> Only a very few people possess the level of discernment needed to know how bad your local concert hall's piano is, and precisely how it is bad. If their art dies out, maybe nobody will know how bad all the pianos are. And then we'll all have slightly worse pianos than we would otherwise have. And I mean if that's the way things are going to go, then let's just steer the Earth into the Sun, because what's the point of any of this.
The problem with this line of thinking -- "If X happens then we'll all be cooked!" -- is that it ignores the fact that X already has been happening and yet life is just fine.
There's an infinite number of pursuits in which expert practitioners could theoretically possess a level of discernment so sublime that nobody else can understand it, let alone appreciate it.
A huge number of these arts will either never be practiced, or were practiced in the past but have already decline. And yet there's no mass ennui or clamoring to steer the Earth into the sun.
The pinnacle of human attention cannot be directed at everything, everywhere, all at once. We have to focus our attention on a limited subset of arts and pursuits, where discernment will always be high, and settle everywhere else.
"maybe nobody will know how bad all the pianos are. And then we'll all have slightly worse pianos than we would otherwise have."
But not really. Because if I truly cannot tell the difference between two objects or the way they sound, then they're the same to me, and I don't lose anything by listening to one over the other. If I could tell the difference, and it was important to me, then maybe I could do something about it.
"The pinnacle of human attention cannot be directed at everything, everywhere, all at once. We have to focus our attention on a limited subset of arts and pursuits, where discernment will always be high, and settle everywhere else."
> But not really. Because if I truly cannot tell the difference between two objects or the way they sound, then they're the same to me, and I don't lose anything by listening to one over the other. If I could tell the difference, and it was important to me, then maybe I could do something about it.
Trust me, as a former piano/harpsichord tuner, that the audience absolutely can tell the difference between a perfectly tuned instrument and one that is badly tuned. They just can't put their finger on what that difference is.
It's the same as when the viola section of an orchestra is out of tune or the horns drag (both very common problems for amateur symphonies). The overall effect is "muddier" and less "brilliant" than other performances, and you can tell as a listener, but very few people in the audience can say "the violas were flat in the adagio section."
It's worse than that. In many cases the consumer can't tell, but it still matters.
Take food, for example. If the tomato on your sandwich has fewer micronutrients than a different one, you may not be able to taste it, especially after the restaurant (or you) have slathered the sandwich with sauces full of salt and sugar and fat. So you want a chef you can trust who knows how to choose a tomato (and a farmer who knows how to grow one), whether you can taste the difference or not, or the result at scale is you end up deficient in various vitamins and minerals and can't figure out why you're tired all the time.
That's not quite the same thing, because if the tomato is full of cadmium, whether or not you can taste it the 0.01% of the customers who are chemists and personally test all of their food for safety themselves are going to figure it out. Then every store will refuse shipment of any of those tomatoes and the cops will come to shoot the farmer's dog and run over the tomato field with their ludicrous panzer.
Whereas if they find that the tomato has 10% as much β-carotene as a tomato should or what have you, somebody will write an article about it that six in a thousand customers read and people will keep buying those tomatoes because they're cheaper and not even required to be labeled differently.
It's the difference between "so bad that people won't stand for it" and "worse, but people tolerate it", and the second one can be more of a problem specifically because people don't get mad enough about it to fix it.
I doubt there are chemists sitting at home with an ICP testing heavy metal levels of all their produce. That would be a lot of work and expensive to maintain. In reality no one would even notice the toxicity unless FDA happened to check or someone got sick and traced it back.
> I doubt there are chemists sitting at home with an ICP testing heavy metal levels of all their produce.
It only takes one. Also, who says they're doing it at home? One hypochondriac willing to stay after work to use the equipment to quell their fears (or substantiate them) is all it takes.
Okay, guys, come on now. back off here.
Beta carotene. Vitamins. Shortage in food.
The thesis is along the lines of "near-perfection but non-perfection flaws that people miss are important, OH NO, they're not important because everything was fine when they weren't perfect" -- but AHA! what about tomatoes with suboptimal vitamin levels! you couldn't even taste that! Honestly this is ridiculous, tomatoes, seriously?
Guess what. There's a lot of ADEK vitamines (fat soluble) out there. There's a lot stored up in our bodies. So much so that you can get a disease by pumping up the stores too much! Typically: TWO YEARS worth. And if that didn't set off a flag in your mind "oh, you mean vitamin A, of which two units are metabolically extracted from beta carotene" than you need to shut up right now throwing around beta carotene as an essential nutrient because you don't even know fundamental human metabolism!
Long story short, you know what else is really good at handling sloppy near-perfection-but-not-perfect differences -- -- -- biology. We've got 30% or so of our genome made of self-replicating viruses that snuck into a germ cell a billion years ago, yet somehow it all works, we've got 10 gorillion cells made from a single cellular machine at one point, building a functional reproductive-worthy body, and somehow that all works. People understand gusts and ideas as to what it's all doing, but do we know all of it, maybe not even most of it? No, we don't even know. It's like how magnets work, nobody knows. But big picture, the body has some capacity of adaptation and ranges of acceptable conditions, yet this TOMATO HYPOTHESIS seems to view the body as some sort of formula one engine that requires micrometers level clearances so it can go 20,000 RPM instead of the typical 6,000, and oh the medical castastrophe that should happen should someone eat a tomato of diminished nutritive content.
Now, I don't know what kind of world we live in here. Do we live in TOMATOLAND where people eat with every meal ketchup and marina sauce as the main dish? Are we worried that in TOMATOLAND that a 90% drop in essential amino acids of our favored cuisine will cause problems in population health? Because I'm pretty sure if a damned tomato comes up 90% short on beta carotene, that said food eater has TWO WHOLE YEARS to eat NON TOMATO FOODS such as CARROTS or FORTIFIED FOODS WHICH IS MOST FOODS which will easily replenish their vitamin A levels.
This is a bad analogy because food is dual purpose - nutrition and enjoying the taste.
Music is just about subjective enjoyment - you will not get cancer if the piano was not in tune - and if you can't tell the difference then it is irrelevant to your experience.
There is a second-order effect to this too, which connects to the original article.
If the piano is slightly out of tune, and the orchestra is slightly worse, people stop appreciating it (not realizing how much better it COULD be), and the art dies out, not because it's moved past it's time, or the culture moved on, or people don't want it, but because THEY DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT THEY CAN HAVE.
That is 100% the case with Tomatoes. Most people I know (including myself) think tomatoes are bland boring filler. Annoying to cut. Barely add any flavour. Need salt + fat (cheese, bacon, etc) to really bring out their flavour.
And then one day we have a farmer's market heirloom tomato, and it's like our world gets shattered.
"I COULD be eating tomatoes like this on the regular? And I'm not? Whatever happened as a society to get me to this point was a crime, and needs to be undone."
But most people never even get to experience that, I think.
To follow this analogy, isn't it possible then for someone to study precisely what the difference is, and become an expert, thus bringing us back into the level of expertise we were at at the start of the analogy?
Surely the experts didn't all learn from each other; who was the first expert? That expert surely learned in some other way, so the only thing lost at the start of the analogy is the time required for someone interested to (re)achieve mastery.
Sure, related to tuning because it's a pretty closed problem. The expertise in terms of tuning was developed over about ~800 years, but the math for modern tuning was known 500 years ago. It's conceivable that one could re-invent equal temperament and then quickly re-invent the modern tuner given everything we know about electronics and audio processing. However, that knowledge all builds on itself. If we decide that all audio processing is done with RNNs/ML instead of objective ("old") mathematics, then we're going to lose the ability to make a tuner, too, and eventually we'll need a new Fourier to come back up with the Fourier transform.
About the tomatoes in the other comment chain? Your guess is as good as mine whether we can recover that knowledge.
I heard that pianos have stretched harmonic series due to string tension/weight/something, so piano tuners actually have to tune upper notes higher and lower notes lower, while ensuring various harmonics interact well. There's quite a bit of art to it rather than pure numeric ratios (which may or may not be possible to encapsulate in ML).
The internet has worsened this phenomenon. I, like many other people, have gotten into the habit of appending site:reddit.com to Google searches as search quality declines. This gives better results from actual humans (usually), but it also skews toward people who are invested enough in the topic to post about it on niche subreddits. This leads to, for example, product recommendations that are way out of alignment with what most people need, even if the information about them is true.
"product recommendations that are way out of alignment with what most people need"
I have to disagree. When i dont do the reddit thing, the average quality of material products has been.. very bad. Amazon reviews don't seem to be enough to choose anything with an electric motor or a hinge that won't fall apart in a month of light use.
Let me give an example: soundbars for TVs. Reddit will tell you to never buy one, because a dedicated speaker system sounds better at the same price. This is true-ish. However, a speaker system requires a large, heavy A/V unit, lots of wires, lots of space, and highly noticeable, if not outright ugly, speakers. A soundbar doesn't have any of those problems, is usually the cheaper option, and still sounds much better than built-in speakers. They're the right choice for most people, but it takes reading between the lines to parse that from reddit posts.
I trust people to be able to generally decide if they have the space, tolerance for cords and aesthetics to make a purchase decision like that. I'm struggling to visualize the peril in accidentally buying speakers.
Personally, I'll happily pay for something with some features I don't need if it's got good build quality. Finding versions of MANY THINGS that aren't egregiously poorly made seems like it's getting harder?
Maybe this is just the temporal warp of getting older. As subjective time passes by more quickly, entropy is getting more of my attention than when I was younger and a day felt long. It's possible my perception that tools are engineered to the brink of functioning by a thread is survivorship bias. All the old tools that are still trucking are just the ones that survived. No way to know for sure, but if some convincingly thrice burned carpenter on reddit makes me think I oughta buy mikita I probably will.
The recommendations aren't bad, they're just overkill. Makita makes great tools, but depending on the tool, cheaper ones are fine for most purposes (cheaper, not cheapest, I've seen too many Ryobi contraptions start smoking for that). Guitars and bicycles are two more I've run into where reddit advice will have you paying much more than you need to. Sometimes it's okay to get the no-brand Amazon version, and sometimes it's very much not. It's a skill to determine which is which.
I do think you're right that average quality has gone down. The MBAs of the world work hard to make their products function till the last day of the warranty and not a second longer, and that's a relatively recent business philosophy.
Right, and that reason is because there is a market for testing tool waters to see if it is a tool that you even need. Often you cannot truly appreciate if a tool is a tool you should have before trying it. You can read testimonials from other people all day, every day, but until it is actually in your hand...
So, hypothetically, do you buy the $100 version with clear compromise, but good enough to offer some validation, or go for the $1,000 ultimate version from the hop? That's the gamble. If your assumption was right, you're in deep for $1,100, but if your assumption proves wrong, you're only out $100. That's the idea here. When in doubt, try the cheap tool, and when you're still wanting to use it beyond its constraints, you've proven you need the more premium product. If you leave it sitting on the shelf, now you know you don't need the tool at all.
As with all short-soundbite suggestions, it's not meant to apply to all situations. But in the average case, it is likely that you are better off gambling the hypothetical $100 – especially when the undertone is within a hobby context. It is very likely you will discover you didn't really like the hobby anyway. Of course, as always, it is assumed you will still bring your thinking cap to the table. Indeed, there are situations where going straight to the hypothetical $1,000 tool is the right choice, but the saying is merely pointing out that it isn't always the best choice like some people are inclined to believe.
I agree with you. I do think there are different levels of cheap though.
I don’t have the eloquence to quite describe, but it’s the difference between a harbor freight miter saw, a Milwaukee, a Makita,(their 12 in. Dual-Bevel Sliding Compound Miter Saw, is amazing, but I still use my harbor freight dual bevel as well with a different blade for more construction ish stuff vs trim work / precision ish), and a festool.
My father drives me insane with this. He buys these $1 can openers that break every 3-9 months. He thinks I’m insane for paying $10-$20 for a can opener that has now lasted me 9+ years.
I probably would have been okay with a $5-7 one.
More succinctly : the cheap
One is cheap for a reason. But that doesn’t mean you need the most expensive. Usually the cheap tools end up being more in the long run. (Breakage, poor quality output, time, material usage….)
When I first got a 10 inch table saw, I couldn’t believe how easy things were: setting the fence, cutting hard wood, depth adjustments were so much faster. But I still have my 8 inch craftsman I paid $5 for at a yard sale 20 years ago, and it’s not bad.
I'm not advocating for running out and filling your shop with boutique tools by any stretch. Mid-market brands like Dewalt are perfectly serviceable without incurring all of the safety issues that harbor freight brands are notorious for.
