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.
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.)
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.
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.
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."
Reminds me of that typographer that specialises in historical typefaces and who according to their partner is insufferable when watching period movies as they point out all the fonts on the shops and set that wouldn’t have existed at the time.
Weirdly enough I'm having to install some window film on a new office space I just got. The windows are large so I'm going to have to splice pieces together. I looked up how the pros do it and it's exactly what you're saying. You overlap the pieces half an inch, cut the overlapped sections, wet it and smooth it out, and then later go over it with some clear nail polish.
You can also "own it". I had a damaged area in the bathroom, I knew I'd never get paint to match exactly, but couldn't be bothered to repaint entirely. So I made a few random triangles with masking tape, one covering the spot, and painted inside them. Looks deliberate. Also got away with only buying a paint sampler...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
I just saw Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass in concert last night (he's 90 and can still play that horn!) and one of the things he talked about was recording his vocals for This Guy's In Love With You written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. He's a great musician but not much of a trained singer, and he said when he got into the studio, he sat down and did a relaxed first practice take, expecting he'd go and record one "for real".
Instead, they told him his first take was absolutely perfect - and it went on to be Bacharach/David's first #1 hit song.
Sometimes you get lightning in a bottle, and you just don't mess with it because it's perfect even in its imperfections.
And sometimes for some types of music they will intentionally re-do takes until the singer is a little hoarse and irritated to get a more 'raw' performance.
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'être.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
With black ink on paper, quite a few. With oil, less. It is part of the medium: how much is a flash of intuitive certainty and how much is slower planning and execution.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Music is the same way, especially with improvisation. When you're improvising, you don't make stuff up entirely from scratch - you glue together all the little bits you have in your toolbox to make something new. That's why we endlessly practice scales, arpeggios, learn new songs, copy others' licks, etc.
Why do you think half the keyboard/organ solos in classic rock songs sound like jazzed up versions of Bach and Mozart? That's what they had learned as kids or in music school before going on to make rock and roll.
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.
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.
Right, I don't deny that parts are repeatable, like creating a function or creating a git repo, or creating a 2 column table schema.
But a whole piece is never the same. This is because the cost of copying is almost zero and the value is in the end-product and not in the performance.
An exception would be if we are talking about an oil on canvas painting and a client asks for a piece that has already been sold.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Except that's the exact opposite of the takeaway, diminishing return problems are easy. He's proposing a model for why often art does the exact opposite and produces super-linear returns.
It's a common experience for an artist that everything they're doing to a piece makes it look like a total failure and far below the quality they were aspiring to until they do one final layer of polish and the piece transforms from sub-par to spectacular at the final stage. Of course, there are also scenarios where no amount of polish can fix it because the artist simply wasn't good enough and didn't find the right decisions at the final stage and other scenarios where there were no right decisions and no amount of skill could have fixed fatal flaws earlier in the decision making.
The exquisite agony of art is that all 3 scenarios feel subjectively almost identical in the middle of the creation process and so much of art is hoping we come up with some reliable process of divination to tease apart the micro-differences that give you an indication of what path you're on.
OP is proposing a model for why this is this is the case but unless you're an experienced creative, you don't understand the problem phenomena that this is identifying in the first place.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The picture of the solution space in 3D makes a great point - we see a narrow hill that leads to a global maximum (i.e. a great result) in a solutions search space that otherwise has a very obvious & wide hill that produces "okay" results. Going from the okay & safe results to a great result means taking the risk of going back down the hill of shittier solutions.
He points out that generative AI will tend to produce results that land on that big wide hill. It's the safe hill, and has the most results. This is perhaps where taste (as a proxy of experience) trumps AI.
Interesting to tie this to the finishing stage of any work. I was definitely thinking about software development in that situation. I would argue it's similar to drawing as he mentions in the FAQ - we're solving a novel problem, as we start implementing a solution we might discover it is inappropriate and have to change to a different part of the solution space.
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.
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.
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.
I'm personally a little frustrated with these music theory answers. Trust me folks, these answers are nearly impossible for a non-musician to understand (and even as a musician it's a bit impenetrable).
