[HN Gopher] Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived q...
___________________________________________________________________
Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of
creative work
Author : eatitraw
Score : 126 points
Date : 2025-11-11 08:29 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (markusstrasser.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (markusstrasser.org)
| turtleyacht wrote:
| How often is a drawing really trashed and restarted?
|
| There's the saying, "Plan to throw one away," but seems like it
| varies in practice (for software).
|
| There are even books about patching paintings, like _Master
| Disaster: Five Ways to Rescue Desparate Watercolors._
|
| In architecture, it's understood the people, vehicles, and
| landscape are not as exact as the building or structure, and
| books encourage reusing magazine clippings, overhead projectors,
| and copy machines to generally "be quick" on execution.
|
| Would like to see thoughts on comparing current process with the
| "Draw 50" series, where most of the skeleton is on paper by the
| first step, but the last is really the super-detailed, totally
| refined, owl.
| gilleain wrote:
| So i can only speak from my own experience of the last 5 years
| of trying (and often failing!) to accurately copy or otherwise
| create various drawings.
|
| Very rarely do I start completely from scratch, but usually
| adjust the drawing so much that maybe I should have. I wonder
| if I tracked the adjustments if I would find every line was
| redrawn in some cases.
|
| Thing is, it is hard to see what part is 'off' until most of
| the other parts are right. Especially with highly symmetric
| drawings, where symmetries appear gradually as the whole thing
| comes together.
| tomashubelbauer wrote:
| From my very limited experience with art, it's more often the
| case that a work in progress creation is abandoned and then
| taken a stab at anew later than trashed and restarted. Or it is
| iterated on to a degree that it is not meaningfully different
| from a full restart.
|
| I have a bit more experience with software and the only reason
| for why we don't plan throw one away is because it costs more
| money and the market pressure on software quality is too low to
| make stakeholders care. In my personal hobby coding, I often
| practice this (or do what I described above with art which is
| closer to abandoning until inspiration strikes again at which
| point a blank slate is more inviting). The closest thing
| professionally I get is a "spike" where I explore something via
| code with the output not being the code itself, but the
| knowledge attained which then becomes an input to new code
| writing.
| ema wrote:
| While I'm always ready to throw away code when I realize that
| there is a better way to do things I found it quite difficult
| to write code with the intent to throw it away. However I
| often do write code with intent of modifying it once I have a
| better idea of what is needed. It might be because I'm
| comparatively better at refactoring than at starting from
| scratch.
| vrighter wrote:
| When programming stuff as a hobby, I do always plan to throw
| one away.
|
| The first one is where I learn my lessons and write enough
| spaghetti until I fully understand the problem.
|
| Then I delete the first one, and start over with the lessons
| learnt.
| moron4hire wrote:
| When I was a kid, I obsessed over getting a picture right the
| first time. But as I got older, I learned to do subject studies
| to refine tricky details before committing them to a larger
| piece.
|
| If you ever get the chance to see the personal effects of a
| famous artist, most have piles and piles of sketches and
| studies they've done while prepping for a larger piece.
| eschneider wrote:
| Hmm...a lot? For a complex work, you'll sometimes do some
| number of sketches and studies and drawing and
| underpaintings...Lots of things get tried/discarded/modified
| before you land on a final painting.
| creer wrote:
| > Draw 50
|
| For me, "draw 50" series is about letting loose, NOT about
| skill. On the contrary, it's about exploring the space of all
| the different ways a prompt can be worked with in an UN-literal
| manner. Overall drawing facility will improve merely as a
| byproduct. The ability to be whimsical and exploit drawing
| flaws, erm, deliberately, is the real prize.
|
| Different from "limbering up" exercizes like drawing your hand
| - where you do one at the beginning of a session just because
| it gets you started and in the flow without having to think or
| pick a "real" topic. (A similar idea is to leave some already
| decided work mid-done: when you arrive in the morning you can
| work on that and limber up and do something useful without
| having to think clearly yet.)
|
| Different from thumbnails which are about picking a direction.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I am pretty sure "draw 50" refers to Lee J. Ames' "Draw 50
| Somethings" series of wordless instructional books, where
| "something" ranged from "animals" or "athletes" or
| "dinosaurs" to "Beasties and Yugglies and Turnover Uglies and
| Things That Go Bump in the Night". Drawing fifty instances of
| a thing out of your head is a good exercise but completely
| different from those.
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lee+j+ames+draw+50&t=osx&ia=images.
| ..
| creer wrote:
| Oh cool! Yeah it made me think of these internet challenges
| "I'll draw and post 1 portrait a day for the next year" or
| whatever. And art classes "give me 20 sheep". Where it's
| fine to start "literal" but you are encouraged to get bored
| of that quickly and become more creative with it.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Pro artist here.
|
| I trash and restart sketches that took a few minutes to do at
| most. It's very rare for me to get more than an hour or two in
| and discard it, I've explored and found a solid foundation long
| before I put that much work in.
|
| If I was working in a studio environment there's the risk of
| things like "I spent a couple weeks painting that bg and
| animating that scene and it was absolutely gorgeous but it got
| cut when the we took a good hard look at the remaining budget
| and total runtime and cut the entire sequence it was part of"
| but that's another matter.
|
| The Draw 50 process is solid. The classical techniques I learnt
| in training for animation are similar.
| TZubiri wrote:
| In art, while there are mistakes that can really make a drawing
| "wrong", there is a much wider array of valid end-states. Which
| is why Generative AI managed to make art way before it managed
| to write code.
|
| An example of this is Bob Ross' school of incorporating
| mistakes into the piece. Surely it's something that would fly
| way less in some types of drawings like anatomical ones, but
| especially when the motif is fantastical or even abstract,
| there's fewer possible mistakes to make, so there's less reason
| to throw something away.
| exasperaited wrote:
| "Understanding Poetry, by Dr J. Evans Pritchard, PhD"
| DuperPower wrote:
| lol I cited this exact scene as an example of typical
| anglosaxon conception of art, now you are crying that art has
| become shit but any attempt at scientific analysis is taken as
| a joke when actual poetry is even harder than Code, the amount
| of data you can compress on a single Word and rhyimes and stuff
| IS the hardest thing ever, but because you dont want to think
| someone can do an effort you want the Robin Williams and Dead
| Poets society to win and make art non scientifically
| understandable to anyone, if you cant do scientific or
| technical analysis of art thats your opinion but why the
| obsession on trashing anyone Who does It?
| qlm wrote:
| Perhaps a controversial view on this particular forum but I find
| the tendency of a certain type of person* to write about
| everything in this overly-technical way regardless of whether it
| is appropriate to the subject matter to be very tiresome
| ("executing cached heuristics", "constrained the search space").
