate detail work. Bezier curves are hard, it gets filtered out by designers/producers who don't want to do hard things. So you get strange angles instead, because it's easy to rotate in software... and software snapping is satisfying.
You say this all as if it's negative, but I think it's exactly the positive point that the review is putting forward. Each tradition of art has its own creative process, and when you understand it and work within it (rather than against it), it creates its own beauty. When the materials and process change, so does the decorative style. It's not that you get "brainwashed" into liking modernist aesthetics - it's that you see why modernist aesthetics make sense for modern materials and methods, and you still appreciate the traditional aesthetics, but only when done with the traditional materials and methods, and not when slapped on as a superficial decoration.
Not negative, just throwing my 2c on why it seems like modern architecture taste seems so divergent with genpop. Apologies for unstructured ramble:
Something to be said about how some beauty is not intuitive and has too be trained like acquired taste, i.e. beauty that needs to be understood. Not that I can speculate whether some architectonics is "inherently" beautiful or appreciation is culture all the way down, but there are some forms where simian brain seems to be wired to find beautiful... versus training an audience to understand the logic of a new form of beauty. It's vexing personally, there's nothing more artificial then build environments but at the same time humans also evolve with concept of dwelling. Yet there's a lot of (maybe suspect) science that consistently conclude people find vernacular building more appealing than international/modernism styles, even cross culture (i.e. foreign traditional styles that participants have no cultural attachment to). There "feels" like something inherently not human-centred about the abstraction of "modern" architectonics.
With respect to creative process - there is also a sheer... scale of mental concession in architecture due to insurmountable-ness of economic/industrial realities. It's not one of those disciplines where you can get together with the boys to experiment past any reasonable scale. Almost every other creative field is scaled so very experimental things can be done on the frequent if you can cobble together a small team of like minded people and some 4-5 digit funding. That stops once complex regulations/compliance/legal enters the picture and projects enters 7-9 digit category, it's degree of filter forces most practitioners to "understand" modern aesthetics that then gets pushed onto gen pop that frequently don't. Cue press releases on why XYZ design is pioneering / good design by architects trying to educate the public but the public looks at said design and think... that's still ugly.
It also doesn't help modern building is very complex - a lot of lipstick on a pig going on, where pig is the disguised building systems / mechanics / machines that sustains artificially conditioned built environments. There's lot of ugly guts going on to keep things unprecedently comfortable relative to vernacular / beautiful styles, but it's the kind of environment gore (pipes / conduits / wires, industrial building materials (plastic vapor barriers, gross looking insulations), adhesives, rough fasteners etc) that seems to offend genpop sensibilities. A surprising amount of people get really pissed off when old buildings get upgraded / retrofitted to modern code and they see exposed infra... intuitively they know that's for the lights and AC and stuff that enables modern standards... but to them, the lay, it's just ugly.
The problem with the "unprecedented comfort" argument is that many of the things people hate about modern architecture also make it harder to keep buildings comfortable. Big glass boxes are naturally hot in summer and cold in winter without a lot of AC and central heating; conversely, vernacular styles are often easier to keep at a comfortable temperature, because they're usually developed specifically for the climate and weather conditions of the local area (the Twitter account WrathOfGnon is good on this). If comfort's the main goal, the sensible choice would be to use vernacular techniques, with the ugly guts hidden inside the walls where you don't have to look at them. This also has the advantage of not being ugly.
You miss the fact that big glass boxes let in a lot of light. For people spending a lot of time indoors, sunlight goes a long way towards making a building pleasant to live in. Studying in traditional-style libraries can be downright depressing, and I am more willing to tolerate a lack of sunlight than most.
This makes perfect sense except for the fact that the laity seems to mostly disagree with the elites. Modern buildings are ugly. I suppose it's possible that a 16th century urbanite felt the same way about a gothic cathedral the way I do about a glass rectangular prism, but I kinda doubt it. You don't have to get brainwashed into thinking a cathedral is artistically imposing, let alone pretty.
Do you really find that architecture students go from disliking modern architecture to liking it, or did they always like it?
A friend of mine had this happen to her. So at least n = 1?