E minor gives you the exact same amount of options as C major. The options are just shuffled around a little bit. You literally get the same amount of notes in either, just a slightly different set. It isn't any more complex. Listeners aren't going to notice a difference, except one will probably sound happy and one will probably sound sad/angry. The "acceptance volume", to use the blog author's term, isn't any different.
At best, it can change things a little bit for some instruments. For example, with a vocalist, their voice can only go so high. They might be able to hit up to a high C, but not even higher up to an high E. If you're in C major, that's great, the vocalist's highest note (C) is the 'home note' which sounds great (playing a C in C Major makes the song sound like it's 'finished'). If you're E minor, the 'home note' is E, and as mentioned they wouldn't be able to hit that note. So you wouldn't really be able to 'finish' on a high note.
Ultimately, I doubt the author is a musician. It was a strange example to make their point.
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'.
> 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.)
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.
Minor edit: The "5.3%" I wrote out seemed too large and was bothering me all day. The culprit is that a Major Third is 5/4, not 4/3, leading to the D/E ratio being 1.2% too small rather than 5.3% too large. Apologies.
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”.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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, clichés, 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.
>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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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?
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
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.
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.
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.).
> 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.
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 opinión but why the obsession on trashing anyone Who does It?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
The audience is like 25+ feet away to be fair. A little different in your kitchen.
The scale is different but the principle is still quite similar.
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.
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."
Reminds me of that typographer that specialises in historical typefaces and who according to their partner is insufferable when watching period movies as they point out all the fonts on the shops and set that wouldn’t have existed at the time.
Apologies their name alludes me.
Weirdly enough I'm having to install some window film on a new office space I just got. The windows are large so I'm going to have to splice pieces together. I looked up how the pros do it and it's exactly what you're saying. You overlap the pieces half an inch, cut the overlapped sections, wet it and smooth it out, and then later go over it with some clear nail polish.
Yeah
You can also "own it". I had a damaged area in the bathroom, I knew I'd never get paint to match exactly, but couldn't be bothered to repaint entirely. So I made a few random triangles with masking tape, one covering the spot, and painted inside them. Looks deliberate. Also got away with only buying a paint sampler...
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.
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.
As my old art teacher used to say, "You work on something and it gets better and better and then it turns to shit."
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.
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.
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.
Was your old teacher’s name Cory Doctorow?
Edit: attempted sarcasm about enshittification
"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.
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.
I find I can churn away making revisions for a month and it makes a new, typically worse, song
I just saw Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass in concert last night (he's 90 and can still play that horn!) and one of the things he talked about was recording his vocals for This Guy's In Love With You written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. He's a great musician but not much of a trained singer, and he said when he got into the studio, he sat down and did a relaxed first practice take, expecting he'd go and record one "for real".
Instead, they told him his first take was absolutely perfect - and it went on to be Bacharach/David's first #1 hit song.
Sometimes you get lightning in a bottle, and you just don't mess with it because it's perfect even in its imperfections.
And sometimes for some types of music they will intentionally re-do takes until the singer is a little hoarse and irritated to get a more 'raw' performance.
I don't think the phenomenon you're describing is a result of the amount of effort put into the piece.
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'être.
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
maybe if you had put up more effort polishing it it wouldn't have hit the front page :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
With black ink on paper, quite a few. With oil, less. It is part of the medium: how much is a flash of intuitive certainty and how much is slower planning and execution.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Music is the same way, especially with improvisation. When you're improvising, you don't make stuff up entirely from scratch - you glue together all the little bits you have in your toolbox to make something new. That's why we endlessly practice scales, arpeggios, learn new songs, copy others' licks, etc.
Why do you think half the keyboard/organ solos in classic rock songs sound like jazzed up versions of Bach and Mozart? That's what they had learned as kids or in music school before going on to make rock and roll.
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.
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.
Right, I don't deny that parts are repeatable, like creating a function or creating a git repo, or creating a 2 column table schema.