|
| *I associate it with the asinine contemporary "rationalist"
| movement (LessWrong et al.) but I'm not making any claims the
| author is associated with this.
| botanical76 wrote:
| I mean, I talk like this as well. It's not really intentional.
| My interests influence the language that I use.
|
| Why is the rationalist movement asinine? I don't know much
| about it but it seems interesting.
| gilleain wrote:
| A bit harsh, but I see what you mean. It is tempting to try and
| fit every description of the world into a rigorous technical
| straightjacket, perhaps because it feels like you have
| understood it better?
|
| Maybe it is similar to how scientist get flack for writing in
| technical jargon instead of 'plain language'. Partly it is a
| necessity - to be unambiguous - however it is also partly a
| choice, a way to signal that you are doing Science, not just
| describing messing about with chemicals or whatever.
| auggierose wrote:
| Just reading the abstract, I have to agree with you.
| DuperPower wrote:
| no, we need more of this, the opposite of this is Robin
| Williams destroying the poetry theory book in dead poeta
| society, the result was weak kids and one of them commited
| suicide. More technical stuff in relation to art is a good
| thing, but its expected that anglosaxon people have allergy to
| this, they think is somehow socialist or something and they
| need art to be unfefined etc
| qlm wrote:
| Respectfully, I have no idea what you're talking about. Dead
| Poets Society is a story and the message of the story isn't
| that Robin Williams' character is bad.
|
| Are you saying my perspective is anti-socialist? What is
| "refined" art?
| DuperPower wrote:
| of course in the movie they sell the idea that art is not
| subject to scientific or technical analysis, but if you do
| an indepent analysis you realize those kids didnt become
| stronger or freer. Art like the article explained is
| related to effort and technique. but people in the US LOVE
| stuff like Jackson pollock, they need for art to not being
| a thing you put effort and mind into
| qlm wrote:
| Can you give an example of an artwork you think is
| acceptable?
| danparsonson wrote:
| You're confusing art with technical skill. You like art
| that demonstrates technical skill, that's fine. But art
| doesn't have to demonstrate technical skill to be
| artistic - indeed defining what 'art' is exactly is
| surprisingly difficult.
| cestith wrote:
| You can put art through all sorts of scientific and
| technical analysis. Being analyzed is how we teach the
| techniques to new artists. A mechanical reproduction of
| it from that analysis is not art, though, and sometimes
| you get the break the rules in favor of the expression.
|
| Did you know, for example, that Shakespeare coined a
| great many words and phrases used in English to this day?
| Before Sam Clemens, people tended to speak in proper
| schoolhouse English no matter the setting or character.
| Poetry and prose are not just the ability to arrange
| words on a page. Novels and plays are not limited to the
| three-act or five-act story arc. Simile and metaphor are
| often encouraged, but overused ones are actually frowned
| upon.
| exasperaited wrote:
| I am not sure you watched the same movie I did.
| jbreckmckye wrote:
| I have observed it too, it is heavily inspired by economics and
| mathematics.
|
| Saying "it's better to complete something imperfect than spend
| forever polishing" - dull, trite, anyone knows that. Saying
| "effort is a utility curve function that must be clamped to
| achieve meta-optimisation" - now that sounds clever
|
| If I was going to be uncharitable, I think there is are corners
| of the internet where people write straightforward things
| dressed it up in technical language to launder it as somehow
| academic and data driven.
|
| And you're right, it does show up in the worse parts of the EA
| / rationalist community.
|
| (This writing style, at its worst, allows people to say things
| like "I don't want my tax spent on teaching poor kids to read"
| but without looking like complete psychopaths - "aggregate
| outcomes in standardised literacy programmes lag behind
| individualised tutorials")
|
| That's not what the blog post here is doing, but it is
| definitely bad language use that is doing more work to obscure
| ideas than illuminate them
| qlm wrote:
| Yes, you articulated my issue in a much better way than I
| managed to!
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| I'll be the first to admit I was unable to follow the article
| because of this.
| nilirl wrote:
| What diction is "appropriate to the subject matter" is a
| negotiation between author and reader.
|
| I think the author is ok with it being inappropriate for many;
| it's clearly written for those who enjoy math or CS.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| I think it's a trick. It seems to be the article is just a
| series of ad-hoc assumptions and hypotheses without any
| support. The language aims to hide this, and makes you think
| about the language instead of its contents. Which is
| logically unsound: In a sharp peak, micro optimizations would
| give you a clearer signal where the optimum lies since the
| gradient is steeper.
| qlm wrote:
| > In a sharp peak, micro optimizations would give you a
| clearer signal where the optimum lies since the gradient is
| steeper.
|
| I would refuse to even engage with the piece on this level,
| since it lends credibility to the idea that the creative
| process is even remotely related to or analogous to
| gradient descent.
| nilirl wrote:
| I wouldn't jump to call it a trick, but I agree, the author
| sacrificed too much clarity in a try for efficiency.
|
| The author set up an interesting analogy but failed to
| explore where it breaks down or how all the relationships
| work in the model.
|
| My inference about the author's meaning was such: In a
| sharp peak, searching for useful moves is harder because
| you have fewer acceptable options as you approach the peak.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| Fewer absolute or relative? If you scale down your search
| space... This only makes some kind of sense if your step
| size is fixed. While I agree with another poster that a
| reduction of a creative process to gradient descent is
| not wise, the article also misses the point what makes
| such a gradient descent hard -- it's not sharp peaks,
| it's the flat area around them -- and the presence of
| local minima.
| nilirl wrote:
| I see your point. I'd meant relatively fewer progressive
| options compared to an absolute and unchanging number of
| total options.
|
| But that's not what the author's analogy would imply.
|
| Still, I think you're saying the author is deducing the
| creative process as a kind of gradient descent, whereas
| my reading was the author was trying to abductively
| explore an analogy.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| True, but my point is that not only does the analogy not
| work, the author also doesn't understand the thing he
| makes the analogy with, or at least explores the thought
| so shoddily that it makes no sense.
|
| It's somewhat like saying cars are faster than motorbikes
| because they have more wheels-- it's like with horses and
| humans, horses have four legs and because of that are
| faster than humans with two legs. It's wrong on both
| sides of the analogy.
| danparsonson wrote:
| I enjoy maths and CS and I could barely understand a word of
| it. It seems to me rather to have been written to give the
| impression of being inappropriate for many, as a stand-in for
| actually expressing anything with any intellectual weight.
| dauertewigkeit wrote:
| It's a middle school essay that is trying to score points based
| on the number of metaphors used. Very unappealing and I
| wouldn't call it technical.
