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Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work

markusstrasser.org

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

#51

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

Bands and artists do sometimes record a banger very quickly, and no, the effort is not in muscle memory or practice.

If it was in muscle memory it would be repeatable feat, and it really isn't.

Some work is technically polished and you can see/hear the effort that went into it.

But there's a point where extra effort makes the work less good. Music starts to sound stale and overproduced, art loses some of its directness, writing feels self-conscious.

Whatever the correlation between perceived artistic merit and effort, it's a lot more complex than this article suggests.

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

#52

Post by krick »

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…

To be fair, it's always an artistic choice if you think it is appropriate here or not, but, yeah, this article is a really heavy offender. Reading the "Abstract claim" I caught myself thinking that this word salad hardly makes any sense, but I don't know and am just gonna let it go, because I am not yet convinced that it's worth my time to decipher that.

Also, "asinine contemporary "rationalist" movement" is pretty lightweight in this regard. Making an art out of writing as bad as possible has been a professional skill of any "academic philosopher" (both "continental" and "analytical" sides) for a century at the very least.

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

#53

Post by armonster »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #51

Bands and artists do sometimes record a banger very quickly, and no, the effort is not in muscle memory or practice. If it was in muscle memory it would be repeatable feat, and it really isn't. Some work is technically polished and you can see/hear the effort that went into it. But there's a point where extra effort makes the work less good. Music starts to sound stale and overproduced, art loses some of its directne…

I don't think the phenomenon you're describing is a result of the amount of effort put into the piece.

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

#54

Post by moron4hire »

turtleyacht wrote: post #2

How often is a drawing really trashed and restarted? There's the saying, "Plan to throw one away," but seems like it varies in practice (for software). There are even books about patching paintings, like Master Disaster: Five Ways to Rescue Desparate Watercolors. In architecture, it's understood the people, vehicles, and landscape are not as exact as the building or structure, and books encourage reusing magazine cli…

When I was a kid, I obsessed over getting a picture right the first time. But as I got older, I learned to do subject studies to refine tricky details before committing them to a larger piece.

If you ever get the chance to see the personal effects of a famous artist, most have piles and piles of sketches and studies they've done while prepping for a larger piece.

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

#55

Post by optymizer »

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 last 10% take 90% of the time"

The author had a shower thought. It was poorly explored, poorly argued and deliberately packaged in complex language to hide the lack of substance. The bibtex reference at the end is the cherry on top.

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

#56

Post by moron4hire »

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…

I had to think way too hard about what the author was trying to say. It smacks of an attempt at precise language, yet the subject matter is not precise at all. The author commits a Paul Grahamism, assuming their personal experience is generalizable and uniform.

Certainly, some artists work in the way they describe. Maybe even "most", who knows. But there are plenty of artists that do not. I've known plenty of artists to go straight to the detail in one corner of their piece and work linearly all the way across and down the canvas. I don't know how they do it, it certainly doesn't work for me, but obviously different people work in different ways.

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

#57

Post by stavros »

optymizer wrote: post #55
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 last 10% take 90% of the time" The author had a shower thought. It was poorly explored, poorly argued and deliberately packaged in complex language to hide the lack of substance. The bibtex reference at the end is the cherry on top.

Hey, I have my share of poorly-explored showethought posts, but at least I don't try to ornament them in sesquipedalian locution that purposely obfuscates the rudimentariness of the notion.

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

#58

Post by eschneider »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #51

Bands and artists do sometimes record a banger very quickly, and no, the effort is not in muscle memory or practice. If it was in muscle memory it would be repeatable feat, and it really isn't. Some work is technically polished and you can see/hear the effort that went into it. But there's a point where extra effort makes the work less good. Music starts to sound stale and overproduced, art loses some of its directne…

As my old art teacher used to say, "You work on something and it gets better and better and then it turns to shit."

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

#59

Post by lynguist »

I discussed this premise with my LLM and we came to this following conclusion which I find quite elegant:

> In any bounded system under feedback, refinement produces diminishing returns and narrowing tolerance, governed by a superlinear precision cost.

> There isn’t one official name, but what you’ve articulated is essentially a unified formulation of the diminishing-returns / sensitivity-amplification law of creation — a pattern deep enough that it keeps being rediscovered in every domain that pushes against the limits of order.

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

#60

Post by eschneider »

turtleyacht wrote: post #2

How often is a drawing really trashed and restarted? There's the saying, "Plan to throw one away," but seems like it varies in practice (for software). There are even books about patching paintings, like Master Disaster: Five Ways to Rescue Desparate Watercolors. In architecture, it's understood the people, vehicles, and landscape are not as exact as the building or structure, and books encourage reusing magazine cli…

Hmm...a lot? For a complex work, you'll sometimes do some number of sketches and studies and drawing and underpaintings...Lots of things get tried/discarded/modified before you land on a final painting.
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