Harbor Freight is interesting to me, many of their items I won’t buy due to the quality, but certain other things tend to be excellent. However, I have noticed a trend where HF has started to have a few genuine quality offerings - but the price differential from a name brand shrinks drastically.
Example: their Hercules dual bevel miter saw- $349.99
A mostly comparable dewalt is $399.99.
(The dewalt is better in my opinion even because of how the detent overide and adjustment works, not to mention more positive stops )
An example of a gem however is their $50 electric planer. I own an older version of it. I don’t think it’s particularly great as your only / primary electric hand planer(except in a pinch), but the ability to use it roughly / places / ways that would damage a better planer.
(Example, planing an old door while still mounted, or leveling a floor with luan ply, and planing areas that have adhesive, small nails, debris…)
Yeah idk, a lot is going to have to change with their offerings before I'd ever consider shopping there again. After first hand encounters with overheating issues with motor tools to weird shit like angle grinders with 2x the normal RPM and zero torque, abrasive disks that delaminate and fly all to hell under normal use, chain falls with chains so short the unit is functionally useless, leaky jacks, and incorrectly heat treated hand tools, I got tired of playing roulette.
Cheap tools are usually adequate to judge whether this is a type of tool you need and will frequently use... and cheap tools may be adequate to meet your entire need.
I frequently buy cheap tools while I am learning about whether I need a "real" one and which one I should then select. I would suggest other people do so, too.
I actually got a cheap Chinese chainsaw for some light work around the countryside, it cost me about 80 EUR and performs adequately for the task at hand.
So then I bought another one of the same variety, with the expectation that once this (or the other one) dies, it can be cannibalized for spare parts if need be AND I won’t have to stop in the middle of doing something, cause of the backup.
It’s much the same for me when buying mechanical keyboards, computer mice, HDDs/SSDs or other technology too. My current CPU is on AM4 because I have the old one as a backup and a spare motherboard too.
What can I say, I like having backups and being reasonably frugal: e.g. getting a mid range phone since I don’t need fancy features and if anything happens to it it won’t be a big financial hit to replace (or use any old one for a bit, until the new one arrives, since none receive software updates for that many years).
Part of the problem is that expensive tools are not usually expensive for a reason. Till you work with the cheaper one a bit you don't even know what you want from the expensive tool and can easily buy a "cheap" tool at a high dollar cost.
Another side of that idea is that you often don't need the more expensive features. My immersion blender is the cheapest thing I could get my grubby little mitts on. It reaches to the bottom of the deepest pot I care to use it with, it's plenty powerful to chop up veggies smoothly, and it doesn't overheat on sustained use. It would not work in a professional kitchen, but I don't run a professional kitchen. Any additional expenditure would have been wasted, and if the item were bigger, were heavier, or had more attachments, those would just represent a waste of space in my house.
The other thing is that I have the "slightly upmarket" immersion blender (Breville) that everyone recommends and mine overheats before finishing a pot of soup. Which made me realize that most people who recommend things (on reddit or anywhere) don't use them enough to have firsthand experience with that thing, they're just repeating what they've heard.
> That is some of the worst advice I've ever heard. Cheap tools are always cheap for a reason.
As a DIY person with a garage filled with every type of tool imaginable, that is some of the best advice that can be given: buy cheap tools, but expensiver tools if it breaks.
IME, most people don't use the cheap tool enough to break it.
As a contractor who makes a living off his tools daily your read-through is one of the reasons why I know so many people with permanent eye injuries from buying shitty hammers. Cheap tools are dangerous.
Yep. And cheap tools are bad in more ways than life expectancy.
Cheap knives can’t hold an edge. Cheap laptops are slow, have bad battery life and crash. Cheap microphones make your speech more tiring to listen to. And so on.
> A soundbar doesn't have any of those problems, is usually the cheaper option, and still sounds much better than built-in speakers.
The specific problem here seems to be that soundbars have gone actively backward over time.
I had an old JBL soundbar whose only issue was that it had no Bluetooth security. This meant that someone in the apartment complex would randomly connect to it and blast us with 900 decibels of whatever they were watching--generally at 7:30AM.
So, we went searching for a replacement. We must have listened to every soundbar available at retail.
They were all expensive and all sucked--none of them were better than that 10 year old JBL.
Eventually we opted for a sound system that was not particularly cheap. And my wife still complains that it doesn't sound any better than the old soundbar we replaced. And she is correct.
Alas, no. You couldn't disable Bluetooth completely. As soon as it "woke up" from any "sleep", Bluetooth would always reenable itself even though I always had the optic fibre cable plugged in.
Probably the only thing I could have done was cover it in aluminum foil. I thought about just opening it up and tearing out the antenna, but the casing was an injection molded piece with integrated clips. It would break on opening and not be possible to put back together.
A friend recently asked for budget speaker recommendations and was leaning toward a soundbar. I helped research; I'm a big fan of checking enthusiast communities for product guides, perhaps in part because I maintain one for flashlights. I came across the same advice to avoid soundbars and ended up with a list of powered speakers instead. That's no more complicated to hook up than a soundbar, and my friend was extremely satisfied with the speakers.
I think they probably wouldn't have been as satisfied with a similarly priced soundbar. It's not because the soundbar couldn't be as good, but in practice usually wouldn't be. The intended audience isn't as discerning, so products don't have to be as good to sell well.
The trick with enthusiast recommendations is to limit scope creep if you're not trying to become a hobbyist yourself. Don't get talked into a complex audio system or a flashlight with fan cooling and 80000 lumens when your needs are basic, but do get the $80 powered speakers and the 18650-powered flashlight with USB charging.
That's in r/Soundbars, which is naturally rather favorable. The outright dismissals I've run into come from the much larger r/hometheater, which is also the source of most TV audio buying guides.
it absolutely doesn’t, the common reddit recommendation is to just get edifier r1280dbs and a sub, and you’ll outperform most soundbar systems that cost even 2x as much.
But can you tell? I cannot tell many of these when I hear them in the piano tuning context (I've tried and given up). But I can hear how much better the piano sounds after all that is done.
Then again, pianos are a bad compromise. There is no way to have octaves and fifths on the same piano, much less thirds (both major and minor). We learn to live with it, but it isn't right, for simple pieces you can tune a piano for that exact song and make it sound much better - but if you get much more complex than "mary had a little lamb" you run into a conflict and some key will need to be two different notes.
> We learn to live with it, but it isn't right, for simple pieces you can tune a piano for that exact song and make it sound much better
"Better" is always relative, so it's often more correct to say it is/sounds "different".
For example, a true temperament guitar can sound weird/"wrong" to some people. A lot of folks are used to those compromises just being part of the sound. Similar to a "honky tonk" piano: if you tuned it differently, it would come across as a timbre change more than simply "better" tuning.
In the grand scheme of things, there are professions and arts that were once considered essential to everyday life and in ways that we today don't even consider. The profession is lost to time, but so is the need. It's the in-between transitional state, where the profession is in the process of dying, that is the most painful period.
Some day, the last note played on a piano will be played and lament for the piano tuner will die with it.
In the case of stringed instruments, equal temperament isn't the only compromise; there is also stretched tuning, which seeks to match the harmonics (rather than the fundamentals) of harmonically related strings to one another (in a mechanical system where the harmonics are neither perfect integer ratios of the fundamental nor constant ratios across all of the strings).
There's stuff on the edge, though-- like there was a post here a few days ago, where the commenter was talking about deploying monitoring and measurement into workplaces and finding lots of stuff wrong, and everyone panicking.
On the one hand, panicking is unproductive: nothing is worse than it was last week.
On the other hand, finding out that a whole lot of infrastructure that was supposed to make your business better, actually isn't doing its job, is still significant. If your e-mail campaigns weren't clickable, and you lost a bunch of business but never noticed, you still lost a bunch of business. It still required uncommon discernment to even notice, but the impact was unquestionable.
> finding out that a whole lot of infrastructure that was supposed to make your business better, actually isn't doing its job, is still significant.
Yes, in many contexts discernment matters. More broadly, being able to tell the difference in quality or performance is relevant when you've spent more time/money/effort to have a better result. Even if "no one could tell and it was fine anyway", then you could have saved that time/money/effort and put those resources to better use.
I think about this when cooking. There are 1000 variables like ingredient choice, prep methods, spices used, cook time. Changing one produces an effect too small for me to discern. But when I make suboptimal choices on 20 different variables, they stack up to produce a dish that's noticeably worse. :( How can I do science and improve my skills when I can't observe the difference changing one dimension makes!?
> How can I do science and improve my skills when I can't observe the difference changing one dimension makes!?
The classic answer to this is you need to improve your capacity to measure. Ie, taste ingredients and things constantly and learn with your mouth how the taste of your tomato will translate into the taste of your curry.
Just like the soloist and piano tuner in this story, subtle discernment is a huge part of expertise.
It also appears to ignore the fact that pianos had to be invented. The “best” had to be discovered and learned, and can be learned again in the future, even if the present chain of knowledge dies out. Or, not beholden to the past, future generations might determine/discover a new “best”.
> The “best” had to be discovered and learned, and can be learned again in the future
Only if the conditions required for re-discovery occur in the future. Those conditions may include things like a thriving world market in high-performance acoustic pianos, the need to have only the best pianos played at court, the need for one king to be or appear wealthier than another king etc. Acoustic pianos may never be that important to humanity again, so it's not clear we'll recover all information we gained when they were.
Archeologists often try to reconstruct ancient practices. Although modern humans have the advantage of a much larger basis of knowledge, it's not always trivial nor even always possible to reconstruct old ideas.
Learning is a feedback loop process. Whether you can recover knowledge depends on how successfully you can replicate the feedback loop. And that depends on ambient factors.
Yes, and that's common knowledge among most musicians nowadays. Sure, it's hard to be a musician -- amateur or professional -- and not also be an enthusiast. And I don't think very many violinists would turn down a chance to try a Strad, or at least hold it and look at it.
There's still an open question about whether the new fiddles are better, or that the old ones are deteriorating, or both.
Disclosure: Working double bassist. And don't get me started about bows. ;-)
I play French. I played cello as a kid, and when I started bass lessons in college, my teacher played German but told me there was no reason for me to switch. Most teachers have a preference but can teach either one. I've seen great bassists play both. There's a slight preference towards German for adult beginners because the learning curve isn't as steep.
Which Stradivarius? He made many, some better than others. Also, which modern violin - there are many makers who make theirs sound different, and of course each violin from the same maker will have their own sound.
But to get back on topic I’m not sure I get how wine is the same.
Wine is a product with large taste variations between the different regions and vine varieties. Plus depending of the year you will again have variations in the grapes which can be more or less balanced during the fabrication.
Some producers are known to have produced particularly great wine some specific years which lead to say bottles being very expensive but most of it is very much fact based.
The only dubious thing I see in wine is that the way aging changes the taste of a bottle is not an improvement indefinitely. At some point the wine just gets worst and the search for very old bottle is mostly posturing.
Deeply check out the story of Steinway if you respect their instruments.
It's not publicized but there was a documentary about how they almost lost far too much of their raw abilities gained since the 19th century when it comes to institutional knowledge which had always been essential to the way they had made pianos in a less-then-fully documented way, that had been passed on through generations.
Most likely some of the most talented builders at earlier times were not very literate with paperwork anyway.
The modern company dropped the ball for quite a while through attrition, until an urgent effort was undertaken to preserve what they had and uncover any little tidbits that were inadvertently lost. A lot of careful measurements were taken like never before, and documentation produced.
I doubt if the pianos are the same, but don't think I would be able to tell the difference either.
This page has some excellent little videos itself:
I think there is a Jean shepherd story about his apprenticeship spent in a harp or piano factory. I think the arc is he started out lost and hating it, finally started to like it and then they chose to keep the other kid they hired.
> "The “best” had to be discovered and learned, and can be learned again in the future, even if the present chain of knowledge dies out."
If the Boeing Effect is anything to go by, I don't think that assumption can hold in the short/medium term. Yes, maybe a century from now we'd have some set of pressures and alignment of various incentives such that we rebuild/rediscover this lost knowledge. But it'll be bleak until then, and we can't rely on it to happen in our generation.
But I'd go further and argue it's deeper. Sometimes it's not just about any one single "node" being lost. The network of nodes and the unique connections and weights between them will forever be gone.
To borrow yet another saying/aphorism. "It's much easier to destroy something than to build it."
Maybe? You’re assuming that someone between now and whenever humanity ends will have the time and resources to rediscover it. I’m not sure I’d take that bet.
> X already has been happening and yet life is just fine
The OP doesn't say life isn't fine. He says that if we don't aim for perfection, if art ceases to matter because we cease to truly care, then there's no point. We'll eat shit and reproduce just the same -- but there is no point.