|
| EDIT: For all the people saying the writing is inspired by
| math/cs, that's not at all true. That's not how technical
| writing is done. This guy is just a poser.
| qlm wrote:
| > I wouldn't call it technical
|
| Fair. Perhaps I should have said it gives the illusion of
| being technical.
| krick wrote:
| To be fair, it's always an artistic choice if you think it is
| appropriate here or not, but, yeah, this article is a _really_
| heavy offender. Reading the "Abstract claim" I caught myself
| thinking that this word salad hardly makes any sense, but I
| don't know and am just gonna let it go, because I am not yet
| convinced that it's worth my time to decipher that.
|
| Also, "asinine contemporary "rationalist" movement" is pretty
| lightweight in this regard. Making an art out of writing as bad
| as possible has been a professional skill of any "academic
| philosopher" (both "continental" and "analytical" sides) for a
| century at the very least.
| dickiedyce wrote:
| Also - the speed and quality improvements when having to redo
| homework lost to an undiscerning canine companion is also a
| corollary of this. Perhaps the time it takes to 'redo' is a
| better measure than last mile - it's the entire effort, minus the
| initial solution-space exploration?
| svara wrote:
| Perceived quality is relative. It's roughly linearly related to
| rank position along some dimension, but moving up in rank
| requires exponential effort due to competition.
| fluoridation wrote:
| I would be surprised if anyone perceives quality like that.
| Like, are you saying that in a situation where there are only
| two examples of some type of work, it is impossible to judge
| whether one is _much_ better than the other, it is only
| possible to say that it 's better? What makes you think it
| works like this?
| Xmd5a wrote:
| This insight, that perceived quality is relative, can be
| understood in a more literary way, in this fragment by Proust
| describing the Rivebelle restaurant:
|
| > Soon the spectacle became arranged, in my eyes at least, in
| a more noble and calmer fashion. All this vertiginous
| activity settled into a calm harmony. I would watch the round
| tables, whose innumerable assemblage filled the restaurant,
| like so many planets, such as they are figured in old
| allegorical pictures. Moreover, an irresistible force of
| attraction was exerted between these various stars, and at
| each table the diners had eyes only for the tables at which
| they were not sitting,
|
| The relative nature of perceived quality indicates that the
| order of representations (artworks) is judged only in
| relation to the order of castes (ranking); one can only judge
| what is equal by comparison to what is unequal, and
| equivalence is not understood through equality (even
| approximate) but through inequality (partial order). It is
| the absence of a ranking relationship between two entities
| that establishes their equivalence.
|
| Maybe I should have just gone with "in this case,
| classification is more fundamental than measure", but I feel
| there is something interesting to be said about the structure
| of artworks and the structure of their reception by society,
| indeed Proust continues with:
|
| > ...the diners had eyes only for the tables at which they
| were not sitting, with the exception of some wealthy host
| who, having succeeded in bringing a famous writer, strove to
| extract from him, thanks to the spiritual properties of the
| 'turning table', insignificant observations at which the
| ladies marvelled.
|
| See ? Writers (and artists in general) take on the role of a
| medium. They are used to channel distant entities, like
| tables during spiritism sessions, and from what Proust tells
| us, that "the diners had eyes only for the tables at which
| they were not sitting", maybe we can infer that what writers
| channel doesn't just come from distant worlds, as incarnated
| in what their words represent, but as a delta in perceived
| quality, starting with our own.
|
| This is why I'd like to elaborate on this idea of coupled SSR
| processes I developed in another comment.
|
| A sample space reducing process is a process that seeks to
| combine atomic parts into a coherent whole by iteratively
| picking groups of parts that can be assembled into functional
| elements ready to be added to this whole.
|
| In that sense, the act of writing a long work already has the
| shape of a SSR process in a very simple sense: each
| narrative, stylistic, and conceptual choice constrains what
| can follow without breaking coherence. As a novel unfolds,
| fewer continuations remain compatible with its voice,
| characters, rhythms, arguments. You are not wandering freely
| in idea-space; you are navigating a progressively narrowed
| funnel of possibilities induced by your own earlier
| decisions. A good book is one that survives this internal
| reduction without collapsing.
|
| On top of that, there is a second, external funnel: the
| competitive ranking of works and authors. Here too the
| available space narrows as you move upward. The further you
| climb in terms of attention, recognition, or canonization,
| the smaller the set of works that can plausibly dislodge
| those already in place. Near the top, the acceptance region
| is tiny: most new works, even competent ones, will not
| significantly shift the existing order. From that
| perspective, perceived quality is largely tied to where a
| work ends up in this hierarchy, not to some independently
| measurable scalar.
|
| The interesting part is how these two processes couple. To
| have any chance of entering the higher strata of the external
| ranking, a work first has to survive its own internal funnel:
| it has to maintain coherence, depth, and a recognizable voice
| under increasingly tight self-imposed constraints. At the
| same time, the shape of the external funnel, market
| expectations, critical fashions, existing canons, feeds back
| into the act of writing by making some narrative paths feel
| viable and others almost unthinkable. So the writer is never
| optimizing in a vacuum, but always under a joint pressure:
| what keeps the book internally alive, and what keeps it
| externally legible.
|
| But what interests me more is that some works don't just
| suffer this coupling, they encode it. That's what you see in
| the Proust passage: he is not merely describing a restaurant;
| he is describing the optics of social distinction, the way
| people look at other tables, the way a famous writer is used
| as a medium to channel prestige, the way perception itself is
| structured by rankings. The text is aware of the hierarchy
| through which it will itself be read. It doesn't just
| represent a world; it stages the illusions and comparisons
| that make that world intelligible. That's a second-order
| move: the work includes within itself a model of the very
| mechanisms that will classify it.
|
| If you like a more structural vocabulary: natural language is
| massively stratified by frequency. Highly frequent words
| ("I", "of", "after") act as primitive binders; extremely rare
| words tend to live out on the leaves of the tree; in between
| you get heavier operators that bind large-scale entities and
| narratives ("terrorism" being a classic example in the
| grammar of public opinion). Something similar happens
| socially. Highly visible figures - the wealthy host, the
| celebrated writer, the glamorous guest - play the role of
| grammatical linkers in the social syntax of recognition: they
| bind other people, distribute attention, create or close off
| relational triads. Proust's "the diners had eyes only for the
| tables at which they were not sitting" is exactly this:
| desire and judgment are mediated through a few high-frequency
| social operators.
