8 ms·

How Did Cool Become Such a Big Deal? (2014)

51 points by pshaw 8y ago

xissy 8y ago
Cool.
dluan 8y ago
Cool is one thing I feel like robots will never understand. It is so hard to capture beyond just the physical vocabulary or syntax or body movements, or even black or white. Because when you see or meet someone, cool, you just know. James Baldwin was a cool af mfer. > For black people, to be cool was to be “calm, even unimpressed, by what horror the world might daily propose.” Cool was a quietly rebellious response to the history of slavery and post-Civil War injustices. Cool is kind of the anti-reactionary, laissez-faire attitude, but it's also using that attitude to create. To use slang in creative, liberating ways. Or music, or art, or drugs, or whatever. Now give an algorithm that's been trained with all of human history and society. Would it also disregard the past horrors, but use the memory to create? What would it create? Would it be cool, even if you didn't know that it came from a human or a robot?
- lisper 8y ago
  > Cool is one thing I feel like robots will never understand. They said computers would never be able to beat humans at chess. Then IBM built Deep Blue. They said computers would never be able to beat humans at go. Then Google built AlphaGo. They said computers would never be able to understand natural language. Then Apple built Siri. It's a matter of when, not if, computers will understand cool. But when they do, they will probably be too cool to care.
  - WilliamEdward 8y ago
    These are manufactured AI, designed to trick you into thinking they have the same potential as the human mind when in reality they can only perform one task really well. Don't get your hopes up at seeing AI become anything remotely like a human being in your lifetime, and probably long after that too.
  - Bouncingsoul1 8y ago
    Citation needed, who said this. Anyway I guess on any nontrivial problem there will be people arguing for both sides. Stephen Hawking said there would nothing ever be able to leave a black hole, later he proved otherwise. I guess this is just the nature of engineering/science.
    - lisper 8y ago
      > who said this. Who said what?
  - Yetanfou 8y ago
    IBM and Google did develop the systems you mentioned. Apple on the other hand is the odd one out here as they did not develop Siri: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-buys-siri-a-mobile-assistant-app-as-war-with-google-heats-up-2010-4?r=US&IR=T&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-buys-siri-a-mobile-ass...
  - panic 8y ago
    Trying to be cool generally makes you less cool.
  - Animats 8y ago
    Probably when computers get better at DJing than humans.
    - lisper 8y ago
      You really need to watch the first season of The Good Place. :-)
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >They said computers would never be able to understand natural language. Then Apple built Siri. So, they're still saying that, then. Might as well have invoked Eliza. As for the other two, they are just number crunching endeavors. If somebody said computers would never be able to beat humans at them, they were wrong from the start. For the other things, not so sure.
  - schrodinger 8y ago
    > They said computers would never be able to understand natural language. Then Apple built Siri. I think it’s a stretch to say that Siri understands natural language. You need to form your sentences very specifically to have any luck, dramatically different than talking to a human.
    - noirbot 8y ago
      And even then, it occasionally "corrects" what it thought it heard to instead be some clearly nonsense sentence. Just the morning I asked Siri to "Remind me to set beers aside for the party" and now I have a reminder to "Set Beer's aside for the pantry." after clearly seeing it have the exact right sentence for a second before adjusting to that.
      - mikestew 8y ago
        Every year I attend a bluegrass music festival called Wintergrass. Siri knows about Wintergrass, she sees it in my calendar and I've seen her recognize the spoken word before. Even though I live down the road, this year me and some jamming buddies thought it would be nice to have a room to stash instruments, nap, whatever. "Hey, Siri, remind me to get a room for Wintergrass." "Okay, I'll remind you to get a room for one in the ass." One would also think that Siri has figured out my sexual preferences by now. (To be clear, she obviously has not.) But to the point, the hype of speech recognition over the decades, and the state of the art today, are why I am not convinced I'll live long enough to see true self-driving cars despite the current hype of that tech.