I’m fascinated by mediocrity as an aspiration, understood as optimization resistance and withheld reserves. Mediocrity is slouching towards survival. Mediocrity is pragmatic resistance to totalizing thought. Mediocrity is fat in the system. Mediocrity is playful, foxy improvisation.
I think your point is going to be lost on people who view art as a commodity to be consumed. From that point of view, replacing the artist with a machine can only result in a loss, if the person consuming the art could tell the difference in the first place. If not, then who cares if a machine or a person tuned the piano, etc?
This is such an all-or-nothing thought. We can aim for "better", or even just "good enough", without aiming for absolute perfection or mediocrity, and things will still keep getting better.
His point is excessively perfectionistic at best, to the point of detriment, and at worst... well, it's pedantic.
Not really, he isn’t accounting for variation in skill level in his anecdote. If this piano tuner is just average for his profession, which seems likely, then the piano is still out of tune to the top 20% of discerning musicians, aficionados and expert piano tuners. The problem is there’s only a very small amount of that skill to go around so the majority of concert hall pianos are going to stay imperfectly tuned. The bigger problem is with the author’s assertion that a robotic piano tuner must necessarily be worse than a human. Maybe the currently available electronic tuners are but that they remain so isn’t a given, it’s more likely that they could be better but it would simply cost too much to achieve that level of performance at the moment. With sufficiently cheap electronics and intelligence it may eventually be possible to sell an automatic piano tuner to every piano owner that far exceeds any human’s ability. Is that not a valid way to achieve perfection?
> the majority of concert hall pianos are going to stay imperfectly tuned.
Any "important" concert hall will tune the piano before each concert. If there is no concert for months the piano will sit untuned (but still be practiced on), but a piano tuner is cheap insurance that nothing happened. If there are two concerts on the same day they might or might not tune between them.
Of course there are a lot of "small-town" concert halls where the piano is not tuned as often. Your local high school probably isn't tuning the piano before the concert - even though the piano is moved from the choir room to the stage before the concert which is the most likely way to mess up tuning.
> The pinnacle of human attention cannot be directed at everything, everywhere, all at once. We have to focus our attention on a limited subset of arts and pursuits, where discernment will always be high, and settle everywhere else.
There's 8 billion of us. There's more than enough human attention to go around.
In the words of Stephen Jay Gould, “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
It is not so clear-cut though. There is a hierarchy here that the article misses a bit I think. There will be participants of various awareness level:
1. Members of the audience that do not notice anything at all
2. Members of the audience that only notice it subconsciously, affecting some overall feeling of quality (an analogy would be typography which operates mostly in this realm)
3. Members of the audience that consciously notice that something is off, somewhere
4. The conductor that exactly knows that the piano is off
5. The tuner that exactly knows what and where is wrong with the piano
I think this is the rub with anything subjective ie culture, especially art. Case in point greek sculptures from antiquity. We have known now for a while that they were painted and even know what pigments were used and can go on to create some semblance of what they probably looked like. But I have yet to come across anyone that prefers them to the unpainted versions. [1]
More recently and more zeitgeist, Breakdancing in the olympics. Most people have no idea about breakdancing yet alone how its culture has evolved. Viewed from their lens Australia was a terrible joke easily made fun of, yet to the breaking community Rachael Gunn is a hero and being defended. [2]
2 is disingenuous IMO. The olympics is an athletic competition. There are objective winners and losers. Breaking as an olympic sport is an athletic competition.
It's a totally different thing than breaking as creative expression. There's nothing wrong with being confidently goofy at a party, sure, but if breaking wants to remain a method of expression and nothing else, it shouldn't be in the olympics. Otherwise it's fair to be puzzled (and amused) that a subpar athlete reached that level of competition.
You're under representing the sadness of lost artistry. For example, there is a marked degradation in the quality of fine art between the late classical period and the early medieval period. Civilization in a large region of Europe lost skills for centuries.
We as a society don't want to lose artistry that was painstakingly developed - there's no guarantee it will ever be developed to that level of sophistication again. I don't want future generations to look at my generation as we do the dark ages.
I think it's easy right now to think that progress is guaranteed or the opposite - that it's impossible to achieve. As population levels out civilization will need to become more about archiving what we know than pushing the envelope but no one wants to lose information.
Based on what? You'd have to have somebody who could compare the past to the current state to establish a delta (or lack of one) and make that assertion.
Consciousness, downgraded due to cultural conditioning.
For example: sometimes climate change is a huge deal, other times it is just fine. Consciousness (2024) seems unable to (try to) be consistent, it's like it lacks an index or logic processor or something. Maybe there's a startup idea here somehow.
What if when climate change isn't a big deal you have the equivalent of a person using a free app with ads to tune your piano reporting to you, and when climate change is a big deal you have that piano repairman that can hit a key and tell you the string is rusted when struck too hard from experience.
...and then each post links to other articles on the internet in an exercise to reveal which of the two of us has more genuine competence in this domain.
I am highly confident that I would be the victor in such a contest. Can you think of any games where you could outperform me, Surely Highly Rational In Fact Human?
I’m not 100% sure but I read that part as a little bit of a joke? Like in the context of the story, the author had just describe the fact that the piano sounded only a little better, they thought, during the concert. Possibly the difference was imperceptible to most of the crowd.
So I think chucking the Earth into the sun is intentionally being over-dramatic.
Actually I think ending it on a joke was not the best move, because it does muddle things a bit. The stakes are not so high but it does matter. The piano was not bad enough for the audience to notice, but it was bad enough for the player to notice. If it is bad enough to bother the person using it, it is bad enough to matter.
I mean, if the player is self-criticizing like most elite people do, they probably play better if they know everything, even the little stuff that the audience barely notices, is going right.
That is a reflection on the types of tool a good craftsman uses.
While a good craftsman can use some bad tools to good results, they almost always use good tools (not using good tools is often done to prove a point).
I think it's simpler than that - it's just repetition and practice. Even if we lose a skill, we can learn it again. And IMO very quickly - if the author of the article practiced tuning pianos for a few hundred hours, he would quickly discover how is his skill increasing.
Also is it worth it. We know longer know how to make a saturn-V rocket like what took us to the moon. We could figure it out, but we have much better technology and so if you want a rocket like that it is better to start from scratch at this point. (it probably would be cheaper as well once you adjust for inflation, but for sure better. Faster depends on your budget, NASA paid a lot of speed in the saturn-V program)
There's anyway, at the moment, more people that are more discerning. Maybe not for tuning your cheap upright piano, but it's pretty likely there's more concert halls with more amazing grand pianos than there ever was before.
And even on things that impact us, we can't be experts.
The roofers did a shit job, but it looked so professionally done and I paid them well. Six months later the roof started to leak, by that time they were gone... The contractors widened the doorway but didn't bother checking the house plan and the load was incorrect, the structural engineer had a heart attack looking at that.
Maybe I don't want parallel minor 7th intervals on the piano to exhibit gradually changing beats among the harmonics, in proportion to the frequency. Maybe pianos don't need to be same to that extent.
Pianos should not have that - a piano should have a minor 7th that doesn't beat at all. However if you play the key tuned as a perfect minor 7th and use it as the root note for a standard major chord (root-third-fifth) it will sound terrible as the intervals will not even be close. Your choice is have hundreds of keys on the piano so that when you want the chord you select the exact perfect pitch you want (called just intonation), or we have to compromise the tuning of the piano somehow so we can get by with just 88 keys. We have chosen to stick with 88 keys and then use equal-temperment as a compromise so that the key we use for a minor 7th also sounds okay when used as the root note in a regular major chord. The piano overall sounds much worse than perfect, but it is an acceptable compromise. there are other compromises that people sometimes argue are better, whole books have been written on the subject.
I don't think that's what the article is talking about: differences between perfect minor 7ths and equal-temperament ones. Rather, the tuner in question basically has already nailed the equal-temperament minor sevenths already (as far as you or I might think) and is just listening for beats among their harmonics now, so that when a run of parallel minor sevenths is played, the frequency of the beats among the harmonics rises in proportion to the frequency of the chord, like speeding up a recording.
> The problem with this line of thinking -- "If X happens then we'll all be cooked!" -- is that it ignores the fact that X already has been happening and yet life is just fine.
We sure as hell are cooked, son, we just ain't stopped movin' yet.
> The space of possible subjects is huge, so on average your discernment is terrible, relative to what it could be. This is a serious problem if you create a machine that does everyone's job for them.
It's a problem if you're building systems as a dilettante. There are enough individuals on the planet that people can specialize so we need not be at the mercy of systems built by people of average discernment.
> If their art dies out, maybe nobody will know how bad all the pianos are. And then we'll all have slightly worse pianos than we would otherwise have. And I mean if that's the way things are going to go, then let's just steer the Earth into the Sun, because what's the point of any of this.
One counterexample to this viewpoint is Damascus steel. The exact art of making it has been lost (although now effectively reproduced), but modern steels surpass the qualities that made Damascus steel prized. It turns out those ancient masters didn't know bad their steel was. Maybe modern piano tuners don't know how bad their technique is, once the process of "finessing how the overtones interact with each other" has been thoroughly characterized by present or future technology.
I thought that it was precisely because ancient masters knew how poor their steel was that Damascus even became a thing. Is that not correct? I have always read that it was a technique to overcome bad base metal.
Pretty much. We know how it was produced, but we have better steel available and so nobody is willing to go through that much work to produce an inferior product. If you want a good sword you start with good modern steel and treat it like the book says - which includes give it as little time in the furnace as you can get by while shaping it. If you want a sword that looks pretty you can cheat to apply decorations that look like Damascus from a distance and that is good enough (you might or might not start with good steel, but if you do it is better than a real Damascus sword). Nobody has the patience to do things the old way as there is no advantage to it.
If the old way actually had advantages someone would do it. In the case of Damascus we have enough science to know it wasn't as good. There are other areas where people to go through the effort to create something the old way - either it isn't much more work (it may be more work, just not too much more), or the old way is somehow better.
Remind me of the florida keys syndrom where each generation think it's a great fishing spot but doesn't have a frame of reference for how much the fishes actually became less numerous and smaller:
I get this feeling a lot when reading old books. People used to be…more interesting? Or at least there were more interesting places like Paris in the 20s. Today the “artistic” hubs in the world feel boring compared to NYC in the 80s or Paris circa 1890-1930, but you wouldn’t know it if you didn’t read the older books.
Because we are more socially interconnected, so the strings of society that keep us connected are also the ones constraining us. The "risk" of non-uniformity outweighs the gain for most people.
Back then, doing something that society deemes risky/provocative/condemns, as an artist, a musician, a politician would be seen or heard only by the people present, everyone else would have second or third hand accounts of it, and that would be maybe tomorrow, maybe the week after, maybe the month after.
You could get drunk in a tavern, get in a brawl and paint the owner's wife posing as a nude boar. The people who would know about it first hand would be only the people who directly saw it. Your boss wouldn't hear about it unless he is in direct contact with the people there, which would be rare.
Nowadays, getting in a brawl would end up with someone calling the cops immediately, someone posting it on instagram, someone calling your job to get you fired with probably a dozen articles next day "drunken fool fights local bar owner after insulting his wife".
These social constraints, the speed of information and the interconnectedness of it all is constraining us into uniformity, as behaviour against the graph is more and more ostracised - unless you have enough social capital to afford it, at which point it is rewarded.
So of course we are less interesting - we are being forced into uniformity.
it's material and political. the most interesting people have enough resources to focus on non-survival tasks, and the individual or collective ability to act freely. today, people generally have higher expenses, less free time, and there are more cops. you'll still see interesting culture among
1. cities where living expenses are generally high, so discretionary spending is low, but a subculture has successfully secured low-cost housing or workspace somewhere the cops can't easily go.
2. rural areas where wages are generally low, so discretionary spending is low, but a subculture has successfully exploited region-exclusive exports or experiences somewhere the cops don't bother to go.
3. wealthy people
4. indigenous people that have resisted the incursion of wage labor and state power
All three statements are manifestly true. I'd only add that free time is bi-modal; under- and over-employed with few people (in the USA) having "just right" work-life balances.
The role of alcohol, drugs, and other mind-altering substances in history can't be ignored. A lot of these fascinating people were intentionally and unintentionally drugging themselves.
Clay Shirky argued in Cognitive Surplus that excessive gin consumption was because those people were bored. It stopped when their job opportunities opened up.
IIRC, he was optimistic that media consumption would similarly dry up once people had more compelling options.