|
| A certain kind of writing operates precisely at that
| interface: it doesn't just tell a story inside the internal
| funnel, and it doesn't just try to climb the external
| ranking; it exposes and recombines the "function words" of
| social perception themselves: the roles, cliches, prestige
| tokens, feared or desired third parties (like the forever-
| imagined intruder in Swann's jealousy). The difficulty is not
| only to satisfy two nested constraints (a coherent work and a
| competitive position), but to produce a form that reflects
| on, and potentially perturbs, the very grammar that links the
| two. That's where the channeling comes in: literature not
| only represents something, it re-routes the connective tissue
| through which quality, status, and desire are perceived in
| the first place.
| fluoridation wrote:
| >Moreover, an irresistible force of attraction was exerted
| between these various stars, and at each table the diners
| had eyes only for the tables at which they were not
| sitting,
|
| You're reading _way_ too much into it. This is just a
| reprise of "the grass is greener on the other side". What
| it's saying is simply "a lot of diners were dissatisfied
| with their dishes and looked around to see what other
| people were eating".
|
| >The relative nature of perceived quality indicates [...]
|
| My whole point is that I don't buy quality is purely
| perceived relatively. If you start a sentence like this,
| whatever comes after is irrelevant.
|
| You've brought up food, so let's go with that. If I'm a
| blank slate and I eat a certain food, am I unable to decide
| whether I like it or not until I eat a second, different
| food? Are the sensory signals my brain receives just a
| confounding mystery in the absence of further stimulation,
| to the extent that I can't even tell sweet from bitter?
| nilirl wrote:
| I liked the post but can someone explain how macro choices change
| the acceptance volume?
|
| Is it their effect on the total number of available choices?
|
| Does picking E minor somehow give you fewer options than C major
| (I'm not a musician)?
| davisoneee wrote:
| No you have an equal number of options (minor and major are
| effectively transpositions/rotations...e.g. the chord
| progressions are "m dim M m m M M" for minor (m-minor, M-major,
| dim-diminished) chord progression, vs "M m m M M m dim" for
| major).
|
| The post is likely getting to the point that, for english-
| speaking/western audiences at least, you are more likely to
| find songs written in C major, and thus they are more familiar
| and 'safer'. You _can_ write great songs in Em, but it's just a
| little less common, so maybe requires more work to 'fit into
| tastes'.
|
| edit: changed 'our' to english/western audiences
| seanhunter wrote:
| > Does picking E minor somehow give you fewer options than C
| major (I'm not a musician)?
|
| Short answer: No. No matter what note you start on you have
| exactly the same set of options.
|
| Long answer: No. All scales (in the system of temperament used
| in the vast majority of music) are symmetrical groups of
| transpositions of certain fundamental scales.[1] These work
| very much like a cyclic group if you have done algebra. In the
| example you chose, E minor is the "relative minor" of G Major,
| meaning that if you play an E Aeolean mode it contains all the
| same notes as G Major), and G major gives you the exact same
| options as C Major or any other Major Scale. What Messiaen
| noticed is that there are grouped sets of "Modes of limited
| transposition" which all work this way. So the major scale (and
| its "modes", meaning the scales with the same key signature of
| sharps or flats but starting on each degree of the major scale)
| can be transposed exactly 11 times without repeating. There are
| 3 other scales that have this property (Normally these are
| called the harmonic minor, melodic minor and melodic major[2]).
| There are also modes of limited transposition with only 1
| transposition (the chromatic scale), 2 (the whole-tone scale),
| 3 (the "diminished scale") and so on. Messiaen explains them
| all in that text if you're interested.
|
| [1] This theory was first written out in full in Messiaen's
| "The technique of my musical language" but is usually taught as
| either "Late Romantic" or "Jazz" Harmony depending on where you
| study
| https://monoskop.org/images/5/50/Messiaen_Olivier_The_Techni...
|
| [2] If you do "classical" harmony, your college may teach you
| the minor scales wrong with a descending version that is just a
| mode of the major scale. You may also not have been taught
| melodic major but it's awesome. (By "wrong" here, I mean
| specifically Messiaen and Schoenberg would say it's wrong
| because a scale is a key signature/tonal area and so can't have
| different notes when a melody ascending from descending. If
| there are two sets of different notes, Messiaen would say they
| are two scales and I would agree.)
| hansvm wrote:
| It...depends.
|
| If you're working in a continuous environment rather than
| discrete (choirs and strings can fudge notes up or down a bit,
| but pianos are stuck with however they're tuned), you'll often
| find yourself wanting to produce harmonies at perfect whole-
| number ratios -- e.g., for a perfect fourth (the gap between
| the first and second notes in "here comes the bride") you want
| a ratio of 4:3 in the frequencies of the two notes, and for a
| major third (the gap between the first and second notes in "oh
| when the saints, go marching in...") you want a ratio of 5:4.
| Those small, integer ratios sound pleasing to our ears.
|
| Those ratios aren't scale-invariant though when you move up the
| scale. Here's a truncated table:
|
| Unison (assume to be C as the key we're working in): 1
|
| Major Second (D): 9/8
|
| Major Third (E): 4/3
|
| However, E is also a major second above D, so in the key of D
| for a "justly tuned" instrument, you would want the ratio D/E
| to also be 9/8. Let's look at that table though: (4/3)/(9/8) is
| 32/27 -- 5.3% too big (too "sharp").
|
| When tuning something like a piano then where you can't change
| the frequency of E based on which key you're playing in, you
| have to make some sort of compromise. A common compromise is
| "equal temperament." To achieve scale invariance in any key you
| need an exponential function describing the frequencies, and
| the usual one we choose is based on 2^(1/12) since an octave
| having exactly twice the fundamental frequency is super
| important and there are 12 gaps in normal western music as you
| move up the scale from the fundamental frequency to its octave.
|
| Doing so makes some intervals sound "worse" (different anyway,
| but it makes direct translations hard) than they would in,
| e.g., a choir. A major third, for example, is 0.8% sharp, and a
| perfect fourth is 0.1% sharp in that tuning system.
|
| Answering your question, at first glance you would expect the
| scale invariance to therefore not limit your choices. Every key
| is identical, by design.
|
| That's not quite right though for a number of reasons:
|
| 1. True equal temperament is only sometimes used, even for
| instruments like pianos. A tuner might choose a "stretched"
| tuning (slightly sharpening high notes and flattening low
| notes) or some other compromise to make most music empirically
| sound better. As soon as you deviate from a strict exponential
| scale, you actually live in a world where the choice of key
| matters. It's not a huge effect, but it exists.
