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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

#111

Post by hansvm »

hansvm wrote: post #71
nilirl wrote: post #20

I liked the post but can someone explain how macro choices change the acceptance volume? Is it their effect on the total number of available choices? Does picking E minor somehow give you fewer options than C major (I'm not a musician)?

It...depends. If you're working in a continuous environment rather than discrete (choirs and strings can fudge notes up or down a bit, but pianos are stuck with however they're tuned), you'll often find yourself wanting to produce harmonies at perfect whole-number ratios -- e.g., for a perfect fourth (the gap between the first and second notes in "here comes the bride") you want a ratio of 4:3 in the frequencies of t…

Minor edit: The "5.3%" I wrote out seemed too large and was bothering me all day. The culprit is that a Major Third is 5/4, not 4/3, leading to the D/E ratio being 1.2% too small rather than 5.3% too large. Apologies.

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

#112

Post by QuercusMax »

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 just saw Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass in concert last night (he's 90 and can still play that horn!) and one of the things he talked about was recording his vocals for This Guy's In Love With You written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. He's a great musician but not much of a trained singer, and he said when he got into the studio, he sat down and did a relaxed first practice take, expecting he'd go and record one "for real".

Instead, they told him his first take was absolutely perfect - and it went on to be Bacharach/David's first #1 hit song.

Sometimes you get lightning in a bottle, and you just don't mess with it because it's perfect even in its imperfections.

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

#113

Post by QuercusMax »

egypturnash wrote: post #101

> Drawing takes forever because you're exploring AND refining simultaneously. > We don't "rehearse" a specific drawing, we solve a novel problem in real-time. There's no cached motor sequence to execute. When you have been drawing long enough there are a lot of cached motor sequences to execute and modify. A lot of art training is simply filling this cache: spend a few hours every week drawing the human body from dif…

Music is the same way, especially with improvisation. When you're improvising, you don't make stuff up entirely from scratch - you glue together all the little bits you have in your toolbox to make something new. That's why we endlessly practice scales, arpeggios, learn new songs, copy others' licks, etc.

Why do you think half the keyboard/organ solos in classic rock songs sound like jazzed up versions of Bach and Mozart? That's what they had learned as kids or in music school before going on to make rock and roll.

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

#114

Post by TZubiri »

egypturnash wrote: post #109
TZubiri wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but there's no point in repeating the exact same sequences unless you are practicing, in production you always do novel stuff, in both programming and drawing. This is unlike other disciplines like music or carpentry.

I have been drawing professionally for about a quarter of a century and it is my experience there are a lot of sequences that recur. A hand is a complex piece of anatomy but you really only need a mental library of a few dozen poses to meet most needs, for instance. You don't repeat it exactly every time, it's easy to change the angle a little, the lighting needs to adapt to the scene, some hands are dainty and some…

Right, I don't deny that parts are repeatable, like creating a function or creating a git repo, or creating a 2 column table schema.

But a whole piece is never the same. This is because the cost of copying is almost zero and the value is in the end-product and not in the performance. An exception would be if we are talking about an oil on canvas painting and a client asks for a piece that has already been sold.

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

#115

Post by lanstin »

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…

With black ink on paper, quite a few. With oil, less. It is part of the medium: how much is a flash of intuitive certainty and how much is slower planning and execution.

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

#116

Post by shalmanese »

raincole wrote: post #64
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…

This kind of article is why people read comments first today. It's such a simple idea. And it already has a name, diminishing returns. I don't know what prompted this article but it wasn't insight.

Except that's the exact opposite of the takeaway, diminishing return problems are easy. He's proposing a model for why often art does the exact opposite and produces super-linear returns.

It's a common experience for an artist that everything they're doing to a piece makes it look like a total failure and far below the quality they were aspiring to until they do one final layer of polish and the piece transforms from sub-par to spectacular at the final stage. Of course, there are also scenarios where no amount of polish can fix it because the artist simply wasn't good enough and didn't find the right decisions at the final stage and other scenarios where there were no right decisions and no amount of skill could have fixed fatal flaws earlier in the decision making.