That's just a property of the fact that the interesting people all know each other and the uninteresting people don't know them. In some sense, Sam Altman, Emmett Shear, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Paul Graham, Elon Musk, John Carmack are in a shared sphere. And they are interesting whether you think they are smart or not.
You don't hear about John-Pierre Duvage from the coffee shop because he wasn't interesting. In the future, they will talk about the places where these people met.
Groupies always wonder where the musicians are. The musicians find each other easily.
Those people you mentioned are interesting and intelligent but I wouldn’t call them artistic, or diverse intellectually. And more importantly they aren’t “a scene”, in a physical place, like Paris or lower Manhattan were.
Their sphere almost certainly include the rest that those outside barely know of. For every well-known Aella in the group, there is someone more strange and esoteric with local influence only within. The strange and interesting are never as legible to their contemporaries as they are to those who come after because one's influence is only clear after one has sufficiently influenced.
A thing that strikes me is that people in the Bay Area frequently claim that it has nothing interesting, but my friends hosted a 30-person event locally that had musical compositions, art, and talks about all sorts of things. A local festival. No one outside us knew. I suspect that, like us, there are numerous groups of people out there and that this sort of stuff is common. Only those with breakout ideas make it out, but the groups themselves comprise individuals who, if you teased out their tales, would make good stories.
If my friend groups span libertarian billionaire techies and union working-class ironworkers, I must assume that the rest of these groups are similarly diverse.
For my part, I have found the Bay Area a fascinating place full of fascinating people. I am thankful to have found my way here. Sometimes I think not even Moll Flanders has lived more exciting a life than many of those I have met here.
Although this article doesn't make the point explicitly, this is really about how we can't discern right tails. The Olympics nicely illustrate this. In most cases we can only tell which of these world class athletes are best by having them perform side-by-side. But otherwise who can tell by eye if an athlete is top 100 or top 10 worldwide? Even good chess players can't tell by the moves alone what the Elo rating of more skilled players are.
We don't know how bad things are is one way to put it. Another way is that there are people of extraordinary ability, walking among us mere mortals.
I've played this game called Heroes of the Storm for many thousands of hours and I still struggle to identify a player's skill level. The only time I'm certain that I'm playing against a Grand Master-tier opponent is when the match-up allows for a lot of counter-play, these players manage to make you feel incredibly frustrated at every opportunity. It's also one of the best ways to learn, because it teaches you what kind of behavior is allowed and possible, and how to punish your opponent for their mistakes.
In games with elo ratings the skill level is quite clear. If I play vs a GrandMaster then I will lose 99% of the time. I can watch the replay and see what he does better, but even then I will probably understand just a part.
It's not as clear in a team based game, since draft and teamwork both play a large role in the match outcome. Many lower ranked players are often very skilled at micro but fail to macro correctly.
There are streamers that do seasonal Bronze to GM runs, and sometimes viewers will accuse someone of being a smurf because of how well they're playing. But then after the match their profile gets checked and it turns out they're actually playing in their correct rank, and they just got a very lucky draft and overall game.
Finally, even if you're playing vs a GM they might not be playing their main role / heroes, or going the most optimally tryhard builds. Even if someone has the core fundamentals correct, mastering a hero and learning all of their interactions perfectly could take dozens to hundreds of games.
An example from another game: in Brood War there was a time where the most legendary player, Flash, held two of the top 10 spots in the ranked ladder; once for Terran (his main race) and once for Protoss (his second best race). But while his Zerg is also very good, he's not a top 10 in the world player of that race.
Humans can't analyze chess exhaustively. We do so largely by pattern recognition. As a result, we mostly cannot accurately analyze the chess of players who are significantly stronger than we are.
In other words, when a human says "this is a good position for white" or "that was a good move" (roughly equivalent to saying "that move leads to a good position"), we do so not by checking every possible sequence of moves (which would require analyzing billions of possible continuations) and ensuring that all of them are good. We instead do so by intuition - we assess what the position looks like in comparison to positions we've analyzed before that we know lead to a win for one player or the other. As a concrete example: if we see connected passed pawns for white, we're probably going to say white is winning, unless mentally we can find a continuation where black is able to capture them or blockade them.
So all it takes for a chess position to be good without a human being able to tell, is for there to exist some sequence of moves that leads to a different result from what we expected, and we are unable to find that sequence. In the example above, a human would wrongly conclude that white is winning if there actually does exist some deep and complicated series of moves black can play to permanently blockade the connected passers.
You see this most commonly with chess engines (i.e. chess AI). The engine will make a move, or suggest a move, and the human (who may even be one the top players in the world) raises their eyebrow. Why, because the move visually seems to make no sense and/or serve no purpose. The engine is making that move based on some billion-position analysis it performed, that the human just isn't capable of. Only after the engine ultimately wins the game, does the human go back and start to get a sense of what the purpose of that strange-looking move was.
It's not an argument at all, it's just an explanation based on my experience playing and studying chess. My purpose was not really to argue or debate.
If you're -curious- about why weaker players can't accurately analyze the chess of strong players, I've laid out for you why that's the case.
On the other hand, if you're -skeptical- that weaker players cannot do this, I'd encourage you to do your own research on the topic and highlight where you believe I've stated something false.
> The Olympics nicely illustrate this. In most cases we can only tell which of these world class athletes are best by having them perform side-by-side.
Maybe for the judging events. Race vents have times. You can google how fast someone has run or swam before.
Over time this is likely true, but the reality of the top-end of sport is that tiny differences in tracks/environments have a big impact. So if your goal is to find the best out of a group of people at a point in time, I’d suggest the only fair way to do it is to pit them against each other at the same event.
For an example of this, see how the Paris Olympic pool was considered a slow pool due to its depth. Or how wind impacts running times, and can’t always be fairly accounted for (e.g. gusts).
There’s also the phenomenon where athletes perform better when competing against someone vs competing by themselves.
I showed my wife (who runs a riding academy) a picture of a pretty Chinese girl holding a horse somewhere near the mountains in the West of China and the first thing she noticed was that they'd put the halter on wrong.
I was impressed with how AIs would draw individual stitches on clothes but a seamstress friend of mine shook her head and pointed out how they also got it wrong.
I don't really know anatomy but I'm exposed to anatomy through dance and body work a fair amount. It's not just the fingers but any part of the bodies that AI draws that look wrong to me - if I look carefully.
I don't think you necessarily need to be an expert to see the multiple wrongnesses of AI images. It's just that AI images don't signal people to look more closely. (and a lot of popular illustration has bad anatomy and people excuse that).
And broadly, I think the division between experts and non-experts in the "telling things are wrong" department is over-emphasized by focus-example chosen in the article. The production of pop-songs, for example, is an area where an expert can make a song more appealing to the average person (objectively verifiable: they create top-ten hits). So the average person can tell a song is well/badly produced when they aren't an expert who can produce songs.
You can't learn to be a good figure artist by looking at flat images, you have to study anatomy, look at skeletons, learn the names of major and minor muscles and otherwise know what's inside. 3-d animated characters in games are good because this knowledge is baked into them.
I spent a really limited amount of time in stalls (mainly because my sister was really into horses and sometimes they let me ride the small ones) but I seem to recall at one point someone talking about halters and how both people and horses have different preferences for how it should be put on, and it also depends on the style/type of halter. Maybe I misremember completely, but doesn't feel too out of place that they'd have different preferences and ways of doing things if you're comparing Eastern ways and Western ways.
Yeah, and even no halter. No offense to the parent commenter, but things like dressage are driven by defining "right" and "wrong", in order to create an in-group and out-group, and not necessarily to create better riders. You can ride a horse bare back, and in some cases, it really is better than with a saddle (and other accoutrement).
We’ve already lost a tremendous amount of craft over the last 1,000 years. There are almost no craftspeople left in the world who can do the kind of moldings & designs you see in renaissance era buildings.
Having been a classical musician, what I noticed about getting tuning right is there is a body sensation of lightness/breath that is palpable if you are a classical enthusiast - even if you can’t distinguish the sound you are hearing from an “ideal memory” of what it should sound like.
But the largest reduction in auditory tech has already happened - mp3 compression.
Uncompressed audio is radically different and richer than low fi digital compression, but almost everything we hear everywhere is coming through streaming services.
The rare delights of extreme tech built around the first principles of a discipline like sound/music are achieved by overcoming very difficult and confounding problems. They are technical wonders as much as they are refined experiences.
I once worked with a scientist who had permanently solved the issue of mic feedback. Imagine what revolution that would be for AV use cases everywhere! But it required a radical shift in the protocols used to build both mic and speakers, so even though Sony optioned it there’s not a single product you can buy with the tech.
Like the Internet, everything is really just a semi-poor adaptation to a semi-poorly design system. Fundamental protocol changes (like ipv4 to ipv6) are brutally hard.
We like to believe that modern society is hard-wired for improvement, but it seems mostly hard-wired for minimal change that delivers marginal improvements detectable by the lowest common denominator consumer/user.
To me, that makes it all the more extraordinary when genuine protocol level changes - like EV cars - are made reality.
> Uncompressed audio is radically different and richer than low fi digital compression, but almost everything we hear everywhere is coming through streaming services.
Out of curiosity, have you blind A/B tested yourself with the various streaming service "high" quality MP3 encodings vs. lossless? (like https://abx.digitalfeed.net/) I agree that there is some difference that you can hear in certain parts of songs listening on high-end equipment/headphones (stuff that is greater quality than >99.9% of the listening population has), but really to me it would be hard to call it radically different. Obviously if you are below 320 MP3s there are more noticeable compromises that do ruin things one you notice.
You are probably right, but I take OP as metaphorically speaking.
Recently I went to a local orchestra performance, and I was absolutely blown away by the sound. It was overwhelming in a way spotify never is. It was like a full body experience. I’ve been to the orchestra before, but it’s been a few years and I just forgot how powerful music can be.
Kinda like how most people listen to low quality audio streams, on low quality earbuds/soundbars. Hell, I torrented a video recently because it wasn’t available to buy, and again, was blown away because the quality was so high compared to the streaming I pay for. I think in general, we’re all just becoming used to the mediocre.
Well, it's important to differentiate what actually matters in cases like this otherwise we just get into a weird luddite place of complaining about things that don't actually matter.
Here it is the listening medium and environment where an orchestra hall is a physical building built at a cost many orders of magnitude more expensive than speakers specifically for the experience of listening to live music compared to listening to something on a home speaker or phone.
To me It's interesting that you assume Spotify is the problem, whereas its actually the listening medium you are using Spotify through. In the case of audio, you could listen to Spotify recordings on sound systems that will basically blow you away in the same way a live orchestra will, but they cost probably 10's of thousands of dollars. For example at the higher-end of setups people describe it being hard to differentiate between concert recordings and actual concerts, and this should be expected with what we know about audio.
I do agree though that quality degradation as a means of meeting cost and false-repackaging of that as higher quality is annoying. Especially in streaming video, things are advertised as 4K, but that ignores bitrate and we have the potential infrastructure to deliver experiences that are way better like streaming the equivalent bitrate of a Bluray, but we've kind of fallen into a place of "good enough" where most people don't know or appreciate what is possible. Audio is kind of similar, but there is maybe more of an argument that cost of listening systems means we're at a happy-medium of cost vs. quality and you can pretty much buy the level of experience you want there.
One really, really critical piece of this: our ability to discern quality is predominated by how much quality we've had the opportunity to discern in our lifetimes.
Jeff has eaten at ten thousand restaurants around the world in his lifetime. Nick drinks Soylent for 80% of his calories; the other 20% often comes from McDonalds or Chipotle. They've both eaten at this Bistro you are considering getting dinner at; after asking for their opinion, would you assign more weight to Jeff's or Nick's?
Its true that 99% of the population cannot discern the difference between lossless and ~320kbps lossy audio encoding. Is that truly a "natural" phenomena? Or is it learned through existence in an inevitable world where high quality music and high-quality listening devices aren't available to most people? What impacts does this have as that drop in quality feeds upstream: when producers and musicians make music with Airpods because that's what they grew up with, and its what most of their audience uses?
Music is a less interesting domain of this discussion because, really, most platforms do lossless now. Spotify is adding it soon. Its basically the default on Apple Music and Tidal. AM has genuine multi-channel Dolby Atmos. Extremely high quality music consumption has never been easier or more accessible (well, a 3.5mm jack would be nice, but that's a sailed ship).
