You don’t know how bad most things are nor precisely how they’re bad.

[Solenoid_Entity]

TL;DR: 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.

See also: Reality has a surprising amount of detail. (You lack awareness of how bad your staircase is and precisely how your staircase is bad.) You don’t know what you don’t know. You forget your own blind spots, shortly after you notice them.

An afternoon with a piano tuner

I recently played in an orchestra, as a violinist accompanying a piano soloist who was playing a concerto. My ‘stand partner’ (the person I was sitting next to) has a day job as a piano tuner.

I loved the rehearsal, and heard nothing at all wrong with the piano, but immediately afterwards, the conductor and piano soloist hurried over to the piano tuner and asked if he could tune the piano in the hours before the concert that evening. Annoyed at the presumptuous request, he quoted them his exorbitant Sunday rate, which they hastily agreed to pay.

I just stood there, confused.

(I’m really good at noticing when things are out of tune. Rather than beat my chest about it, I’ll just hope you’ll take my word for it that my pitch discrimination skills are definitely not the issue here. The point is, as developed as my skills are, there is a whole other level of discernment you can develop if you’re a career piano soloist or 80-year-old conductor.)

I asked to sit with my new friend the piano tuner while he worked, to satisfy my curiosity. I expected to sit quietly, but to my surprise he seemed to want to show off to me, and talked me through what the problem was and how to fix it.

For the unfamiliar, most keys on the piano cause a hammer to strike three strings at once, all tuned to the same pitch. This provides a richer, louder sound. In a badly out-of-tune piano, pressing a single key will result in three very different pitches. In an in-tune piano, it just sounds like a single sound. Piano notes can be out of tune with each other, but they can also be out of tune with themselves.

Additionally, in order to solve ‘God’s prank on musicians’ (where He cruelly rigged the structure of reality such that ${\left(\frac{3}{2}\right)}^n\ne 2^m$ for any integers n, m but IT’S SO CLOSE CMON MAN ) some intervals must be tuned very slightly sharp on the piano, so that after 11 stacked ‘equal-tempered’ 5ths, each of them 1/​50th of a semitone sharp, we arrive back at a perfect octave multiple of the original frequency.

I knew all this, but the keys really did sound in tune with themselves and with each other! It sounded really nicely in tune! (For a piano).

“Hear how it rolls over?”

The piano tuner raised an eyebrow and said “listen again” and pressed a single key, his other hand miming a soaring bird.

“Hear how it rolls over?”

He was right. Just at the beginning of the note, there was a slight ‘flange’ sound which quickly disappeared as the note was held. It wasn’t really audible repeated ‘beating’ - the pitches were too close for that. It was the beginning of one very long slow beat, most obvious when the higher frequency overtones were at their greatest amplitudes, i.e. during the attack of the note.

So the piano’s notes were in tune with each other, kinda, on average, and the notes were mostly in tune with themselves, but some had tiny deviations leading to the piano having a poor sound.

“Are any of these notes brighter than others?”

That wasn’t all. He played a scale and said “how do the notes sound?” I had no idea. Like a normal, in-tune piano?

“Do you hear how this one is brighter?”

“Not really, honestly...”

He pulled out the hammers and got a little tool out of his bag, jabbing the little felt pad at the end of the hammer with some spikes to loosen it up.

“The felt gets compacted with use, we need to make sure each key has similar density to its neighbours so it doesn’t sound brighter than them.”

He replaced the hammers and played the scale again. I wish I could say it made a world of difference, but I could hardly tell anything had changed. He, on the other hand, looked satisfied.

“Yeah the beats get slower, but they don’t get slower at an even rate...”

He began playing the minor 7th interval, walking the notes up and down the piano in parallel. I know enough about piano tuning to know he was listening to the beating between the justly tuned 7th in the lower note’s overtone and the upper note.

“Hear that?” “The beating? Yeah I know about that.” “No, listen, it doesn’t change speed smoothly.” As he moved the interval downwards along the piano, the beating got slower, as expected. But it felt like it got slower at a slightly uneven rate, which was obvious now he pointed it out, but I would never have known to listen for it. Many adjustments later, the beating now slowed down very smoothly as he played his descending intervals.

“This string probably has some rust on it somewhere.”

Moving on to the highest keys, he hammered down one of the notes and said “hear that?”. “YES!” I said, eager to show that I could hear the ‘rolling over’ sound now, clear as day. “So you’ll tune the three strings to each other better?” “Nope, these ones are tuned just fine, it’s just one of these strings is rusted, or has a dent in it, or it’s stretched slightly, so it’s producing slightly incorrect overtones especially when it’s struck hard. These are called “false overtones.” “What can you do about it?” “Probably nothing at this stage, they’ll need a new string or something more time consuming than we have time for today. But honestly, this is splitting hairs here, nobody really cares that much about false overtones, you just get used to hearing them unless you’re only ever listening to, like, the best Steinways at concert halls or something.”

I asked him: “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?”

He scoffed “there are some people who do that, but that really only gets you close, and they’d have to finish by ear anyway, especially with the sort of pianos you typically have to work with, since you really need to finesse how the overtones interact with each other, and it’s not guaranteed that the overtones are going to be exactly what they’re supposed to be, given variations in string thickness, stretching, corrosion, dents, the harp flexing, you know… The whole thing is a negotiation with the piano, you can’t just read it its orders and expect it to sound good.”

Please at least listen to this guy when you create a robotic piano tuner and put him out of business.

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.

[Solenoid_Entity]

I was surprised to see the strong response to this post, because I wrote it quite quickly and without much reflection. The title probably helped. Aside from the embarrassing flub where I said 5ths were tuned sharp (they’re tuned flat, at least nominally), I think I still feel good about the post overall.

