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[Awaclus]

plot twist: it's all of the above.

I think signaling is definitely a component of art, being different is also a component, and inherent beauty is also a component

Art is ultimately about forming a connection with your audience and expressing yourself in a way that resonates within them. Perhaps the message you want to express is "I'm super good at this", but that's a pretty shallow message and it might impress people but it's not going to resonate because making it all about yourself is the antithesis of relatability.

[silverspawn]

I don't know if that's true, though. Good art is about that, but I do genuinely think that there are lots of people who critique things by how impressive they are, and consume then even if they don't even enjoy it all that much

[faust]

I have discovered a great new pastime: On each bike ride that I take, I stop once and flatten the tire of a parked SUV.

[Awaclus]

I don't know if that's true, though. Good art is about that, but I do genuinely think that there are lots of people who critique things by how impressive they are, and consume then even if they don't even enjoy it all that much

In my experience, it seems very standard for critics to criticize art when it's obviously just showing off the artist's skills and praise art when it's just doing something simple with a strong message especially where perhaps something more difficult would have been expected. If you look up e.g. Archspire songs on YouTube, the comment section is usually full of people pointing out that the songs are catchy and have a nice atmosphere, or they're commenting on the themes in the lyrics or bragging that they recognized a classical music or a hip hop reference, and all these other things that pertain to not how ridiculously difficult it is to play their music, but how the commenter is experiencing it and finding it relatable. A lot of the people who do mention how ridiculously difficult it is to play their music juxtapose it with other, in their opinion inferior bands whose music is just difficult and doesn't have these other aspects. (And they're all correct, Archspire is amazing.)

Of course, other tech death bands exist whose music is pretty shallow and mostly based on how difficult it is, and those bands have their fans too, but I think mostly those fans are musicians who want to learn how to play like that, not random people who listen to it just because it's impressive.

[silverspawn]

this tracks the music critique I read, but I'm not sure how it generalizes to other art with different culture. Also, isn't like modern classic (which has a different culture) this thing that's hyper complicated and sounds like shit?

[silverspawn]

Ok so the Gestalt paper is only on arxiv and has 0 citations. perhaps this is a sign of the system working, and whatever journal or conference it was submitted to rejected it because they realized that the metric doesn't make any sense?

[silverspawn]

Somehow whenever I read a paper, my default assumption is "this is a very serious well-respected work that obviously got published", which doesn't really make sense because all papers treat themselves as very serious and well-respected

[silverspawn]

They even have have a section in the paper where they perform a "sanity check" of their metric, but it doesn't address the obvious issue at all

[silverspawn]

nvm it is cited the number was just outdated I suppose. But it's not published anywhere.

[silverspawn]

oh nvm again another version is published in Springer. RIP

[silverspawn]

This entire "following citations" thing would work so much better if papers cited the things that were really important, as supposed to citing fifteen examples of similar work for no reason.

[silverspawn]

I'd like to have some kind of assistant who knows Machine Learning who can do this for me because I'm already annoyed and feel like I'm wasting time here. Too bad I don't have the money or prestige...

Given infinite time, I wouldn't just locate all the papers about illusions in neural networks but also set up experiments myself in a way that's not stupid.

I also wonder to extent there is a positivity bias, and perhaps someone already tested neural networks for illusions in ways that make sense but didn't publish it because they didn't find any.

[Awaclus]

this tracks the music critique I read, but I'm not sure how it generalizes to other art with different culture.

I am not that much of an expert in any other form of art, but the general impression I get from art exhibitions is that they're also focused on the themes and the artistic expression, not so much on showcasing how impressive it is (and indeed some of it is incredibly unimpressive). Film awards generally go to films that are exceptionally relatable (at least in a concrete enough way that it can be easily analyzed and explained to justify the award), not exceptionally difficult, and I feel like so do book awards. And it's definitely the relatable works that become popular.

Also, isn't like modern classic (which has a different culture) this thing that's hyper complicated and sounds like shit?