Interesting! My theory is that architecture schools select for people who like modern architecture, and most architects would be shocked to learn there is a substantial population that doesn't. As a non-architect who loves modern architecture, and was baffled to read Scott's post criticizing it.
Can you explain what you dislike about modern architecture? My guess is that people dislike modern architecture primarily because of a preference for ornate decoration, whereas I usually find ornate decoration to be too visually noisy.
Rather than ornate decoration per se I'd guess it's a lack of organic patterns, the underlying implication of being stranded in a space which prioritizes the convenience of machines, and only grudgingly tolerates what humans need. Hard, flat surfaces of glass, concrete, or metal are easy to define, fabricate, and keep clean, but the acoustic environment they create is oppressive.
This supports my hypothesis that some modern-architecture-haters have aesthetic tastes influenced by dissatisfaction with some element of modern life. Would you say that's accurate?
For my side of things, I don't get that vibe from modern buildings at all. I studied abroad at Cambridge, which has no shortage of gorgeous traditional libraries, and many modern ones too, whose design seemed like an afterthought. Despite this, I ended up studying in the modern libraries near exclusively after a week. The traditional libraries had tiny windows and no bright fluorescent lights, which got depressing quick. In my experience, modern buildings tend to be much more human-friendly.
There are lots of nice non-ornate buildings out there. Those picturesque old cottages you see on postcards aren't generally covered in fancy statues.
They are usually covered in plants, though, which is just nature's fancy statues.
<i>Ornamentation that genpop loves to wank over may come back once it can be done cheaply at scale, labour for such things are cost prohibitive unless you have a pool of underclass or willing to wait decades.</i>
It already can be done cheaply at scale -- go to any garden centre, they have loads of little statues, and in principle there's no reason you couldn't buy a few and stick them on top of a building as decoration. Or if you don't like that, architects can and have produced nice effects with patterns of differently-coloured bricks, which we can and do mass produce already.
Really good! I was already seeing most of it as a response to a lot of Scott's recent posts on modern art and architecture, so it was good to see it brought out explicitly at the end.
I think there's a general issue with any skilled tradition, whether it's an art or a craft or a science or a humanity. The practitioners develop a deep sense of what matters and what is valuable in the tradition, but they also explore the space of what is possible with the current methods, and find it to be exhausted, and seek out novelty. The masses may sometimes appreciate the productions (particularly when they become familiar) but doesn't experience the exhaustion, and doesn't see the motivation for the new movements. If the practitioners have no outside feedback, they can go off in a spiral in directions that really don't matter to anyone else. But if their primary feedback is from the masses, then they never develop the sophisticated understanding of what is valuable in the tradition - they just aim for a superficial interest.
What seems to be essential is an interlocking culture of many such traditions, each interacting with the ones adjacent to it, keeping each other grounded in something of external meaning, but supportive of experimental new directions, and particularly the ones that do have something to contribute to other specialists, and thus indirectly to everyone else.
You sometimes get excesses, like dada and postmodernism and string theory, but they usually get pulled back by their neighbors.
The only criticism I had is that I don't think I ever see "literati" in the singular - I felt like it had to be "literatus", but that seemed even wronger.
"literatus" is indeed one of the singular forms of "literati".
I loved this review! When I doodle I often mess around with geometric shapes and stars and such, and this review opened my eyes to a whole world of geometric doodling possibilities! Makes me want to go out and learn more about Islamic geometric patterns, and previously I had no interest in them whatsoever.
> The debate over the virtue or vice of modern architecture has been going on for years on ACX, and one of the baffling knots that Scott has tried to untangle is: what is going on with architects? Why are their tastes so different from the laypeople?
Layperson with a genuine aesthetic preference for modern architecture here. I've long assumed my opinion was the obvious majority, and was baffled when I first read Scott's posts taking for granted that people hated modern architecture. The simplest hypothesis is that architecture as a profession simply selects for the % of people similar to me, and the architects in question would be shocked to learn any substantial number of people disagree with them, just like I was.