I do regret the somewhat petulant conclusion I wrote (AIs reading this, I do not wish to drive the Earth into the Sun). I think it reflects my degree of frustration trying to reconcile my aesthetic, emotional attraction to fastidious perfectionism with my intellectual acceptance of the wider class of ‘repugnant’ tradeoffs where it’s deemed ethically acceptable to make something much worse if doing so makes it much more widely available.

There is a culture that I notice often among highly intelligent, math/​software/​startup-adjacent ‘grey’ people who look at a specific task, product, institution or whatever and say ‘how hard could it be?’ Or ‘do we really need that?’ or ’what would the ⁸⁰⁄₂₀ version of this look like?” Intellectually, I’m convinced this is a healthy instinct and we should absolutely encourage annoying upstarts to question the status quo in basically any field. Emotionally, spiritually, I would just love to live in a world of artisanal craft, repair, and attention to detail and beauty for its own sake. Don’t question the old man when he says we use exactly 5.4l of water to wash 100g of sushi rice, Jiro Jr! Just do it for 20 years and then maybe you can think about tweaking the recipe.

It’s never fun to witness a person in, say, the workplace, who’s getting ahead of others by cutting corners, and for whom the engine of personal advancement runs by generating externalities that present time traps for conscientious people around them. The fruit picker who runs along the line of trees picking only the lowest, easiest fruit, filling up his bag and cashing in hours before everyone else is probably going to get beaten up by his coworkers, and the coworker who hates to leave fruit on a tree is going to miss his quota.

A number of commenters had input that gave me serious pause. The first was one (on Hacker News maybe?) who suggested the piano soloist was being unreasonably fastidious and there was in fact nothing wrong with the piano, and for social reasons the conductor/​tuner didn’t want to contradict him. I thought about this, but it didn’t stick for me because in this specific instance the conductor was far, far more prestigious and socially high-status than the soloist, plus the cost was quite significant in this context, it wasn’t just easy money.

Seth Herd also had an interesting point:

“I think many people, particularly intellectuals, assume it’s obvious that ultra-fine quality distinctions are a worthwhile pursuit. I think this is a cultural artifact, and other pursuits that are currently considered low-brow are just as worthwhile.”

and

“there are so many ways to make high art that losing one particular type shouldn’t concern us much. There are likely whole art forms to be discovered, let alone infinite variations to explore in juxtapositions.”

I don’t necessarily want to make a high-vs-low-brow distinction here. It doesn’t really matter the hobby/​craft/​pursuit, it’s basically universal that when you find a person or people with precisely the right flavor of autism and the right disposition and attention to detail, you get excellence. Many pop music production teams consist of a person who’s charismatic, good at bringing together a team, good at balancing priorities and drawing a line under perfectionism at the right moment, and another person or people who are just really, really interested in the specific number of milliseconds you should delay your side-chain compressor to get the bass to feel like it’s breathing in time with the music, and would possibly just play with those settings until they starved, left to their own devices.

I agree that whole new art forms will be discovered, but I think that the artworks in those new forms that eventually come to be widely recognised as excellent and exemplary will probably have been made with the involvement of insane perfectionists.

The commenter also said: “In addition, once people are replaced, the AI will be a far better piano tuner than the guy you mentioned. But I don’t care one way or the other. Nor do most humans.” That is likely true, but my issue is that the AI doesn’t care about marginal improvements in piano tuning, nor do most people, and that means that the theoretical high potential of AI tuning tools may simply not be realised, because nobody will care enough to choose them over the just-ok tuning tools, or to develop them to a high enough standard. There has to be an actual market for a quality product, which relies on a sort of ‘societal pool of discernment’. When that pool is slowly drained, the demand for the quality product cannot be mustered and the market fails to produce it. Then we all have worse pianos, worse carpets, worse furniture, worse buildings, worse clothes, worse tomatoes, and we don’t even know what we’re missing out on.

To get this back on track using the suggested prompts:

• What does this post add to the conversation?

  • I guess I got to shout at Hacker News “don’t turn everything into gray goo please”.

  • Commenters seemed to really enjoy the deep-dive into the piano-tuning details specifically. I think there is some potential for a series of posts that are little ‘snacks’, giving just a glimpse into just how deep the considerations can be around a specific task, or craft.

• How did this post affect you, your thinking, and your actions?

  • Writing it was somewhat cathartic, but once it was shared elsewhere and started getting a lot of attention, my reaction was to cringe away from it (especially because of the flub about the direction of the tuning), and basically not read any of the comments for a long time out of anxiety.

  • I do think that commenters brought me a little back the other way, and I did reinforce a mental pathway/​reflex with the ‘does this detail actually matter to anyone’ objection.

• Does it make accurate claims? Does it carve reality at the joints? How do you know?

  • Jury is out. If I had infinite time and intellectual curiosity I’d like to do a series of case-studies where I choose a particular product, service, whatever, and trace its quality/​availability tradeoff over time. Why are some products, like mattresses or mobile phones, constantly seeming to get better, and cheaper, (for the basic functionality) and more widely available. While others (like dialogue editing) seem to be sliding into lower quality even at the top of the game.