|
| 2. Even with true equal temperament or in a purely vocal
| exercise or something, there are other issues. Real-world
| strings, vocal folds, etc aren't spherical cows in a
| frictionless vacuum. A baritone voice doesn't sound different
| just because their voice is lower, but because of a different
| timbre. When you choose a different key, you'll be moving the
| pitch of the song up or down a bit, exercising different vocal
| regions for singers, requiring different vocal types, or
| otherwise interacting with those real-life deviations from
| over-simplified physics. Even for something purely mechanical
| like piano strings, there's a noticeable difference in how
| notes resonate or what overtones you expect or whatnot.
| Changing the key changes (a little) which of those you'll hear.
|
| 3. Related to (2), our ears also aren't uniform across the
| frequency spectrum, and even if they were our interpretations
| of sounds also depends on sounds we've heard before, leading to
| additional sources of variation in the "experience" of a
| slightly lower or slightly higher key.
| anechouapechou wrote:
| I believe that last-mile edits do not significantly improve the
| quality of (most) creative work. To produce high-quality work,
| one must have already "cached" their "motor heuristics," which,
| in simpler terms, means having dedicated thousands of hours to
| deep and deliberate practice in their field.
|
| The definition of 'last-mile edits' is very subjective, though.
| If you're dealing with open systems, it's almost unthinkable to
| design something and not need to iterate on it until the desired
| outcome is achieved. In other domains, for example, playing an
| instrument, your skills need to have been honed previously:
| there's nothing that will make you sound better (without
| resorting to editing it electronically).
| tinkelenberg wrote:
| A teacher told me once that editing poetry is like trying to
| open a glass jar. Eventually, you have to set it down or you'll
| break the thing.
| contravariant wrote:
| Just map quality q to e^q or something and it will be sublinear
| again.
|
| Or more directly, if your argument for why effort scales linearly
| with perceived quality doesn't discuss how we perceive quality
| then something is wrong.
|
| A more direct argument would be that it takes roughly an equal
| amount of effort to halve the distance from a rough work to its
| ideal. Going from 90% to 99% takes the same as going from 99% to
| 99.9% but the latter only covers a tenth of the distance. If our
| perception is more sensitive to the _absolute_ size of the error
| you get an exponential effort to improve something.
| mjburgess wrote:
| Your first line assumes that `q` fails to refer to an objective
| property. The `e^q` space isn't quality, as much as `e^t` isnt
| temperature (holding the property we are talking about fixed).
| Thus the comment ends up being circular.
| energy123 wrote:
| The issue was with the word "it". In the sentence, that word
| is acting as an indirection to both q and e^q instead of
| referring to a unitary thing. So yes, "it" does become
| linear/sublinear, but "it" is no longer the original subject
| of discussion.
| contravariant wrote:
| I don't think you're wrong but I think I failed to convey the
| point I wanted to make.
|
| What I was getting at is that _without_ an objective way of
| measuring the whole idea of super- or sub-linear becomes ill
| defined. You can kind of define something to be sub-linear by
| definition, so the argument becomes tautological or indeed
| circular.
|
| So an article that talks about perceived quality without any
| discussion about _how_ people perceive quality or importantly
| _differences_ in quality can say pretty much anything and it
| will be true for some definition of quality. You can 't just
| silently assume _perceived_ quality to be something
| objective, if you give no arguments you should assume it to
| be _subjective_.
| Xmd5a wrote:
| On a related note I wrote a few "poems" using anagrams. The
| principle is simple: take a short phrase and have each line in
| the poem be an anagram of it. You can't do this with just any
| phrase; the letters need to be reasonably well balanced for the
| target language so you can still form pronouns, key grammatical
| verbs (to be, to have, etc.), and some basic structure.
|
| It becomes interesting once sentences span multiple lines and you
| start using little tactical tricks to keep syntax, semantics, and
| the overall argument coherent while respecting the anagram
| constraint.
|
| Using an anagram generator is of course a first step, but the
| landscapes it offers are mostly desert: the vast majority of
| candidates are nonsense, and those that are grammatical are
| usually thematically off relative to what you've already written.
| And yet, if the repeated anagram phrase is chosen well, it
| doesn't feel that hard to build long, meaningful sentences.
| Subjectively, the difficulty seems to scale roughly
| proportionally with the length of the poem, rather than
| quadratically and beyond.
|
| There's a nice connection here to Sample Space Reducing (SSR)
| processes. The act of picking letters from a fixed multiset to
| form words, and removing them as you go, is a SSR. So is sentence
| formation itself: each committed word constrains the space of
| acceptable continuations (morphology, syntax, discourse, etc.).
|
| Understanding scaling through history-dependent processes with
| collapsing sample space, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.2775
|
| > Many such stochastic processes, especially those that are
| associated with complex systems, become more constrained as they
| unfold, meaning that their sample-space, or their set of possible
| outcomes, reduces as they age. We demonstrate that these sample-
| space reducing (SSR) processes necessarily lead to Zipf's law in
| the rank distributions of their outcomes.
|
| > We note that SSR processes and nesting are deeply connected to
| phase-space collapse in statistical physics [21, 30-32], where
| the number of configurations does not grow exponentially with
| system size (as in Markovian and ergodic systems), but grows sub-
| exponentially. Sub-exponential growth can be shown to hold for
| the phase-space growth of the SSR sequences introduced here. In
| conclusion we believe that SSR processes provide a new
| alternative view on the emergence of scaling in many natural,
| social, and man-made systems.
|
| In my case there are at least two coupled SSRs: (1) the
| anagrammatic constraint at the line level (letters being
| consumed), and (2) the layered SSRs of natural language that
| govern what counts as a well-formed and context-appropriate
| continuation (from morphology and syntax up through discourse and
| argumentation). In practice I ended up exploiting this coupling:
| by reserving or spending strategic words (pronouns, conjunctions,
| or semantically heavy terms established earlier), I could steer
| both the unfolding sentence and the remaining letter pool, and
| explore the anagram space far more effectively than a naive
| generator.
|
| Very hand-wavy hypothesis: natural language is a complex, multi-
| layered SSR engine that happens to couple extremely well to other
| finite SSR constraints. That makes it unusually good at "solving"
| certain bounded combinatorial puzzles from the inside--up to and
| including, say, assembling IKEA furniture.
|
| One extra nuance here: in the anagrammatic setting, the coupling
| between constraints is constitutive rather than merely
| referential. The same finite multiset of letters simultaneously
| supports the combinatorial constraint (what strings are formable)
| and the linguistic constraint (what counts as a syntactically and
| discursively acceptable move), so every choice is doubly binding.
| That's different from cases like following IKEA instructions,
| where language operates as an external controller that refers to
| another state space (parts, tools, assembly steps) without
| sharing its "material" degrees of freedom. This makes the anagram
| case feel like a toy model where syntax and semantics are not two
| separate realms but two intertwined SSR layers over one shared
| substrate--suggesting that what we call "reference" might itself
| be an emergent pattern in how such nested SSR systems latch onto
| each other.