IMO: Video is a far, far more tragic loss. Netflix charges more for access to 4K content; but you'd be a fool to pay it, because as many who have streamed both would attest, "4K isn't worth it you can barely tell the difference between 1080p". If you played these same people a Bluray of that release, their minds would be blown. Near-100% of people can discern the difference, and would prefer the Bluray; but Netflix will not stream that quality, because its an order of magnitude more bandwidth usage. What's more: Many recent productions are simply never available in this highest-quality format. Because 99% of content is consumed via Compressed Stream: TV panel quality at the same price point has stagnated or even dropped over the past five years. I hope you'll believe that some major productions may soon have a conversation like "Why do we need these five figure dollar 16k cameras, this is just going to stream on netflix, just grab a basic Sony DSLR from B&H and let's save some money."
How many people would even pay for blu-rays, or blu-ray quality streaming for the average Netflix show?
Probably not even enough to cover the costs of overhead and distribution… this isn’t ‘enshitification’, just revealed preferences of the average Netflix consumer.
The more quality focused streaming consumers use Apple TV or iTunes anyways.
Just in renaissance? There is virtually nobody left in the workforce that can write JavaScript. Most of the old timers have gotten out, and the youngsters are an epic example of the article: the loss of perspective to self-reflect due to a machine (library) that does their jobs for them. Case in point: take React and querySelectors away and watch the sadness unfold like an apocalypse movie.
Yes, yes, I know there are still people who can/do write JavaScript... they just are not statistically represented in the workforce.
Great composers were never "statistically represented in the workforce". Just like rock stars today are not. Yet they still exist, and have a positive impact on the life of many people.
To me, that makes it all the more extraordinary when genuine protocol level changes - like EV cars - are made reality.
Not how I see them at all. They're just as incremental and actually overall a worse experience. The only "benefit" they have is their acceleration.
Everything is touchscreen in the cabin which is demonstrably worse. There's a persistent Internet connection sending all my data to a black hole where it will get used in ways I don't approve of.
If I want to fuck off for a weekend somewhere, I need to plan the getaway around places that have recharge ports. And when I do get there, I need to figure out what a "charging network" is, download the correct app for the charging network, fight with the fucking app/charging port to get my payment information where it needs to be and that the charging port recognizes my payment, and finally wait for several hours vs. a 5 minute (max) refueling stop with an ICE.
And these are just some of the problems I have with them. The core tech of EVs may be a big game-changer but everything else about the EV experience can fuck off in its current iteration.
A lot of people commenting are referring to hobbyist art, like TFA's piano tuning, or audio cables, or sewing equestrian tack.
The point (that the article alludes to but definitely does not spell out) is that, with the advent of general AI, this style of artistry will die in EVERY field if we allow it to; not just art and media, but engineering, technology, policy too.
This to me is a HUGE problem with the introduction of these consumer-ready AIs. You may be able to say "agh I'm an engineer and I wouldn't let this happen in my project!" but some places just want their dang power plants, whether or not they have a host of lifelong nuclear engineering in their region. I worry about a power plant that has a fault when the only true experts are few and far between.
People can learn things when they need to solve problems, forging "expert-enough people" out of otherwise lower-skilled folks with incredible speed. This only happens in the face of problems that need solving, and so far AI seems to be amazing at generating "problems that need solving" by being just good enough to get going but not so good as to solve all the unforeseen or unknown problems you encounter once you are going. I don't think this pattern will result in a world of only upside or purely better solutions than before AI hit the scene, but I also don't feel like it's quite as apocalyptic as many fear.
This is a good point; I agree that it's good that we have a nuanced and realistic (as opposed to pessimistic) view of the situation. As someone else pointed out regarding the Dunning-Kruger effect, the less knowledgeable we are the worse we are at understanding our own level of knowledge. Regarding your comment, not understanding the "unforeseen or unknown problems you encounter once you are going" could be catastrophic in certain fields.
The title is actually what Dunning & Kruger found in their paper. Poor performers have no idea the difference between a poor performance and a good performance. If they knew how bad they were then they could tell the difference between good and bad. And of course, because of how quantiles work, there's going to be 50% of people in the bottom half.
(The classic usage of Dunning-Kruger effect to mean poor performers rate themselves higher than good performers isn't what the paper is about and you're welcome to read it [1])
Even with the most advanced pre-genAI technology, making sounds and images is a manual craft that requires one to develop not just technical skill / tool knowledge, but the concepts to define and articulate what you actually want. Intentionality and vision. The “what you want” becomes more complex and nuanced just as much as the “what you can”, by necessity.
GenAI not only fills in the blanks for “what you want” based on a vague text prompt, with the lowest common denominator of its training data, it provides no means or motive to develop intentionality. In its current form, it’s a cognitive dead end, endlessly providing a statistically smudged shadow of the detailed knowledge and conceptual space that gave birth to the data it was trained on. A picture is worth a thousand words, and today’s cutting edge models still forgot most of them.
It could get better. But it could also stagnate in a very dystopian way if it discourages learning traditional art without becoming a real alternative that continues to produce artists and not just consumers.
These new AI tools have the potential to be more personally comprehensive and have more widespread adoption than slavery and other forms of servitude. The loss of skill (or lack of development) that the parent commenter is referring to has been discussed as widely as Hegel's master-slave dialectic to Idiocracy. Individuals and cultures that use these tools to replace the innate tools they have developed become qualitatively less sophisticated, unless they are pressured by some other external need, or their own self-mastery. I suspect we will have a mix of all these situations across fields and cultures that adopt these new AI tools, and will need to focus on not only making the tools better, but pressuring ourselves to be better (i.e., we replaced physical labor through previous tools, but have only partly accommodated that lack of physical development through gym culture, sports, and more back to the earth activities like hiking- personal transportation being one of the first things to get replaced by new tools like domesticated animals, bikes and cars). If it happens too fast, or we have other catastrophes, we might need to bring back non-military conscription focused on the environment (as in William James's lecture on the Moral Equivalent of War), in order to prop up our nation state and technological culture that it has provided the foundation for.
This is totally true, but the rate of this death has exploded with the advent of computers, and is accelerating as LLMs become more sophisticated.
At the very least, to me it seems like things are finally happening fast enough for humans to notice a trend. I think I read the phrase "faster than generational rate", meaning that things happen at a frequency that we can observe in our lifetimes (advent of computers is faster than generational, but the development of agricultural advances really isn't)
I agree with this, but I also think that while we're not at 100% general AI, we are experiencing a gradual continuous approach towards it. The problems start now, and we have the opportunity to solve them while they're not as serious.
I almost agree with you; I would support that we do not currently have GAI, but I think we are near it, and regardless of how close we are to it, we currently have a lesser version of the same thing, which means a lesser version of the same problem.
If Keith Jarrett can produce such a sublime music as his Köln Concert on a broken piano, perhaps the level of perfection mentioned in the article is just professional pedantry. After all, isn't an artist a better artist when they can use their medium to maximum effect no matter its imperfections.
Very true. My favorite example of this is academia. When you do a MSc everything seems nice and some things feel a bit weird but it is what it is. Then over time you realize how misaligned the incentives are with what is actually useful for the general population. But the whole system is writing with much jargon and emphasizing that they followed all procedures and peer-review. So the population thinks it must be useful, or at least cannot point out why it isn’t.
Hearing things the easy part. The finer you split the hair, the harder it is to actually translate that to a tuning action, with a piano. There are no fine-grained worm gears in the tuning pegs. The pegs are just metal sticks stuck into a hole, prevented from rotating (going flat) by static friction. You cannot adjust them smoothly; when you turn them with the tuning wrench (properly called a "tuning hammer"!) you must overcome static friction to make them move. At that point, they will jump. If you're looking to make a very fine adjustment, it will be almost certainly overshot. So you must do something like jump to a sharper pitch, and from there try to relax it by jumping down to the target pitch. (And that also results in better tuning stability: lower likelihood it will slip.) If the target is very narrowly defined, this can take multiple attempts. The piano has 88 keys, the bulk of which have three strings: have fun!
... but why? sure gears - like on guitars - would be probably too big and wouldn't fit[0], right? (and/or too expensive)
but they could put the knobs on the top of the peg ... the gear could be inside, and as it is rotated it could push out small cams or "break pads" to make a wedge[1], same friction would make sure the pin stays in place and does not rotate, but no need for the hammering.
of course probably because of acoustic this or that having solid pins is "much" better?
The existence of LessWrong does make me want to steer the Earth into the Sun. All that effort supposedly reinventing human dialogue in terms of what is maximally rational and instead you get insights not far above the level of your below average NYT op-ed column.
From a certain distance LessWrong looks like the kind of place that would appeal to someone like me, so in spite of some of the negative characterizations I heard I tried browsing it through the strongest steelman goggles I could find.
The experience mainly left me with a sober respect for Groucho Marx's about not joining clubs that would have me as a member.
I think that place was at the forefront maybe 10-15 years ago and by now it's more a new generation of imitators/cargo-culters of that original vibe, which is not so appropriate to where the discourse has gone today.
Where's the equivalent place of today? The answer is necessarily murky and elusive. When a club gets famous for being the place where all the cool people hang out, it quickly ceases to be that kind of place. Cool places have to filter for the ability/connections to find them.
I would never call LW cool, but I get what you're saying. I think the problem is that its moment has passed. There was only a single moment in human history where people thought that Harry Potter fan fiction could change the world, and however snide that sounds, I don't mean it as an insult. I knew many people who were profoundly impacted by their time in that fandom (and yes, even as it moved away from its roots in fan fiction it was still fundamentally a fandom).
What happened is that the internet changed and fandom changed, and also trends in philosophy for young lonely nerds shifted away from that particular brand of rationality, to places both sunnier and darker. I think if you want to find spaces like that you now have to look either in closed Discord server or more likely offline. Substack certainly does not provide the same kind of community.
> That's one hell of a statement for a place like LessWrong.
Not that I hang out a lot at LessWrong, but it seems like a place for philosophy (and more), from an outsider perspective at least. And nihilism certainly is a perspective some hold within philosophy, so it seems like exactly the right place for a statement like that?
Nihilism is a terminology debate. Running the planet into the sun because the pianos are out of tune is a physics-based policy proposal. You want your civilization to gracefully degrade as it loses value, rationally shedding components that become untenable.
It's likely that at least one person's going to have value up to the very end as your civilization loses resources but still remains rational, something that can't be said if it went into the sun hundreds of years ago.
I doubt that this is what the author intended, but it could be interpreted to refer to human's cultural ability to pay attention to small, seemingly unimportant (if not unseen) details.
Take climate change: most informed people think this is a job for science, this is where we should exert our effort and invest our funds. But this overlooks that individual human opinion and volition plays an absolutely massive role in the problem, at many levels. From where I'm sitting, this problem is not even on science's radar, beyond general complaints about those stupid people who ruin everything (overlooking that it was science that invented the technologies that went on to enable climate change in the first place...but you see, that doesn't count, it is(!) not a part of "the" chain of causality). Metaphysical causality is something else that is basically not on science's radar, or in their Theory of "Everything".
But of course, all of this this is pedantic, and can be safely ignored, or better yet, suppressed.
Huh, maybe I was a little hasty. Looking again, it does seem like a joke.
I still think it’s kinda off. It doesn’t quite land. Like I’m not sure what takeaway they are trying to give. That ambiguity makes it much less funny.
It would have worked better if they connected it to the point about not automating away these skills / expertise with shittier versions, which is a great point and would be nice to end on.
> I'm already seeing this happening in a number of industries (including software development).
Hm, that's a good point.
I see other commenters getting hung up on the idea that "in a world where nobody can tell that a piano is 0.01% out of tune, does it even count as out of tune?"
But that's just a toy example, and though the author already did directly address it, many don't seem to understand the impact. Maybe it helps to put it into other terms.
I can tell when there's problems in software that I couldn't write. Similarly with most systems I interact with. For society to lose the knowledge of making $system perfectly doesn't mean that nobody will ever know, it means everybody who interacts with $system will just be a little bit less happy than they would be otherwise.
Our societal fitness will be reduced because we'll all be a little less happy, a little less healthy, etc. Saying "it doesn't matter if this thing is a little worse and nobody knows how it could be better" is like saying a parasite is fine because you've been living with it for years.
The vast majority of content that entertains people online is just the Nokia Snake Game but for writing or film. Near-zero-value time-wasters. Hard to make it much worse or ruin it when it’s already worth about as much as used tissue paper. That’s also why I don’t relate to concerns about what might happen to the Web without ad revenue—nearly all of what that pays for has nearly zero value and is easily replaced by plentiful other low-value things.
(Yes, I do include this comment among the low-value junk)
That’s an insult to Nokia Snake. Nokia Snake doesn’t have ads, loot boxes, in-app purchases, collectibles, social media integration or any of dozens of other dark pattern that are practically standard in casual games now.
