Artistic pursuits may be “upper-class”, but they are not unproductive. They serve to keep the upper classes practiced in physical cognition, counteracting a tendency to shift entirely into social modes of cognition (gossip and status-signaling games) as one ascends the social ladder. This is very important for the quality of decisions they make as leaders of society. (...) The fact that there has been such a decline in interest and participation in high culture among the upper classes is very worrying
Ok, allow me to say it using my own words:
Roughly, human pursuits can be divided into “social games” such as gossip or conspiracies, which are usually zero-sum, or even negative-sum as they often compete in sacrificing to Moloch everything that does not provide immediate social value, and “games with nature” such as work, science, but also sports and that part of art which requires skill e.g. playing the piano (as opposed to “modern art” which is merely about who makes a media hype around you, so it requires allies instead of technical skills). The word “game” is used here as in “game theory”, i.e. it may or may not refer to playful activities.
And there is a risk that when people climb the social ladder, they lose touch with “games with nature”, because they delegate it to people lower than them on the social ladder. With the horrifying consequence that people who rule the world may actually understand it the least. I mean, they certainly understand the social aspects of the world, that’s what they specialize at, so they are good at e.g. organizing a revolution; but they have no idea how to grow grain or cook bread, so the revolution is typically followed by bread shortage and lot of suffering.
Having upper-class people spend some time doing “games with nature” may keep them more sane, and as a result keep the whole society more sane. But, frankly, the “games with nature” are typically motivated, directly or indirectly, by survival (you grow grain and cook bread to avoid starvation, you learn science inter alie to achieve job safety which is to avoid starvation), and this motivation does not apply to the upper class. Having them do sports or (skill-based) art may be the only chance to get them in contact with non-social aspects of reality. Of these two, sports are more about body, and are quite repetitive, while art is more about mind and creativity.
Is this approximately right?
I still think that if someone is doing math or programming, they already have their dose of “games with nature” there. But if a rich programmer has a child that dislikes math and computing… I agree that skill-based art is better than most of the alternatives.
I update that if actual upper-class people want their child to play piano, there may be actually a very healthy instinct behind that. (Or may be just blindly copying what their neighbors do.)
I still think that if someone is doing math or programming, they already have their dose of “games with nature” there.
Of course, but these pursuits themselves are often described as artistic in character, especially by their most elite practitioners.
I update that if actual upper-class people want their child to play piano, there may be actually a very healthy instinct behind that. (Or may be just blindly copying what their neighbors do.)
They probably are copying what their neighbors do, but it is a good fortune if their neighbors happen to do that.
Of course, the effect is dependent on how good the piano instruction is, which is dependent on the level of musical culture of the surrounding society.
Roughly, human pursuits can be divided into “social games” such as gossip or conspiracies, which are usually zero-sum
How do you expect humans to network, figure out who their friends and enemies are, establish trust, etc? “Games with nature” are all fine, but they imply a solitary individual who is an island. Humans are social animals, they build complex social structures and making these structures work necessitates “social games” which are definitely not all zero-sum.
Not to mention that if you want some of your genes to survive into the next generation, you’d better learn to play the appropriate social games :-)
that’s what they specialize at, so they are good at e.g. organizing a revolution; but they have no idea how to grow grain or cook bread
I think you’re getting a bit carried away. Specialization is mostly good. It’s perfectly possible to run a state without having any idea how to bake bread.
frankly, the “games with nature” are typically motivated, directly or indirectly, by survival
So are social games. For most of human history in most cultures, if a society threw you out and shunned you, your chances of survival plummeted.
if actual upper-class people want their child to play piano
I think that “want [the] child to play the piano” and doing art yourself are very different things. I’m much more inclined to buy the argument that sending the child to a music school is all about social signaling for the parents (the child is just being the means) than the argument that someone who does art herself is doing art for social reasons.
The idea is not to ignore “social games” completely, but rather that some people—specifically, upper-class people—are in a risk of going too far, and seeing the world consisting of “social games” only. Mostly because they are liberated from forces that make lower classes play the “games with nature”, such as having to bake your bread or having to keep a job.
Yes, division of labor is a good thing. Problem is, with any division, you need some kind of coordination: whether a person, or an impersonal market. But when you successfully do the revolution, you may kill the competent people and make the market illegal. Then, there may be many people who know how to grow grain and bake bread, but some activities necessary for this process may be made illegal and punished by death. The result is shortage of bread.
The king does not have to know how to make bread, but should not be so insane that he prevents anyone in his kingdom from making bread. And believing e.g. that “objective reality does not exist and everything is socially constructed” seems like a royal road to insanity; but at the same time it is easy to imagine how a person who only ever plays “social games” might find that credible.
It seems like the ideal leisure activities, then, should combine the social games with games against nature. Sports do this to some extent, but the “game against nature” part is mostly physical rather than intellectual.