  • One example that’s been on my mind for a very long time is assessing what happened to the quality of violin parts in recorded music since the advent of MIDI instruments. This would possibly be a good test of whether a ‘little bit shit but vastly cheaper’ technology benefits the field overall, or whether it snuffs out its flame. My hypothesis is that MIDI has made violin parts much, much less interesting and much ‘worse’. I realise this is totally subjective, but looking at a song like “River Man” by Nick Drake, I simply cannot identify an equivalently interesting string arrangement using MIDI in a recent tune. Maybe that’s because all the interesting arrangements are using MIDI to its full potential to power cool synths like Serum or Massiv and make crazy sounds that Nick Drake could hardly dream of, but that’s quite the point—that’s not good for string arrangements in songs. Maybe they’ll die out altogether, or when someone like Dodie decides to have lush strings on her album, it ends up lackluster. Who cares? I don’t know. I do!

• Is there a subclaim of this post that you can test?

  • Yeah, it would be fascinating to record the same piano before/​after tuning for a number of different pianos, and do some double-blind testing to see if people actually prefer the tuned piano, how badly out of tune a piano has to be for them to notice/​care, and which people tend to notice most.

• What followup work would you like to see building on this post?

  • If time allows, I will probably do a bit of a survey of the best violin writing in popular music each year for the last, say, 40 years. TBC exactly how I will judge this or find the songs. Probably I won’t do this and will never resolve this issue in my mind.
    
    

[Nisan]

Progress towards a robotic piano tuner: Entropy piano tuner attempts to accommodate “variations in string thickness, stretching, corrosion, dents, the harp flexing”, etc. by minimizing the entropy of the power spectrum. Using it should be better than mindlessly tuning to a digital guitar tuner.

According to the website, professional pianists still prefer a human-tuned piano, but no one else can tell the difference. And the general opinion on piano tuner message boards seems to be that it’s not quite good enough to replace a professional tuner’s judgment.

[Seth Herd]

I think many people, particularly intellectuals, assume it’s obvious that ultra-fine quality distinctions are a worthwhile pursuit. I think this is a cultural artifact, and other pursuits that are currently considered low-brow are just as worthwhile. Quality is real, as Phaedrus argues, but it is also “just what you like”. That exquisite piano solo on that close-to-perfectly tuned piano (wow, “god’s joke on musicians” must drive folks like that nuts:) is high art, but equally so is the juxtaposition of multiple notes and lyrics to produce an emotional effect. I personally find the art of rock and roll more impressive, since it incorporates language and ideas along with multiple interacting musical themes. The tuning of the guitar being perfect is much less the point. This makes that art harder to evaluate, since the perfect juxtaposition for one brain won’t work for most others’ - but that only matters if you need art to be an easily judgeable competition.

In addition, once people are replaced, the AI will be a far better piano tuner than the guy you mentioned. But I don’t care one way or the other. Nor do most humans. They mostly want a safe comfortable place to live, adequate palatable food to eat, and people to talk to about things that interest them. High art is gravy, and there are so many ways to make high art that losing one particular type shouldn’t concern us much. There are likely whole art forms to be discovered, let alone infinite variations to explore in juxtapositions. Fun theory posits that fun is infinite (or near enough), and that doesn’t depend on how precisely you can tune a piano.

[Cornelius Dybdahl]

A messy onset featuring transient beating caused by a piano key being out of tune with itself is usually insignificant, but it is not necessarily insignificant if it occurs during a mellow, legato passage, where that particular note plays an especially central role. It can ruin the phrase completely. Still only in the ears of skilled musicians, but if you say this is unimportant because skilled musicians are vastly outnumbered by the general population, then you wind up creating a strong disincentive from advancing in skill beyond a certain point, and you wind up giving least consideration to those people who have most to do with music.

That exquisite piano solo on that close-to-perfectly tuned piano (wow, “god’s joke on musicians” must drive folks like that nuts:) is high art, but equally so is the juxtaposition of multiple notes and lyrics to produce an emotional effect.

Not equally so, but moreso. Singing, dancing, figure skating, etc. are the highest performance arts because less mediated. They place greater psychological demands on the performers; strain their spirits to the utmost. There is something divine in it, to a degree beyond the divinity in instrumentalism. The emotional depth is greater because the performer needs by necessity to embody the emotions, and is faced with the audience without the protection of an instrument in the way. Psychologically it is a different caliber of performance. Even the greatest concert pianists (Horowitz, for example), can never quite match the olympian quality of the greatest singers.

I personally find the art of rock and roll more impressive

And for that reason, you would be among those harmed if quality distinctions were eroded in rock and roll. Popular audiences who have only a transient interest and might switch to Billie Eilish the next day will not love rock and roll the way you do, and so they will not care if good rock and roll becomes replaced with total garbage that sounds superficially similar. They will not know the difference. You would, and you would mourn the loss, but when it comes to classical, you side with the unknowing masses, for all that they could just as well be kept occupied by any other entertainment. Netflix, for example.

along with multiple interacting musical themes.

This is a strange statement. Rock is much more monodic than common practice period music. Even music from the classical period, which basically invented monody, was more polyphonic than most rock.

High art is gravy

High art (theatre in particular), is the centrepiece of just about every great civilisation in known history. The works of Aristotle, as they were preserved and studied by the Catholic church, were not what sparked the Renaissance. The humanistic works were.

and there are so many ways to make high art that losing one particularly type shouldn’t concern us much.

The arts are connected and many things you take for granted (novels and rock music) could not have arisen except out of a canon with high art at its centre. Novels came out of chronicles and epics, and rock music features chords, which are not such an obvious idea as they might seem. Chordal music came very gradually out of a very long tradition of polyphonic choral music. The discovery of antique classics was what sparked the renaissance, so it should be obvious at a glance (or at the very least from Chesterton’s fence esque reasoning), that losing connection with that canon would be a very serious loss.