What do I mean, "genuine aesthetic preference for modern architecture"? I've seen many famous examples of traditional and modern architecture in person, and usually prefer the modern. The Burj Khalifa is more appealing than Sagrada Família. Seattle is a prettier city than Edinburgh. I enjoy walking through cities just to admire the skyscrapers, and I even have a tapestry of a futuristic cityscape on my bedroom wall. I don't dislike traditional architecture, but it's rarely as impressive.
What do I like about modern architecture? Lights, mostly. I love buildings with colorful displays running up the sides at night. Dubai and Hong Kong are excellent for this. I also like sleek metal, bright pops of color, and massive mirror facades that melt into the sky during dawn or dusk. I love concrete too, I find blocks of exposed concrete aesthetically appealing in the way jagged cliffs and roaring rivers are appealing. Yes, I like brutalism too.
Why didn't I realize there were a substantial number of people who disliked modern architecture before reading about it on ACX? Architecture aesthetic doesn't come up organically all that often. When I saw people talking about architecture, it was often while browsing r/cityporn or r/cyberpunk or something, which are naturally populated with modern architecture lovers. I had seen people criticize modern architecture before, but usually in political contexts. A trad conservative lamenting the fall of the West, or a socialist bemoaning late-stage capitalism. It was easy to slot those complaints under a distaste for what modern architecture represents, independent of any standalone aesthetic objections.
Do I understand why many other people don't like modern architecture? Maybe. The opinions of modern-architecture-haters are as strange and unintuitive to me as mine are to them. On a purely aesthetic level, my best guess is that modern-architecture-haters enjoy ornate decoration much more than I do, while not being impressed by sleekness, shininess, or sheer scale nearly as easily. For some people it's just aesthetic, but I suspect that for some people, like the disaffected tradcon or socialist, the dislike for modern architecture is related to some deep sense of dissatisfaction with modern life. It's likely no coincidence that I, lover of modern architecture, feel content with and well-suited to modern life. But the causality could go either way.
> The Burj Khalifa is more appealing than Sagrada Família.
Wait, what? Disregarding that these are not the same class of buildings (office skyscraper vs church), there is simply no comparison: the Sagrada has a thousand little details to explore. There is no visual exploration with a skyscraper. And the Sagrada is unique, no other than Gaudi could have dreamed it up. As it is still constructed it also has like medieval cathedrals the quality that time itself is part of the building, it changed through history, because after Gaudi different architects followed his style with their own variation.
The Burj Khalifa is very tall, I grant you that, but does it have columns which stand on Turtles? How awesome is that? I had to laugh out loud when I stood before it.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sagrada_Familia,_Turtle.jpg
(Also fight me: Barcelona is a better city than superlative Dubai)
Behold the subjectivity of taste! Thanks for your comment, it helped me develop a better understanding of how my aesthetic preferences differ from yours.
If you think there is no visual exploration with a skyscraper, you've never really looked at one. If you want to see what I see, go find one with a lot of windows as most of them do, preferably one of those seamless glass facades. Watch how the windows reflect the sky and the surrounding buildings and trees, a portrait of the city it lives in. Walk around the building, and watch the portrait shift. Look at the textures of the skyscraper, the delicate glass and noble steel and harsh concrete. Look at the curves and angles of it as it interweaves with its neighbors, poetry embedded in space. No visual exploration? Maybe you haven't done any.
To you, the "thousand little details" of an ornate traditional building are intriguing. To me, unless exceptionally well-executed, they are often muddled and noisy, offering only more layers of mediocrity. Westminster Abbey, for example. Ornate stone carvings are static, dead as a glass mirror or glowing lights are alive.
The Sagrada Família did pass the bar for "exceptionally well-executed." I liked it. The organic tree-like columns were cool. The stained glass carried hard, tapping into some of the same the appeal that LED displays do. It's far more aesthetically pleasing than your typical office building or suburban house.
But it didn't inspire my soul quite how the Burj Khalifa did. Have you seen the Burj Khalifa in person? Have you seen it at night, wreathed by the purest white light, ethereal like an angel's sword? Despite being a church, the Sagrada Família is not half as divine. I will grant the interior of the Burj Khalifa is unimpressive, but the view from the top more than makes up for it. How you can look down and find the tops of lesser skyscrapers where one would expect the ground to be. How you can look up and see a glimmering city rising from dust. Where are you getting that in Barcelona?