But a whole piece is never the same. This is because the cost of copying is almost zero and the value is in the end-product and not in the performance. An exception would be if we are talking about an oil on canvas painting and a client asks for a piece that has already been sold.
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.
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.
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.
Feynman's Physics lectures are proof of that: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/
10/10 should be required reading for all humans
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
You waste time when few word do trick
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.
Except that's the exact opposite of the takeaway, diminishing return problems are easy. He's proposing a model for why often art does the exact opposite and produces super-linear returns.
It's a common experience for an artist that everything they're doing to a piece makes it look like a total failure and far below the quality they were aspiring to until they do one final layer of polish and the piece transforms from sub-par to spectacular at the final stage. Of course, there are also scenarios where no amount of polish can fix it because the artist simply wasn't good enough and didn't find the right decisions at the final stage and other scenarios where there were no right decisions and no amount of skill could have fixed fatal flaws earlier in the decision making.
The exquisite agony of art is that all 3 scenarios feel subjectively almost identical in the middle of the creation process and so much of art is hoping we come up with some reliable process of divination to tease apart the micro-differences that give you an indication of what path you're on.
OP is proposing a model for why this is this is the case but unless you're an experienced creative, you don't understand the problem phenomena that this is identifying in the first place.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My takeaway from the post:
The picture of the solution space in 3D makes a great point - we see a narrow hill that leads to a global maximum (i.e. a great result) in a solutions search space that otherwise has a very obvious & wide hill that produces "okay" results. Going from the okay & safe results to a great result means taking the risk of going back down the hill of shittier solutions.
He points out that generative AI will tend to produce results that land on that big wide hill. It's the safe hill, and has the most results. This is perhaps where taste (as a proxy of experience) trumps AI.
Interesting to tie this to the finishing stage of any work. I was definitely thinking about software development in that situation. I would argue it's similar to drawing as he mentions in the FAQ - we're solving a novel problem, as we start implementing a solution we might discover it is inappropriate and have to change to a different part of the solution space.
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.
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.
"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.
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)?
I'm personally a little frustrated with these music theory answers. Trust me folks, these answers are nearly impossible for a non-musician to understand (and even as a musician it's a bit impenetrable).
E minor gives you the exact same amount of options as C major. The options are just shuffled around a little bit. You literally get the same amount of notes in either, just a slightly different set. It isn't any more complex. Listeners aren't going to notice a difference, except one will probably sound happy and one will probably sound sad/angry. The "acceptance volume", to use the blog author's term, isn't any different.
At best, it can change things a little bit for some instruments. For example, with a vocalist, their voice can only go so high. They might be able to hit up to a high C, but not even higher up to an high E. If you're in C major, that's great, the vocalist's highest note (C) is the 'home note' which sounds great (playing a C in C Major makes the song sound like it's 'finished'). If you're E minor, the 'home note' is E, and as mentioned they wouldn't be able to hit that note. So you wouldn't really be able to 'finish' on a high note.
Ultimately, I doubt the author is a musician. It was a strange example to make their point.
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
> 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.)
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.
Minor edit: The "5.3%" I wrote out seemed too large and was bothering me all day. The culprit is that a Major Third is 5/4, not 4/3, leading to the D/E ratio being 1.2% too small rather than 5.3% too large. Apologies.
Very funny to put a bibtex citation under such a small piece of work
We'd be fortunate if everything that gets cited were this short (it certainly often has similar amount of useful information)
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!
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.
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...
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.
I have no idea what the C major/E minor example was trying to convey.
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.
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.
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?
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, clichés, 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.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Yes, you articulated my issue in a much better way than I managed to!
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.
> I wouldn't call it technical
Fair. Perhaps I should have said it gives the illusion of being technical.
I'll be the first to admit I was unable to follow the article because of this.
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.
Just reading the abstract, I have to agree with you.
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.
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
I am not sure you watched the same movie I did.
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?
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
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.
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.
Can you give an example of an artwork you think is acceptable?
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.
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.
"Understanding Poetry, by Dr J. Evans Pritchard, PhD"
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 opinión but why the obsession on trashing anyone Who does It?
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).
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.
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.
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.