| SebFender wrote:
| I appreciate this post as I think too many folks focus on the end
| before understanding what made it there. It's kind of asking
| what's the movie about before watching it or especially movie
| trailers that essentially shows way too much.
|
| We should all take some time to better understand what brought us
| here to be better prepared for general creative work and
| uniqueness in the future...
| stavros wrote:
| Judging by the comments here, I'm the only one, but I have no
| idea what he's talking about. Even the abstract:
|
| > The act of creation is fractal exploration-exploitation under
| optimal feedback control. When resolution increases the portion
| of parameter space that doesn't make the artifact worse
| (acceptance volume) collapses. Verification latency and rate-
| distortion combine into a precision tax that scales superlinearly
| with perceived quality.
|
| Is this just saying that it's ok if doodles aren't good, but the
| closer you get to the finished work, the better it has to be? If
| your audience can't understand what the hell you're talking about
| for simple ideas, you've gone too far.
| 65 wrote:
| The abstract is some of the worst writing I've read in a while.
| Trying to sound so very smart while being incapable of getting
| your point across. This whole article reeks of pretentiousness.
| codelikeawolf wrote:
| Yeah, it came off as complete nonsense. If someone were
| talking to me like this in person, I'd probably start
| suspecting they were doing it to distract me while their
| friend was outside stealing my hubcaps.
| stavros wrote:
| Yeah, to date I think the smartest writing/speaking I've seen
| was Feynman. The way he could explain complicated physics
| concepts in simple words is just unmatched.
| optymizer wrote:
| Feynman's Physics lectures are proof of that:
| https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/
|
| 10/10 should be required reading for all humans
| mrob wrote:
| It would be clearer with a comma after "increases". Without
| that it's a garden-path sentence:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
|
| You read "increases" as a transitive verb, and then reach the
| "collapses" at the end of the sentence and have to re-parse
| the whole thing when you realize it was really intransitive.
| soseng wrote:
| Hate to comment on the medium or writing style instead of the
| content but you're not alone. I understand the terms in the
| article in isolation or used in other fields, but it seems like
| the author is using a lot of technical metaphors. Or maybe I'm
| not their sophisticated audience.
| optymizer wrote:
| "The last 10% take 90% of the time"
|
| The author had a shower thought. It was poorly explored, poorly
| argued and deliberately packaged in complex language to hide
| the lack of substance. The bibtex reference at the end is the
| cherry on top.
| stavros wrote:
| Hey, I have my share of poorly-explored showethought posts,
| but at least I don't try to ornament them in sesquipedalian
| locution that purposely obfuscates the rudimentariness of the
| notion.
| fragmede wrote:
| You waste time when few word do trick
| moron4hire wrote:
| I had to think way too hard about what the author was trying to
| say. It smacks of an attempt at precise language, yet the
| subject matter is not precise at all. The author commits a Paul
| Grahamism, assuming their personal experience is generalizable
| and uniform.
|
| Certainly, _some_ artists work in the way they describe. Maybe
| even "most", who knows. But there are plenty of artists that
| do not. I've known plenty of artists to go straight to the
| detail in one corner of their piece and work linearly all the
| way across and down the canvas. I don't know how they do it, it
| certainly doesn't work for me, but obviously different people
| work in different ways.
| raincole wrote:
| In defense of Paul Graham, his essays are often unnecessarily
| long, but I don't remember he has written something as bad as
| this abstract.
|
| It's more on par with something you'll find on lesswrong.
| moron4hire wrote:
| Oh, yeah, Graham doesn't write in this style, but he does
| mistake personal experience for universal truth, which is
| the vibe I get from articles like this when they try to use
| officious language in an inappropriate way.
| raincole wrote:
| This kind of article is why people read comments first today.
|
| It's such a simple idea. And it already has a name, diminishing
| returns. I don't know what prompted this article but it wasn't
| insight.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I think you're just not the audience.
|
| Changing the words is going to lose some of the low-amplitude
| frequencies but I'll try.
|
| It's a model for why (call the following X) things get harder
| when you try to make them more perfect. Let's take X for
| granted.
|
| You can ask yourself "why is X true?". One model you could have
| for this is the "finishing touches" model: as a thing gets
| closer to perfection, identifying imperfections and rectifying
| them is harder simply out of search constraints (the less of
| something the harder they are to find).
|
| Another model you could have is the "dimensional model". A
| thing is great when it's great along many axes. The more
| dimensions you add, the harder it is to search in them for
| perfection. Related: the curse of dimensionality.
|
| And here he posits a new model, the "resolution model": the
| finer the look at what is good, the more 'options' you have at
| each stage to choose from; it's not just that you make the
| broad and then refine within, but that you are actually
| building the refined thing from the beginning.
|
| He then tries to show how some kinds of creation tolerate
| movement in the parameter space better.
|
| No model is perfect, so each of these ideas captures some
| attribute of the difficulty and maps it to a mental structure
| that is more easily manipulable by the modeler.
|
| The typical owl drawing is a few circles and then the more owly
| bits, and then the feathers on the owly bits, and then the
| shadows on the feathers on the owly bits. And this is a method
| to reduce the kind of problem he's talking about. But if you
| want to make the perfect owl, perhaps there is an element of
| making your circle just so, already accounting for the shadows
| on the feathers on the owly bits before any of the precursors
| are made.
|
| Anyway, this is imperfect because I am necessarily shaving off
| the hair on the ball to show you it's spherical. And his entire
| model is that the hair determines the ball.
| renewiltord wrote:
| The problem, perhaps, is that it is rare to have the kind of
| greatness that conceives of a concept and serializes it to
| text and image in such a way that anyone could deserialize it
| and approach a semblance of the concept in the mind that
| conceived it. Perhaps many of us find ideas in ideaspace and
| many of us can transmit ideaspace shapes to the universal
| others losslessly but the intersection of the two is very
| small.
|
| So we must live in the world where those of us who discover a
| point in ideaspace draw imperfect maps until the one who can
| draw a good map arrives at the same point. And perhaps some
| points aren't even well-mappable by the discoverers. And
| perhaps the communicator never realizes he has arrived at the
| point he was told about and so never speaks of it.
|
| We fumble in the dark desert for an oasis. Unlucky universe
| to be in.