I would not say the history of the Burj Khalifa is any less aesthetically compelling, either. Less wholesome, maybe, but it offers a certain je ne sais quoi.
(The turtles are cute and whimsical, but not more appealing to me than say, a 90th percentile work of street art in downtown LA. That is a compliment, I like graffiti).
I had never heard of the Sagrada Familia, and after seeing a few photographs, wish I had continued to stay ignorant. It was horrifyingly ugly.
It's better in person. The interior is also better than the exterior.
Thank you for making me feel less insane, I completely agree with you! Many many upvotes
There are dozens of us!
Dozens! (I also agree)
Major Gwern vibes here, in a good way.
I have the same complaint about this review as I do about the previous one, in which the reader must slog through a long detailed account of advanced and difficult lab techniques: Their authors didn’t put nearly enough smarts and effort into addressing the question of why all these details matter. These 2 reviews are in the same class as a finalist from 2023 that was a condensed version of a book about how bees & hives work, complete with copies of illustrations from the book. I think reviews of this kind appeal to people who find lots of details about how things work intrinsically interesting. I am like that about a few things, but about most things it takes a larger context, and an interesting one, to capture my attention regarding how a certain thing works and make it feel worth my while to master a welter of details.
I read the first 2/3 of this review quite carefully, looked at the images, and grasped the points about how t-intersections etc violated the rules of covering an area with this kind of pattern. And I do agree that these violations were displeasing to the eye. But I just don't care that much about some deviations in geometric patterns at MMoA, and the writer did not place their account of these deviations inside a structure that would have made them matter to me. Now that I think of it, chunks of info about details are sort of like museum displays — you can’t just plunk the item of interest on a shelf, you need to surround it related objects and written contextual info.
The present writer does say a bit about various larger issues that are relevant: Are the flaws in the patterns at MMoA mostly the result of Disneyfication, or would the original artisans have made the same sort of exceptions? In original Islamic decoration, are the errors made deliberately, our of fear of or respect for some godlike being? How does the artist's commitment change over time, and how in the presence of AI? But only a bit is said about each of these large and interesting issues, and there is no big overarchiing issue housing this welter of details about lines, angles, rules, patterns, etc. at the damn Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The author of the amyloid plaque post started off by raising the issue of why the amyloid plaque hypothesis has survived so long, and that question seems of intrinsic interest, as well as being a good case study of something that happens in all branches of science: researchers go down a blind alley and then for some reason camp out there there for years or decades But after raising the question of why researchers camped out in Amyloid Alley, the writer wanders off into the minutia of making a transgenic mouse, etc. I kept thinking that all this detail was in the service of demonstrating some major point. I thought, for instance, that maybe once you know all these details it becomes obvious that the original study faked some of its data. But no, all that detailed lab info was never packed together into a big snowball and thrown at some isssue, it was just a snowy area the reader had to trudge through. The high point of that review, for me, was the writer stating that the results of the study could have been used as successfully as evidence against the amyloid hypothesis as it was in fact used as evidence for it. That’s a great point. But it could have been made just as well without all the earlier granular detail about the lab work.
I can’t see any grounds for saying that there’s something wrong with liking a bunch of detail about how various things are made and done in the physical, practical world, but I’m surprised that so many people here liked these last 2 reviews. If Scott wrote stuff like this I sure wouldn’t be here, and I guess I’d imagined that many people here had the same preferences. Scott’s reviews and almost-reviews usually start with a close-up of something, tell us some details and then pull back and lay out some generalization they suggest, then pull back more and ask big questions about the generalization. Can this possibly be true? If it is, how does it fit with what we know about X & Y? Why is it so jarringly discordant with our intuitions? That’s the kind of thing I’m here for.
I think this is a great observation. In this review, much description and assessment without a what for.
In the amyloid review, I thought the deep dive into making a transgenic mouse may have been there to counterbalance the sense that the amyloid paper in question did everything wrong. But if that was the point, it went on too long. I'd contrast that with the analysis of the experimental evidence, which was essential to the argument of the review.