Maybe we could improve on that. I’m envisioning some sort of combination of programming and lacrosse, where the field reconfigures itself according to the players’ instructions with a 10-second delay...
But more realistically, certain sports are more strategic and intellectual than others. I’ve seen both tennis and fencing mentioned as sports that involve quick strategic thinking and predicting your opponent, although they lack the team element that lets you build coordination skills. Maybe some kind of group fencing would be good… or doubles tennis?
I don’t think knowing how to grow grain and bake bread helps you avoiding to turn a free market economy into a planned economy that mismanages resources.
Mao prohibited farm ownership and no amount of understanding the actual skill of baking or growing crops would have convinced him that private ownership is a good idea.
Lysenko’s success is also not simply about lack of farming knowledge but about having an intellectual climate that’s not well-fitted from separating true theories from those that aren’t.
Mao prohibited farm ownership and no amount of understanding the actual skill of baking or growing crops would have convinced him that private ownership is a good idea.
What makes you so sure of this? More to the point, what makes you sure that a society that tied status more closely to such skills wouldn’t have promoted someone better than Mao to the top?
Lysenko’s success is also not simply about lack of farming knowledge but about having an intellectual climate that’s not well-fitted from separating true theories from those that aren’t.
The point here is to get into the reasons why intellectual climates have the properties they do, with respect to the ability to develop and identify true theories.
To be sure, societies could have multiple failure modes, and I am open to the possibility that the USSR and Maoist China may have been bad for reasons entirely unconnected to the relationship between status and physical cognition. However, the populist character of both makes me doubt this, as populism seems anticorrelated with both good aesthetics and good science.
what makes you sure that a society that tied status more closely to such skills wouldn’t have promoted someone better than Mao to the top?
There have been enough revolutions and (temporarily successful) peasant revolts to demonstrate how that usually turns out. Lenin famously said that “Any cook should be able to run the country” and I don’t think it worked well.
populism seems anticorrelated with both good aesthetics and good science
Thus, by “a society that tied status more closely to such skills”, I do not mean the typical conditions leading to, and resulting from, a peasant revolt.
It’s more complicated :-D Like in French, most Russian nouns have masculine or feminine gender and IIRC in the original Russian the cook was specifically a female cook. And Lenin, sigh, was a cishet white male.
What makes you so sure of this? More to the point, what makes you sure that a society that tied status more closely to such skills wouldn’t have promoted someone better than Mao to the top?
Mao was the son of a farmer. Mao actually worked on his father farm instead of learning the piano and was bullied for his farmer background in high school.
I don’t think good aesthetics tell you about how to grow crops or bake bread.
Sure, but that’s true of most every human activity under the sun (including “games with nature”).
you may kill the competent people and make the market illegal
Knowing NOT to do this is in no way dependent on knowing how to grow wheat or bake bread.
believing e.g. that “objective reality does not exist and everything is socially constructed” seems like a royal road to insanity
I agree, but here the difference between beliefs and aliefs becomes important. Besides, physical reality has a habit of rudely intruding into social constructs and if you still insist on ignoring it, well, you might be in line for a Darwin Award.
Ok, allow me to say it using my own words:
Roughly, human pursuits can be divided into “social games” such as gossip or conspiracies, which are usually zero-sum, or even negative-sum as they often compete in sacrificing to Moloch everything that does not provide immediate social value, and “games with nature” such as work, science, but also sports and that part of art which requires skill e.g. playing the piano (as opposed to “modern art” which is merely about who makes a media hype around you, so it requires allies instead of technical skills). The word “game” is used here as in “game theory”, i.e. it may or may not refer to playful activities.
And there is a risk that when people climb the social ladder, they lose touch with “games with nature”, because they delegate it to people lower than them on the social ladder. With the horrifying consequence that people who rule the world may actually understand it the least. I mean, they certainly understand the social aspects of the world, that’s what they specialize at, so they are good at e.g. organizing a revolution; but they have no idea how to grow grain or cook bread, so the revolution is typically followed by bread shortage and lot of suffering.
Having upper-class people spend some time doing “games with nature” may keep them more sane, and as a result keep the whole society more sane. But, frankly, the “games with nature” are typically motivated, directly or indirectly, by survival (you grow grain and cook bread to avoid starvation, you learn science inter alie to achieve job safety which is to avoid starvation), and this motivation does not apply to the upper class. Having them do sports or (skill-based) art may be the only chance to get them in contact with non-social aspects of reality. Of these two, sports are more about body, and are quite repetitive, while art is more about mind and creativity.
Is this approximately right?
I still think that if someone is doing math or programming, they already have their dose of “games with nature” there. But if a rich programmer has a child that dislikes math and computing… I agree that skill-based art is better than most of the alternatives.
I update that if actual upper-class people want their child to play piano, there may be actually a very healthy instinct behind that. (Or may be just blindly copying what their neighbors do.)
