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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1774 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 6, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What do you think makes someone good at drawing? I’ve always been terrible at it despite relatively strong visuospatial skills (in the mental shape rotating sense) and decent manual dexterity. For whatever reason, this doesn’t translate at all to my ability to imagine the distances, angles, and ratios of objects well enough to recreate them accurately on a page. Sometimes it feels like I only imagine things topologically.

From https://paulgraham.com/taste.html

Line drawings are in fact the most difficult visual medium, because they demand near perfection. In math terms, they are a closed-form solution; lesser artists literally solve the same problems by successive approximation. One of the reasons kids give up drawing at ten or so is that they decide to start drawing like grownups, and one of the first things they try is a line drawing of a face. Smack!

To get good at drawing you have to happily suck at it for years. There are a lot of things like this. Drawing is a special case because we tend to not be aware of how much time someone spent practicing.

I wonder if the ability (or lack of ability) to draw has anything to do with what I've heard termed aphantasia? This is not an original wonder, I expect. I was sitting around a table of men and women several months ago, and our host asked everyone to close their eyes and imagine I believe an apple (This was back in November.) I could see an apple in my mind, with a dark background, imagining the color of it from stem to bottom, red to pinkish to green-yellow, the way apples are sometimes mottled, and when we all opened our eyes, of the eight or so people there, I think only two of us said we were able to imagine it. My wife in particular said she just saw black. I was thinking this might simply be an artifact of how the question had been asked--an excess of honesty might produce "I didn't see it" because really there was no apple, I wasn't seeing a real apple with my eyes, it was in my "mind's eye" as it were. But if--and this assumes at face value that the host, his wife, the others there, and my wife simply could not visualize an apple in the way I could--would that have an effect on their ability to, say, draw an apple?

Many Japanese are almost stereotypically talented at drawing (my wife is not). Often however this means that they draw manga-type stylized figures very well, but not realistic objects. Then some of my students who are required by their histology instructor to draw, say, glomeruli in the kidneys can do so with impressive talent. Just with a pencil and eraser. Surely someone has studied this. I should look it up.

I was thinking this might simply be an artifact of how the question had been asked

This point has been gone over and over on Reddit and always circles back to some people admitting that no, they really don't have visual imagination.

I personally take literally nothing from Reddit seriously. In qualitative study there are various traps researchers can fall into when it comes to relying on self-report. There are also strategies to control to some degree for this. Reddit is the wild west of unreliable accounts. I don't suppose it was always so, but trolls, edgelords, sock puppets, shit posters and pathological liars all seem to have ensconced themselves there fairly robustly.

I've got to say I find your all-encompassing scepticism towards Reddit a smidgen excessive - they were only saying the same thing that you said here in response to posts that echo what you've heard people say to your face, only at scale.

Practically everyone here is or was a Redditor of relatively long standing. Reddit is not a high quality forum populated exclusively by intelligent and thoughtful people, but it's not completely devoid of them either. Eternal September began a long time ago.

And that's fine. I've been burned a sufficient number of times on reddit to be comfortable with my (excessively) skeptical (or sceptical, if you like) approach to posts and interactions there. Which is why I included the caveat term "personally" as in "I personally." Certainly you and whoever are free to do whatever suits your own temperament. I was on reddit from around 2013 to 2021, and for a large part of that period it was fine, and I even felt somewhat at home. There was a time when I wasn't sure what was wrong, and then it hit me.

As for the issue at hand, it's difficult without an actual controlled test to have any sort of granularity in judging responses. Even the VVIQ test relies on a 5-point Likert scale, and it's not entirely clear how valid/reliable it is. Questions beyond simply "Can you see the apple?" and "Do you notice colors? Can you rotate it in your mind? Can you imagine a bite taken out of it?" and so on and so forth can help, but even then there's a lot of noise. Whether a number or even a great number of redditors chime in saying they have no visual image does not negate that in that moment in that house with those people I was with there may have been a lack of clarity, to say nothing of the fact that about half of the people were Japanese (and thus prone to conformity in a group setting) as well as interacting in a second language, adding another layer.

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