Oh, it’s not shittified, I just mean it’s a way to pass the time that’s basically interchangeable with tons and tons of other ways to pass the time. That’s most of what people do on the Web, and that’s what most of the content’s for. It’s all solitaire (the real card game) or reading the magazines in the doctor’s waiting room. Just something to do.
>I'm already seeing this happening in a number of industries (including software development).
It comes up in all sorts of unexpected places in technology, once things are overly optimized for price often the original better version goes away. Like right now you can't buy a good cassette tape player, because the only ones made now all use the same mechanism that sucks. They stopped making good mechanisms like 20 years ago when people mostly stopped buying cassettes.
There is an alternate explanation. The piano is fine. The soloist is an asshole and likes to make people jump through hoops. The conductor does or doesn't realize this, but either way doesn't want to upset the soloist. The piano tuner knows the piano is fine but doesn't mind getting paid so plays along. The author plays along, unwilling to point out them emperor has no clothes.
Befriend anyone that is working full-time in one of the skilled trades (welding, plumbing, masonry, roofer, etc.) and they will tell you precisely how bad the thing is.
I've worked at companies where the internal vibe among engineering was that the product was shit, but customers loved it. Engineers are looking at parts they know could be better; customers are looking at the competition.
> Just trust the people who have the best discernment.
I don't like that kind of conclusion. For some reason (the context of the article?) it made me think of gold plated digital cables.
It's like the old fairy tale of the princess and the pea [1]. Sometimes when people are complaining about some tiny subtlety that we can't recognize ourselves we think they are a princess. Other times, someone tries to convince us they are a princess by pointing out a subtlety that isn't even there.
There is likely an objective truth about tuning pianos. I am suspicious when someone claims they have a super-power that cannot be replaced.
Gold plating has a practical purpose: anti-corrosion. Selling cables with audiophile shenanigans that aren't based in science (or gains that are microscopic and inconsequential) is where you cross the line into bullshit.
Counterpoint — good-enough technology prevents over-optimization, where we pay too high of a cost for too-marginal gains. It is generally better to reduce the cost of a 98% solution than to maintain the cost of a 99% solution. There will be exceptions for domains that require a 100% solution, but piano tuning is not one of them.
In most cases piano tuners are probably operating within the confines of what’s realistic with regards to cost and time. I mean even in this post they did exactly that. Not sure the point you are making
> 'God's prank on musicians' (where He cruelly rigged the structure of reality such that (3/2)^n!=2^m for any integers n, m but IT'S SO CLOSE CMON MAN)
What exactly is this about? Other than (3/2)^12 being 129.7 which is somewhat close to 2^7 I don't see much other being close.
Also, musician's mathematics are so weird, talking about '11' while there are 12 notes, '5th' while no 5 is involved, ...
The author is mistaken in the details. 12 5ths are stacked in order to get back to the start note (7 octaves higher). They're called "5ths" because they're the fifth scale degree, i.e. 4 diatonic scale (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatonic_scale) notes above the start point (because they start counting at 1), which is an interval of 3 tones and a semitone. With the notes "equally spaced" (according to the logarithm of frequency, because we perceive intervals according to pitch ratio), the semitone becomes equal to exactly half the tone (despite the name, that isn't guaranteed for other tuning systems!) - thus, the interval that we play on an "equal tempered" piano as a "perfect fifth" is 700 "cents" i.e. a frequency ratio of 2^(7/12).
Meanwhile, per music theory going all the way back to the ancient Greeks, this interval ought to be exactly 3/2, which is slightly larger. Contra what was written in the article, these intervals are thus tuned flat from that Pythagorean ideal. The difference is about 2 cents (where a cent is defined as a frequency ratio of 2^(1/1200), effectively). Most people wouldn't be able to hear the difference (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-noticeable_difference#Mus...).
Which is to say: yes, 129.746... might not seem that close to 128, but 1.498... is close enough to 1.5 that it lets us have music that sounds right (if sterile, according to some) in every key.
Other intervals possible in this tuning arrangement (i.e, powers of 2^(1/12)) can approximate other reasonably-consonant intervals with varying accuracy.
3:2 is the perfect fifth. 2:1 is the octave. Hence if you climb (or descend) by perfect fifths you never align with the notes you get if you climb (descend) by octaves.
Look up "just intonation" and "equal temperament" if you are interested. Also "The Well-Tempered Clavier" is highly recommended for listening!
Just a side note: "The Well-Tempered Clavier" is not at all the same as the "Equally Tuned Piano".
Bach was certainly aware of the equal tuning, where all intervals were the same. It had been used on lutes for some centuries. But with harpsichords, and to some extent pipe organs, an equal temperament was not what Bach or his contemporaries wanted - it didn't have a single pure interval!
They are more like ordinals than "math" numbers the way you're thinking. It's the fifth scale degree, not 5 of something.
The 11/12 contradiction, or seven notes in an octave too, is just because it's essentially 1-indexed. Interestingly indian classical music is distantly related through the shared proto-indo-european cultural history but counts it differently. They call the octave the saptak, etymologically related to the "sept" root for seven in romance languages.
There seems to be something missing from the problem statement. If I can choose any integers n, m, then I will just choose n=m=0 which gives a trivial equation.
Doesn't mean that. 2^0 is non-zero. I interpret it to mean that every note must have the same non-zero frequency. In other words, the ratio between any two notes is 2^0 = 1.
It's going to be okay. The wonder of the Internet is that you can create small communities found among the billions that inhabit the Earth. And your communities can create small areas of deep interest. The drive to make something a certain way is built into many of us as humans. It will not break in the face of some degree of standard quality.
As an example of a triviality:
Costco has pens to put your cart in. They also have people going around retrieving carts. They then have a tractor move the carts to where people can take them into the store. Many people leave their carts in the pens. Some do not. The other day, the carts were overflowing from the pen I'd walked to, but I could see the reason was that there were two carts misaligned deep in the pen.
A valid and reasonable thing to do is to have gone to a different pen. Many would have accepted adding my cart to the overflow as well. But a desire for order caused me to realign the carts and solve the overflow. If I had not, nothing much would have gone wrong. Because I did, no greater result was created.
I am paid a large sum of money and any marginal additional time I spend I can create more money (since I work in HFT). The cart wrangler is paid very little. It is not comparatively advantageous. The work was wasted work, in some sense. But I had to do it. I was compelled to do so.
This is a useless thing, but there are people who feel that desire I felt there who will feel it for other things. To make a better-sounding piano, the perfect dish, to master joinery. And things will be good for them and those they serve.
And that is good. And that is enough. Because total utility is the integral of utility across all. And less individual over more participants can sum to higher overall utility.
It only takes a single visit to an old house built around the turn of century to realize that the artistry, craftsmanship, and all of the other skills needed to make such a thing today are incredibly rare.
Everyone seems to think and say that they want some for of AI to arrive and free us from all that grind that is beneath us.
We don't know how different, and how good, things can be until we try.
Until some of us invest in discernment, invest in the art of it, and the rest of us give it a listen or a look.
Some cultures end up adopting the new level of discernment wholesale.
And in some cultures, the refinement slowly slips away and things revert back to the sloppy, lazy, easier-to-sustain base level.
As others have noted, our time and attention are finite. Both as producers and consumers of culture. I care about some things and ignore others, both as a producer and a consumer. We individually and collectively choose which aspects of life get the attention and the love.
Having grown up in the generation of DVDs and Blu-rays I'm cursed with the inability to ignore streaming video compression artifacts such as blocking, banding, and ringing. They alone can get me annoyed enough that it breaks my engagement with the film. Any sort of hiccup from packet loss resulting in complete distortion of the video or buffering sends me into a "fsck this sh!t" rage. It completely ruins the experience for me. That means I will never watch a film that I really care about via streaming.
I don't have a lot of time to watch films these days, so when I do I always opt for a physical disc to make sure I actually enjoy the experience. In addition I've noticed that it often costs $20 to "rent" a new release via streaming and $30 to buy an actual disc, so it doesn't make any financial sense to me at all to "rent" a crap streaming experience for 2/3 of the cost of buying a high-quality copy of the film.
But now there's another problem. I've noticed that many films being released today are streaming-only. One I looked at last week could be "rented" from a streaming service for $20, "bought" from said streaming service for $30, or bought on physical media in JULY 2025. That's right, an entire year from now.
In years past I've frequently made it a habit to head down to the local Target in the late afternoon to see what new releases they have in the electronics department. However the last time I went there the Blu-ray section had been completely removed. No doubt because studios are no longer releasing new films on Blu-ray until a motherfscking YEAR after they make it available on streaming. When I asked an associate where the films were he apologetically stammered, "Uh, yeah, sorry, we're, uh, turning down our film section. There are a few stragglers left at the end of the aisle over there."
Now there is no way for me to legally get a new release film that I can tolerate watching within a reasonable amount of time. I would garner that it's primarily an artifact (no pun intended) of the current generation having grown up with crap streaming videos, and so they are adapted to it and don't have expectations for quality like those of us from the DVD and Blu-ray generation have.
I suppose this is another way it goes to show that knowing how bad most things are and precisely how they're bad is more a curse than a blessing. As I walked out of Target empty-handed I admit I did have a feeling somewhat like wanting the Earth to be steered into the sun.
And then I jumped on VPN and pirated the film I wanted to watch.
For what it's worth, I recently visited a thrift store and I was somewhat surprised to see a sizable DVD/bluray section. I imagine there won't be any new releases there, though.
The part I left out was that I also went to a thrift store and found a couple of used 1080p Blu-rays for older films for around $5 each. There were almost no 4k Blu-rays though, and no new releases.
I'm having a hard time squaring the "don't put this guy out of business because it will become a lost art" with the very real practical goal of "release a digital piano tuner for $2 on the App Store that will make every piano not tuned by this guy-- the ones in school theaters, churches, or sitting rooms, sound better. I can't even imagine what an exorbitant price to a concert hall means but for sure the high school production of Anything Goes can't afford it.
It sounds like you haven't tuned an instrument with many strings.
Tuning one string will change the tuning of the rest.
The tuner might tell you the end state, but not how you get there, and it might not be the right tuning for how the piano will be played or the room it will be played in
I don't think this is the point of the article. In the TL, DR, they allude to the fact that the introduction of general AI into the world will accelerate this, because it will be "$2 app store tuner" on a larger, more intense scale.
Doesn't require much through to extrapolate this to different areas. Sure, it would be sad if the expertise on sewing and clothing construction was lost to automation, but it wouldn't be the end of the world. But every person has a hobby that they would be sad to see lose its complexity and art. It might be catastrophic, though, if the world's nuclear engineers began automating their right-tail knowledge away.
> Your discernment in a subject often improves as you dedicate time and attention to that subject. The space of possible subjects is huge, so on average your discernment is terrible, relative to what it could be. This is a serious problem if you create a machine that does everyone's job for them.
This is the "first level" of expertise. Yes, you will notice this as you delve into more and more areas, but you also find there are a lot of common modes and human patterns that inextricably become part of the subject matter. Having a grasp on this allows you to very quickly get to the intermediate level in most subjects.
Consequently, this is why I dislike modern math's continued fascination with Greek symbols, when Greek or Latin is not taught anymore. It creates an artificial barrier to entry that's very frustrating.
Admittedly.. these days it's much easier. In the 1990s and prior to unicode it was a small nightmare. It's the same issue that Wikipedia still generally uses generated images to display equations, so unless you know the name of the symbol or can type it, you're going to have a hard time finding any reference to it.
I'm not sure I follow. What symbols should be used for variables? Once you run out of all characters in the Latin alphabet, you either use another one or you have to resort to subscripts, hyperscript etc.
Sometimes precision dies, no one cares, and that's ok. There are vanishingly few people who can maintain pipe organs, which is ok because historically speaking relatively few people want to listen to pipe organs anymore.
We can't prioritize everything all the time forever.
"why don't you use a fancy electronic tuner for this, and just have a table to look up the frequencies for each string, and tune it that way?"
"..."
There just aren't tuners fancy enough IMO. Make one with a high resolution spectrogram, I think the piano tuner person would actually appreciate that. So much subtle detail in a spectrogram.
edit: there's a discussion below the essay on some just such very fancy tuners.
Not sure how I feel about this. As the author acknowledged at the end, the piano tuning maybe was "good enough" in the beginning that no one would really notice the difference. What, then, was the point that leads us to say this piano tuner is essential and should not be replaced by something that can get it tuned to the level it was at the start of this essay? Especially considering not many could afford that piano tuner's exorbitant Sunday rate. We shouldn't pretend ROI doesn't matter.