| conorbergin wrote:
| Very funny to put a bibtex citation under such a small piece of
| work
| MITSardine wrote:
| We'd be fortunate if everything that gets cited were this short
| (it certainly often has similar amount of useful information)
| thechao wrote:
| I had a cabinet built and the guy doing the work pointed out that
| the human eye is really great at detecting line-line deviation;
| but, building to & correcting for that deviation requires working
| across the whole surface. He was making an area-effort to linear-
| quality argument. He said every time you halved the gap, it
| quadrupled the effort. Also, he said that was what saw-dust &
| glue were for.
| sokoloff wrote:
| One thing I've learned over decades of home/DIY projects is
| it's usually better to intentionally target a small
| overlap/reveal rather than trying to have two materials match
| perfectly.
|
| If you have a piece of door trim that exactly matches the piece
| behind, any imperfections or subsequent wood movement will be
| unsightly. If you instead target a 1/4" reveal, imperfections
| and slight wood movement are wildly less noticeable.
|
| This is "build so the 1/32" imperfection/movement doesn't
| matter at all" rather than trying to halve or quarter it. (If
| you can make something monolithic after attaching, such as a
| plaster wall, you don't have to do this, but wood furniture and
| trim often has these intentional offsets.)
| nradov wrote:
| One thing I learned from theater set construction is that you
| can slap some gaffer's tape and paint over any flaws, and the
| audience will never notice.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| The audience is like 25+ feet away to be fair. A little
| different in your kitchen.
| cestith wrote:
| The scale is different but the principle is still quite
| similar.
| bluGill wrote:
| Except for others who do that type of work and so know what
| to look for. I have a friend who does trim work in mansions
| - I can't take him to a restaurant near me because the trim
| work is terrible and he can't help but stare at it the
| whole time - nobody else notices.
| senderista wrote:
| Sounds like my dad (a former finish carpenter). He was
| never able to hold down a job because of his
| perfectionism. The union carpenters he worked with had a
| slogan: "If you can't see it from the freeway, nail it."
| creer wrote:
| Technical aspects to the trade are a different issue, I feel.
| "Wood moves, design for it" is a technical aspect of
| woodworking which comes up frequently. You learn about the
| medium (same for 3D printing, welding, electronics), and make
| use of that knowledge. The medium is far from the ideal stuff
| you might have thought - the more knowledgeable worker makes
| use of that awareness. It's not a question of guiding your
| effort through chaos but understanding that physics is NOT
| all chaos. "Wood moves" is not this big mystery - it's just
| the reality of the medium.
|
| This comes up a lot in investing and economics also. The
| difference between the naive view and a bit more awareness of
| how the world works is not some kind of deep conspiracy and
| "magic recipe" to be discovered. It's just how the world is.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Bands and artists do sometimes record a banger very quickly, and
| no, the effort is not in muscle memory or practice.
|
| If it was in muscle memory it would be repeatable feat, and it
| really isn't.
|
| Some work is _technically polished_ and you can see /hear the
| effort that went into it.
|
| But there's a point where extra effort makes the work less good.
| Music starts to sound stale and overproduced, art loses some of
| its directness, writing feels self-conscious.
|
| Whatever the correlation between perceived artistic merit and
| effort, it's a _lot_ more complex than this article suggests.
| armonster wrote:
| I don't think the phenomenon you're describing is a result of
| the amount of effort put into the piece.
| eschneider wrote:
| As my old art teacher used to say, "You work on something and
| it gets better and better and then it turns to shit."
| ryanchants wrote:
| This is a large part of the discussions in the first one or
| two interviews in Interviews with Francis Bacon by David
| Sylvester. Bacon talks about pushing to the limits of adding
| more to a work until it's good, and then if taken too far it
| ruins the work. And only very rarely can he pull it back
| around to good.
| hbarka wrote:
| Was your old teacher's name Cory Doctorow?
| hbarka wrote:
| Edit: attempted sarcasm about enshittification
| lanstin wrote:
| My wife is an oil painter, abstract expressionism, and she
| will constantly worry if something is done. And there have
| been glorious paintings ruined by one last thing.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| Taoists discovered this phenomenon thousands of years ago and
| called it overdevelopment. And it's universal for all
| processes under the Sun. There simply isn't infinite progress
| in one direction, because it's a circle. The ideal way is to
| switch one circle for another at its peak development, but
| recognition of that point requires using the heart, not the
| brain.
| brk wrote:
| "But there's a point where extra effort makes the work less
| good."
|
| This happens frequently in mixing and mastering audio tracks.
| You pile up incremental changes that all seemed good at the
| time. Then you go back and listen to a recording from 20
| revisions ago and it sounds better than your current "best"
| effort.
| bluGill wrote:
| Sometimes that is because you need 60 more revisions to make
| it good - though you may have to go back to the start several
| times to figure out which are good.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| I find I can churn away making revisions for a month and it
| makes a new, typically worse, song
| lynguist wrote:
| I discussed this premise with my LLM and we came to this
| following conclusion which I find quite elegant:
|
| > In any bounded system under feedback, refinement produces
| diminishing returns and narrowing tolerance, governed by a
| superlinear precision cost.
|
| > There isn't one official name, but what you've articulated is
| essentially a unified formulation of the diminishing-returns /
| sensitivity-amplification law of creation -- a pattern deep
| enough that it keeps being rediscovered in every domain that
| pushes against the limits of order.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Agreed, that's an elegant conclusion. Thanks for sharing.
|
| PS Usually LLM-generated content is strongly penalized here
| (and with good reason). But IMHO, when clearly noting it as
| such, and sharing something worthwhile -- as in this case -- an
| exception should be made.
| pram wrote:
| The more mileage you get, the easier it is to see the mistakes in
| your old art (if you're improving lol)
|
| The more refined your technique is, the harder it will be to
| discern mistakes and aesthetic failures.
|
| Eventually you might come to a point where you can't improve
| because you literally don't see any issues. That might be the
| high water mark of your ability.
| creer wrote:
| Isn't there simply a human tendency to try and find a magic
| formula in what is simply survivor bias?
|
| As creative projects (software, painting...) we finish or
| satisfactorily achieve relatively few items. And except for the
| most repetitive of us, these achievements are pretty different.
| Wide space, chaos, few satisfactory products by comparison. That
| doesn't bode well for "magic recipe". All the way to "rules of
| thumb" that we take fun in violating.
|
| So there are two issues in there: We have more taste than skill
| and so many of our attempts will disappoint us no matter what.
| And we will obsess on trying to find a magic formula - when it's
| rather likely that there isn't one. The "space" is large and
| chaotic and we might want to reassure ourselves instead that
| serendipity has something to do with it.
|
| Is there then place for rules of thumb? Whatever let's us get to
| work in the morning, I guess. For me, I do like the recognition
| of past track record: with a bit of age hindsight, I know I can
| do it - no need to dispair. That is useful and reassuring. If I
| just try some more - in ever varying manners, it will happen.