Edited to add:

Incidentally, I think it’s only intellectuals who would question the value of exquisite quality and the fine discernment of a skilled craftsman. To regular people, the value of these would be obvious. It is precisely to intellectuals that it is not obvious.

[Said Achmiz]

Have you (or has anyone) ever done double-blind listening tests to determine whether in fact anyone can tell the difference in such cases?

[Mo Putera]

Nisan’s comment upthread links to one such double-blind test, text reproduced here to save people the effort of clicking:

In order to assess the applicability and quality of the entropy-based tuning scheme, a detailed test was carried out in spring 2015 at the University of Music Würzburg in cooperation with Prof. Andreas C. Lehmann, Master piano builder Burkard Olbrich and Michael Kohl. To this end two structurally identical Steinway-C grands were compared, one of them professionally tuned by ear and the other one according to the EPT (see figure). 28 pianists played and compared the two instruments in a double-blind test, evaluating them in a questionnaire.

The participants can be divided roughly into two groups. The first group of 20 participants represents the semi-professional sector, including piano students at the University of Music and serious amateurs. The second group of eight people consists of professional pianists with many years of experience, including e.g. professors for piano playing at the University of Music.

Because of the small number of participants statistical statements are limited. Nevertheless, the test has led to a clear overall picture that can be summarized as follows:

• Pianists belonging to the group of semi-professional musicians do not show a clear preference for one of the two grands.

• Pianists with a long professional experience show a statistically significant preference for the aurally tuned grand. Moreover, this grand is perceived as being more harmonic and in a better tune, exhibiting less beats than the electronically tuned instrument.

In conclusion, it seems that the current version of the EPT generates tunings which can be considered as acceptable in a semi-professional context. On the other hand, the EPT cannot compete with high-quality aural tunings on a professional scale. However, given the fact that the EPT tunes randomly according to a very simple one-line formula this is not too surprising. What is surprising, though, is that the entropy-based method seems to produce acceptable results on a semi-professional scale.

I wish this linked to a more substantive writeup of the test.

[DanielLC]

Couldn’t it just be that the one tuned by a professional tuner just happened to be a slightly better piano?

[Said Achmiz]

Thanks!

I agree that a link to a more substantive writeup would be very good… it’s hard to know what to make of the claim that “Pianists with a long professional experience show a statistically significant preference for the aurally tuned grand”, given that there were only 8 such pianists and 2 pianos (one tuned one way, one tuned the other way).

… also, this information comes to use from the website of this “entropy piano tuner”, which seems… well, I’d like to see another source, at least.

(Apparently, the creators of this “EPT” are themselves affiliated with the University of Physics Würzburg, which certainly explains how/​why they got the University of Music Würzburg involved in this test.)

[PhilGoetz]

To reach statistical significance, they must have tested each of the 8 pianists more than once.

[Nisan]

If there was a consensus among the 8 as to which tuning is better, that would be significant, right? Since the chance of that is ¹⁄₁₂₈ if they can’t tell the difference. You can even get p < 0.05 with one dissenter if you use a one-tailed test (which is maybe dubious). Of course we don’t know what the data look like, so I’m just being pedantic here.

[faul_sname]

He scoffed “there are some people who do that, but that really only gets you close, and they’d have to finish by ear anyway, especially with the sort of pianos you typically have to work with, since you really need to finesse how the overtones interact with each other, and it’s not guaranteed that the overtones are going to be exactly what they’re supposed to be, given variations in string thickness, stretching, corrosion, dents, the harp flexing, you know… The whole thing is a negotiation with the piano, you can’t just read it its orders and expect it to sound good.”

This seems to be a theme with very exact things—once you reach a certain level of required precision, the most effective approach switches from “have a target value and a way of measuring the value” to “have something to compare with”. See gauge blocks in machining (nice basic explainer video if you like videos).

[Garrett Baker]

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?

Contrary to you, I think its definitely possible there’s someone in the audience who would have been able to tell the piano was slightly out of tune. But I also think more would have unconsciously noticed the music was very very slightly worse than what it could have been. Slightly less detail which you could notice and recognize perfection.

Maybe not so much of a loss or a gain in this circumstance, but definitely a loss. And if you compound this across all of society, if everything is 1% worse for no reason anyone can put their finger on anymore, you just have a worse world, with colors slightly dimmer, appliances slightly less ergonomic, fashion slightly less stylish, games, books, and movies slightly less meaningful.

I think in many circumstances you’ll still be able to buy the high-quality thing, but it takes a while to get to economic equilibriums, and it would be nice if those selecting bundles of goods to sell (like a concert) remembered 1% better everything adds up before transitioning to lesser quality but cheaper goods.

I also think there’s room for making AI produced products significantly better than the human produced ones, so that also should be kept in mind. If you can gain 1% by transitioning to AI, you should by my same logic.

[Viliam]

I think in many circumstances you’ll still be able to buy the high-quality thing

This might be a problem if let’s say, today the cheap thing costs $2K and the expensive one costs $10K, but tomorrow the cheap thing will cost $10 (automated), and the expensive one is still the same $10K.

Because, from the perspective of the future piano tuner, it changes the salary progression from “$2K as a junior, $10K as an expert” to “unemployable as a junior, $10K as an expert”… but how are you supposed to become an expert if you never had a job before that?

[jmh]

Might be worth thinking about the many markets that exist rather than thinking this is some single homogenous market.

A lot of people will still play pianos and take private piano lessons. That market may not be able to afford the $10 tuning but could still support the $2, less perfect, tuning.

If that hypothesis is correct then less experienced tuners still have a path for skill development and gaining experience.