Probably close enough for present purposes.
Of course, but these pursuits themselves are often described as artistic in character, especially by their most elite practitioners.
They probably are copying what their neighbors do, but it is a good fortune if their neighbors happen to do that.
Of course, the effect is dependent on how good the piano instruction is, which is dependent on the level of musical culture of the surrounding society.
How do you expect humans to network, figure out who their friends and enemies are, establish trust, etc? “Games with nature” are all fine, but they imply a solitary individual who is an island. Humans are social animals, they build complex social structures and making these structures work necessitates “social games” which are definitely not all zero-sum.
Not to mention that if you want some of your genes to survive into the next generation, you’d better learn to play the appropriate social games :-)
I think you’re getting a bit carried away. Specialization is mostly good. It’s perfectly possible to run a state without having any idea how to bake bread.
So are social games. For most of human history in most cultures, if a society threw you out and shunned you, your chances of survival plummeted.
I think that “want [the] child to play the piano” and doing art yourself are very different things. I’m much more inclined to buy the argument that sending the child to a music school is all about social signaling for the parents (the child is just being the means) than the argument that someone who does art herself is doing art for social reasons.
The idea is not to ignore “social games” completely, but rather that some people—specifically, upper-class people—are in a risk of going too far, and seeing the world consisting of “social games” only. Mostly because they are liberated from forces that make lower classes play the “games with nature”, such as having to bake your bread or having to keep a job.
Yes, division of labor is a good thing. Problem is, with any division, you need some kind of coordination: whether a person, or an impersonal market. But when you successfully do the revolution, you may kill the competent people and make the market illegal. Then, there may be many people who know how to grow grain and bake bread, but some activities necessary for this process may be made illegal and punished by death. The result is shortage of bread.
The king does not have to know how to make bread, but should not be so insane that he prevents anyone in his kingdom from making bread. And believing e.g. that “objective reality does not exist and everything is socially constructed” seems like a royal road to insanity; but at the same time it is easy to imagine how a person who only ever plays “social games” might find that credible.
It seems like the ideal leisure activities, then, should combine the social games with games against nature. Sports do this to some extent, but the “game against nature” part is mostly physical rather than intellectual.
Maybe we could improve on that. I’m envisioning some sort of combination of programming and lacrosse, where the field reconfigures itself according to the players’ instructions with a 10-second delay...
But more realistically, certain sports are more strategic and intellectual than others. I’ve seen both tennis and fencing mentioned as sports that involve quick strategic thinking and predicting your opponent, although they lack the team element that lets you build coordination skills. Maybe some kind of group fencing would be good… or doubles tennis?
Exactly! Hence arts (and sports).
War.
Strategic, intellectual, contains the team element, and is highly motivating :-P
I don’t think knowing how to grow grain and bake bread helps you avoiding to turn a free market economy into a planned economy that mismanages resources. Mao prohibited farm ownership and no amount of understanding the actual skill of baking or growing crops would have convinced him that private ownership is a good idea.
Lysenko’s success is also not simply about lack of farming knowledge but about having an intellectual climate that’s not well-fitted from separating true theories from those that aren’t.
What makes you so sure of this? More to the point, what makes you sure that a society that tied status more closely to such skills wouldn’t have promoted someone better than Mao to the top?
The point here is to get into the reasons why intellectual climates have the properties they do, with respect to the ability to develop and identify true theories.
To be sure, societies could have multiple failure modes, and I am open to the possibility that the USSR and Maoist China may have been bad for reasons entirely unconnected to the relationship between status and physical cognition. However, the populist character of both makes me doubt this, as populism seems anticorrelated with both good aesthetics and good science.
There have been enough revolutions and (temporarily successful) peasant revolts to demonstrate how that usually turns out. Lenin famously said that “Any cook should be able to run the country” and I don’t think it worked well.
As I said above,
Thus, by “a society that tied status more closely to such skills”, I do not mean the typical conditions leading to, and resulting from, a peasant revolt.
If only someone had thought to send Lenin to cookery school.
It’s more complicated :-D Like in French, most Russian nouns have masculine or feminine gender and IIRC in the original Russian the cook was specifically a female cook. And Lenin, sigh, was a cishet white male.
If https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin is to be believed then it’s more complicated still because what Lenin actually said was exactly the opposite.
A meme necessarily looks better than the actual source :-/
Mao was the son of a farmer. Mao actually worked on his father farm instead of learning the piano and was bullied for his farmer background in high school.
I don’t think good aesthetics tell you about how to grow crops or bake bread.
Sure, but that’s true of most every human activity under the sun (including “games with nature”).
Knowing NOT to do this is in no way dependent on knowing how to grow wheat or bake bread.
I agree, but here the difference between beliefs and aliefs becomes important. Besides, physical reality has a habit of rudely intruding into social constructs and if you still insist on ignoring it, well, you might be in line for a Darwin Award.
LOL