|
| One place for "rules of thumbs" is in them being tropes. We can
| get some impact on the viewer by violating them. There is a trope
| of learning the rules so you can violate them. For example a Rule
| of Thirds - can be fertile grounds for getting at the viewer. The
| rule doesn't do much for us, and we have no problem violating it,
| but our less savvy viewers might remember it and get one more
| whiff of meaning from the violation. And if we are less concerned
| with our own satisfaction and more interested in sales, we might
| pay attention to "what's popular these days" and produce some of
| that. Not all artists are dead set on personal achievement at the
| cost of sales. A slightly different look at such rules.
| regulation_d wrote:
| I follow a few landscape photographers on YouTube and really
| enjoy watching them go out into the field (whether it's an
| actual field or mountain or beach). They've got their art (at
| least their own style) so dialed in, that the technical
| details, the subject, the composition, those are almost a
| forgone conclusion. What matters at that point is light. And
| light is luck. The difference between an average image and an
| outstanding one lies in something beyond their control.
|
| And when fortune smiles on them, they get positively giddy.
|
| I really appreciate people who understand that they have to
| meet luck half way. Even though they've spent hours upon hours
| upon hours honing their craft, the thing that puts them over
| the hump is both unpredictable and uncontrollable.
| creer wrote:
| "Inspiration is for amateurs--the rest of us just show up and
| get to work." (see interesting shared history of the quote
| here https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/08/28/inspiration/ ).
|
| Yeah, that doesn't mean we can't get lucky and run into the
| perfect circumstance. It means that when that circumstance
| happens, we'll be there ready to harvest it. Similarly, "the
| best camera is the one you carry".
|
| And yes, these anti- magic formulas that dispell the idea of
| magic formula, are magic formulas.
|
| > And when fortune smiles on them, they get positively giddy.
|
| Yes! This is a great pleasure. Satisfaction. There is one
| series in particular I work on that operates like this. I'm
| just ready for it - don't even look for it, not anymore - but
| when I run into the "circumstance", that's a great feeling.
| And I'm ready for it.
|
| In engineering or software there is still that idea of the
| back-burner stuff that does need to be done. This idea of
| staging or starting what needs to be done at the end of the
| previous day. So that you have something relatively mindless
| to get you launched the next morning. I also know that anti-
| "magic rule", even though it's one I have a hard time keeping
| to.
| corysama wrote:
| After this you get to the commercial market for creative works.
| In a market that with a lot of options for consumers that are
| equally accessible, similarly priced, and infinitely replicable,
| power-law-curve nonlinear returns on quality is the norm.
|
| So, there is huge motivation to put in "just a bit more effort".
|
| And, thus you get Crunch Time in gamedev!
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| If you dislike crunch time, you should be thankful we live in
| the superlinear world, and not the sublinear world. Imagine how
| bad the winner take all dynamics would be if 5% extra effort
| from you resulted in a game that is not 2% but 2 _times_ as
| good as it would be otherwise.
| im3w1l wrote:
| I think it's simply because there is a cap to how good something
| can be, but no cap on how much effort you can spend trying to
| reach perfection.
| vahid4m wrote:
| almost for any project I work on keep reminding myself os what I
| read somwhere:
|
| 90% of the project takes 90% of the time and the other 10% of the
| project takes another 90% of the time.
| markusstrasser wrote:
| Author here. Somehow the worst thing I ever wrote is on the front
| page of HN.
|
| I wrote this fast so there's jargon and bad prose. The title is
| deliberately dry and bland so I wasn't expecting anyone to click
| it. Also I slightly changed my mind on some of the claims ..
| might write up later.
|
| The main reason I like to think of creative work in a more
| abstract/formal/geometric way (acceptance volume, latency,
| sampling) is it's easier for me categorize tasks, modalities and
| domains and know how to design or work around it. It's very much
| biased by more own experiences making things.
|
| Also, abstract technical concept often come with nice
| guarantees/properties/utils to build on .. some would say that's
| their raison d'etre.
|
| Re comments: * "this is just diminishing returns" -- ok and this
| is a framework for why: the non-worsening region collapses, so
| most micro-edits fail
|
| * "bands record bangers in an hour" -- practice tax was prepaid.
| The recording session is exploitation/search riding on cached
| heuristics imo (and it still takes hours of repeated
| recording/mixing/producing to actually produce a single album
| track).
|
| * music key example -- yes I should've picked a different one.
| Main point was that some choices create wider tolerance
| (arrangement/range/timbre) even if keys are symmetric in equal
| temperament
| egypturnash wrote:
| > Drawing takes forever because you're exploring AND refining
| simultaneously.
|
| > We don't "rehearse" a specific drawing, we solve a novel
| problem in real-time. There's no cached motor sequence to
| execute.
|
| When you have been drawing long enough there are a _lot_ of
| cached motor sequences to execute and modify. A lot of art
| training is simply filling this cache: spend a few hours every
| week drawing the human body from different angles, in a year or
| three you 'll be able to make it up from pretty much any angle.
| Add in another twenty years of doing that _and_ experimenting
| ways to make your tools do more of the work for you and you can
| dash off "sketches" that a beginner would consider finished
| paintings that took days to do.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Right, but there's no point in repeating the exact same
| sequences unless you are practicing, in production you always
| do novel stuff, in both programming and drawing. This is unlike
| other disciplines like music or carpentry.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I have been drawing professionally for about a quarter of a
| century and it is my experience there are a lot of sequences
| that recur. A hand is a complex piece of anatomy but you
| really only need a mental library of a few dozen poses to
| meet most needs, for instance. You don't repeat it _exactly_
| every time, it 's easy to change the angle a little, the
| lighting needs to adapt to the scene, some hands are dainty
| and some are big meatslabs, but that's all about as easy to
| adjust on the fly as, say, shifting the rhythm of a rock song
| you know well into a big band swing groove.
|
| You also learn a discipline we artists call "construction",
| wherein you can quickly break any object down into a few
| basic shapes that are incredibly easy to reason about in 3d,
| and quickly layer details atop that.
|
| Also consider a daily comic strip. How many times do you
| think Charles Schultz drew Charlie Brown in a single year?
| How many of those drawings were largely similar to each
| other? Now _that 's_ serious production work. Animation's
| similar, you probably have a wider range of angles and motion
| than in a 1970s newspaper comics page but you are still
| drawing the same character a zillion times and your hand
| _learns_ stuff and spits it back out without any conscious
| thought on your part.
| senderista wrote:
| I have no idea what the C major/E minor example was trying to
| convey.
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