
How Did Cool Become Such a Big Deal? (2014) - pshaw
https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2014/julyaugust/feature/how-did-cool-become-such-big-deal-0
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dluan
Cool is one thing I feel like robots will never understand. It is so hard to
capture beyond just the physical vocabulary or syntax or body movements, or
even black or white. Because when you see or meet someone, _cool_ , you just
know. James Baldwin was a cool af mfer.

> For black people, to be cool was to be “calm, even unimpressed, by what
> horror the world might daily propose.” Cool was a quietly rebellious
> response to the history of slavery and post-Civil War injustices.

Cool is kind of the anti-reactionary, laissez-faire attitude, but it's also
using that attitude to create. To use slang in creative, liberating ways. Or
music, or art, or drugs, or whatever.

Now give an algorithm that's been trained with all of human history and
society. Would it also disregard the past horrors, but use the memory to
create? What would it create? Would it be cool, even if you didn't know that
it came from a human or a robot?

~~~
lisper
> Cool is one thing I feel like robots will never understand.

They said computers would never be able to beat humans at chess. Then IBM
built Deep Blue.

They said computers would never be able to beat humans at go. Then Google
built AlphaGo.

They said computers would never be able to understand natural language. Then
Apple built Siri.

It's a matter of when, not if, computers will understand cool. But when they
do, they will probably be too cool to care.

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schrodinger
> They said computers would never be able to understand natural language. Then
> Apple built Siri.

I think it’s a stretch to say that Siri understands natural language. You need
to form your sentences very specifically to have any luck, dramatically
different than talking to a human.

~~~
noirbot
And even then, it occasionally "corrects" what it thought it heard to instead
be some clearly nonsense sentence. Just the morning I asked Siri to "Remind me
to set beers aside for the party" and now I have a reminder to "Set Beer's
aside for the pantry." after clearly seeing it have the exact right sentence
for a second before adjusting to that.

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mikestew
Every year I attend a bluegrass music festival called Wintergrass. Siri knows
about Wintergrass, she sees it in my calendar and I've seen her recognize the
spoken word before. Even though I live down the road, this year me and some
jamming buddies thought it would be nice to have a room to stash instruments,
nap, whatever.

"Hey, Siri, remind me to get a room for Wintergrass."

"Okay, I'll remind you to get a room for one in the ass."

One would also think that Siri has figured out my sexual preferences by now.
(To be clear, she obviously has not.)

But to the point, the hype of speech recognition over the decades, and the
state of the art today, are why I am not convinced I'll live long enough to
see true self-driving cars despite the current hype of that tech.

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Alex3917
In jazz the aesthetic emphasis is on the empty space in between the notes. In
the 30s you had a bunch of folks mixing weed with heroin in a way that
seemingly unlocked the ability to create art out of these interstitial
moments.

As a social term cool just means the same thing, referring to things whose
positive qualities come from what they lack.

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swingline-747
I would suggest it's not cool, but the meta concept of status, that became the
big deal. When essentially everyone became materially-comfortable in Western
life circa post-WW2, society got flatter and flatter. In order to break up
that flatness, the main driving social-differentiator signals emphasize
appearance and attitude.

~~~
growlist
> the main driving social-differentiator signals emphasize appearance and
> attitude

Indeed, pushed hard by the advertising industry etc. with the idea that we are
defined only by the products we consume.

I see cool as similar to the phenomenon of less well off people spending money
on designer labels, i.e. reaction to a position of relative social
inferiority. Chavs buy Burberry, whereas Prince Charles patches holes in
clothes that he's had for decades.

~~~
coldtea
> _Prince Charles patches holes in clothes that he 's had for decades._

Which is also a status-signal ("hey, I've got good tailored clothes which are
sentimentally important to me and I am beyond consumerism") from someone with
a huge estate...

~~~
growlist
This is probably the first time I've been in the position of being a defender
of Prince Charles, but I think your comment is at best ill-informed, at worst
cynical:

'I happen to mind deeply about the poisoned legacy we are leaving our children
and grandchildren and have been attempting to invest in their futures through
reminding people of the urgent need to work in harmony with nature, rather
than against her.'

~~~
coldtea
> _' I happen to mind deeply about the poisoned legacy we are leaving our
> children and grandchildren and have been attempting to invest in their
> futures through reminding people of the urgent need to work in harmony with
> nature, rather than against her.'_

Yeah, give away your estate you didn't earn but enjoy because of an antiquated
bloodline-based institution to help nature causes then.

~~~
growlist
I'll drag us back on topic by saying that I think it's pretty cool that Prince
Charles is using his power, such as it is, to help spread ideas that might
help us stop ruining the world.

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yesenadam
Far as I know, Lester Young invented cool.

Here he is just before he died[0] with his old friend Billie Holiday (who he
nicknamed 'Lady Day' \- he called everyone 'lady'). Before him, what everyone
wanted to be was _hot_ , screaming, wailing sax, jumping up on bars, playing a
lot of notes, extreme. Then suddenly _less is more_. He came up playing with
Count Basie, who was also a _less is more_ kind of guy. To oversimplify, _hot_
was about high energy, _cool_ was about beauty and taste. _Hot_ was macho,
competitive, striving to impress; _cool_ was human, content, enlightened.

[0][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKqxG09wlIA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKqxG09wlIA)

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hfdgiutdryg
That site is extremely uncool on mobile, and I can't even find a way to
contact them about it. Their desperately uncool need for Facebook and Twitter
credit, along with their insistence that you read at a font size they've
chosen, means I see three to five words per line. Ironically, tapping on
'accessibility' and starting to scroll auto-scrolls instantly to the bottom,
then it's 'sticky' until it auto-scrolls all the way to the top!

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dredmorbius
Cool, blood.

[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sang-
froid&yea...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sang-
froid&year_start=1650&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=10&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Csang%20-%20froid%3B%2Cc0)

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xissy
Cool.