The exquisite agony of art is that all 3 scenarios feel subjectively almost identical in the middle of the creation process and so much of art is hoping we come up with some reliable process of divination to tease apart the micro-differences that give you an indication of what path you're on.

OP is proposing a model for why this is this is the case but unless you're an experienced creative, you don't understand the problem phenomena that this is identifying in the first place.

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

#117

Post by jfvinueza »

markusstrasser wrote: post #91

Author here. Somehow the worst thing I ever wrote is on the front page of HN. I wrote this fast so there's jargon and bad prose. The title is deliberately dry and bland so I wasn't expecting anyone to click it. Also I slightly changed my mind on some of the claims .. might write up later. The main reason I like to think of creative work in a more abstract/formal/geometric way (acceptance volume, latency, sampling) is…

maybe if you had put up more effort polishing it it wouldn't have hit the front page :)

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

#118

Post by fouc »

My takeaway from the post:

The picture of the solution space in 3D makes a great point - we see a narrow hill that leads to a global maximum (i.e. a great result) in a solutions search space that otherwise has a very obvious & wide hill that produces "okay" results. Going from the okay & safe results to a great result means taking the risk of going back down the hill of shittier solutions.

He points out that generative AI will tend to produce results that land on that big wide hill. It's the safe hill, and has the most results. This is perhaps where taste (as a proxy of experience) trumps AI.

Interesting to tie this to the finishing stage of any work. I was definitely thinking about software development in that situation. I would argue it's similar to drawing as he mentions in the FAQ - we're solving a novel problem, as we start implementing a solution we might discover it is inappropriate and have to change to a different part of the solution space.

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

#119

Post by cootsnuck »

sokoloff wrote: post #42
thechao wrote: post #41

I had a cabinet built and the guy doing the work pointed out that the human eye is really great at detecting line-line deviation; but, building to & correcting for that deviation requires working across the whole surface. He was making an area-effort to linear-quality argument. He said every time you halved the gap, it quadrupled the effort. Also, he said that was what saw-dust & glue were for.

One thing I’ve learned over decades of home/DIY projects is it’s usually better to intentionally target a small overlap/reveal rather than trying to have two materials match perfectly. If you have a piece of door trim that exactly matches the piece behind, any imperfections or subsequent wood movement will be unsightly. If you instead target a 1/4” reveal, imperfections and slight wood movement are wildly less notice…

Weirdly enough I'm having to install some window film on a new office space I just got. The windows are large so I'm going to have to splice pieces together. I looked up how the pros do it and it's exactly what you're saying. You overlap the pieces half an inch, cut the overlapped sections, wet it and smooth it out, and then later go over it with some clear nail polish.

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

#120

Post by ajb »

sokoloff wrote: post #42
thechao wrote: post #41

I had a cabinet built and the guy doing the work pointed out that the human eye is really great at detecting line-line deviation; but, building to & correcting for that deviation requires working across the whole surface. He was making an area-effort to linear-quality argument. He said every time you halved the gap, it quadrupled the effort. Also, he said that was what saw-dust & glue were for.

One thing I’ve learned over decades of home/DIY projects is it’s usually better to intentionally target a small overlap/reveal rather than trying to have two materials match perfectly. If you have a piece of door trim that exactly matches the piece behind, any imperfections or subsequent wood movement will be unsightly. If you instead target a 1/4” reveal, imperfections and slight wood movement are wildly less notice…

Yeah

You can also "own it". I had a damaged area in the bathroom, I knew I'd never get paint to match exactly, but couldn't be bothered to repaint entirely. So I made a few random triangles with masking tape, one covering the spot, and painted inside them. Looks deliberate. Also got away with only buying a paint sampler...

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