Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The age of average

alexmurrell.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 493 posts

Re: The age of average

#131

Post by hammock »

crazygringo wrote: post #123

What the article describes is correct, but I don't think the words "average" or "homogeneity" or "conformity" are the right terms, as they seem to carry negative connotations here. Rather, the right word is "convergence". The point is, people like certain things aesthetically. It used to be that artists and designers were still trying to figure out what looks good, and trying all the things. But now we've tried so ma…

One essayist calls this phenomenon “refinement culture”: https://medium.com/@lindynewsletter/refinement-culture-51d96...

Another essay that I can't find anymore called it "expedience." As in, we all converge on the same products not because they are the best, but because they are "good enough"

Re: The age of average

#132

Post by FeteCommuniste »

jonnycat wrote: post #119

A tangent from the point of the post, but Komar & Melamid did a similar "experiment" with music to produce both the most wanted and most unwanted songs, and the results are amazing/hilarious. The most unwanted song, for example, features all the thing people dislike in music (according to their surveys): opera singers rapping about cowboys, bagpipes, uncomfortably slow tempos, and choirs of children singing ad jingle…

Wow. Not just an opera singer rapping, but an opera singer rapping over a drum-machine beat with what sounds like a tuba playing the bassline and discordant accordion, bagpipe, and harp riffs coming in and out.

Hahaha, this is beautifully terrible. Thanks for linking it.

Re: The age of average

#133

Post by wellpast »

There must be a name for this phenomenon where someone sits in their academic study, spends time smartly and refinedly analyzing some aspects of social behavior, and among myriad possible theories they select the one where mankind, in general, is stupid, philistine, average...

Re: The age of average

#135

Post by Last5Digits »

I'm always wary of articles like this. The feeling of things becoming mediocre strongly resonates with me, but I am aware that there could be a great many different biases at play.

When I was younger, entertainment media felt magical. The complexity and depth of experiences I could get from even a second-rate story was immense. I remember staying up late at night to process the last movie I watched, or feeling that rich combination of sadness and inspiration from finishing a long book.

I barely consume media nowadays, because every book, movie, TV show, video game and song fails to give me an interesting or meaningful experience. They all feel like grey slop - and after a few minutes, I start to fantasize about vacuuming my apartment, because even that seems like an adventure in comparison.

The question is, why do I feel this way? Is it because the modern entertainment industry truly has become stale, or is it because I've lived long enough to see the simple patterns underlying most of our desires and fantasies?

Re: The age of average

#136

Post by ryandrake »

tsunamifury wrote: post #120
pier25 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same that has always happened. Human groups tend to become homogeneous because this helps survival. The difference is now the cultural bubble is global and of course it's completely irrelevant for survival.

No it’s not and stop trying to be smarter by saying it’s always been this way. Go look at art of different societies from as near as 150 years ago. Spanish, French, English, and American fashion, architecture, and style are wildly different compared to the sea of homeginity of today. I am tired of hacker news for always having these shallow “smarter than you” sage comments that completely miss the point. It’s just li…

> I am tired of hacker news for always having these shallow “smarter than you” sage comments that completely miss the point. It’s just like the article pointed out. At scale here everyone’s comment is “no you’re wrong because [some mundane detail observation that misses the point].”

Nitpicking mundane (and unimportant) details is HN Commentary In a Nutshell. I totally expected these comments and did not come away disappointed. We make an art out of missing the forest for the trees here!

It sucks, too, because the article makes a great point with numerous examples, but all we have here are comments like "Well, ackshually, in paragraph 5 sentence 3, the author says 'all' when he meant 'most' so the entire article is clearly wrong!" which completely miss the point.

Re: The age of average

#137

Post by alkonaut »

While it's a bit dull and boring, eventually when everyone sees what everyone else sees (as we do when we all have internet connected devices with cameras) then our styles and tastes will also be converging. Which will be the "winning" one will depend on context. In some cases it's going to be a boring convergence to an arbitrary or bland style, in others it's boing to be simply an adaptation of somethin that's objectively good. This isn't just about style, it's about everything. If something is objectively better (E.g. single faucet with hot/cold instead of the UK traditional double faucet) then the better one will take over. And that will happen once people realize there is an alternative to the status quo.

Re: The age of average

#138

Post by nebulousthree »

Who knew that the primary incentive being economic would lead to a convergence of human behaviours?

Every profit-motive champion raved about the variety produced by means of competition. Instead, the fear of failure from truly distinguishing oneself has driven competitive differences to the edge where it remains superficial and unimportant. Alpine white or cream white paint? Straight tube or spherical Edison bulbs? Nietzche or Camus on the toilet bookshelf?

In fairness, we can say that this incentive has normalized a lower bound of acceptable design in terms of function. Yes, it's bland, but it works.

But now what? The incentive needs to be transcended. The only way to do that actually is to be rich and/or crazy enough to deny the potential of economic failure. But who can afford to do that?

This hasn't changed. The Sistine chapel wasn't painted according to the whims of the peasantry.

Re: The age of average

#139

Post by bumby »

crazygringo wrote: post #123

What the article describes is correct, but I don't think the words "average" or "homogeneity" or "conformity" are the right terms, as they seem to carry negative connotations here. Rather, the right word is "convergence". The point is, people like certain things aesthetically. It used to be that artists and designers were still trying to figure out what looks good, and trying all the things. But now we've tried so ma…

I've tried making this same point when it comes to auto designs (at least in the competitive, cost-sensitive ones). A lot of mid-sized cars look the same because the design constraints generally converge on the same handful of principles. They've converged not in the aesthetic sense as much as the engineering sense: because they work at a relatively low cost.

(I'm speaking mainly about things like aerodynamics here, not necessarily EV-vs-ICE etc.)

Post reply on HN