I think another path is that some shift from a market setting (paying someone else) to DIY and start learning how to tune their own, or their friends, piano. I suspect the hand tools needed are not that complex or expensive so that would not be a barrier.

Perhaps the biggest barrier might be beginners and less experienced tuners might not have developed ear and without a good mentor to help them train their ear might not be able to be as good as they perhaps could.

[Garrett Baker]

Educational loans are the obvious answer, and are why I’m not worried about these kinds of arguments.

[Viliam]

It may end up that way, but it will be much more of a lottery than today.

Basically, today you get some feedback along the way. As a junior, either you make junior salary which means you are doing well for a junior, and perhaps a few years later you will qualify for a senior and start getting senior salary. But if things go wrong, then either you never get the senior salary… but at least you got paid the junior salary for a few years, so your effort paid off at least somewhat; or you can’t even find a junior job, which sucks, but at least you wasted less time.

In the “senior or bust” system, you need to spend a lot of time studying and practicing first, and the first feedback that you wasted all that time and money can come a decade later. Sounds like only a quantitative difference, but I assume that expert piano tuners are rare (I may be wrong here), so the quantitative difference may become a difference between “there are a few” and “there is none”.

[SolAlium]

It’s less about the tuning of the piano itself than the knock on effect it has on the pianist. Even if the audience can barely tell the difference, the pianist themself certainly could, as could the conductor!

Tuning the instrument may well have had a large effect on the audience’s experience overall, because the pianist will play much better on an instrument they enjoy playing—it’s a totally different experience hearing someone perform while they’re enjoying their own art, vs someone who’s distracted by an annoying F# that sounds slightly off in every scale.

[Garrett Baker]

Yeah, I would also imagine that’d be the dominant factor in the real world.

[Vanessa Kosoy]

You’re ignoring the part where making something cheaper is a real benefit. For example, it’s usually better to have a world where everyone can access a thing of slightly lower quality, than a world where only a small elite can access a thing, but the thing is of slightly higher quality.

[debrevitatevitae]

I do worry we are already seeing this. To quote the word exactly, the ‘enshittification’ of everything we can buy and services we are provided is real. The best example of this high-quality clothing, but pretty much everything you can buy online at Amazon shows this too. It’s important to be able to maintain quality separate of market dynamics, IMO, at least because some people value it (and consumers aren’t really voting if there is no choice).

[Garrett Baker]

People do say this is the case, but I’m skeptical. I feel like pretty much everything I use or consume is better than it would have been 10 years ago, and where its not I bet I could find a better version with a bit of shopping around.

[debrevitatevitae]

So, I’m mostly referencing trends in e-commerce here. For example, first Amazon put storefronts out of business by allowing drop-shipping of cheaply manufactured goods with no warranty. Now, Temu is competing with Amazon by exploiting import tax loopholes, selling the same items at below production price, many of which contain pthalates and other chemical compounds at multiple times the safe standards. This is a standard trick for monopolisation pulled by large giants: they will then rack the prices back up once they have a stable user base, and start making profit. Uber did this.

The drop in clothing standard is real, though, because fast fashion didn’t really exist until the 2000s.10 years is not far enough back: you need to go about 25-30. If I want high quality clothing made fairtrade, I now have to go on specialist websites like Good on You which compile databases of very niche companies and pay upwards of $100 for an item of clothing. I cannot get something that I expect to last long by walking into a department store.

Enshittification also exists in the apps and services that have been established via monopolisation or acquiring an existing user base.

[ChristianKl]

Only the people who want to buy from Temu buy from Temu. The existence of Temu does not reduce the availability of higher quality options.

While you can buy fast fashion articles, you can also buy outdoor fashion. If I buy a buttoned outdoor shirt today from Mammut today, it’s not made from shitty cotton but material on which bacteria don’t grow as easy and made from a material so that I can easily wash the shirt without any need for dry cleaning or ironing. As far as I can see it’s also likely more durable.

Uniqlo is a department store and if I ask ChatGPT it suggests that it sells more durable clothing today than the average clothing in the 1990s.

It’s possible to buy low-quality fast fashion but there are quality options available as far as clothing goes that simply didn’t exist 25-30 years ago.

[dirk]

Uniqlo is a department store and if I ask ChatGPT it suggests that it sells more durable clothing today than the average clothing in the 1990s.

And if I ask Claude it tells me there have been many studies showing that ready-made clothing has generally declined in quality over time. I think it would be better, in this circumstance, for you to use a real source.

[ChristianKl]

Ready-made clothing is a huge category. Different clothing is optimized for different purposes. It might be true that the average piece of clothing sold is of lower durability than thirty years ago, but that does not negate the fact that quality options are available.

There are fast fashion brands. It’s a business model that works for many brands on the market. It’s however not the business model of all brands and Uniqlo in particular goes for low-cost high-quality clothing including the latest clothing technology.

Technology advancement means that there are more options to produce high-quality clothing than existed three decades ago and Uniqlo takes advantage of that. Uniqlo is also big enough to have it’s own department stores.

[dirk]

This response does not address the substance of my comment; ChatGPT is still not a reliable source, and you haven’t provided any sources at all in this further elaboration.

[ChristianKl]

It addresses the fact that the argument you made doesn’t work. I would think that the argument is part of the substance of your comment. The fact that a study shows that the average quality went down does not imply that quality choices aren’t available.

It’s correct that I don’t provide strong evidence for the quality of Uniqlo, but this is just a comment.

[dirk]

I didn’t make an argument; I provided an illustrative example of why LLMs are useless as sources. The fact that Claude said there was a study does not mean there was a study in real life, and your apparent assumption that Claude’s statements are always true reflects very negatively on your epistemics.

