I can’t remember where I read this anecdote, but it pertains to a student who became obsessed with the Implicit Awareness Test to the point where he completed it on a daily basis. One day, out of nowhere, it came back with a net positive association with black faces. He struggled to account for this until he realised he’d been watching coverage of the Olympics that morning.
As for expressing points with non-argumentative methods, the general idea makes me a little uneasy. Some time ago, after attending a folk festival, I came to the conclusion that music shouldn’t be the dialectic of politics. It’s too easy for the uninitiated to conflate a good piece of music with a good argument. Artistic flair is both a useful and fun tool for presenting ideas, but too much flair and you have to start wondering if the ideas could stand up by themselves
Oh, art is dangerous. I always thought that if you don’t realize that Plato had a point, you shouldn’t be making art at all.
Ever seen “Triumph of the Will”? It’s beautiful, particularly the music. It won’t make a modern viewer into a Nazi, but if you get absorbed in it you’re going to have emotions that you never intended.
I thought it would be obvious to the LW community that art can deceive; what I thought was more interesting was that art can help you fix an incorrect heuristic that you already know is incorrect
I’m very much behind the idea of using art (or indeed anything) to regulate undesirable brain events that are outside of direct conscious control. I’m also behind making ideas aesthetically pleasing in general. It’s the “non-argumentative ways of conveying a point of view” that I find uncomfortable. How do you properly respond to them?
Making something beautiful for beauty’s sake creates a barrier to destroying it. If someone writes a perfectly palendromic villanelle advocating a borderline-indefensible position, it becomes harder to critique that position without looking and feeling like an unappreciative phillistine.
This may be covered by your “not manipulation” caveat, but I’d still rather ideas be incidentally beautiful than deliberately so.
Making something beautiful for beauty’s sake creates a barrier to destroying it.
Every argument dares you to demolish it, but not so with art. Bach wrote a beautiful song about how death is good. Those who believe that death is good can derive some comfort from it, but I don’t feel it is an obstruction when I try to convince them of the opposite point of view. A rational argument for the value of life has nothing to fear from a song; and an affect-laden parable is not made weaker by Bach’s song.
Personally, I would still listen to Bach on my 200th birthday.
It’s the “non-argumentative ways of conveying a point of view” that I find uncomfortable. How do you properly respond to them?
The same way I properly respond to all other ways of conveying a point of view: the most effective way I know that isn’t itself unethical. If my audience is more moved by poetry than prose, arguing in prose when others are using poetry to argue wrong positions is not praiseworthy.
Of course, if I’ve spent decades learning how to argue in prose and/or am naturally skilled at it, whereas I’m not skilled at arguing in poetry, that means choosing to compete in an area where I’m not confident.
And you’re absolutely right: that is uncomfortable. Sometimes, the right thing to do happens to be uncomfortable. It sucks, but there it is.
All of that said, it is important to clearly distinguish in my own head between the goal of being compelling and the goal of being correct. They are distinct, and largely orthogonal. But they are both important.
I came to the conclusion that music shouldn’t be the dialectic of politics...Artistic flair is both a useful and fun tool for presenting ideas, but too much flair and you have to start wondering if the ideas could stand up by themselves
Add to that the danger of a corrupting effect on art itself, whose primary value does not derive from extra-artistic “ideas” it “presents”.
It is notable how little of the greatest music (to take the art form I know the most about) is explicitly political.
I suspect it works both ways. Art with an explicit political message (i.e. something sophisticated enough to be able to disagree with) is less likely to gain widespread appeal than something politically ambiguous.
I’ve recently been thinking about notorious graffiti artist Banksy lately, who’s a pretty good example of this. He does have widespread appeal, in spite of his work being considered political, but his art doesn’t present a coherent enough political stance for anyone to actually disagree with.
