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

Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work

markusstrasser.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 125 posts

Re: Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work

#31

Post by qlm »

dauertewigkeit wrote: post #27
qlm wrote: post #4

Perhaps a controversial view on this particular forum but I find the tendency of a certain type of person* to write about everything in this overly-technical way regardless of whether it is appropriate to the subject matter to be very tiresome ("executing cached heuristics", "constrained the search space"). *I associate it with the asinine contemporary "rationalist" movement (LessWrong et al.) but I'm not making any…

It's a middle school essay that is trying to score points based on the number of metaphors used. Very unappealing and I wouldn't call it technical. EDIT: For all the people saying the writing is inspired by math/cs, that's not at all true. That's not how technical writing is done. This guy is just a poser.

> I wouldn't call it technical

Fair. Perhaps I should have said it gives the illusion of being technical.

Re: Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work

#32

Post by mjburgess »

contravariant wrote: post #25

Just map quality q to e^q or something and it will be sublinear again. Or more directly, if your argument for why effort scales linearly with perceived quality doesn't discuss how we perceive quality then something is wrong. A more direct argument would be that it takes roughly an equal amount of effort to halve the distance from a rough work to its ideal. Going from 90% to 99% takes the same as going from 99% to 99.…

Your first line assumes that `q` fails to refer to an objective property. The `e^q` space isn't quality, as much as `e^t` isnt temperature (holding the property we are talking about fixed). Thus the comment ends up being circular.

Re: Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work

#33

Post by tinkelenberg »

anechouapechou wrote: post #24

I believe that last-mile edits do not significantly improve the quality of (most) creative work. To produce high-quality work, one must have already "cached" their "motor heuristics," which, in simpler terms, means having dedicated thousands of hours to deep and deliberate practice in their field. The definition of 'last-mile edits' is very subjective, though. If you're dealing with open systems, it's almost unthinka…

A teacher told me once that editing poetry is like trying to open a glass jar. Eventually, you have to set it down or you’ll break the thing.

Re: Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work

#34

Post by qlm »

davrosthedalek wrote: post #28
nilirl wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What diction is "appropriate to the subject matter" is a negotiation between author and reader. I think the author is ok with it being inappropriate for many; it's clearly written for those who enjoy math or CS.

I think it's a trick. It seems to be the article is just a series of ad-hoc assumptions and hypotheses without any support. The language aims to hide this, and makes you think about the language instead of its contents. Which is logically unsound: In a sharp peak, micro optimizations would give you a clearer signal where the optimum lies since the gradient is steeper.

> In a sharp peak, micro optimizations would give you a clearer signal where the optimum lies since the gradient is steeper.

I would refuse to even engage with the piece on this level, since it lends credibility to the idea that the creative process is even remotely related to or analogous to gradient descent.

Re: Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work

#35

Post by 65 »

stavros wrote: post #30

Judging by the comments here, I'm the only one, but I have no idea what he's talking about. Even the abstract: > The act of creation is fractal exploration–exploitation under optimal feedback control. When resolution increases the portion of parameter space that doesn't make the artifact worse (acceptance volume) collapses. Verification latency and rate–distortion combine into a precision tax that scales superlinearl…

The abstract is some of the worst writing I've read in a while. Trying to sound so very smart while being incapable of getting your point across. This whole article reeks of pretentiousness.

Re: Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work

#36

Post by nilirl »

davrosthedalek wrote: post #28
nilirl wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What diction is "appropriate to the subject matter" is a negotiation between author and reader. I think the author is ok with it being inappropriate for many; it's clearly written for those who enjoy math or CS.

I think it's a trick. It seems to be the article is just a series of ad-hoc assumptions and hypotheses without any support. The language aims to hide this, and makes you think about the language instead of its contents. Which is logically unsound: In a sharp peak, micro optimizations would give you a clearer signal where the optimum lies since the gradient is steeper.

I wouldn't jump to call it a trick, but I agree, the author sacrificed too much clarity in a try for efficiency.

The author set up an interesting analogy but failed to explore where it breaks down or how all the relationships work in the model.

My inference about the author's meaning was such: In a sharp peak, searching for useful moves is harder because you have fewer acceptable options as you approach the peak.

Re: Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work

#38

Post by energy123 »

mjburgess wrote: post #32
contravariant wrote: post #25

Just map quality q to e^q or something and it will be sublinear again. Or more directly, if your argument for why effort scales linearly with perceived quality doesn't discuss how we perceive quality then something is wrong. A more direct argument would be that it takes roughly an equal amount of effort to halve the distance from a rough work to its ideal. Going from 90% to 99% takes the same as going from 99% to 99.…

Your first line assumes that `q` fails to refer to an objective property. The `e^q` space isn't quality, as much as `e^t` isnt temperature (holding the property we are talking about fixed). Thus the comment ends up being circular.

The issue was with the word "it". In the sentence, that word is acting as an indirection to both q and e^q instead of referring to a unitary thing. So yes, "it" does become linear/sublinear, but "it" is no longer the original subject of discussion.

Re: Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work

#39

Post by davrosthedalek »

nilirl wrote: post #36
davrosthedalek wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a trick. It seems to be the article is just a series of ad-hoc assumptions and hypotheses without any support. The language aims to hide this, and makes you think about the language instead of its contents. Which is logically unsound: In a sharp peak, micro optimizations would give you a clearer signal where the optimum lies since the gradient is steeper.

I wouldn't jump to call it a trick, but I agree, the author sacrificed too much clarity in a try for efficiency. The author set up an interesting analogy but failed to explore where it breaks down or how all the relationships work in the model. My inference about the author's meaning was such: In a sharp peak, searching for useful moves is harder because you have fewer acceptable options as you approach the peak.

Fewer absolute or relative? If you scale down your search space... This only makes some kind of sense if your step size is fixed. While I agree with another poster that a reduction of a creative process to gradient descent is not wise, the article also misses the point what makes such a gradient descent hard -- it's not sharp peaks, it's the flat area around them -- and the presence of local minima.

Re: Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work

#40

Post by codelikeawolf »

65 wrote: post #35
stavros wrote: post #30

Judging by the comments here, I'm the only one, but I have no idea what he's talking about. Even the abstract: > The act of creation is fractal exploration–exploitation under optimal feedback control. When resolution increases the portion of parameter space that doesn't make the artifact worse (acceptance volume) collapses. Verification latency and rate–distortion combine into a precision tax that scales superlinearl…

The abstract is some of the worst writing I've read in a while. Trying to sound so very smart while being incapable of getting your point across. This whole article reeks of pretentiousness.

Yeah, it came off as complete nonsense. If someone were talking to me like this in person, I'd probably start suspecting they were doing it to distract me while their friend was outside stealing my hubcaps.
Post reply on HN