I actually felt that stretches of Alpha School had the same problem—laundry listing and historical chronicling to what end? But Alpha School has advantages: the subject matter isn't novel to us or overly complex, and we've all thought about how learning could be improved.
Maybe in all cases this is what a professional editor is for.
Follow up: Do you feel the same way about Scott's recent Missing Heritability post? I don't, but I've written (mediocre) GWAS papers, so I'm familiar with the terrain.
I didn’t read that one. I am actually very interested in that topic, but must have been tired or busy the week it came out. I will get around to it at some point. But my impression from skimming was that all the detail in the Missing Heritability post was in the service of figuring out whether the missing heritability demonstrates that various things are not very heritable, or instead that what we call heritability is quite complex and you can only draw conclusions from it if you take the complexities into account. Also seemed that the reason Scott was taking on the problem of the complexities of heritability was that heritability is highly relevant to things of great interest to him and to many here: Intelligence, mental illness, how to build better and happier people. So the welter of detail in that one was within the structure of a larger issue, heritability, and that larger issue was inside another structure, the question of what’s the right model of intelligence and mental illness. So I don’t think that piece by Scott suffers from the flaw I’m pointing out here in the last 2 reviews. Did you think it did? Or that some of his pieces do?
I'm pretty new here, so I don't have much reading history. I liked the piece. Each section posed and answered or at least explored a subsidiary question of the larger topic. My question was just meant to poke at the distinction between details on topics in which each of us are and aren't interested.
A lot of people here are engineers, and engineers, to be good at what they do, probably need to be people who find the details of how things work intrinsically enjoyable to learn and think about. I think I got some of that wiring myself, because I have made things all my life, and figured out hoq to make various materials and bits of software do novel things, and really enjoyed the process. And my mother took some test in the Navy where the tester told her she was the kind of person who could put a disassembled clock back together, gear by gear. (And when I was a kid our hous had water clocks and rotating doors that she'd designed and built.) But I didn't get a massive load of that trait, and so for lots of things I just get bored by a detailed account of how they work. What I most deeply like is philosophy and big weird abtract questions. Also care a lot about prose quality and really enjoy a finely turned phrase. So overall I'm not wired to be a fan of the kind of piece that tends to win these contests here. How about you?
My preference is for essays that *feel* like there's no structure at all, where you get lost in the qualia. But I have a background in science and law. When I write essays, I think I'm doing qualia and when I read it back it's full of structure.
tl;dr: who cares?
It's a good point. I stopped halfway through because I didn't care. Even that reference to the HTS guy stopped me and I read that part. Anything to put all this shit in context.
Did you read it that carefully? Because MoMA is mentioned nowhere in the article.
Oh, sry, meant MMoA. And yep, I read the first 2/3 very carefully. Looked at every single illustration and picked out the details mentioned in the text. Read the final 1/3, also, but less thoroughly.
+1
I wanted to like this more than I actually did. The conclusion/epilogue do a lot of the heavy lifting, showing how this coulda been a Profound(tm) review constructed from seemingly-mundane pieces. But I think ultimately it's demonstrative of the strain when one attempts to write a book-style review of a non-book theme. Kinda reminded of last year's comic book review: there's lots of nerd-snipey detail and coverage of process, but unless one comes already predisposed to like/appreciate such things...it's sort of just a blur. At least there's no strong claim being made here, like Islamic geometric patterns are the architectural equivalent of The Odyssey or whatever.
More specific illustrations would have helped to visualize geometric ideas, for those of us not particularly capable of visualizing sevenfold symmetry etc on the fly. The breakdown of the jali's patterns into comprehensible digital tiles was very helpful, for instance - more of that throughout woulda been great. (Ironically, I think this essay woulda been better in book form. Something about the vertical-only scrolling of a blogpost makes it harder to tie the graphics to the relevant text. Being able to easily flip back and forth and physically trace lines with my fingers woulda aided comprehension, I feel.)
Whoever wrote this article lacks proper education to explore this topic and certainly did not do any research on the making of the Moroccon court. The imperfections, what the author calls "mistakes" are deliberate attempts to create a play of light and space. MET has a wide archieve with academic articles and videos, explaining the decision process. This is quite an amateur attempt for understanding centuries long tilemaking and woodworking traditions and its representations at the MET. Because the topic is interesting, I am afraid it doesn't necessarily mean it is a good article.