Sure. I’m a fan of folk music, and it definitely suffers at the more didactic end. (I have a pretty high tolerance for explicitly political music—I’m a Phil Ochs fan—but there does reach a point where it isn’t music anymore, it’s an editorial set to a tune.) Art does its work below the rational level—that means that good art is pretty much amoral, and it’ll always take some wrangling to corral art into serving a purpose.
I can’t remember where I read this anecdote, but it pertains to a student who became obsessed with the Implicit Awareness Test to the point where he completed it on a daily basis. One day, out of nowhere, it came back with a net positive association with black faces. He struggled to account for this until he realised he’d been watching coverage of the Olympics that morning.
As for expressing points with non-argumentative methods, the general idea makes me a little uneasy. Some time ago, after attending a folk festival, I came to the conclusion that music shouldn’t be the dialectic of politics. It’s too easy for the uninitiated to conflate a good piece of music with a good argument. Artistic flair is both a useful and fun tool for presenting ideas, but too much flair and you have to start wondering if the ideas could stand up by themselves
Oh, art is dangerous. I always thought that if you don’t realize that Plato had a point, you shouldn’t be making art at all.
Ever seen “Triumph of the Will”? It’s beautiful, particularly the music. It won’t make a modern viewer into a Nazi, but if you get absorbed in it you’re going to have emotions that you never intended.
I thought it would be obvious to the LW community that art can deceive; what I thought was more interesting was that art can help you fix an incorrect heuristic that you already know is incorrect
I’m very much behind the idea of using art (or indeed anything) to regulate undesirable brain events that are outside of direct conscious control. I’m also behind making ideas aesthetically pleasing in general. It’s the “non-argumentative ways of conveying a point of view” that I find uncomfortable. How do you properly respond to them?
Making something beautiful for beauty’s sake creates a barrier to destroying it. If someone writes a perfectly palendromic villanelle advocating a borderline-indefensible position, it becomes harder to critique that position without looking and feeling like an unappreciative phillistine.
This may be covered by your “not manipulation” caveat, but I’d still rather ideas be incidentally beautiful than deliberately so.
Every argument dares you to demolish it, but not so with art. Bach wrote a beautiful song about how death is good. Those who believe that death is good can derive some comfort from it, but I don’t feel it is an obstruction when I try to convince them of the opposite point of view. A rational argument for the value of life has nothing to fear from a song; and an affect-laden parable is not made weaker by Bach’s song.
Personally, I would still listen to Bach on my 200th birthday.
The same way I properly respond to all other ways of conveying a point of view: the most effective way I know that isn’t itself unethical. If my audience is more moved by poetry than prose, arguing in prose when others are using poetry to argue wrong positions is not praiseworthy.
Of course, if I’ve spent decades learning how to argue in prose and/or am naturally skilled at it, whereas I’m not skilled at arguing in poetry, that means choosing to compete in an area where I’m not confident.
And you’re absolutely right: that is uncomfortable. Sometimes, the right thing to do happens to be uncomfortable. It sucks, but there it is.
All of that said, it is important to clearly distinguish in my own head between the goal of being compelling and the goal of being correct. They are distinct, and largely orthogonal. But they are both important.
Add to that the danger of a corrupting effect on art itself, whose primary value does not derive from extra-artistic “ideas” it “presents”.
It is notable how little of the greatest music (to take the art form I know the most about) is explicitly political.
I suspect it works both ways. Art with an explicit political message (i.e. something sophisticated enough to be able to disagree with) is less likely to gain widespread appeal than something politically ambiguous.
I’ve recently been thinking about notorious graffiti artist Banksy lately, who’s a pretty good example of this. He does have widespread appeal, in spite of his work being considered political, but his art doesn’t present a coherent enough political stance for anyone to actually disagree with.
Sure. I’m a fan of folk music, and it definitely suffers at the more didactic end. (I have a pretty high tolerance for explicitly political music—I’m a Phil Ochs fan—but there does reach a point where it isn’t music anymore, it’s an editorial set to a tune.) Art does its work below the rational level—that means that good art is pretty much amoral, and it’ll always take some wrangling to corral art into serving a purpose.