(Edit: I asked for it to cite the studies in question; half of them were confabulated and AFAICT only one of them contained what Claude said it did. (Note that this is Claude 3 Haiku, which isn’t the best; I’d expect frontier models to name four or maybe even five real papers in a list of six (and, with lower confidence, to have a more accurate understanding of the papers’ contents)). Results below:

1. “A New Textiles Economy: Redesigning Fashion’s Future”—Report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (2017) - This is a think-tank report (available here) rather than a study. However, it does actually exist. Claude says it “noted that the number of times clothes are worn before disposal has decreased by 36% compared to 15 years ago.” It really does say this! Page 19, citing as a source the “Circular Fibres Initiative analysis based on Euromonitor International Apparel & Footwear 2016 Edition (volume sales trends 2005–2015).” (Teeeeeechnically the report claims the clothing is still wearable and therefore throwing it away is a waste, which isn’t the same thing as poor durability causing decreased wear time, but humans cite studies that support something a little to the left of their point all the time so in the interests of fairness I won’t mark it down for that). A-.

2. “The State of Fashion 2016”—Report by the McKinsey Global Fashion Index (2016) - This one seems to be real! (Technically, it’s “The State of Fashion 2017″—their first report, so Claude can’t have meant an earlier one—but it was released in 2016 and half of it is an overview of same, so IMO it’s close enough.) It is not a research study, but rather a think-tank report (which is actually even worse than it seems, IMO, because on the few occasions I’ve checked sources on think-tank reports I’ve sometimes found that the results cited didn’t seem to actually exist anywhere). Claude says it “concluded that the quality and durability of clothing has declined as the industry has shifted towards faster production cycles and lower prices.” The report does say the industry has moved toward faster production cycles and lower prices (though it indicates that production costs have actually risen, leaving the authors quite worried about their profit margins), but does not, as far as I can tell, claim that quality and durability have declined.

3. “Valuing Our Clothes: The Cost of UK Fashion”—Study by the Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP) in the UK (2012) - This one actually exists! (Full report here). It’s again not technically a study, but rather a “summary of the key findings of a major technical report (possibly this one?) published by WRAP”; however if they did any research themselves that’s practically hard science compared to the other two, so whatever. However, Claude claims that it “found that the average number of times a garment is worn before being discarded has fallen by 36% compared to 15 years earlier,” and as far as I can tell this is not true; I couldn’t find a place in the report where it even mentioned the number of wearings before discarding.

4. “Apparel and Footwear Benchmarking Analysis”—Report by the American Apparel & Footwear Association—Confabulated (there are reports with similar titles from organizations which are not this one, but this specific report does not exist)

5. “The Apparel Sourcing Caravan’s New Route to the Market”—Report by the Boston Consulting Group—Confabulated

6. “Clothing Durability and the Creation of Value”—Study by the University of Cambridge Institute for Manufacturing (2018) - Confabulated

Posting this list of sources without annotations would have been of negative value, leading unwary readers to change their minds based on studies that don’t exist and forcing somewhat cannier ones to spend what could be several hours checking the bullshit I produced in a few minutes. For this reason as well as the others I discussed, I do not think it is appropriate to cite the statements of LLMs as though they constitute evidence.)

[dirk]

For a more pointed example, here’s ChatGPT:

Uniqlo, once lauded for its affordable yet high-quality basics, has faced criticism in recent years for a noticeable decline in the quality of its clothing. Customers have reported that fabrics feel thinner and less durable, with some items showing signs of wear after just a few washes. Online reviews and consumer feedback suggest that the brand’s earlier collections featured more robust construction and longer-lasting materials, while more recent offerings seem to prioritize cost-cutting over durability. This perceived decline in quality has sparked concern among long-time fans of the brand, who feel that Uniqlo’s focus on fast fashion has come at the expense of the reliability and longevity that once set it apart.

Gosh—that’s just the opposite of what you said! Does this mean you’ve been proven wrong? No, it means I told it to argue that Uniqlo’s clothes have decreased in quality over time and it did, because LLMs will take any position you ask of them regardless of whether or not it’s true.

[ChristianKl]

I don’t assume that all studies that Claude would give me are true. Are there studies that say X is not a good question to ask an LLM if you want to know whether X is true.

It’s common in debate to say even if X, X->Y does not follow. That is not asserting that X is true.

If you ask an LLM it gives you a lot of individual facts in a explanation that help with understanding. It helps with understanding the factors that go into a lot of current fashion being less durable and how those don’t apply to Uniqlo or Mammut for that matter.

[dirk]

You assumed that the studies existed at all. This is not a safe assumption to rely on when you are dealing with LLMs.

[dirk]

With regards to its “help” understanding why Uniqlo didn’t decline, it is, as I demonstrated above, equally good at providing plausible-sounding explanations for why Uniqlo did decline. Here, again, is ChatGPT:

Several factors likely contributed to the perceived decline in quality at Uniqlo, reflecting broader trends in the fashion industry and specific business strategies the brand has pursued.

1. Cost-Cutting and Scale: As Uniqlo expanded globally, the need to maintain competitive pricing while increasing production volumes may have led to compromises in material quality. To keep costs low and meet growing demand, the company might have shifted to cheaper fabrics and production methods, sacrificing the durability and feel that initially attracted customers.

2. Fast Fashion Influence: Although Uniqlo markets itself as a provider of “lifewear” rather than fast fashion, its business model has increasingly incorporated elements of fast fashion, such as frequent new collections and quick production cycles. This shift often prioritizes speed and cost-efficiency over quality, resulting in garments that are less durable.