  - boomlinde 8y ago
    The first two are logical problems that can be approached systematically, because go and chess are idealized systems with simple sets of rules. They're about as relevant to understanding subjective and culturally dependent, ultimately irrational notions as "They said computers would never draw a million triangles per frame" To say that Siri understands natural language is just laughable. It can analyze natural language in a way that is extremely error prone and contextually insensitive, just barely well enough for it to parse Zork-like commands and google stuff for you, set alarms or call people in your contact list. What's at all slightly impressive about it is its voice recognition, and even that is very error prone.
- murukesh_s 8y ago
  > rebellious response to the history of slavery and post-Civil War injustices. I may be wrong but I thought black people throught out the world were cool..
  - murukesh_s 8y ago
    One of my personal opinion and nothing of a scientific study is that it might have something to do with Testosterone..
Alex3917 8y ago
In jazz the aesthetic emphasis is on the empty space in between the notes. In the 30s you had a bunch of folks mixing weed with heroin in a way that seemingly unlocked the ability to create art out of these interstitial moments. As a social term cool just means the same thing, referring to things whose positive qualities come from what they lack.
dredmorbius 8y ago
Cool, blood. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sang-froid&year_start=1650&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=10&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Csang%20-%20froid%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sang-froid&yea...
swingline-747 8y ago
I would suggest it's not cool, but the meta concept of status, that became the big deal. When essentially everyone became materially-comfortable in Western life circa post-WW2, society got flatter and flatter. In order to break up that flatness, the main driving social-differentiator signals emphasize appearance and attitude.
- growlist 8y ago
  > the main driving social-differentiator signals emphasize appearance and attitude Indeed, pushed hard by the advertising industry etc. with the idea that we are defined only by the products we consume. I see cool as similar to the phenomenon of less well off people spending money on designer labels, i.e. reaction to a position of relative social inferiority. Chavs buy Burberry, whereas Prince Charles patches holes in clothes that he's had for decades.
  - swingline-747 8y ago
    Yup. And when fully-inculcated as socially-reinforced virtues, these lies take on a self-fulfilling, self-sustaining quality that makes them seem as unquestionable as gravity. TBH, this is likely why I have no social use for most other Americans because they tend to be tedious and predictable, by virtues of being ill-informed, naïve and brainwashed. As an example, when people talk about how "new" or "updated" something is, they act with unthinking, manufactured biases as if that alone is a primary cause for more inherent value, when they're unwittingly cargo-culting the values of shopping to unrelated areas.
    - growlist 8y ago
      I agree, I loathe this obsession with newness and disdain for anything used as if it's tainted/unclean. Some would say the economy would fall apart without consumerism/the debt that supports it, but idk, surely there has to be a better way to arrange things.
      - ryandrake 8y ago
hfdgiutdryg 8y ago
That site is extremely uncool on mobile, and I can't even find a way to contact them about it. Their desperately uncool need for Facebook and Twitter credit, along with their insistence that you read at a font size they've chosen, means I see three to five words per line. Ironically, tapping on 'accessibility' and starting to scroll auto-scrolls instantly to the bottom, then it's 'sticky' until it auto-scrolls all the way to the top!
yesenadam 8y ago
Far as I know, Lester Young invented cool. Here he is just before he died[0] with his old friend Billie Holiday (who he nicknamed 'Lady Day' - he called everyone 'lady'). Before him, what everyone wanted to be was hot, screaming, wailing sax, jumping up on bars, playing a lot of notes, extreme. Then suddenly less is more. He came up playing with Count Basie, who was also a less is more kind of guy. To oversimplify, hot was about high energy, cool was about beauty and taste. Hot was macho, competitive, striving to impress; cool was human, content, enlightened. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKqxG09wlIA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKqxG09wlIA

