7 ms·
Of all the hacker news comments I’ve ever read, yours made me feel the worst. One of the greatest living artists talking about the subjectivity of perception a
by whiddershins 8y ago
Of all the hacker news comments I’ve ever read, yours made me feel the worst.
One of the greatest living artists talking about the subjectivity of perception and you refer to it as quackery.
It hurts my heart.
- kevinwang 8y agoYeah, but he was making some pseudoscientific conjecture about the objectivity of time and using "expansion of the universe" to justify it, not merely the subjectivity of time passage. I mean, it's an interesting hot take, but it's definitely reminiscent of pseudoscience quackery.
- braythwayt 8y agoAlso, his so-called "music." It's just basic arithmetic. Scales, for example, can be reduced to a simple 12-bit number: https://ianring.com/musictheory/scales/ https://ianring.com/musictheory/scales/ All this fluff about a "major" scale and its "modes" when we could just say "2741" and derive other relationships from rotating bits and a few other simple relationships. Everything else, like the "subjective feeling of a Persian Scale" is just quackery. It's just someone who doesn't understand numbers making up nonsense words.
- ggg9990 8y agoHehe... nothing more HN than putting “music” in square quotes to summarily dismiss it. Please link ur Soundcloud
- braythwayt 8y agoYou got me! I am not a musician, I'm a bassist.
- lainga 8y agoactually nothing more HN than expressing doubt or disagreement by demanding credentials out of someone
- andrepd 8y agoYou forgot the sarcasm tag.
- fenomas 8y agoThis is equivalent to saying "visual art is just basic arithmetic" because you found out that the relationships between colors can be described with bit operations on their RGB values.
- braythwayt 8y agoLeaving out the sarcasm tags is also equivalent to expecting that your code is so obvious that it doesn't need any comments.
- emmanuel_1234 8y agoHe literally says: "What I suggest is that these are not subjective, but rather objective experiences. It’s also a little terrifying. What if 1,000 years from now, a life span felt like it was only a few days?" He's talking about the objectivity of perception.
- andrepd 8y agoYou would be right if he was talking about the "subjectivity of perception". But he is not. He is talking about "stars exploding far away", and the expansion of the universe, and relativity. His quote, I repeat: "But what if time is actually speeding up? If everything is changing at the same speed, there is no way to measure it. [...] What I suggest is that these are not subjective, but rather objective experiences.". And this is quackery.
- keiferski 8y agoThey’re having a theoretical discussion. That’s what creative people do. Turn off your scientism goggles for a second.
- retsibsi 8y agoI thought 'scientism' described excessive faith in the scientific method, and/or dogmatic positivism. How does that apply to calling someone out for explicitly invoking scientific findings in a misleading or nonsensical way?
- keiferski 8y agoBecause they’re just having a discussion about interesting ideas...? It’s not a science journal. I used the term ‘scientism’ because the parent commenter is approaching the subject of science from a dogmatic, oppressive perspective. The entire oeuvre of someone like Jorge Luis Borges is predicated on a creative exploration and interpretation of science.
- retsibsi 8y agoI think most people have no problem with science being used as a launching pad for speculation, or a source of metaphor and artistic inspiration, or a cultural product to playfully riff on. The reason some are frustrated by the quoted lines, I think, is that Glass seems to be cloaking his poetic or metaphysical speculations in real science, and perhaps even literally putting them forward as scientific ideas. From that perspective they have more in common with the fuzzy, lazy thinking of pseudoscientists than with the fantastical literature of Borges.
- modzu 8y agotheir perspective is fair for a physics undergraduate. but hopefully it changes.
- andrepd 8y agoI am no longer a physics undergraduate, by the way, I solid get that changed. But I appreciate the effort to stick to the discussion and not dig irrelevant information /s.
- Kalium 8y agoYou're right. This is one of our greatest living artists, a human cultural treasure. We should weigh every word, every performance carefully. His work offers us incredible insight into ourselves. Yet, is it perhaps possible that we should consider carefully how far the credibility he so justly deserves should extend. Someone with minimal qualifications talks of how his subjective experience should be considered objective, and some opine that this should be taken seriously on the basis of unrelated merit. It hurts my head.
- moogly 8y agoSome of us don't even agree with the "one of the greatest living artists" part. Wholly subjective opinion.
- coldtea 8y agoI don't consider culture "wholly subjective". Just somewhat subjective. There are philistines and people who only care about Justin Bieber, and their aesthetic opinions are not equally valid to someone who is an expert on Bach. Of course that (culture) is a human construct, but so is physics and math. Animals don't have either, and the universe doesn't care either way.
- nothrabannosir 8y agoIf Stephen Hawking had ever talked about the objectivity of music or any art in such patently wrong terms, I hope people would call him out on it. Otherwise people like me might take his word for it, precisely because of his purported greatness.