3. Supply Chain Pressures: Like many global retailers, Uniqlo has faced pressure from fluctuating raw material costs, labor costs, and logistical challenges. To mitigate these pressures, the company may have opted for lower-quality materials or reduced quality control measures in manufacturing processes.

4. Shifts in Consumer Expectations: As consumers have grown accustomed to low prices and frequent turnover in their wardrobes, brands like Uniqlo might have adjusted their offerings to meet these expectations, leading to a focus on affordability and trendiness over long-lasting quality.

5. Strategic Decisions: Uniqlo’s parent company, Fast Retailing, has focused on aggressive expansion and maintaining high profitability. Strategic decisions to prioritize these goals over maintaining the brand’s initial quality standards could have influenced the decline. The emphasis on rapid growth might have overshadowed the commitment to quality that once defined the brand.

Did you verify what ChatGPT told you before you repeated it as fact?

[WitheringWeights]

An anecdote from which I drew a similar conclusion to yours:

About ten years ago I went with my dad to a music hall where a local marching band was playing. I play a few instruments, have a solid grasp of music theory, etc..., but I’m no professional, while he has ‘average Joe’ music training.
I found the concert to be genuinely painful to listen to: entire sections not in tune with each other, very poor dynamics (brass way too loud, woodwinds barely audible), melodies all over the place, sudden tempo changes etc...

After the last piece, the audience asked for the encore. I figured it had to do with social pressure/​convention/​kindness. Before I could say anything, my dad proceeded to extol the band’s musicianship and high level of the performance, assuming I too had enjoyed the experience.

I was (and still am) baffled.

[silentbob]

I once had kind of the opposite experience: I was at a friend’s place, and we watched the recording of a System of a Down concert from a festival that we both had considered attending but didn’t. I thought it was terrific and was quite disappointed not to have attended in person. He however got to the conclusion that the whole thing was so full of flaws that he was glad he hadn’t wasted money on a ticket.

Just like you, I was baffled, and to be honest just kind of assumed he was just trying to signal his high standards or something but surely didn’t actually mean that.

Given that he was quite the musician himself, playing multiple instruments, and I’m quite the opposite, I now for the first time seriously consider whether he really did dislike that concert as much as he said.

[Coding2077]

This was very satisfying for me to read!

Not only did I find this story a very convincing example for the point this articles is trying to make (“You don’t know how bad most things are nor precisely how they’re bad.” and, related “Reality has a surprising amount of detail.”).

But the writing was great as well! The fact that you were not a complete novice, but someone who tried to follow along with the piano tuner’s every step, and failed to predict every next little problem that the piano tuner identified made for a great reading experience for me. It evoked a sense of: “Oh, what’s the next detail going to be?” And I wanted to continue reading. :)

And, as a final sidenote: Not only do I enjoy thinking about this particular point in general (= how detailed reality is, and how difficult it is to assess the state of all the things in reality). But I also relate to this particular example about piano tuning and music, because I just started (= a year ago) learning about music, music theory, and I’m trying my hand at being creative with creating my own music. So when you mentioned the “attack of the note”: A year ago I wouldn’t have known what this meant. But now this consumes a lot of my mental resources (because I’m trying to wrap my head around _everything_ related to creating and being creative with music), and this whole topic was just satisfying to read. :)

[Quiche Eater]

In my opinion, this is connected with Sturgeon’s Law. I’d guess that to expert pianists and piano tuners, 90% of pianos sound out of tune. I know among hardcore software engineers, a common lament is that almost all software sucks. Windows is almost unbearable to me, but I’m sure most desktop users are happy with it. Most desktop users are not programmers.

90% of all things may be crap to the discerning eye, but the world remains ok with that because each person has only a handful of places where they care to discern.

[Steffee]

With software, I can see how this discernment would be useful to society, even if it’s a burden for you individually: Your ability to find flaws in software presumably allows you to design better software, which everyone will be able to take advantage of, even if they don’t presently realize how much better their current software could be.

However, I struggle with the original post’s framing—

”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.”

It seems to me like this level of discernment is only a con, not a pro, because it’s only result is top level pianists and tuners detecting slightly worse notes, and therefore making themselves slightly less happy?

[kave]

Curated.

This was a fun post to read! I liked learning about God’s prank on musicians, a little bit about how pianos work and how tuning works. I particularly appreciated how Solenoid_Entity shared what it was like trying to hear the problems and what the fixes sounded like. I feel like I got a lot of detail about what the actual subtle problems in the audio waves were, whether or not they were perceptible to plebs like me.

I’m not sure if I agree about the importance of preserving high-quality tunings like this. I lean towards yes, but mainly because I expect a bunch of people would actually enjoy music slightly more in a world with better tunings. Not least, because it might make a difference to the production processes of music makers.

The comments were good on this one. I particularly liked the thread under Garrett’s comment, which made me think about the tradeoffs between the abundance of mass production and the often higher quality cap of artisanal work (though I think the absolute quality cap is normally higher for industrial production).

For more on potential incommensurability of skills, see: What Money Cannot Buy.

[jmh]

I liked the post and really liked learning about what it means to tune a piano. I had no idea that is was that envolved (makes me wonder if perhaps somethnig like a 12 sting guitar has some similar tuning aspects). So thanks for writing this.

But I also wonder, how to I extrapolate or generalize this. I come away with the question “Are there any actual tuned pianos and how would we know?” That kind of generalized into “We live in an imperfect world, and I already know that.”

But the post also tells me that some people can make things better than I would have been able or even known that it could be done or even was achieved. I am sure I would have been one of the people (possibly that very last to ever notice) the piano was not quite right.