I want to agree with the thesis of the essay, but this anecdote didn't get me there.
To the point of the article, sure, it was good enough, but it could be better, and if we're not striving for the best - if we're not valuing the expertise and practice that allows someone to hear a fractionally out-of-tune piano and recognize it immediately; if we're not valuing the technical expertise to then listen to that piano, recognize all of the tells, and know how to adjust them; if we're not valuing the notion that the piano sounding better is a net good in and of itself - then what's the purpose of us? In the long run, if we're just going to settle for mediocrity, what's the purpose of anything we're doing at all?
Sure, make the device that tunes the piano to the imperfect level it was at the beginning. Better piano tuning is a net good. But recognize the difference between a thousand pianos tuned very well and one perfectly tuned piano, and don't pretend the first is a replacement for the second.
(And, to the obvious point that, like, everyone in this thread is missing: Substitute "piano tuning" for anything you actually value. The point is excellence, not pianos.)
Poor tuning often leads to cascading failures. If an instrument is out of tune it limits your technique because your brain is expecting frequency X but you are hearing frequency Y. To play quickly and accurately you have to be able to trust the instrument.
Tennis players are really particular about how their rackets are strung. While nobody in the crowd will notice an unbalanced racket, the crowd will notice if they hit the ball out. Consistency is important.
You could say the whole point of art, and mastery in it, is to seek something beyond a "pretty good". The pianist could tell the difference and so could the person tuning the piano. Similar to how you can print a copy of a photograph taken of a master's painting, there is a difference between a "pretty good" and "the best".
Yeah, this has shades of "shining your shoes for the fat lady" to borrow a Salinger reference, and I understand that within the context of performance, but maybe I expect this to generalize farther than it does. There are many domains where a low cost, good enough solution is better. Not everyone can afford a piano tuner's exorbitant Sunday fee...
If we are going to bring cost into it, then digital pianos are superior in term of tuning (one might argue about other aspects of sound and feel). Same tuning every time, no adjustment needed.
>If we are going to bring cost into it, then digital pianos are superior in term of tuning (one might argue about other aspects of sound and feel). Same tuning every time, no adjustment needed.
I think they tune them slightly differently depending on what's going to be played. But I suppose a master pianist could have a whole database of their preferences saved up or something.
I bought a Kawai ca99 digital piano three years ago.
The feel is great. The simulated sound is pretty damn good, with a lot of attention to harmonics produced by undamped strings.
The built-in speakers do however quickly reach their limit when played at high volume and distortion artifacts can be annoying.
I'm not a professional pianist. I tried a few pianos both digital and some vertical pianos and I have to say that this one is the best instrument I have played so far.
I think with piano tuning, or anything that is historical and physical and analogue and has status, you're going to get lost in human psychology and so miss the real issue.
A similar field that has always been digital is audio and video compression codecs.
You see similar issues with say Apple advertising their compression as perfect, and devoted hobbyists slaving away to meet goals that the average person cannot even discern.
The capitalist, rather than technical, reality is that advances will be used to deliver the same (or lower) quality at a cheaper rate. And if you measure progress by the number of people who can watch Fast and the Furious on their Android phone on a capped data plan in a third world country that is perhaps the best thing.
And even if you care only for perfection, despite all the genius and effort applied, you could argue that most of the progress over decades has been the ability to throw more CPU at the problem.
All of this makes me think. I recently bought a car, and there seems to be quite a bit of audio difference. Or how pleasurable the audio sounds, how immersive, how the bass sounds.
1) Using Android Auto
2) Using Apple CarPlay
3) Which USB cables are used. Some seem to be better than others.
4) If it's over bluetooth - the worst experience with Android for me.
5) Car radio vs the above
6) Am I using YouTube Music or Spotify on Android Auto/Apple CarPlay
It's almost like with some of these configuration it's frustrating, while it's really pleasurable with others, but I can't tell if I'm imagining it.
From my tests so far, it feels like I'm only happy with the wired Apple CarPlay, and everything else doesn't seem satisfying. I'm not an audiophile or anything. And it has a real effect on my mood. But I have Android myself.
If anyone has any suggestions to try out here... I'll try to maybe see if all the music is downloaded with offline support beforehand and maybe check the settings in Spotify/YouTube Music apps. It seems to be related mostly to how smooth or immersive bass is to me. Because bass can be annoying or it can be pleasurable.
The majority of music apps on devices have their own "custom" EQ settings. It's probably not surprising that they all sound a little different, even if everything around them is digital and "exactly the same signal".
It very much gets into matters of preference and taste - people love to abuse the word "objective" when there's not really any objective measure. Sure, you can say the dominant frequency of a note on a piano is correct or not, but the rest? More due to taste. The preferences can often be "shared" by culture associating specific quirks with "better" or "worse", but that's still just preference.
How many musicians intentionally use older techniques or "worse" equipment specifically because of the sound they create? Look at the culture around Synthesizers, for example. Is it really crazy to believe that the "perfect" concert piano tuner example in the article is just a preference in a shared culture of "Concert Pianists"? And are we then really losing something that's "better"? Or just another cultural artifact that may fade with time?
We're not "losing" things any more than any cultural shift is a "loss".
I like one forum user's suggestion: build an audio file where the left channel is from one recording and the right channel is from another, but in perfect time sync. For example, the left may be a recording of an Apple CarPlay rendition, while the right is a recording of an Android Auto rendition. Then it should be easy for your ears to discern the difference.
The Bluetooth issue could be real. I have a Bluetooth-enabled car radio that switches between full duplex (two-way audio) and half duplex (one-way audio) mode. It sounds normal in half duplex mode, but in full duplex mode, it sounds a lot like an old telephone.
Are you sure about that? Because there are some extreme examples, for instance some USB cables won't work at all for Android Auto. Then some USB cables I had music skipping, and with at least 1 cable the quality seemed much worse for Apple CarPlay than for the best one.
It's a digital data stream. The bits either make it or they dot. Unless the cable is actually faulty (i.e., the error rate exceeds what error correction and recovery can handle), one cable cannot "sound different" to another.
The ones I tried were new, of course still could be faulty. I went to the store and asked for one that would divide to both Apple lightning cable and USB-C, so my partner and I could both use it, since she has iPhone.
The store owner said that he's not sure which ones will work, so he gave many different ones which we tried in the parking lot and then brought back. He gave us only one that spreads into 3 different connectors, USB-C, Lightning and the old Micro-USB. He said that this won't likely work. Rest of the cables were all either USB-C or lightning. However when trying, contrary to what he said, the 3 different connectors one worked, and it seemed to also have best quality, e.g. compared to one lightning which definitely had much worse performance.
What I think is happening is that like someone said somewhere below as well, there's some difference in how fast or stable the data goes through the wire and something will change how they encode/decode it for those reasons. I don't know if it's the apps or the car software. I have to assume there's some sort of quality check and something will change depending on that.
It doesn't help that packaging seems to list out random details and it's hard to compare cables with each other. Some USB cables have listed the data transfer rate, some have not, but they do allow data transfer. Then others don't.
The gold plate-ended USB cables that come in a wooden case with velvet finishing, make the reproduced sound so much smoother, the way yhey were intended by the composer. The glossiness of the gold combined with the subtle soft touch of the velvet will seemlessly flow over to the analog side of the 192kHz DAC, polishing these once harshly digitized signals up to their finest quality.
You are joking, but all I want is the bass to feel really good and immersive in EDM songs. It somehow really makes me happy and the car ride so enjoyable. Like when the bass kind of smooths around you and it feels it's coming immersively from everywhere at once. With some setups the bass kind of does a rough "boom" and goes away quickly, while with others it kind of simmers and tickles you.
I think we are on the same page. The bass is the part that makes a lot of difference. From working in automotive amplifiers i remember that there are tricks to make the bass sound louder and deeper with a limited amount of voltage difference. Usually the mac diff is +14 to -14 volts due to the battery limitation, which seems plentiful but for low tones, the energy efficiency as well as human perception is very low with audio. One of the tricks is introducing first and second harmonics. I've experienced plenty of in-car demos that we would present to customers e.g. in Munich.
Other tricks are speed adaptive eq and volume.
But in the end most quality yield boiled down to tuning. Cars full of, rather low quality speakers (BOM cost a few dollars per channel) could create a quite immersive sound.
That's very interesting to me. Because of this specifically being so weirdly pleasurable. I have now driven a lot of different cars because where I'm locally, you can use an app to rent cars for very temporary times and they are everywhere, within walking distance. Maybe it's in other countries as well, I don't know. But in any case, this has given me so much opportunities to try out various cars from 2021-2023 year release. I only recently got a license, and the car I bought is my first, so I don't have much historical experience, or experience in general, but to me when driving a car this particular audio quality is the main thing to affect my mood and perception. I either feel hyped for the rest of the day or frustrated and disappointed. And I usually don't think of myself as a music fan or anything like that. Also don't think I'm very young, I'm just a late bloomer in terms of getting a car.
Because of that impact, and because of my lack of knowledge, it was very difficult and concerning to find a car, because we are kind of trying out Android Auto, Apple CarPlay, bluetooth without anyone really giving advice on the topic. And car sellers don't seem to be mindful about the topic, neither any relatives that we tried to consult on which car to buy. The best advice car sellers have had on the topic is to "just always use the original cable" which I don't even know what it means. Well I know what it means, manufacturer likely put the proper USB with optimal transfer rates and all, but it doesn't really answer to what the factors are or anything like that.
Are we using wrong settings somewhere? Are we using optimal settings in all the apps, the car audio tuner, equalizer? I don't know.
So we have learned a lot and we decided on a car, which we bought, but presently I still feel there's something different about Android Auto, vs Apple CarPlay, that doesn't make it quite as pleasurable. Like I'm not getting this immersive hype feeling, but more of a rigid "boom". Apple CarPlay showing that the car should be capable of it, but I can't really reproduce it with my Android phone.
But surely I can't be the only one in the World, so it seems like a thing that can be this pleasurable would have been obviously solved.
And it's not about the loudness, it's about how it smooths out or spreads, or feels like it's all around you at any volume. Like you are inside the music and the bass.
When I tried to Google for solving this problem, I didn't really find any answers, so I'm sharing this here on hackernews, since frequently interesting perspectives appear here.
If there's a traffic jam or rush hour, but the music is so great and immersive, it wouldn't matter and you never want the music to end, it seems odd that there's not that much focus on it from sellers point of view or people I know in real life.
Or do I just have a weird physiology/psychology that responds to some odd things that no one else really cares about, or is some small setting somewhere?
That was my thought about part of the process too, like does YT and Spotify use a lower bitrate if you're using usb out vs analog out vs bluetooth? Plus if the data connection is 4g vs 5g or sitting in the driveway using wifi, how does that affect the streaming?
I'm not an audiophile by any means, but streaming almost always sounds worse than CD or even sometimes radio.
Yeah - with bluetooth, definitely there's much, much lower quality in some cases. Initially when trying cars I always used Android and bluetooth, and it gave me very bad impression of some of their audio systems. Then when finally bringing a cable for Apple Car play and using my partner's iPhone, the sound was totally different.
But it does also seem to depend on a car. Because I'm pretty sure I've had some very good experiences with bluetooth as well. And a case where bluetooth Youtube Music sounded good, and bluetooth Spotify sounded bad.
In addition both of these apps have different volume levels despite car having the same volume level, and Android has different volume levels compared to iOS, so all of it combined, testing around made for an annoying experience.
Audio doesn't use very much data. CD bitrate is 1.4Mbps while USB2 is 480Mbps. It would have to super bad to for audio to have problems, and USB2 is super reliable.
Or the car has a fair amount of EMR noise and one cable - being shielded - experiences less loss as a result. This could also explain why bluetooth was particularly bad.
When I asked ChatGPT about it, it also brought up interference as a potential culprit, but I'm not an expert on the topic to consider it or be confident enough to bring it up by myself. I'm not sure how well different materials are shielded from interference or how much effect can interference actually have on it.
What it specifically said is:
> High-quality USB cables often have better shielding, which helps to reduce electromagnetic interference (EMI). EMI can introduce noise or degrade audio quality, particularly in cars where multiple electronic devices are in close proximity.
How the music was produced/mastered makes a huge difference too.
There is a lot of stuff from the late 70's and early 80's where I think a combination of new technologies and cocaine made for producers creating masters that sound awful to my ears.
(disclaimer: not a professional audio engineer, just an instrument player that has some production experience).
There is also a lot of bullshit about “quality” — like the idea that you could get a significant quality improvement sampling audio at 96k as opposed to 44.1k or 48k.
