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TheDag  Per Aspera ad Astra  11mo ago (text post)   2755 thread views

Calling all Lurkers: Share your Dreams of Effortposting

It’s been pointed out recently that the topics discussed in the Culture War thread have gotten a bit repetitive. While I do think the Motte has a good spread on intellectual discussion, I’m always pushing for a wider range (dare I say diversity?) of viewpoints and topics in the CW thread.

I was a lurker for years, and I know that the barrier between having a thought and writing a top level comment in the CW thread can loom large indeed. Luckily I’m fresh out of inspiration, and would love to hear thoughts from folks about effortposts they want to write but haven’t gotten around to.

This of course applies to regulars who post frequently as well - share any and all topics you wish were discussed in the CW thread!

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I have a file in my notetaking program that I've named "mottepost ideas", with things ranging from bullet points to semi-complete drafts of posts to try and finish when I'm in a writing mood and not too frustrated with this place. The problem is that I've also been toying with the idea of trying my hand at real-name blogging for a while - both because I think some of those ideas would be interesting to write up for people I know in real life, and because the idea of attracting more real-life friends with similar interests by public writing is appealing in the abstract - and posting the idea on the Motte first would burn it for using there unless I'm willing to risk self-doxing.

Two entries in that file that I'm pretty okay with burning (because they're low-quality anyway):

critical theory vs. critical thinking

  • Alison Bailey [2017] surprisingly clear about this
  • logic = language of nature, power dialectic = language of humans
  • speak good logic to extract resources from nature, speak good dialectic to extract resources from other humans
  • are your problems better solved by extracting more from nature (chop wood, make fire) or from other people (capture warm house)?
  • "dialectic can not extract a warming fire from winter's frozen wood, nor quenching drink from scorching desert air"
  • dialecticians only can profitably wrangle people because someone has done the work of wrangling nature before them. Had nature not been wrangled, they would be sitting in caves wondering why their children died of tetanus, not sitting in shoddy flats wondering why they can't afford an iPhone

Weirdmaxing

Modern architecture sucks because of runaway elite competition, but what about good-looking traditional schools of architecture? Did those not arise from runaway elite competition? Even people in cultures that build nice buildings (say, 19thct UK) generally have no idea how you could build nice buildings in Japanese or Indian style. Seems like an "unknown unknowns" problem; is it optimal to not have one elite that gets to do runaway loopy optimisation with an evolving value function, but multiple, and then you get to pick out the best one from them? Is this generally a good approach to unknown unknowns?

Modern architecture sucks because of runaway elite competition, but what about good-looking traditional schools of architecture? Did those not arise from runaway elite competition?

Modern architecture has two things going against it... first schools reward "creativity". So all of the grads from the top schools with top marks like to make buildings that are a little zany.

The other is competing preferences. Locals don't particularly care if their city hall looks like every other city hall. They just want a distinguished looking building for city hall stuff. However architects enjoy travelling and looking at unique buildings. So they have a bias towards weird.

Imagine if every city mayor had to buy all their suits from designs proposed by respected graduates of top fashion schools. Inevitably the mayor of Cincinnati would end up in a hot pink suit with rhinestones simply because that was the most normal looking option offered.

It's been my observation that the "high end" of every creative endeavor turns into a circlejerk between practicioners who sit around creating weird things. I've observed this in various arenas: modern art, cooking, fashion, and so on. My guess is it's because by the time you get to the top, you've spent so much time immersed in the field that you're just profoundly bored of all the normal options. That, and they've probably been done before. So between boredom and the desire to make their mark on the world, these folks compete to outdo each other in creating the weirdest possible things.

Unfortunately, that means that the high end stuff also has completely lost touch with everyone who isn't living and breathing that world. Normal people don't give a flying fuck about some weird avant-garde fashion show garment, they just want normal clothes that look nice. So these art forms wind up kind of sucking compared to what came before, because they're busy wrapped up in their quest for novelty instead of considering what people will actually enjoy.

Also, it seems like the creators don't really recognize their own limits. Everyone wants to be the pioneer who revolutionizes their field with a new creation, but few people actually have the chops to pull that off. I recently was at a restaurant where they had a deconstructed black forest cake. Every element of the traditional cake was done in an alternative way (e.g. cherry sorbet for the cherries, chocolate cake crumbs instead of a sponge cake, etc). It was very creative, but frankly it was just plain worse than a normal black forest cake. That chef would've been better off knowing their limits and just sticking to the classic instead of trying to reinvent it in a creative way. The same goes for many artists, fashion designers, and so on. They just aren't as good as they think they are, and so they make something that is not really very good as they miss greatness.

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