Well, no. It is a bit of an acquired taste because the ways in which composers express themselves in contemporary classical music can sometimes be pretty radically different from traditional classical music, pop or other things that most people are familiar with (but actually not that different from e.g. modern jazz or progressive rock, and these three styles even live in a kind of symbiosis where they all get influenced by each other nowadays, with jazz largely acting as the intermediary between prog rock and contemporary classical, which have a weaker direct link — so it's relatively easy to acquire the taste if you already like the other two), but they are absolutely expressing themselves and connecting emotionally with the audience, the audience is just a bit limited in size. And in fact because the music is kind of complex, so are the emotions being conveyed, and it can become a super intense experience for the listener or the musicians performing the piece so much that you completely forget to even think about whether it's impressive or not.

Many pieces are not even super complicated, and often these are still recognized as good and tend to be relatively popular:

[silverspawn]

This is great. If that's representative of what modern classic sounds like, I happily take back everything. Also, great animation.

In general, pretty convincing post

[silverspawn]

I mean I don't claim to comprehend the music on first listen, but it's pretty obvious that this is something created from inspiration

[silverspawn]

Feeling good reading over the now first post of the sequence. It all feels super simple and straight-forward, and if it feels that way to  me, maybe it's at least reasonably simple to read. Now it's time to gather some data points. It's crazy how many people will preread your stuff for free if you just ask.

[Awaclus]

This is great. If that's representative of what modern classic sounds like, I happily take back everything. Also, great animation.

In general, pretty convincing post

Well, Liz and the Blue Bird would not be on my list of pieces to show someone who has never heard contemporary classical music and just wants to form a quick idea what it's like. I think the (real) composer is primarily a film/media composer, and the piece is from a movie, so it has a strong orchestral soundtrack influence to it which definitely isn't forbidden in contemporary classical but it also isn't what it's about. But I would say that it very safely counts as contemporary classical, it has a lot of elements that are typical for the style, and in-universe it is explicitly composed by a fictional contemporary classical composer. And it is a good example of a piece that, while being contemporary classical, is clearly very emotional.

Vesi väsyy lumen alle, on the other hand, could very plausibly be on that list, and I might add e.g. these to go with it:

[silverspawn]

I'm not sure that you don't just have good taste similar taste to me. I like the second one quite a bit

[silverspawn]

It does feel like an intro to something more

[Awaclus]

I'm not sure that you don't just have good taste similar taste to me. I like the second one quite a bit

Well, Arvo Pärt is one of the most respected and popular contemporary classical composers in the world so it's not just me.

[silverspawn]

If you write very hedging sentences with lots of stop words, that will make the sentence what Grammarly calls "wordy", which basically means that the sentence includes a lot of words which may not be required, and the style that will result may sound like this one, possibly being very hard to read and unimpressive. The opposite is brevity. A concise style signals confidence. You avoid redundancy and do not hedge.

Alas, optimizing too hard for confidence can make you sound arrogant. But as usual in a high-dimensional space, there are ways to sidestep this problem. You can sound concise and not arrogant, and that's what I'm trying to get right with the sequence, particularly the preface.

One example: if the post is in QnA format, I think

[question]

Because XYZ.

sounds significantly more arrogant than

[question]

I think XYZ.

but it's about equally wordy and essentially conveys the same information.

Oddly, I'm also finding that occasionally writing ! instead of . reduces arrogance. I think it's because young people write ! a lot, which makes it low status, which makes it a credible signal against signaling high status (i.e., arrogance).

(related to the writing quality axes)

[silverspawn]

There's one LW author I've read a lot of who even uses !! sometimes, but he's the only one who can get away with such madness.

[silverspawn]

Just think about how differently you perceive a sentence that does this!!

[silverspawn]

I'm not sure that you don't just have good taste similar taste to me. I like the second one quite a bit

Well, Arvo Pärt is one of the most respected and popular contemporary classical composers in the world so it's not just me.

I am now a fan of Avo Pärt. I like this so much more than regular classical music. It's not like mind blowing, greatest thing I've ever heard level, but it's really good.

[silverspawn]

about time for another Netflix run

1/n The Sinner