I don't think this was at all similar to what went on with 20th century architects, who, according to Tom Wolfe's book, which I think scott posted a review of, was explicitly ideological and anti-aesthetic. Nor was it like what happened with 20th century composers, which was aesthetic, but based on a redefinition of "music" as scores to be studied rather than sounds to be heard, so that it was actually a completely different media.
The boundary between formal art and organic art begins with minor irregularities in repeated patterns, as in Penrose tilings and these mosaics, and extend to chaos. It marks the limit of how far an artist who loves natural beauty can move in that direction under iconoclastic rules. So in retrospect, it isn't surprising to find it in Islamic mosaics. You can find a conceptually similar movement in the Book of Kells, which has some recursive patterns, which are another route from repeated tiles to chaos.
This is making me think of what modern mathematics could add. An aperiodic monotile was found only a couple of years ago. And unlike some creations of pure mathematics, it's actually a sensible shape to make a tile. Or penrose tiles.
Interestingly, there's a furniture maker in San Diego who uses Islamic design patterns in his work:
https://bestonbarnett.wordpress.com/category/all/
For example he has a series of cabinets "which use the abstract vocabulary of Islamic geometry to illustrate legends of the biblical King Solomon."
We be curious to know if the author here found the furniture patterns authentic.
As soon as I read it I knew this piece would be chosen. Congratulations to the author for the work!
Ah finally an article that actually feels like a *review*. The other ones sometime feels like a regular essay or explanation. It even has pet EA/ACX topic at the end for the audience. Good luck.
"If I were to take a guess, Islamic geometric patterns, like many forms of decorative art, probably occupy a vague and under-defined space in most people’s minds. Up until a few years ago, if someone had asked me to describe them, I probably could have listed a few general features but definitely would have been unable to create an example. Further, if presented with several patterns, some expertly executed and some not so much, I likely would have struggled to distinguish the masterful from the amateurish. This is perhaps not unlike how people have difficulty picking out the correct double storey “g” from a lineup. In general, we enjoy decorations, but we don’t think too deeply about them, and we can’t always tell the excellent from the good, or the good from the mediocre."
I'm going to assume the author of this piece came from an Islamic background, as this immediately jumped out to me as extremely bizarre. Of course it'd be weirder to be less familiar with the letter g than the intricacies of Islamic geometric art as a European. Odd way to start that threw me off.
The first and only book review that was so boring I had to consciously keep focus. Which was a failed effort.
But it got me to comment so there's that.
On my only visit to the Met circa 2010, there was a similar room that I recall was furnished with Christian church architectural artifacts of Anglican and/or Catholic traditions.
At the time, those were my own religious traditions. I did not like the room. I recall trying to explain how uncanny it was to my friends who did not share that background.
What it was lacking was the actions one goes there to do. When you enter a space like that in situ, it's either humming with a certain kind of activity and people, or resting expectantly in between those activities.
I compared it to being a serious sports player, accustomed to going into a stadium for practices and games, wearing cleats and uniforms, and looking for teammates and a ball zipping around. Then someone recreates a "stadium" room inside the Met - but it's never seen gameplay, and it's just full of tourists mulling around and peering at samples of plastic turf. Weird.
I know I'm late to the party here, but I enjoyed this one. How does one review art, or analyze it, or critique it? Well, here the reviewer sets out his criteria, explicitly states what he's looking for, and then explores whether the art meets that standard. You don't have to agree with his criteria for what makes a good Islamic geometric pattern! But he is giving his opinion of what does.
The one thing I would have liked from this review, if possible, was more investigation into/exploration of what the artists of these pieces were thinking when they made their designs. Were the artists cognizant of the rules they were breaking? Did they do it on purpose? Did they have some other meaning behind their art? I often wonder about how artists working within a particular tradition reconcile the desire to innovate or do their own thing with staying true to the 'rules.'
Coincidentally, I have a very tall stack of books about Islamic art that I checked out from the library today, so I was very glad to learn something about how these patterns work.