He’s neither celebrity nor academic, but I’ve always wanted to see a diavlog between Eliezer and PJ Eby.
arthurlewis
Karma: 71
In a sense, I think that all creative pursuits are served well by the type of “brute force” you’re talking about. You write/play/draw something, decide if you like it, and then work from there. However, narrowing down the search space, as you described, can be easier if you leave it to the unconscious. If you’ve been listening to the style of music you’re composing in, or reading the style you’re writing in, etc., it should have at least a few heuristics already loaded up. In the case of your melodies, what happens if you just “hum something?”
I generated a segment by pianistic experimentation (rather than from my aural imagination)
This is how I write most of my music. Every once in a while, a melody or chord progression will just show up fully formed, usually on the subway or in the shower, but it’s rare. Most of the other songwriters/composers I know work similarly. You say you don’t hear new music in your head; a lot of the time, I don’t either. I hear it as it comes out of my mouth or speakers in real-time.
It’s an Intel binary; perhaps you’re on PowerPC?
3 seems likely to be true, given this Google search for “cronoDAS Battletoads.”
Those kinds of flags are the only way I can remember what I like. My memory is poor enough that I lose most details about books and movies within a few months, but if I really liked something, that 5-Yay rating sticks around for years.
Hmm, I guess that’s why part of my brain still thinks Moulin Rouge, which I saw on a very enjoyable date, and never really had the urge to actually watch again, is one of my favorite movies.
Compression seems a fine analogy to me, as long as we’re talking about mp3′s and flv’s, rather than zip’s and tar’s.
If you had actually donated $400 to PSI, but the rest of the statement were true, would that count as the lie?
Handle: arthurlewis
Location: New York, NY
Age: 28
Education: BA in Music.
Occupation: Musician / Teacher / Mac Support Guy
Blog/Music: http://arthurthefourth.com
My career as a rationalist began when I started doing tech support, and realized the divide between successful troubleshooting and what most customers tried to do. I think the key to “winning” is to challenge your assumptions about how to win, and what winning is. I think that makes me an instrumental rationalist, but I’m not quite sure I understand the term. I’m here because OB and LW are among the closest things I’ve ever seen to an honest attempt to discover truth, whatever that may turn out to mean. And because I really like the phrase “Shut up and calculate!”
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I don’t think Schoenberg ever had public favor. He may have had the favor of the “elite” music audience, but, as I understand it, the public at large was listening to early jazz. Maybe this is my American bias; I’m not sure.
I see your point about Bach; I always had the impression that composers knew about him, but the masses didn’t. I could be wrong. What were people in their homes actually playing in the 18th and 19th centuries? Whose music were they going to see? The question of whether or not “popular music” has replaced the music of the canonical composers from a cultural standpoint hinges on these answers that I don’t have.
Ciphergoth, I’m proposing that 5 is another option, not that it should replace the ones he’s already proposed. I don’t know much about BDSM, but I assume it covers a much wider spectrum than the enjoyment of pain. My main point, which I didn’t express clearly enough, is that the term “masochism” is being seriously overloaded in the post. Personally, I can see a connection between spicy food and intellectual challenges (both put me into an excited and forward-moving state, although for propbably different reasons), but horror movies and rollercoasters go into a completely different category (just being scary).
I would love to read and comment on such a post. I would take issue with the widespread use of terms like “good,” “high-quality,” “real,” and “art” to differentiate the Western canon of choral/orchestral music from everything else that’s out there. I’m sure there are many jazz composers and theorists who wouldn’t give Berg or Webern the time of day. And buskers play all kinds of music—it doesn’t have to be Bach or Beethoven to be meaningful.
In terms of the Second Viennese School, what I should have said in my previous comment is that there’s a popular misconception that Schoenberg was the one who tipped the linear progression past the point of contemporary accessibility. i.e. that while Bach’s contemporaries, for example, may not have known his music, they were not freaked out by it. But this seems to be a pretty common thing in musical history—new composer comes along, people say “what the hell is that guy doing? ack, the impropriety!” and decades or centuries later, everybody gets it. Popularity is a fine metric for judging the verdict of history; you just have to wait until it’s actually history.
What about 5. Linkage to another belief that causes us to associate so-called masochistic behavior with something good?
Some people like BDSM because they like the feeling of someone being else in control. Some people like being hit because they associate it with the love of their parents. Some people wallow in bad feelings because that’s how they learned to get attention.
