Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work

> Soon the spectacle became arranged, in my eyes at least, in a more noble and calmer fashion. All this vertiginous activity settled into a calm harmony. I would watch the round tables, whose innumerable assemblage filled the restaurant, like so many planets, such as they are figured in old allegorical pictures. Moreover, an irresistible force of attraction was exerted between these various stars, and at each table the diners had eyes only for the tables at which they were not sitting,

The relative nature of perceived quality indicates that the order of representations (artworks) is judged only in relation to the order of castes (ranking); one can only judge what is equal by comparison to what is unequal, and equivalence is not understood through equality (even approximate) but through inequality (partial order). It is the absence of a ranking relationship between two entities that establishes their equivalence.

Maybe I should have just gone with "in this case, classification is more fundamental than measure", but I feel there is something interesting to be said about the structure of artworks and the structure of their reception by society, indeed Proust continues with:

> ...the diners had eyes only for the tables at which they were not sitting, with the exception of some wealthy host who, having succeeded in bringing a famous writer, strove to extract from him, thanks to the spiritual properties of the 'turning table', insignificant observations at which the ladies marvelled.

See ? Writers (and artists in general) take on the role of a medium. They are used to channel distant entities, like tables during spiritism sessions, and from what Proust tells us, that "the diners had eyes only for the tables at which they were not sitting", maybe we can infer that what writers channel doesn't just come from distant worlds, as incarnated in what their words represent, but as a delta in perceived quality, starting with our own.

This is why I'd like to elaborate on this idea of coupled SSR processes I developed in another comment.

A sample space reducing process is a process that seeks to combine atomic parts into a coherent whole by iteratively picking groups of parts that can be assembled into functional elements ready to be added to this whole.

In that sense, the act of writing a long work already has the shape of a SSR process in a very simple sense: each narrative, stylistic, and conceptual choice constrains what can follow without breaking coherence. As a novel unfolds, fewer continuations remain compatible with its voice, characters, rhythms, arguments. You are not wandering freely in idea-space; you are navigating a progressively narrowed funnel of possibilities induced by your own earlier decisions. A good book is one that survives this internal reduction without collapsing.

On top of that, there is a second, external funnel: the competitive ranking of works and authors. Here too the available space narrows as you move upward. The further you climb in terms of attention, recognition, or canonization, the smaller the set of works that can plausibly dislodge those already in place. Near the top, the acceptance region is tiny: most new works, even competent ones, will not significantly shift the existing order. From that perspective, perceived quality is largely tied to where a work ends up in this hierarchy, not to some independently measurable scalar.

The interesting part is how these two processes couple. To have any chance of entering the higher strata of the external ranking, a work first has to survive its own internal funnel: it has to maintain coherence, depth, and a recognizable voice under increasingly tight self-imposed constraints. At the same time, the shape of the external funnel, market expectations, critical fashions, existing canons, feeds back into the act of writing by making some narrative paths feel viable and others almost unthinkable. So the writer is never optimizing in a vacuum, but always under a joint pressure: what keeps the book internally alive, and what keeps it externally legible.

But what interests me more is that some works don't just suffer this coupling, they encode it. That's what you see in the Proust passage: he is not merely describing a restaurant; he is describing the optics of social distinction, the way people look at other tables, the way a famous writer is used as a medium to channel prestige, the way perception itself is structured by rankings. The text is aware of the hierarchy through which it will itself be read. It doesn't just represent a world; it stages the illusions and comparisons that make that world intelligible. That's a second-order move: the work includes within itself a model of the very mechanisms that will classify it.

If you like a more structural vocabulary: natural language is massively stratified by frequency. Highly frequent words ("I", "of", "after") act as primitive binders; extremely rare words tend to live out on the leaves of the tree; in between you get heavier operators that bind large-scale entities and narratives ("terrorism" being a classic example in the grammar of public opinion). Something similar happens socially. Highly visible figures – the wealthy host, the celebrated writer, the glamorous guest – play the role of grammatical linkers in the social syntax of recognition: they bind other people, distribute attention, create or close off relational triads. Proust's "the diners had eyes only for the tables at which they were not sitting" is exactly this: desire and judgment are mediated through a few high-frequency social operators.

A certain kind of writing operates precisely at that interface: it doesn't just tell a story inside the internal funnel, and it doesn't just try to climb the external ranking; it exposes and recombines the "function words" of social perception themselves: the roles, clichés, prestige tokens, feared or desired third parties (like the forever-imagined intruder in Swann's jealousy). The difficulty is not only to satisfy two nested constraints (a coherent work and a competitive position), but to produce a form that reflects on, and potentially perturbs, the very grammar that links the two. That's where the channeling comes in: literature not only represents something, it re-routes the connective tissue through which quality, status, and desire are perceived in the first place.

As creative projects (software, painting...) we finish or satisfactorily achieve relatively few items. And except for the most repetitive of us, these achievements are pretty different. Wide space, chaos, few satisfactory products by comparison. That doesn't bode well for "magic recipe". All the way to "rules of thumb" that we take fun in violating.

So there are two issues in there: We have more taste than skill and so many of our attempts will disappoint us no matter what. And we will obsess on trying to find a magic formula - when it's rather likely that there isn't one. The "space" is large and chaotic and we might want to reassure ourselves instead that serendipity has something to do with it.

Is there then place for rules of thumb? Whatever let's us get to work in the morning, I guess. For me, I do like the recognition of past track record: with a bit of age hindsight, I know I can do it - no need to dispair. That is useful and reassuring. If I just try some more - in ever varying manners, it will happen.

One place for "rules of thumbs" is in them being tropes. We can get some impact on the viewer by violating them. There is a trope of learning the rules so you can violate them. For example a Rule of Thirds - can be fertile grounds for getting at the viewer. The rule doesn't do much for us, and we have no problem violating it, but our less savvy viewers might remember it and get one more whiff of meaning from the violation. And if we are less concerned with our own satisfaction and more interested in sales, we might pay attention to "what's popular these days" and produce some of that. Not all artists are dead set on personal achievement at the cost of sales. A slightly different look at such rules.

For me, "draw 50" series is about letting loose, NOT about skill. On the contrary, it's about exploring the space of all the different ways a prompt can be worked with in an UN-literal manner. Overall drawing facility will improve merely as a byproduct. The ability to be whimsical and exploit drawing flaws, erm, deliberately, is the real prize.

Different from "limbering up" exercizes like drawing your hand - where you do one at the beginning of a session just because it gets you started and in the flow without having to think or pick a "real" topic. (A similar idea is to leave some already decided work mid-done: when you arrive in the morning you can work on that and limber up and do something useful without having to think clearly yet.)

Different from thumbnails which are about picking a direction.

And when fortune smiles on them, they get positively giddy.

I really appreciate people who understand that they have to meet luck half way. Even though they've spent hours upon hours upon hours honing their craft, the thing that puts them over the hump is both unpredictable and uncontrollable.