For that matter I can’t believe people’s eyes don’t glaze over when they see TV ads that say, for instance, that Dawn dish detergent is better than other brands even though Dawn really has a better package of surfactants than most competitors and, over time, P&G has invested a lot of research into improving it. (E.g. ultraconcentrated soaps were an advance in practical chemistry and you really can clean more with less soap)
Although their ads must be a reason that Dawn is market leading I’m pretty sure the ads, through their style, make a withdrawal from the legitimacy bank account.
> like the idea that you could get a significant quality improvement sampling audio at 96k as opposed to 44.1k or 48k.
There can be real quality improvements, if you’re editing, recording, mastering, producing audio. If the thing you sample isn’t the same as the thing that’s going to be played back, then a higher sampling rate is sometimes called for.
This is true in imaging too. You don’t need HDR or raw formats or excessive resolution if you only show the same thing you captured, but sometimes you do if you’re going to modify it.
Some of the lore around high sampling rates is when people make a rule of thumb for recording and apply it always without thinking about the specifics of a situation. That’s easy to do, but you also have to examine the cost of using a high sampling rate. Does it cost a lot or hurt? If you’re running short on storage space, maybe, but usually no, it’s usually a tradeoff with very low downsides.
Sales people and corporate marketing absolutely do take advantage of this, for sure, and turn what are legitimate tradeoffs for some professionals into specious needs for mass market consumers.
If you want to do physics-based sound transformations which amount to applying partial or ordinary differential equations you have to sample at a rate 3x or more than the Shannon rate because otherwise you encounter instabilities.
Similarly you can't really hear more than 16 bits worth of sample depth if you got your levels perfect but in the real word recording in the studio and field a few more bits of headroom make a big difference.
Thus I'd expect people to record at a high sample rate but I think there is no practical delivery rate.
I'm somewhat agnostic as to whether or not people can hear anything atr all past 44.1kHz, particularly because if you consider how accurately people can point out objects in a real physical soundfield (e.g. like a blind man shooting a gun) and you believe phase accuracy is the key, you'd make the case that people can hear timing differences that couldn't be captured at 44.1khz.
But no "surround sound" technology comes close to replicating how accurately you can spot things in real life and I don't believe practically any commercial recordings past 44.1khz are noticeably better on any real equipment.
Yep for playback, I agree, you don’t need more than 16 bits/sample or more than 44.1k playback rate. The vast majority of humans can’t hear beyond that, at least through the air… I have heard that it can go a lot higher via direct bone contact, but that’s not relevant to playing back music anyway. I just wanted to help clarify that there are real reasons to “sample” (record) something at 96khz or higher, or at 24 bits/channel/sample, but that the reasons easily get lost, and sometimes artificially or intentionally misrepresented for marketing purposes.
I kinda relate this to sporting equipment or cars or other things people buy. Like, nearly everyone on a road bike is riding and wearing race gear, which is uncomfortable, while very few people are actually training or racing. Or, people often buy cars or computers that are far faster or more powerful than they need. Those things get rationalized similarly, with claims that the extra is necessary and makes a difference, or fears that it might be needed someday, and little reflection on the downsides.
One of the angles I find interesting when it comes to "quality" is the debate between Spotify and Apple Music. You'll see takes on Threads/Twitter like "I didn't realize just how much sound I was missing until I switched to lossless audio on Apple Music; Wow!" Its pedantic to point out: The audio quality you're hearing probably isn't better on Apple Music. I mean, the stream is definitely higher quality; AM delivers ALAC lossless audio for most music, while Spotify is still on 320kbps. But, you're listening to it through Airpods, which do not support a wireless, lossless codec. [1]
However: You did notice something different. I know you're using APs, because you noticed something different. What you noticed wasn't audio "quality" per se; you noticed the APs' faux-Atmos. Its a similar vein to saying that the vogue "TAYLOR SWIFT 9 DIMENSIONAL SURROUND AUDIO" [2] Youtube videos are "higher quality"; obviously Atmos, when its at its best, is packing more data from the master, more microphones, more streams. But, you're muxing all that data down to a lossy wireless codec, and then outputting it through two speakers. At best, what you're hearing is not necessarily higher quality, but is simply "more pleasing". And, when Apple Music delivers truly-fake-Atmos tracks, meaning the Atmos was synthesized and processed from original Stereo masters, which does happen quite frequently with older music on the platform, it might even be accurate to say that what you're hearing is actually worse quality; but it might still be more pleasing.
My take is that 96k MP3 “sux” but I might tolerate listening to it on my watch in a noisy gym or running out on city streets. If you hear 128k MP3 compared to the original CD the difference should be night and day but you might think it was OK, somewhere between 192k and 320k the quality difference disappears and even the phase relationships between the channels are pretty well preserved because Dolby Pro Logic works right.
Now there is a huge difference between a good master and a mediocre master and often when people release on a fancy format they start with a better master. For instance a lot of CDs are victims of the loudness war and it isn’t hard to make a better release.
I agree; I believe it to be the case that even when provided with an immaculate audio consumption setup, fully wired, insulated, abyss headphones, some insane schiit amp and dac, a perfectly silent room, let the listener pick the songs, the full nine yards, maybe 1% of the population could correctly discern a stereo lossless track from a stereo 320kbps more than 50% of the time over many songs. Genetics plays a role in getting into this 1%, but the far, far bigger cause is really just experience: Its having listened to the same tracks over, and over, and over again, until you've literally learned where the imperfections in this specific 320kbps encoding of this specific song are, rather than imperfections natural to the codec itself.
That's the "dirty secret" of lossless audio: If you ask even someone in this 1% to do the same thing, but for music the experimenter picks and that they've never heard before: that 1% literally becomes 0%. Maybe there's some gigahuman audio codec engineer employed deep in a basement at Dolby HQ who knows exactly the classes of imperfections that AAC encoding imprints into tracks and also has superhuman ears and such... but its damn close to 0 humans who could do this.
What this says about why anyone cares that AM, Tidal, Qobuz, whatever offer lossless audio, or that Spotify doesn't, is certainly interesting. It does seem like a tremendous waste of bandwidth and local storage, to me. But, I totally and fully subscribe to the message of the original article: It matters to me that this quality is maintained, that it exists for those people who do care about it, and that what I am consuming is as close as possible to what the original artists intended (rather than letting a bunch of cooks into the kitchen with opinions about which hertz are more important than others).
I believe you are conflating kbits/s with kHz. The latter being the unit of the sample rate. The thing is, no human ears hear higher tones than 17kHz and Nyquist and Shannon thought us that double of that as a sample rate is sufficient to reproduce tones equal or lower.
I am using k in this particular message to mean kbps but it I think it does describe the menu of sound quality options that people will hear.
I know people can't hear sine waves above 17kHz but there are questions about transient response and particularly how accurate you would need to represent phase if you want to replicate how well people can spot the direction of sounds in the real world. (Notably no "surround sound" technology of any kind would help a blind man with a gun shoot as accurately as they can in the real world)
> The capitalist, rather than technical, reality is that advances will be used to deliver the same (or lower) quality at a cheaper rate. And if you measure progress by the number of people who can watch Fast and the Furious on their Android phone on a capped data plan in a third world country that is perhaps the best thing.
This is a really strange choice of example, since advances in video compression and streaming have obviously been used to deliver higher quality at a cheaper rate.
Quoting the article, because from your comment I'm not sure you got to the end, which is a shame as it addresses your point.
TL;DR: If we're not going to aim for better, what's the point at all?
> If it weren't for the piano soloist (the conductor probably didn't notice, he just knew to defer to the piano soloist's concerns), we would have played the concert on a very slightly out-of-tune piano, and then...
>
> What?
>
> Nobody in the audience would probably notice. Certainly not in the specific. Nobody is standing up and saying, "there, see how G above middle C has one string that is 0.2hz out of tune with the others?!" Nobody is standing up and saying "that piano is out of tune, what a travesty." Perhaps some of the more sensitive listeners would have felt some vague sense that the piano could have sounded nicer, that maybe the hall needs a better piano, or something.
>
> Did the piano sound better, after all that work? Yeah... it did, I think. Hard to say. I'd like to pretend it was some colossal difference, but that's really the point. My big stupid ears are not the best judge here. Just trust the people who have the best discernment.
> Only a very few people possess the level of discernment needed to know how bad your local concert hall's piano is, and precisely how it is bad.
> If their art dies out, maybe nobody will know how bad all the pianos are. And then we'll all have slightly worse pianos than we would otherwise have. And I mean if that's the way things are going to go, then let's just steer the Earth into the Sun, because what's the point of any of this.
1. If we really need consistently good piano sound quality, maybe we should replace the unreliable pianos overly susceptible to humidity and wear with computer synthesizers that can be told exactly how to sound? I mean that leaves just the speaker housing and wear on the input interface.
2. Maybe music is actually a hobby and not really necessary to be produced reliably. Maybe the fun is in the negotiation with instruments and people?
If the priority is a diverse, fun, culture, maybe don't structure all economy and politics around the idea forcing people to justify their existence.
This is another instance of an insidious modern meme that states that people with non-mainstream skill X should be okay with it dying out because it's not mainstream. It's just a long-winded way to call something irrelevant without actually saying that.
But we know we can't call it that, so we dress it up in pseudo-intellectual bullshit, citing "pragmatism" and using misdirection: "oh, but who can actually appreciate such an obscure thing?" It's exceedingly presumptuous on the speaker's part.
The world's a big place, but it's only as big as we perceive it to be. Don't let people who need it to be smaller tell you what to think.
People like the piano tuner in question are the kinds of people I love talking to and watching work. They know these tiny minute details of things most of us only have a gross understanding of. They know the ins and outs of the craft they've chosen and have a true joy in working it.
This reminds me of the current research in ML of "simplifying" models for inference (pruning, distillation, etc.). Our model of reality is so imprecise, can we be confident that all the local details are insignificant to the global context?
If their art dies out, maybe nobody will know how bad all the pianos are. And then we'll all have slightly worse pianos than we would otherwise have. And I mean if that's the way things are going to go, then let's just steer the Earth into the Sun, because what's the point of any of this.
I think a similar thing happened to journalism ethics over the course of the 20th century up through the 1st quarter of the 21st.
If you extend your journalism one back a quarter, you lose that trend, instead, we start and end with the fine art of creating click bait. Yellow journalists followed by Buzzfeed bloggers
This article came along just as I'm finally digging into *Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt." This article reminded me of more than one passage from Dunn ... I'll quote a couple here.
[Dunn 'quoting' a sculpture:]"Don't just gape in awe and wonder, shake your head, and walk away. Bring me back to life! Know me -- who I was and what I was. The only way to do this is to understand what I am and build another! Why am I smiling? Don't think for a minute that I am content sitting here on my pedastal, misunderstood by the droves that have passed by for centuries. There is more here than meets the eye."
Dunn now: "Words cannot describe my feelings of wonder and awe as I absorbed from the temples not only a philosophical and spiritual aspect but also with my engineer's brain. These temples impressed upon me indelibly that they were incredibly important from an engineering and scientific perspective. "
It seems to me that nearly all of us are forced to walk through most of life in this way ... not because we're deliberatly ignorant ... because we can only truly see, and resonate with, that which is within the scope of our varied expertises (be they one or five). To all else we must remain largely blind, part of the misunderstanding droves ... unless someone with regard for the nuances comes along to let us inside long enough to catch -that glimpse-.
The book "Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech" covers lots of stories like this from the industrial revolution. The luddites resisted having their work taken over by machines. The machines produced worse quality, but were cheaper and lowered the skill level required to do the work. It also made output predictable, allowed people to be bunched into factories and enabled child labour and other kinds of exploitation.
At the time people resisted having their autonomy taken away by smashing the machines and burning factories. It's a great book that will surprise you with how similar many of the situations we deal with today are.
I know the post is about "discernment", but I think the author kind of missed the real issue. It's about automation making things shitty, so that society can be reshaped to maximize profit extraction. We _could_ live in a world that strikes a balance between the relentless drive to automate and a more humanistic approach, but that would require structural changes.
The problem with this line of thinking -- "If X happens then we'll all be cooked!" -- is that it ignores the fact that X already has been happening and yet life is just fine.
There's an infinite number of pursuits in which expert practitioners could theoretically possess a level of discernment so sublime that nobody else can understand it, let alone appreciate it.
A huge number of these arts will either never be practiced, or were practiced in the past but have already decline. And yet there's no mass ennui or clamoring to steer the Earth into the sun.
The pinnacle of human attention cannot be directed at everything, everywhere, all at once. We have to focus our attention on a limited subset of arts and pursuits, where discernment will always be high, and settle everywhere else.