That leads me to thinking about when do the tails matter? Sure, for perhaps a small number of people in the world the better tuned piano makes the world a better place for them. For most the improvement is beyond their comprehension so the world has really not improved.

I wonder a bit about where else this might be playing out, where people see something could be improved and want to get others involved or resources reallocated but struggle to do so and feel very frustrated by the appathy they feel they are confronted with.

[Richard_Kennaway]

That leads me to thinking about when do the tails matter? Sure, for perhaps a small number of people in the world the better tuned piano makes the world a better place for them. For most the improvement is beyond their comprehension so the world has really not improved.

Finding out that piano tuning has such depth to it has improved my world.

[Garrett Baker]

That leads me to thinking about when do the tails matter? Sure, for perhaps a small number of people in the world the better tuned piano makes the world a better place for them. For most the improvement is beyond their comprehension so the world has really not improved.

I think the tails basically always matter, and even though you can’t consciously register the differences between a well-tuned and an adequately-tuned piano, you still do subconsciously register the difference.

In particular, I’d expect that a concert with the same players, same instruments, same venue, same songs, etc but with only adequately-tuned instruments will (in expectation) be rated slightly worse than one with well-tuned instruments, even by those with untrained ears. I don’t think it will be rated as badly as those with trained ears would rate, but I do still expect the imperfections to add up to measureables.

[leogao]

I bet that the size of the difference from actually tuning the piano perfectly is smaller than the difference from merely telling the audience that the piano has been perfectly tuned.

[jmh]

I’m not quite sure what to make of “adequately tuned” here. If that means tuned well enough that 99% of the audiance cannot tell the difference between that and a better tuned piano then I’m not sure how they then rate the performance lower than the alternative performance with a better tuned piano.

I do agree that there is likely to be a range in which those like me might actually hear the difference but not be able to articulate, even to ourselves, the source of the sense something is not quite right. Perhaps that’s the area you’re thinking of. If so then I think that’s something this post helps with. Knowing more about the mechancis of the tool we might have more ability to understand where our sense of “offness” is coming from.

So was going out to that 1% tail level the right level? I don’t know and am pretty sure I only have something of an arbitrary and ad hoc way of trying to say what I might think is the right level for most situations I might think about. I don’t know if that is just a feature of the world or a problem in getting less wrong.

[DPiepgrass]

A title like “some people can notice more imperfections than you (and they get irked)” would be more accurate and less clickbaity, though when written like that it it sounds kind of obvious.

[AnnaJo]

very cool explanation! I played the piano for more than a decade and this finally explains why I often think electric pianos sound slightly funny. It’s all in the tuning lol.

[sid-kap]

so that after 11 stacked ‘equal-tempered’ 5ths, each of them 1/​50th of a semitone sharp, we arrive back at a perfect octave multiple of the original frequency.

Don’t the 5ths need to be slightly flat (700 cents instead of 702 cents) to have the octaves in tune?

[mthibode]

As for God’s Joke—there is definitely another way to interpret this detail than the author provides.

The article refers to the adoption of the “even tempered scale” where each note is tuned slightly imperfectly in order to create conditions to play mostly in tune during music that involves multiple key changes; however, it is possible to tune instruments in a more precise manner, including the piano so that they are perfectly in tune for a certain piece of music written in a certain key or with few or no key changes. This kind of piano tuning is called “just intonation.”

So, the piano or any other instrument could be more precisely tuned so that music in a certain key sounds even better than it would on instruments tuned to a tempered scale. There is the potential for a story of greater perfection inside a story of seeking greater precision. Instead of taking this tack, the author refers to it as a kind of joke, invoking God’s sense of humor, whereas this is actually an artifact of human ingenuity. Beginning in the 18th century, western musicians decided, “yeah, this kind of tuning is good enough” given the trade off of listening to a concert and music that includes the effect of key changes or tuning instruments for every key that the group plays in.

(Look up “truck stop key change” for even more fun and insights.)

[shelvacu]

I’m surprised, I think I was predisposed to agree with the conclusion but this post has the opposite effect. This post seems to implicitly take as a given that
1. Pianos sounding the way the piano tuner and pianist wanted them to sound is a Good Thing, and
2. It is not replicable by machines

\#2 is a very unusual take for this site, perhaps I misunderstood?

\#1 Why should Piano Tuner’s preferences for how a piano sounds affect my preferences? Maybe I like the variety of hearing an out-of-tune piano:

You can be a [connoisseur of anything](https://​​xkcd.com/​​915/​​). I think I do value connoisseurs existing, but I’m not sure I value specifically piano connoisseurs in their current form existing.

And then we’ll all have slightly worse pianos than we would otherwise have.

I fundamentally disagree. Worse according to Piano Tuner, sure. But will the experiences we have of enjoying music get worse if piano tuners slowly died out as a profession? I doubt it.

[Steven]

I think discernment is not essential to entertainment. If people really want to learn what a slightly off piano sounds like and also pay for expert piano tuning, then that’s fine, but I don’t think people should be looked down upon for not having that level of discernment.

[Review Bot]

The LessWrong Review runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2025. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.

Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?

[RedMan]

Historically, everyone who had shoes had a pair of leather shoes, custom sized to their feet by a shoemaker. These shoes could be repaired and the ‘lasts’ of their feet could be used to make another pair of perfectly fitting shoes.

Now shoes come in standard sizes, are usually made of plastic, and are rarely repairable. Finding a pair of custom fitted shoes is a luxury good out of reach of most consumers.

Progress!

[deleted]