51 points by pshaw 8y ago

Cool.

Cool is one thing I feel like robots will never understand. It is so hard to capture beyond just the physical vocabulary or syntax or body movements, or even black or white. Because when you see or meet someone, cool, you just know. James Baldwin was a cool af mfer. > For black people, to be cool was to be “calm, even unimpressed, by what horror the world might daily propose.” Cool was a quietly rebellious response to the history of slavery and post-Civil War injustices. Cool is kind of the anti-reactionary, laissez-faire attitude, but it's also using that attitude to create. To use slang in creative, liberating ways. Or music, or art, or drugs, or whatever. Now give an algorithm that's been trained with all of human history and society. Would it also disregard the past horrors, but use the memory to create? What would it create? Would it be cool, even if you didn't know that it came from a human or a robot?

lisper 8y ago
> Cool is one thing I feel like robots will never understand. They said computers would never be able to beat humans at chess. Then IBM built Deep Blue. They said computers would never be able to beat humans at go. Then Google built AlphaGo. They said computers would never be able to understand natural language. Then Apple built Siri. It's a matter of when, not if, computers will understand cool. But when they do, they will probably be too cool to care.
- WilliamEdward 8y ago
  These are manufactured AI, designed to trick you into thinking they have the same potential as the human mind when in reality they can only perform one task really well. Don't get your hopes up at seeing AI become anything remotely like a human being in your lifetime, and probably long after that too.
- Bouncingsoul1 8y ago
  Citation needed, who said this. Anyway I guess on any nontrivial problem there will be people arguing for both sides. Stephen Hawking said there would nothing ever be able to leave a black hole, later he proved otherwise. I guess this is just the nature of engineering/science.
  - lisper 8y ago
    > who said this. Who said what?
- Yetanfou 8y ago
  IBM and Google did develop the systems you mentioned. Apple on the other hand is the odd one out here as they did not develop Siri: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-buys-siri-a-mobile-assistant-app-as-war-with-google-heats-up-2010-4?r=US&IR=T&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-buys-siri-a-mobile-ass...
- panic 8y ago
  Trying to be cool generally makes you less cool.
- Animats 8y ago
  Probably when computers get better at DJing than humans.
  - lisper 8y ago
    You really need to watch the first season of The Good Place. :-)
- coldtea 8y ago
  >They said computers would never be able to understand natural language. Then Apple built Siri. So, they're still saying that, then. Might as well have invoked Eliza. As for the other two, they are just number crunching endeavors. If somebody said computers would never be able to beat humans at them, they were wrong from the start. For the other things, not so sure.
- schrodinger 8y ago
  > They said computers would never be able to understand natural language. Then Apple built Siri. I think it’s a stretch to say that Siri understands natural language. You need to form your sentences very specifically to have any luck, dramatically different than talking to a human.
  - noirbot 8y ago
    And even then, it occasionally "corrects" what it thought it heard to instead be some clearly nonsense sentence. Just the morning I asked Siri to "Remind me to set beers aside for the party" and now I have a reminder to "Set Beer's aside for the pantry." after clearly seeing it have the exact right sentence for a second before adjusting to that.
    - mikestew 8y ago
      Every year I attend a bluegrass music festival called Wintergrass. Siri knows about Wintergrass, she sees it in my calendar and I've seen her recognize the spoken word before. Even though I live down the road, this year me and some jamming buddies thought it would be nice to have a room to stash instruments, nap, whatever. "Hey, Siri, remind me to get a room for Wintergrass." "Okay, I'll remind you to get a room for one in the ass." One would also think that Siri has figured out my sexual preferences by now. (To be clear, she obviously has not.) But to the point, the hype of speech recognition over the decades, and the state of the art today, are why I am not convinced I'll live long enough to see true self-driving cars despite the current hype of that tech.
- boomlinde 8y ago
  The first two are logical problems that can be approached systematically, because go and chess are idealized systems with simple sets of rules. They're about as relevant to understanding subjective and culturally dependent, ultimately irrational notions as "They said computers would never draw a million triangles per frame" To say that Siri understands natural language is just laughable. It can analyze natural language in a way that is extremely error prone and contextually insensitive, just barely well enough for it to parse Zork-like commands and google stuff for you, set alarms or call people in your contact list. What's at all slightly impressive about it is its voice recognition, and even that is very error prone.
murukesh_s 8y ago
> rebellious response to the history of slavery and post-Civil War injustices. I may be wrong but I thought black people throught out the world were cool..
- murukesh_s 8y ago
  One of my personal opinion and nothing of a scientific study is that it might have something to do with Testosterone..

Alex3917 8y ago

In jazz the aesthetic emphasis is on the empty space in between the notes. In the 30s you had a bunch of folks mixing weed with heroin in a way that seemingly unlocked the ability to create art out of these interstitial moments. As a social term cool just means the same thing, referring to things whose positive qualities come from what they lack.

dredmorbius 8y ago

Cool, blood. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sang-froid&year_start=1650&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=10&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Csang%20-%20froid%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sang-froid&yea...

swingline-747 8y ago

I would suggest it's not cool, but the meta concept of status, that became the big deal. When essentially everyone became materially-comfortable in Western life circa post-WW2, society got flatter and flatter. In order to break up that flatness, the main driving social-differentiator signals emphasize appearance and attitude.

growlist 8y ago
> the main driving social-differentiator signals emphasize appearance and attitude Indeed, pushed hard by the advertising industry etc. with the idea that we are defined only by the products we consume. I see cool as similar to the phenomenon of less well off people spending money on designer labels, i.e. reaction to a position of relative social inferiority. Chavs buy Burberry, whereas Prince Charles patches holes in clothes that he's had for decades.
- swingline-747 8y ago
  Yup. And when fully-inculcated as socially-reinforced virtues, these lies take on a self-fulfilling, self-sustaining quality that makes them seem as unquestionable as gravity. TBH, this is likely why I have no social use for most other Americans because they tend to be tedious and predictable, by virtues of being ill-informed, naïve and brainwashed. As an example, when people talk about how "new" or "updated" something is, they act with unthinking, manufactured biases as if that alone is a primary cause for more inherent value, when they're unwittingly cargo-culting the values of shopping to unrelated areas.
  - growlist 8y ago
    I agree, I loathe this obsession with newness and disdain for anything used as if it's tainted/unclean. Some would say the economy would fall apart without consumerism/the debt that supports it, but idk, surely there has to be a better way to arrange things.
    - ryandrake 8y ago

hfdgiutdryg 8y ago

That site is extremely uncool on mobile, and I can't even find a way to contact them about it. Their desperately uncool need for Facebook and Twitter credit, along with their insistence that you read at a font size they've chosen, means I see three to five words per line. Ironically, tapping on 'accessibility' and starting to scroll auto-scrolls instantly to the bottom, then it's 'sticky' until it auto-scrolls all the way to the top!

yesenadam 8y ago

Far as I know, Lester Young invented cool. Here he is just before he died[0] with his old friend Billie Holiday (who he nicknamed 'Lady Day' - he called everyone 'lady'). Before him, what everyone wanted to be was hot, screaming, wailing sax, jumping up on bars, playing a lot of notes, extreme. Then suddenly less is more. He came up playing with Count Basie, who was also a less is more kind of guy. To oversimplify, hot was about high energy, cool was about beauty and taste. Hot was macho, competitive, striving to impress; cool was human, content, enlightened. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKqxG09wlIA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKqxG09wlIA