I think question 2 is an important one. These behaviors can be logically grouped together as “masochistic’, but the kinds of “bad” that they move towards are completely different. You’re talking physical pain, confusion, fear, exhaustion, self-judgment, identifying with “suffering,” etc. I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by combining them into one category. If we want to talk real masochism, I think the cleanest solution would be to stick with the enjoyment of physical pain.
Anyone gonna weigh in on the old pleasure and pain two-sided coin?
Sometimes history moves slowly. During his life, Bach was best known as an organist; sure, later composers studied and loved his work, but it wasn’t until the mid 19th century that he started to get the reputation that he has now.
I think komponisto is implying that there was plenty of popular music back then as well, but most of those composers/performers didn’t enter the canon.
However, I think there’s another factor at play here—“art music” experienced the same academization and post-modernization that we saw in the visual arts. Serialism, musicque concrete, aleatory composition—all these things pushed the boundaries of what “music” actually meant, going against popular sensibilities in ways that (and I could be wrong here) the “art music” of previous centuries did not. The idea of linear stylistic progression totally breaks down once you get to the mid 20th century, so if you want to construct a convenient narrative, you’ve got to grab onto popular music or jazz.
I think the Second Viennese School tends to get singled out, because they are the major overlap between “music that some devotees of ‘art music’ really enjoy” and “music that some devotees of ‘art music’ think is too bizarre.” If you go earlier, Mahler has too many fans, and later, people like Xenakis don’t have enough.
Ah, but status-based behaviors aren’t necessarily calculated based on present circumstances. e.g. I became somewhat of a grammatical pedant growing up to gain the approval of teachers, parents, etc.; although it’s now an annoying behavior to those around me, the habit still exists.
I’m with you, Saturn. Doing it well isn’t easy at first, but I’ve found I’ve gotten quite good at it by mostly asking questions and keeping my mouth shut. I tend to act as an option-provider and a debugger. I let them do most of the actual determination of actions, and use my own power to help them realize the primary goals they’re optimizing for, realize unconsidered courses of action that may lead to those goals, and challenge existing assumptions. I disagree about the status motivation though—when I’ve actually helped someone optimize, I feel like a real badass.
“There’s no problem with you” can have a lot of persuasive weight as a response to a comment about what may or may not be a problem with CronoDAS. All things being equal, choosing the option that makes you look better is a fairly common bias.
Also, your status as a member of the lesswrong community and your tone, implying you’ve understood his particular situation, both lend you a slight boost in authority above random-person-on-the-Internet. I don’t know whether this boost is trivial or not, but I think Eliezer is proposing a general rule which, although it will overshoot its mark, will guard against biasing the advisee, even in cases where you’d think it wouldn’t be an issue. I believe there was an OB article on these sorts of rules, but I can’t figure out what to search for.
The cheap example works, but, as you said, it’s cheap. The logical fallacies tell me very little in terms of actually modeling the mind, because they generalize too far. A useful model of the human mind that actually addresses akrasia would have to fall in between those two extremes.
I’ve followed pjeby’s work for almost 3 years now, and I’ve been a client of his for 2. From what I’ve seen, it’s a collection of techniques, some new and some modified from pre-existing work, founded on a system of theories about how beliefs are stored and cached in the brain, how emotional responses are coded, and how this data can be manipulated. The use of these techniques is systematized—i.e. in situation X, do Y—but the process of determining the current situation is, as in modern medicine, a mixture of strict procedure and intuition. I mention all this because a) while specific advice does not generalize, the system and process do, and b) this systematization is not clear from his blog, which is targeted towards the self-help audience, rather than aspiring rationalists.
″...from other sciences I have learned what true general models of the human mind look like...”
I would love to see some examples of this.
Are you saying that teachers who don’t externally practice the thing they’re teaching won’t make good teachers? Or that they’re not worthy of respect at all? If the former, I agree with Yvain and others that we have better metrics for determining teacher quality. If the latter, I’m not sure why this would be the case. The comparison to literary critics doesn’t answer that question; it just accesses our assumed cached thoughts about literary critics. What’s the problem with people wanting to be literary critics?
The post proposes a required formula for respect, but it never explains what quantity that formula intends to maximize. What’s the goal here?
In case this hasn’t already happened, or might happen again, I’d also be interested.